S O U L S OF T H E C I T Y
Polis Center Series on Religion and Urban Culture David J. Bodenhamer and Arthur E. Farnsley II, editors
SOULS OF THE CITY Religion and the Search for Community in Postwar America E TA N D I A M O N D
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of Indiana University Press North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana - USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders Fax orders Orders by e-mail
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[email protected] by Etan Diamond All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z.-. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Diamond, Etan. Souls of the city : religion and the search for community in postwar America / Etan Diamond. p. cm.—(Polis Center series on religion and urban culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (cloth : alk. paper) . Cities and towns—United States—Religion. . United States—Religious life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. BL .D .⬘⬘—dc
For Eli and Shira, Remember . . . if you always keep a smile on your face, the world will be a better place.
CONTENTS
I II III IV V VI
Metropolitan Growth and Religious Change: An Introduction ‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’: Building New Religious Communities in Suburbia From Small Town to Mall Town: Rural Communities and Their Congregations What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community? The Dilemma of the InnerCity Congregation Tying the Metropolis Together Finding Community in the Modern Metropolis
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PREFACE
Unlike many history books that have their roots in the personal history of the authors, this book does not represent some culmination of a lifelong curiosity. Rather, this book found me. The Project on Religion and Urban Culture (RUC) was already three years old when I joined the Polis Center in Indianapolis. Charged with studying the role of religion in a mid-sized American city, the RUC project had already undertaken intensive sociological analyses of several neighborhoods across Indianapolis. Some historical research had been done on the early decades of the twentieth century, but no one was working on the middle decades of the century, a period in which Indianapolis’s current landscape was being formed. What, then, what was the value of knowing what the religious landscape looked like right now if we had no way to assess whether it was the same or different from how it was one, two, or five decades earlier? How could the project make any claims about the relationship of religion to community in a changing metropolis if it did not examine what that relationship looked like in generations past? With this challenge before me, I set out to write a book that provided the context for the rest of the project. At the beginning, my primary audience was my colleagues, whom I constantly harangued about the fact that ‘‘history matters.’’ Over time my audience expanded to include historians, sociologists, religious studies scholars, and lay people interested in the convergence of religion and metropolitan growth during the second half of the twentieth century. Readers familiar with Indianapolis will recognize many of the congregations and neighborhoods discussed herein. Those who have never been in the city or who have only driven through it on one of the city’s many interstate highways will see those congregations and neighborhoods as recognizable types. Every city has its array of congregations—liberal and conservative, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, black, white, ethnic, rich, poor, transient, stable, growix
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ing, dying, opening, closing. And every city has its array of neighborhoods—inner city, suburban, rural, middle-class, workingclass, lower-class, segregated, mixed, and so forth. By telling the story of the interactions among these kinds of institutions and places in Indianapolis, this book tells the larger story of religious and metropolitan change across the United States. Special thanks go to my many colleagues at the Polis Center who worked with me on the Project on Religion and Urban Culture. The bulk of this manuscript was shaped by my constant conversations with Mary Mapes, Elfriede Wedam, and Art Farnsley in our suite of offices at the Polis Center. In a group of two sociologists and two historians, it was not surprising that we had many sharp disagreements over the nature and meaning of metropolitan growth and its impact on religion and community. I learned much