Mass at the Drive-In Theater

In most accounts of the Catholic Church’s twentieth-century transformation, the Second Vatican Council, with its sweeping changes to liturgy and the role of the laity, is presented as the watershed moment. But other forces were at play as well. One of the most important was the expansion of American suburban life—the steady exodus of people from the cities into what the historian Kenneth Jackson dubbed “the crabgrass frontier.” This demographic trend, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and accelerating drastically in the early decades after World War II, had profound effects on the American Catholic way of life well before the Second Vatican Council concluded in 1965. That story is the subject of Stephen M. Koeth’s informative new book, Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America.