Mark A. Weitz

Clergy Malpractice in America is a book of modern legal history addressed to a scholarly audience. The liveliness of its narrative and the consignment of bibliographic citation to an appendix make it read more like a journalistic account, however. My own ignorance of the broad course of events that it traces allowed me to read it almost like a novel. I don't necessarily recommend reading it that way, and the remainder of this review will include "spoilers" for those who want to.

This book was grown out of law school research by author Mark A. Weitz, and it is thus the fruit of a twenty-year gestation from 1981 to 2001. The single legal case that it documents ran through various California courts for the entire decade of the 1980s, and was brought against Grace Community Church of the Valley, the largest fundamentalist Christian congregation in southern California at that time. At issue was the church's counseling to a young man who committed suicide.

The legal process was tortuous, and ultimately the California Supreme Court upheld an appellate decision to dismiss the case. The US Supreme Court declined to take it up. Nevertheless, Weitz (as well as his editors in the "Landmark Law Cases and American Society" series) holds this case up as a turning point for consideration of clergy malpractice in US law.

Weitz seems very even-handed in his treatment of the litigants, finding people and things to admire on both sides of the contest. I found myself increasingly sympathetic to the plaintiffs, however, whether or not this feeling followed the author's design. The book is fairly short overall, and not demanding in terms of any background in legal process or jargon. I would strongly recommend it to members of the clergy -- not as a view of the current legal landscape (it isn't), but for a sense of the social demands and tensions surrounding the exercise of pastoral care, and an awareness of the shifting regard for church privileges in American society.… (mehr)