from the three of them about my own work and about the world beyond. My thanks to each of you for those splendid memories. Special thanks goes to David Vanderstel for first bringing me to the Polis Center and for sharing with me his extensive knowledge of Indianapolis and its history. Others at the Center who helped me include David Licht, Vicki Cummings, Michelle Hale, Kevin Armstrong, Dawn Parks, Jim Dowling, Allen Federman, Scott Valpatic, Emma Hall, Tommy Faris, Monty Hulse, Karen Feitl, Robert Cole, Yolanda White, Cynthia Cunningham, John Neal, and Karen Frederickson. Tess Baker’s administrative support was invaluable. Kevin Mickey must be singled out for his tremendous assistance in teaching me about GIS and digital mapping. He gave me a skill that has proven its worth beyond this book. Several research assistants and summer research interns contributed to this book. I appreciate the diligent work of Ted Slutz, Margaret Puskar, Amanda Fisher, Alexis Manheim, Brad Sample, Kevin Corn, Jason Lantzer, and Sarah Wagner. Finally, Jan Shipps deserves special mention for her mentoring and friendship. I appreciate the time and effort she put into our project as a whole, and to my work specifically. As director of the RUC project and of the Polis Center as a whole, David Bodenhamer provided the leadership and vision for this work. David offered a newly graduated historian (me) a chance
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to join an exciting project that fitted directly with my research interests and then provided me with the resources and freedom to write this book. I owe David a tremendous debt of gratitude and thanks for that opportunity. The Religion and Urban Culture Project was funded over the course of several years by the Lilly Endowment, which had been interested in finding out what, exactly, religion has meant to American cities over the past half-century. Through the Lilly Endowment’s generous support and the intellectual interest of Craig Dykstra, the project was able to produce a depth and breadth of historical and sociological research on urban religion. Finally, thank you to Bob Sloan, Kendra Stokes, Jane Lyle, Matt Williamson, and the rest of the staff at Indiana University Press. I appreciate their interest in my book and the topic of metropolitan religion. Their critical comments and close editing helped to reshape—and improve—the manuscript many times over. I also appreciate the close copyediting work of Elizabeth Yoder. From a personal perspective, I also appreciate the support of my family. The final stages of writing and editing of this book were done in the house of my parents-in-law, Harvey and Elaine Snowbell. For almost eleven months, they opened their home to our family while we made the transition back to Toronto. This tremendous act of generosity and kindness will always be remembered. My parents, Jim and Judy Diamond, also deserve many thanks for their advice, friendship, and love (and in my mother’s case, for her proofreading of the entire manuscript!). I am particularly excited to share a publisher with my father, whose book was published by Indiana University Press in . When I agreed to join the RUC project, I did so with the support of my dear wife Judy. Our relocation to Indianapolis meant that we had to leave Toronto and, more important, she had to leave her family (and native country). Her strength and courage in doing so amazed me every single day during our five years in Indianapolis. During that time she taught in two different schools and obtained her masters degree, all while serving as the primary caregiver for our two children, Eli and Shira. Living in a city without extended family, she served as the anchor to our nuclear family, taking the chil-
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dren to the Children’s Museum, Holliday Park, the Monon Trail, and dozens of other activities, including a weekly visit to a housebound woman in the Jewish community. When we returned to Toronto in the fall of , Judy had gained even more respect and love from me, and I thank her deeply for her friendship and support. Finally, my two children. Eli and Shira were not in existence when I began this book. Today, thank God, they are very much so. Every day the two of them make me laugh more than I ever thought possible. Seeing the world through the eyes of a little boy and little girl is a wonderful feeling, and I thank God for the opportunity to share in their delight. Even at their young age, they have already become—in the untranslatable Yiddish phrase—mentshes. I am deeply proud of them and love them both dearly.
