This piece, on "bivocational clergy," is thought-provoking.  Are more clergy today what we would have once called "part-time" clergy?  If so, are there any interesting differentiations between different sub-sets of that group?  The group suggests there are, in terms of geography and gender, with women especially working multiple jobs.

This is part of a number of larger stories, especially one of gender imbalances in the US, and the various degrees of legitimacy we provide to our felllow-citizens.  It may be that the kinds of positions women more frequently accept are the kind that would allow their congregants, or their authorities, to say "well that's a part-time job."  It is also the case that the idea that a man should be a significant wage earner is still operative, perhaps especially so in religious institutions, which are by and large (I think this is empirically true?) more conservative than other parts of the US socio-cultural ecology.

More deeply still, what does it mean that clergy are becoming "bivocational"?  In one sense, this is a reversion to an older pattern in US religion.  After all, what counts as the "job" of a religious authority has changed enormously over time.  It's never been stable--in Late antiquity, Christian bishops were involved in doing a lot of judicial work, in a thing called the "episcopal audience" (if you want more, check out this cool book.)  To what degree have clerics historically been social workers, marriage counsellors, therapists?  Civic activists?  I'd say: to a great degree.

In this way, part of the story of "bivocation" may simply be the way that the clergy-role in the US has always sat uncomfortably alongside the increasing differentiation of public and private life, which has marked our society for at least a century.  In our world, specialization seems to be an ever-widening delta, with the innumberable kinds of specializations (or social roles, let us say) working to fracture earlier occupations, kind of as "distributaries" (not tributaries flowing into a larger river, but one of the branches flowing out of it as the river comes closer to the sea).  This is not only true of clergy, of course, it is a common feature of medicine (think of "specialists"), of law (multiple kinds of lawyers these days), and my home, higher education (the increasing fractalization of "administration" is largely about this specialization of tasks).

Furthermroe, this whole discussion implies an even larger question: What is going on in American religious life institutionally?  We read lots of polls about religious belief and opinions on religious matters.  That's important.  But it is also important to get a picture of the institutional infrastructure of religion in the US.  What information is out there about that?  Work by Robert Wuthnow and David Hollinger has been important here, for me at least; I hope to keep looking around for stuff on the religious institutional infrastructure, and will post when I find it.