Changing the liturgy

People get outraged by changes in liturgy.  Christian Smith ( Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture ) points to the studies of Harold Garfinkel from the 1960s and 70s that highlight this reality:

“Garfinkel and his students uncovered standards and boundaries of these orders [of micro interactions] through the use of ‘breaching experiments’ that intentionally violated the norms and conventions of conversation in order to observe people’s responses.  On the phone, for example, when people said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ the ethnomethodologists replied, ‘What do you mean, How am I?”  At first, people quickly worked to repair the breakdown, but the ethnomethodologists continued to refuse to cooperate.  What they discovered in the process was not only how easily simple conversations can be disrupted but how vehemently people reacted to these disruptions.  At first, their interaction partners were simply completely confused.  Rather quickly, however, they became hostile, indignant, angry.  ’What do you mean, What do you mean, How am I?! What is your program!?’  People, Garfinkel reports, were not simply frustrated; they were outraged.  For, we can observe, their elementary rules facilitating the enactment of moral order were being violated.  Garfinkel was not only being difficult; he was interrupting and desecrating the liturgy of social life.”