S O U L S OF T H E C I T Y
I M E T R O P O L I TA N G R O W T H AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE: AN INTRODUCTION
‘‘Present-day Protestantism is challenged by the urban situation in much the same way that the primitive church was challenged by paganism.’’ So began Walter Smith Jr. in his report to the Indiana Conference of the Evangelical United Brethren. Just as winning the pagan was ‘‘an almost insuperable responsibility,’’ so too ‘‘urban conditions, which include mobility, anonymity, transiency, vicious competition, conflicting social groups, and constant change, confront the church with such gigantic difficulties that many times the church is tempted to believe that the job cannot be done.’’ Moreover, the traditional ways of thinking about the city—urban versus suburban versus rural—were rapidly losing their relevance in the postwar period. ‘‘The city, with its problems, is engulfing the suburbs. Urbia and suburbia are losing their separate identity as urbanization continues. Consequently, no church is separate from the problems confronting the city church. The church must be awake to seize every opportunity to meet human need in its changing environment.’’1 Smith was not alone in his assessment of the changing city. In the postwar period almost everyone involved in religious life, from denominational officials to congregational pastors to lay leaders, recognized that the changing metropolitan landscape was dramatically restructuring the religious landscape. Study after study found, as church consultant Frederick Shippey wrote in , that ‘‘all religious work goes on in this [urban] context. Once a church has
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rooted itself into the life of the community, it must remain alert to the alterations which come within the urban environment. Change is surely inevitable.’’2 From the s forward, American cities expanded dramatically. New suburban development pushed the urbanized area out toward the periphery, reshaping both the rural landscape and the urban landscape left behind. New and different people, new and different industries moved to and within cities. Political alignments shifted with the growth of suburbia and the decline of the inner city. These changes in the second half of the twentieth century challenged people’s understanding of place and space in the city. Concepts such as ‘‘neighborhood’’ and ‘‘city,’’ and perhaps most of all ‘‘community,’’ were ripped apart and put back together in sometimes very different ways. Metropolitan expansion led to increased mobility, which created new environments, neighbors, and institutions—all of which meant new communities. For many people, this changing sense of community was felt most clearly in the religious environment. As an institution structured around community and rooted to particular places of worship, religion could not help but be shaped by the constant swirl of physical and social mobility that dominated the metropolis. To many congregations, the metropolitan relocations and dislocations caused by the ‘‘ceaseless outward movement of residences and residents’’ rivaled those of the Great Depression and World War II.3 In newly developed suburban areas, churches and synagogues functioned as gathering and meeting places for entire neighborhoods of newcomers.4 Elsewhere on the suburban periphery, where small churches had sufficed for small rural communities, the influx of new suburbanites sometimes overwhelmed the old congregations, which felt intruded upon by newcomers who were unfamiliar with the social networks or the ‘‘way things were done around here.’’ In inner-city neighborhoods, white flight and black in-migration challenged the status quo of many congregations. Some congregations saw their membership move completely out of the neighborhood, often to another church, leaving a handful of members to face a much different neighborhood, socially and economically. Some congregations chose to relocate to
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the newer areas. Still others decided to keep the church in its urban environment while reorienting the church’s mission to their new situation. In all of these situations, metropolitan changes sparked changes in the religious landscape and, in particular, in the ways people experienced a sense of community. These interconnections between city and religion frame the three central questions posed by this book. First, how did changes in the metropolitan landscape shape changes in the religious landscape, and vice versa? Second, what differences were there in the religious experiences of suburban, rural, and inner-city residents? Third, what do the answers to the first two questions say about the nature of community in the contemporary metropolis? In asking these questions, the book challenges contemporary social critics who lament the soulless nature of the modern metropolis or decry the absence of community structures, pointing instead to the religious congregations as places of strong community interaction.5 Furthermore, the book takes on scholars who have overlooked the role of religion in the twentieth-century metropolis or who have subsumed religion under larger categories of ethnicity or race.6 Through this analysis of metropolitan growth and religious change, this book argues that the postwar metropolis has, in fact, supported vibrant religious communities. But at the same time, it shows that there has never been one kind of community, nor has there been a ‘‘magic formula’’ for creating community structures. The ways people experience community have varied by religious tradition, history, and metropolitan geography. More important, ‘‘community’’ must not be understood solely in terms of inclusiveness and welcoming. Communities also exclude and separate, and religious communities—like other kinds of communities in the metropolis—are no exception. Although the book focuses on religion’s place in the late-twentieth-century metropolis, it is helpful to note that the relationship between religion and cities extends far back in time. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the concept of ‘‘city’’ was closely linked to the religious identity of the Israelites. Jerusalem was the ‘‘city of Zion’’ and the ‘‘city of David.’’ In the time of the Israelite kingdom, certain cities served a sheltering function, as ‘‘cities of refuge’’ for indi-
