Religion in Cities and Suburbs

Religion has always operated as a fulcrum of influence in the American city and suburb. Even before Puritan father John Winthrop famously proclaimed his Massachusetts colony to be a “city on a hill,” thus indelibly linking the religious and urban dimensions of the national experience, Native Americans had seen fit to construct their own cosmopolitan centers in part as monuments of faith. Through ensuing centuries of development, religion's presence in the urban environment changed but never diminished; to the contrary, it at once diversified and intensified. Amid the tumult of the 19th-century industrial city, urban religion was transformed as a multiplicity of new beliefs, practices, and adherents added increasing complexity to a landscape that was already being redrawn by other elemental social forces of change. But though altered by these external contingencies and challenged by new dynamics of growth within, religion strengthened rather than weakened its grip on the city through institutional innovation and theological reinvention. Urban religion's remarkable malleability grew more noticeable in the late 20th century, even for scholars who postulated its demise as a result of secularization. As they continued to sift through the evidences of life in the “secular city” and then witness new religious vitality in the postindustrial city, they too concluded that the sacred exercised moral, cultural, and political authority in the modern metropolis. And so what was true for the United States in its infancy has remained so throughout its history: Religion is an integral force that has persistently and profoundly shaped the city and suburb in its own image.

How religion has, throughout American history, helped mold these two domains in such pronounced fashion is a query best illuminated through examples drawn from a narrower continuum of time. Consider, then, the substantive contributions religion made to the creation, maintenance, and realization of urban and suburban life in the United States between the late 19th and late 20th centuries, the period of most dramatic urban development in this country. Typically, historians have tapped four streams of analysis when [Page 669]assessing the fundamental processes of change during this hundred-year span, each of which is organized around one of the following foci: the conceptualization of urban and suburban space; the construction of meaning and creation of community within this space; the functions of city and suburban systems; and the way political power is exercised within these systems. As a brief chronological overview of this period illustrates, whether operating theologically as a system of belief, culturally as a system of being, or socially as a system of behavior, religion has forcefully and consistently asserted itself in each of these processes.

Warranting attention, in the first place, is the role religion played at the opening of this era in inventing urban space. In the late 19th century the unyielding sacred vision of Winthrop's postmillennial conception of the city, which promised gradual but certain progress toward cosmopolitan bliss, continued to inform city elites as they laid out their urban grids. Tempering this optimism was an accompanying awareness of the countervailing forces of anomie and injustice fostered by processes of industrialization, and it was an effort to curtail these “ungodly” influences in the pursuit of purity that led urban planners to embrace grand schemes like the garden city plan and City Beautiful Movement. Deeply influenced by millennial imagery of the New Jerusalem first embraced by English social critics in the early 19th century, American urban architects joined their counterparts by planning urban communities with dispersed populations and ample recreational space. Implementation of the garden city plan, it was believed, would surely eradicate the “unbearable” aspects of the industrial city and consequently pave the way for heavenly splendor on a metropolitan scale. Even more positivistic was the City Beautiful Movement, which combined postmillennial aspirations with expectations of American imperial grandeur in the quest for a new urbanism. While undoubtedly inspired at the personal level by a range of ideological commitments, the alliance of prominent architects, city planners, and social scientists that gave voice to this movement and then designed its boulevards, public buildings, civic centers, monuments, and fairs shared a common agenda: to use a new aesthetics and scale of grandeur to infuse the mundane with transcendent possibilities and to train the eyes of all city dwellers on a higher, spiritual plain.

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