The following was published as the Foreword of The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities (2021), edited by Katie Day.
When I was growing up in Southern California in the 1960s, there were still many open fields that had yet to be developed into housing tracts or shopping malls. When the rains came in the winter, these fields bloomed with grass, weeds and wildflowers. These otherwise unremarkable open spaces were transformed into lush green carpets teeming with all sorts of life: grass and other plants, flowers, birds, tadpoles and frogs, right smack in the middle of our recently developed suburban neighborhoods. Until I was in college and I left Southern California for the first time, my view of the world was that everything came alive in the winter. Had I grown up in Chicago, my view of nature—and the way I thought the world worked—would have been significantly different.
While this anecdote may seem trivial, and perhaps a strange way to introduce an important new book that investigates religion in an urban setting, my point is that place matters. Place, in this sense, is more than just a location where we might happen to live. Our perspectives on the world are shaped by many different social and psychological influences, but the specific “place” that provides the context through which we interact with the larger world is of key importance in developing our ongoing understanding of that world. Religion is no different in this regard. Not only are individual religious perspectives, beliefs and practices informed by how one interacts with other individuals, nature, the built environment and the like, but so also are institutions and organizations as they interact with each other in that same environment.
Yet, despite the fact that urban scholars have produced many insights on how urban areas work, religion rarely makes an appearance in these studies. If it does appear, it’s generally one among many other discrete social institutions located in a particular area, rather than an integral institution in the urban setting. Similarly, religion scholars have been mainly preoccupied with religious beliefs, practices, rituals and the like, as though these exist independent of their location.
Although there are notable exceptions (e.g. Ammerman 1996; Eiesland 2000; McRoberts 2005; Day 2018), “place” has been underdeveloped as a significant methodological and theoretical category in the study of religion. More typically, one sees case studies of individual congregations, or an examination of congregations in a particular community, but with no significant exploration of how congregation and community are a part of the same social ecology. Or one sees an analysis of some variable within religion–such as class, race or gender—that is abstracted from the specific context in which that variable is embedded. What is missing is a holistic analysis of the role of religion at the community level that examines how congregations are embedded in neighborhoods and how that may matter. Leaving ideas of place out of these analyses also leaves out any sustained reflection on how religious groups operate as integral parts of the urban ecology of the city.
Into this void step professors Katie Day and Elise Edwards, with the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities. This book is a treasure trove of insights into the different ways that religion is embedded in its urban environment and how that may matter, to both religion and to the city. Rather than treating the city as an independent variable that only acts on religion, the chapters in this volume treat the city and religion as partners in a recursive relationship in which they are shaping as well as being shaped through their interaction. This, in my view, is the signature contribution of this volume. The chapters operate from an ethnographic methodological and ecological theoretical approach, harkening back to Robert Ezra Park, Ernest W. Burgess and the pioneering approach to urban studies of the Chicago School of sociology (Park and Burgess 1925).
As an undergrad who was first exposed to the discipline of sociology through reading the deep ethnographic accounts of different neighborhoods and types of people in Chicago, I was enthralled with the storytelling and the ecological frame that was the hallmark of the Chicago School. Books like Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), The Taxi Dance Hall by Paul Cressey (1932) and Nels Anderson’s The Hobo (1923) were deep descriptions of the lives of different kinds of people in the city of Chicago, where they lived and how they spent their time. But they also provided a way to understand these stories as they fit into the larger fabric of the city. That is, the Chicago School sought to explain processes and interactions within and between people and institutions so as to develop theoretical lenses that could clarify the ecological relationships of populations, organizations and institutions in the city of Chicago and beyond. As Robert Park wrote in the volume that set out the research paradigm for the Chicago School’s urban sociology, the importance of the city as a research site lay in:
[T]he opportunity it offers… a great city tends to spread out and lay bare to the public view in a massive manner all the human characters and traits which are ordinarily obscured and suppressed in smaller communities… . The city, in short, shows the good and evil in human nature in excess. It is this fact, perhaps, more than any other, which justifies the view that would make of the city a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be conveniently and profitably studied. (Park 1925, 45-46)
Although the Chicago School had a self-conscious mission to create a secular sociological science as opposed to some religious do-good approach to solving social problems (Smith 2003), some of the studies that came to be recognized as foundational in establishing the empirical science of society also had a progressive intent to solve the many problems that they had identified in the urban context. For example, the research for Anderson’s The Hobo was sponsored by the Executive Committee of the Chicago Council of Social Agencies, with the goal of the project to “secure those facts which will enable social agencies to deal intelligently with problems created by… the tens of thousands of foot-loose and homeless men” in the city of Chicago (Anderson 1923, ix-x). This, of course, was not the norm, but that progressive, reformist impulse remained. This suggests that even in their efforts to establish the scientific study of social phenomena, the scholars of the Chicago School also believed that good empirical research could help to solve the problems that existed in–and because of–the modern city.