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viduals who killed accidentally. In Jewish rabbinic literature, cities are seen as places of community and religious infrastructure. The twelfth-century Talmudist Moses Maimonides ruled that a person could not live in a place that lacked certain basic social, political, and religious institutions, an opinion that ruled out an isolated, rural lifestyle. In medieval Europe, cities had both religious and nonreligious roots. Some cities developed around the places where bishops were located because they were centers for religious information and power. At the same time, mercantile cities developed as antireligious (or perhaps extra-religious) entities, places unfettered by the interlocking relationships of feudalism and clericalism. That Protestantism, in its European form at least, began in cities of Western Europe should not surprise, for these places had a long history of radical religious ideas. The image of the city as a religious place comes clearest with the famous pronouncement of Puritan leader John Winthrop, who sought to create a ‘‘city on a hill.’’ Winthrop’s Boston was rather unmetropolitan even compared with the Massachusetts wilderness, yet it was not accidental that Winthrop did not seek to create a ‘‘village’’ or a ‘‘town’’ on a hill, but a ‘‘city.’’ Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, religion took on particular relevance to American cities as immigration brought new and different religious styles. In the s, German and Irish Catholics challenged the Anglo-Protestant status quo on a range of issues, including temperance and education. A large German Jewish immigration in this same period expanded the religious landscape beyond Christianity. In the late s, immigration from eastern and southern Europe brought new waves of Catholics and Jews into urban areas. More than with earlier immigrant generations, this one brought out an organized response from city-dwelling Protestants, who saw connections between the non-Protestants and the many social, economic, and moral problems associated with industrialization and urbanization. The Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth century included those who sought to improve the city and the lives of those in it through overt evangelization and more subtle ‘‘Americanization’’ programs such as settlement houses. In the s, the Ku
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Klux Klan’s explicitly anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish rhetoric emerged as a harsher alternative to the ‘‘kinder, gentler’’ Social Gospel. At the same time that these mostly rural Protestants were lashing out against urban Catholics and Jews, the debate over religion in cities took another turn with the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that unfolded over the Scopes trial. Here the secular urban liberal was posited against the rural conservative, and cities were seen (for good and bad, depending on one’s perspective) as places where religion went to be refined and distilled of its premodern notions. The last half of the twentieth century saw the relationship between religion and cities bounce around considerably. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, American society grabbed onto religion with both hands. Levels of adherence reached record highs. New church construction boomed as new suburban neighborhoods were built. Television brought religion into the living rooms of American families. Catholicism and Judaism had shed their ‘‘foreign’’ identities and were accepted as legitimate alternatives to Protestantism.7 In the s that suburban religious boom turned sour as social observers criticized suburbanites for their vacuous religious experiences and institutions.8 Increasing political and cultural concern for the inner city translated into the emergence of ‘‘urban ministry,’’ which was seen as more authentic than suburban ministry. Meanwhile, the reopening of America’s doors of immigration brought new Asian religions to the United States, and some cities became centers for Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. The s saw yet another shift as the conservative Protestant presence burst onto the metropolitan scene. Jimmy Carter’s election introduced the evangelical Protestant community to the rest of the nation and made it clear that conservatives were as prevalent in suburban subdivisions as they were in backwater rural towns. By the s and s, echoes of the Social Gospel movement were heard, albeit in different tones, with the popularity of faith-based social services. As politicians and civic officials debated welfare reform and welfare devolution, they looked to urban churches as key community institutions in distressed neighborhoods. On the suburban frontier, a second boom in religion created the phenomenon
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of the ‘‘megachurch,’’ a comprehensive congregation that tapped into the continuing desire of metropolitan residents for religious community and connections.9 Given this historical relationship, in the theologian Clifford Green asked that we understand the metropolis and its religion as an ‘‘interconnected whole.’’10 Green directed his comments primarily toward religious practitioners to emphasize the necessity for relationships between poorer inner-city churches and wealthier suburban ones. Taken more broadly, however, Green’s comment echoes the earlier statements of Frederick Shippey, Walter Smith, and others in the s and s. The metropolis is a single ecological system that cannot be understood in piecemeal fashion: ‘‘urbia and suburbia’’ have become one. Or, as Carl V. Herron, executive of the Manhattan Division of the Protestant Council of New York City, stated in , ‘‘The suburban church has a stake in the welfare of the city church, because the former survives and grows at the expense of the latter.’’11 It was this connectedness that led the Episcopal Church to name its new magazine Church in Metropolis in , rather than Christ in the Inner City or Neighborhood Church. As the magazine’s introductory editorial articulated, ‘‘It is the inter-relatedness of many and diverse functions within the community of a large region that describes our life wherever we may live.’’ Congregations in the inner city, the suburbs, and even in the rural fringe all shared a common destiny.12 A single episode—the suburban relocation of a religious congregation, for example—was in fact three stories, involving those who moved to the suburb, those who were left behind in the urban core, and those who were already living on the rural periphery. This book heeds Green’s call by exploring metropolitan growth and religious change in one American metropolis, Indianapolis, Indiana. A self-styled ‘‘all-American City,’’ Indianapolis (and Marion County, with which the city is now contiguous) offers researchers a metropolitan and religious landscape that has long reflected the simultaneous and contradictory tensions between community connectedness and community fragmentation. After the city’s first settlers moved from their original position on the White River to
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Original Plat Map of Indianapolis, s. Indiana Historical Society.
