A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb

Christian Century, June 20, 2001 by James W. Lewis

A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb.

By Nancy Eiesland. Rutgers University Press, 256 pp., $21.00 paperback.

HARDLY ANYONE likes suburban sprawl. Although most suburbanites prefer to live in suburbs, many of them regret that so many others have followed them out of the city, thereby destroying the advantages that attracted them in the first place. For many, the answer is to move still farther out. Rural landscapes recede, traffic increases and strip malls proliferate.

The cities and suburbs in which we live significantly affect our lives, including our religious lives. But too many churches of all denominations, especially metropolitan ones, are unreflective about the implications of their particular geographic location. Once they have chosen a favorable spot (a corner lot in a populated area, a visible intersection), their reflection about place tends to cease. Some megachurches intentionally appeal to an entire region, effectively cutting the link between congregation and local place.

But as Robert Orsi notes in his introduction to Gods of the City, place is important both for the questions asked of religious faiths and the answers they propose. "Specific places structure the questions, and as men and women cobble together responses, they act upon the spaces around them in transformative ways.... Religion is always, among other things, a matter of necessary places." Religious life is deeply embedded in physical space--something we forget at our peril. This neglect of place would be of little concern if it were only geographical. But it is, in fact, essentially theological.

My thinking about these things has been shaped to a considerable degree by my own place--the mid-sized metropolitan area of Louisville, Kentucky. During the past year Louisville's news has been dominated by several seemingly disparate issues--the troubled relationship between the police department and the African-American community; efforts to build more mixed-income housing in the city; adoption of a regional plan intended to moderate suburban sprawl; disagreement about the number and location of proposed new Ohio River bridges linking Louisville and southern Indiana; a campaign to attract high-tech business to the downtown area; and a lively election campaign around the issue of a city-county merger.

Similar issues and the questions they raise can be found in many cities. What does it mean for contemporary Christians to live in the city? What is the proper relationship between center city, suburb and exurb? Where should political power reside and why? What are the distinctive opportunities and responsibilities of local religious leaders? What is the good life in the contemporary metropolis? What opportunities and temptations does the city offer? What about the automobile? What about the environment? What about suburban sprawl? What do and what should religious institutions contribute to urban life?

Historically the church has played an important if sometimes heavy-handed role in attempting to shape urban life. Calvin's Geneva comes to mind, as does colonial Boston. And many urban pastors have exerted their influence on today's cities. But our willingness to think seriously about the relationship between our Christian faith and the places in which we live seems to come and go. For a few brief decades at the turn of the 20th century, such Protestants as Graham Taylor and H. Paul Douglass thought and wrote about the emerging industrial city. In the '60s Gibson Winter and Harvey Cox praised some urban churches but found suburban ones sadly lacking in religious vitality. Now, it no longer makes much sense to distinguish sharply between suburbs and city.

If the church abdicates its role in the shaping of 21st-century metropolitan America, developers, politicians and individual consumers will make those decisions by themselves. But the shape of the city should not be determined solely by political and economic concerns, since the nature of metropolitan life, our responsibility to the earth, and the physical and social conditions necessary for human flourishing are deeply theological issues.

Three of the many issues facing contemporary metropolitan areas impact churches directly: a rapidly growing ethnic and religious pluralism; the ethnic, racial, physical and economic boundaries between city, suburb and country; and the changing economic realities of the postindustrial city. The increasing religious and ethnic pluralism of American cities is among the most obvious challenges confronting American Christians. Initial reports from the 2000 census suggest that 9.5 percent of the American population is foreign-born. This diversity is most obvious in the larger cities, especially those on the coasts. But it is increasingly evident in mid-sized cities like Louisville and in many rural areas as well. While many of these immigrants are Christian, many others, especially those from Asia and the Middle East, are not. Not since the turn of the 20th century, in fact, have American cities confronted such ethnic multiplicity, and never have they confronted such religious diversity.