What is conspicuous by its absence among the Chicago School studies, similar to urban studies more generally, is that there is not much in the way of a sustained analysis of the role of religion and religious institutions in the urban setting. Although core Chicago School scholar Louis Wirth addressed the experience of Jewish immigrants (Wirth 1928), and a more marginal figure, Samuel Kincheloe, detailed competition, adaptation and succession among churches in the urban setting (Kincheloe 1938), not much else on religion was published from the Chicago School. In the classic book that set the Chicago School research agenda, The City (Park and Burgess 1925), Robert Park does briefly address religion, emphasizing the need for continuous “readjustment” by religion to the continuously changing conditions of urban life:
Under the disintegrating influences of city life most of our traditional institutions, the church, the school, and the family, have been greatly modified…. The church … which has lost much of its influence since the printed page has so largely taken the place of the pulpit in the interpretation of life, seems at present to be in process of readjustment to the new conditions. (Park 1925, 24)
Park’s underlying assumption about religion was not just that, along with other important social institutions like the school and the family, it was, of necessity, “readjusting” to the new realities of its urban setting, but that religion was secularizing due to the ecological processes in which it was embedded in the city. Park was not alone in this observation. The Protestant church in the 1920s was simultaneously in the process of becoming more “scientific” and thus “modern,” and also fighting over what that meant–an “adjustment” to social and scientific change, or a giving up of the faith (see e.g. Marsden 1980; Flory 2003). Yet, if we don’t assume that, in adjusting and adapting to new realities, religion necessarily becomes more modern—and thus secularized—we can find examples of religious groups that adapted to modern scientific realities in the service of building a following for their otherwise traditional beliefs and practices. This battle, I would argue, is a direct result of the location of the combatants in the primary urban centers of the time—New York and Chicago. And, as Park observed, they found it necessary to adjust to the changing realities they encountered on a daily basis in their urban setting.
Katie Day and Elise Edwards are ideally situated as the organizers and editors of this Handbook. Katie Day has recently published an in-depth look at the religious institutions in one eight-mile stretch of road in Philadelphia, documenting how they have changed as the city has changed around and with them (Day 2018). Elise Edwards is an ethicist and theologian who was also trained as an architect, so fully understands the seemingly disparate worlds that intersect in the urban environment. Both of them have also worked to bridge the gap between academic research and praxis in their teaching and writing, and as such are excellent guides on this journey through the religious landscape of cities.
Further, the strength of this editing and organizing partnership is evident in the range of contributors and topics of the chapters included in the Handbook. The contributors include social scientists, journalists, theologians and religious practitioners, representing an interdisciplinary mix that allows the reader to bring the different disciplinary and professional approaches into conversation with each other. The topics are equally broad; yet, as noted above, all coalesce around the shared ethnographic methodology and theoretical assumption that religion exists and changes within a particular urban ecology of organizations, institutions, neighborhoods, politics, public officials and the like. Thus, chapters are representative of global cities ranging from Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Nashville and—yes–Chicago in the U.S., to locations across the globe such as Indonesia, Mumbai, Jos (Nigeria), Hong Kong and Haifa. Topics include investigations of the relationship between religion (in various forms) and the built environment, the use of GIS technology to map urban religious groups, gentrification, community organizing, food movements, urban policy and climate change. In short, there is something of interest for anyone interested in how religion is influenced in the urban context, and how religion in turn, seeks to exert its influence on the urban setting in which it is located.
It is my hope that as this book is read and disseminated, the essays included here will spark creative new investigations of how religion and its urban setting are symbiotically related, and provide greater insights into how religion not only changes and adapts in response to its urban place, but how it also exerts its own influence in and on the city. But first, enjoy this book. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of urban processes and how religion and the urban influence each other, which both reminds us of the past while beckoning us toward the future.
Citations
Ammerman, Nancy. 1997. Congregation and Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Anderson, Nels. 1923. The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cressey, Paul. 1932. The Taxi Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Day, Katie. 2018. Faith on the Avenue: Religion on a City Street. New York: Oxford University Press.
Eiseland, Nancy. 2000. A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Flory, Richard. 2003. Promoting a Secular Standard: Secularization and Modern Journalism, 1870-1930. Chapter 9 in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press.
Kincheloe, Samuel. 1938. The American City and its Church. New York: Friendship Press.
Marsden, George. 1980. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of American Evangelicalism, 1870-1925. New York: Oxford University Press.
McRoberts, Omar. 2003. Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Park, Robert E. and Ernest W. Burgess. 1925. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, Christian. 2003. “Secularizing American Higher Education: The Case of Early American Sociology,” Chapter 2 in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press.
Wirth, Louis. 1928. The Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zorbaugh, Harvey. 1929. The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.