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higher and drier ground, the city grew slowly within the milesquare grid designed by Alexander Ralston, a student of Washington, D.C., designer Pierre L’Enfant. As the city expanded beyond the initial Mile Square and industrial development took hold, distinct regions began to appear within the city. When construction began on a Central Canal on the near west side of the city, industries situated themselves on or between the White River and the canal. Later the creation of both a single ‘‘union station’’ on the near south side and a new ‘‘belt railroad’’ that linked all of the lines around the eastern, southern, and western sides of the city attracted a multitude of factories and business to the edges of downtown.13 These industrial developments greatly influenced the residential settlement of the city during the mid-nineteenth century. Because the prevailing winds in Indiana flow from northwest to southeast, the city’s elite began to locate themselves north and northeast of the industrial region so they could still be close to downtown but would not have to breathe the noxious fumes. Although the introduction of mule-drawn streetcars in enabled industrial workers to live a little farther from their jobs, most continued to build their homes near the railroad tracks, which soon became a formidable barrier between the north and south sides of the city.14 In time, Indianapolis developed distinct pockets of working-class settlements in the industrial areas on the west, east, and south sides of downtown. Irish immigrants, who first came to Indianapolis to construct the canal and railroads, originally resided on the near west side, but with the advent of streetcars, most moved south to an area that became known as Irish Hill. Germans settled directly east of downtown in Germantown and southeast of town around the streetcar turnaround at Fountain Square. Attracted to jobs at Kingan and Company meatpacking plant and National Malleable Castings Company, immigrants from Eastern Europe settled near those factories along the White River. Smaller groups of Jewish, Danish, Greek, and Italian immigrants also settled in Indianapolis, all in ethnic neighborhoods on the near south side.15 African American settlement originally centered on Indiana Avenue, a marshy area just west of downtown between the canal and the White River. In the early twentieth century, another African
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American enclave appeared on the northeast side of town near the Atlas Engine Works at th Street and Martindale Avenue. African Americans settled in the neighborhood because of the proximity to domestic employment with the city’s elite and the easy access to public transportation. By the s, when national immigration laws halted Indianapolis’s already low level of European migration, Appalachian migrants became the next major group to settle Indianapolis. Upland southern migration increased as the Appalachian timber industry faltered and coal mining became more automated.16 Migrants from Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia moved northward and settled on the south and west sides of downtown Indianapolis, where industries were willing to hire and train unskilled migrants.17 White Appalachians settled in neighborhoods like Stringtown, West India-
Social Geography of Indianapolis, s.
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napolis (which was in turn divided into topographical neighborhoods like The Valley, The Bottoms, and The Hollow), Mars Hill, Fountain Square, and Irish Hill; while black southerners continued to settle in the African American neighborhoods of the northwest and northeast sides of downtown. Indianapolis’s social geography was formalized in the s with the adoption of the city’s first zoning ordinance. Following the patterns of zoning that were spreading across the nation in the post– World War I decade, Indianapolis had sought to rationalize and control development—residential development over here, industrial development over there. The zoning laws solidified the city’s spatial patterns by delineating the west and south sides as primarily industrial areas, with some working-class residential areas permitted; the east side as a slightly higher residential class, but with some industrial use still permitted; and the central north side as entirely ‘‘high-class’’ residential—with no industry. (The primarily African American neighborhoods on the northwest and northeast sides were conspicuously zoned at a lower grade, creating a white wedge between the two black neighborhoods.) With these zoning laws, the central north side became neatly ‘‘barricaded on the south by the commercial and industrial areas, and on the east and west by railroads and low grade areas.’’ As a result, this ‘‘high grade settlement’’ was free to grow outward, toward the ‘‘open, and pleasant country to the north, away from the ‘dead-end’ barrier to the south.’’18 By the s, this ‘‘open, and pleasant country to the north’’ included new neighborhoods both within the city limits, between th and th Street, and outside the city limits beyond the Central Canal and the White River. The latter included Meridian Hills, Crows Nest, and Williams Creek, which offered space for wealthy families to escape the denser and more heterogeneous neighborhoods of the city. As ethnic groups began to achieve higher social and economic status, they often left the areas of first settlement for these higherstatus neighborhoods on the north side. In the early twentieth century, affluent Jews moved to nicer streets within their south side neighborhoods. But beginning in the s and continuing through the s and s, upwardly mobile Jews moved to even more
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prestigious neighborhoods on the north side.19 Similar migration patterns developed among other ethnic groups, as the south side served as the ‘‘starter neighborhood’’ where a person of workingclass background could come in and find affordable housing and a job but use it as a stepping stone to go elsewhere.20 Thus, although a major urban center, Indianapolis on the eve of World War II resembled a mixture of small town and big city. The predominance of native whites, the small proportion of foreignborn immigrants, and the highly segregated African American population suggested a typical midwestern town more than it did the heterogeneous metropolises of Detroit or Cleveland or Pittsburgh. The physical layout of the city—with low density, single-family housing and grid street patterns—looked different from other urban industrial centers. Yet the level of social segregation among what diverse groups there were—with the black ghettos, the Jewish neighborhoods, the pockets of ethnic communities, and the white native neighborhoods—looked a lot like the major urban cities. Indianapolis’s religious landscape similarly reflected both the small town and the big city. From its inception, Indianapolis was known as a ‘‘city of churches.’’ In his original plat of the city, Alexander Ralston set aside three distinct spaces for religious purposes in the northeast, northwest, and southwest corners of the Mile Square. Although within a decade these spaces were used for secular purposes instead, the town’s founders had recognized the place of religion in their city. Indianapolis’s central space, which became known as Monument Circle, also had a strong religious connection, with five prominent churches standing on or immediately adjacent to this highly public space. Like most smaller midwestern towns and cities, Indianapolis was dominated by a few Protestant denominations for much of its history. Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Disciples of Christ comprised the majority of adherents and congregations, although there were smaller pockets of other Protestant denominations, Jews, and Catholics. These last two groups in particular remained largely separate from the dominant Protestant establishment, having their own congregations and community structures. The small African American population developed its own community institutions as
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well, with its churches often originating as ‘‘colored missions’’ of one of the white congregations. Because Indianapolis never had the levels of European immigration experienced in many industrial cities in the early twentieth century, the Protestant-Catholic tensions common to industrializing cities were less evident than they were elsewhere. Still, Catholic in-migration was sufficiently robust to make them the single largest religious group in Indianapolis by the s. (Protestants as a whole were more numerous, but any single Protestant denomination was smaller than the Catholics.) The growth of Indianapolis’s Catholic population helped to spark the meteoric local rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the s. Far from being a fringe social or religious group, this version of the Klan represented the ideas of the mainstream Protestant establishment that looked askance at Indianapolis’s growing Catholic presence. Marches and cross burnings on church property as well as pro-Klan sermons and open participation
Race and Ethnicity in Indianapolis, –. Bodenhamer and Barrows, Encyclopedia of Indianapolis.
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by clergy offered clear markers as to who was and who was not part of this religious community. The Klan’s popularity aside, Indianapolis’s religious landscape did not require organized hatred to mark community insider and outsider status. There were enough theological and social markers to separate the city’s religious communities into five groups: a white, mostly liberal mainline Protestant community; a white, mostly conservative Protestant community; an African American Protestant community; a Catholic community; and a Jewish community. For the most part, the walls that divided the groups were high; while much variation existed within any single group, there was very little crossover. Yet for all their differences, they all shared the common experience of living in an Indianapolis metropolitan region that was undergoing considerable change in the second half of the twentieth century. They obviously experienced those changes differently—race, class, geography, and religion each had its own influence. But when viewed collectively, the experiences of these different religious communities in their different geographical settings combine to tell the story of metropolitan growth and religious change in a midwestern city. This brief review of Indianapolis’s urban and religious history makes clear that the city is far more representative of the American metropolitan experience than are the more familiar settings of Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles. Scholars tend to focus on those larger megalopolises because they contain such a wide ethnic variety and have a large presence of world (non-Christian) religions. Yet that very complexity also makes them unrepresentative of most of the smaller and mid-sized cities in the United States, which lack either Los Angeles’s extensive suburban sprawl or Chicago’s ethnic diversity. Instead, medium- and small-sized cities have had some sprawl and some ethnic pockets—much in the way that Indianapolis does. Moreover, smaller cities—particularly those in the Midwest—while often numerically dominated by Catholics, have remained mainline Protestant cities in cultural terms, with the dominant civic leaders coming from a handful of elite Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Methodist congregations. Thus, the experiences retold in this book are closer to those of the Columbuses and Des
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Denomination
Total
Rank
Catholic Methodist Episcopal and Methodist Protestanta Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Black Baptistb American Baptist Presbyterian Church (USA) Evangelical and Reformedc Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) Evangelical United Brethrena Episcopal
39,418 27,571 17,614 12,617 9,482 9,060 5,417 3,927 3,706 2,572
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1971
Catholic United Methodist Church Christian Churches and Churches of Christ Presbyterian Church (USA) Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) American Baptist Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) United Church of Christ Episcopal Church of the Nazarene
Total
Rank
91,820 46,124 25,227 24,348 19,563 18,354 9,954 9,204 8,882 7,129
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1990
Catholic Black Baptist United Methodist Church Christian Churches and Churches of Christ Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Presbyterian Church (USA) American Baptist African Methodist Episcopal Zion Assemblies of God Southern Baptist Convention
Total
Rank
84,033 56,403 37,027 22,836 20,596 17,990 11,483 10,328 10,229 9,353
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Notes: a In 1968, the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren merged to form the United Methodist Church. b Black Baptists were not enumerated 1971. c In 1957, the Evangelical and Reform Church and the Congregationalist Church merged to form the United Church of Christ.
Religious Affiliation in Indianapolis, –.
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Moineses and Topekas—the places that have been ignored by scholars and policymakers and that are often seen as ‘‘boring’’ or ‘‘unremarkable.’’ In fact, these places experienced the postwar period in many of the same ways as the larger metropolitan regions, with outward suburbanization, rural transformation, inner-city change, and the movement of people and institutions in all directions. In telling the story of metropolitan growth and religious change in the postwar period, an author has the dilemma of where to begin. Particularly when the point to be made is that events in the suburban subdivisions, the rural periphery, and the inner city are all closely interrelated, the question becomes which strand to pick up first? Or perhaps it does not really matter, since the interrelation of the three suggests that any place could be the starting point. In this book, I have decided to proceed through the three phases of metropolitan growth by examining the three parties involved: the suburbanizers, the suburbanized, and the unsuburban. Chapter begins this story by examining Indianapolis’s new suburban development and the founding of new suburban congregations. Noting that many of Indianapolis’s new suburban subdivisions lacked basic community-building institutions such as schools or shopping centers, the chapter discusses the ways that many new suburbanites turned to religious congregations to fill that community need. The chapter argues that despite the considerable variety in congregational origins—from denominational sponsorship to independent grass-roots formation—congregations all shared the common goal of creating community among people who were often strangers only weeks or months before. Postwar suburbanization did not happen in a vacuum, however. The rural metropolitan periphery was full of small, relatively isolated communities that had survived for many decades outside the orbit of the big city. As new suburban developments sprang up around them, these smaller communities faced numerous challenges. Chapter explores the multiple ways that rural congregations experienced metropolitan change, with some embracing change as a way to develop their churches and others turning their backs on suburban change altogether. In either case, the chapter argues, rural congregations were asking the same question: What
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did community mean when old-timers were being joined by more and more newcomers with few social or geographical ties to the congregation? Chapter turns the attention away from the metropolitan periphery toward the inner city, where neighborhoods and congregations were confronting changes on their doorsteps. Here, even more than on the suburban fringe, questions of community were being asked by inner-city congregations. What did it mean when the community inside the church was increasingly different from the community outside the church, whether that be racially different or socioeconomically different or both? As the chapter explains, some congregations answered the question by withdrawing their community entirely from the neighborhood and relocating elsewhere. Others committed themselves to redefining ‘‘community’’ to include others and outsiders. Together, Chapters , , and make clear how changes to each part of Indianapolis’s metropolitan landscape—suburb, countryside, and inner city—reshaped the religious landscape in the period from to . In Chapter the book turns to the years after , when the distinct parts of the metropolis were officially merged into a single metropolitan governmental unit. What did metropolitan consolidation do to the city’s religious landscape? Here the chapter argues that while the religious landscape reflected some degree of metropolitan unification, for the most part Indianapolis and its religion continued to be marked by fragmentation and community otherness. A final chapter brings the discussion of religion in the metropolis full circle by looking toward the future. In a modern metropolitan environment where mobility is a given, what does this mean for religion and religious congregations? In a society where geographical permanence is often an elusive goal, what role do churches and synagogues play? Such questions are important, given the contemporary rhetoric about community (or the absence thereof ) in the modern metropolis. As social observers look around and see a sprawling, fragmented environment, the immediate assumption is that people are no longer connected to one another. The continued existence of religious congregations, however, challenges such con-
Metropolitan Growth and Religious Change
clusions. Even as people’s lives have been stretched and reconfigured in new ways, the religious congregation remains an important part of the metropolitan fabric. Congregations continue to serve as social magnets, destinations that metropolitan residents can go to and feel part of a community. They also provide a sense of geographical rootedness. It is not coincidental, after all, that we still call churches and synagogues places of worship. There is, in short, little reason to think that either of these trends will cease. As gathering points for otherwise secular and transient metropolitan people to worship, practice, and gather, religious congregations play a vital role. They are, in fact, the souls of the city.
II ‘‘ HI, NEIGHBOR!’ ’: BUILDING NEW R ELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES IN SUBURBIA
‘‘The rush to suburban and new housing poses some hard problems for today’s churches, challenged with providing Sunday school and worship facilities for all communicants.’’1 This comment, from the Indianapolis Star in , provides as clear a statement as any on the relationship of religion to suburbanization in the immediate post–World War II period. As millions of families across the nation left the familiarity of the urban neighborhood and the comfort of the religious and social communities therein, they often moved to a suburban landscape too new to have any sense of community in place. With the exception of the nation’s largest builders of planned communities, few new suburban subdivisions contained extensive community-oriented amenities. Some might have had a playground or a park, but new school construction was often the domain of the local municipality, and commercial projects were usually left to private developers. With little else besides a house and yard, new suburbanites were forced to develop their own community structures with strangers who only days or weeks before had moved to the same neighborhood. For many, these communities developed around the church or synagogue, as religion took center stage in the lives of America’s new suburbanites. The hundreds of thousands of new churches and synagogues formed between and ranged from denomina
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
tionally planted and planned churches to small independent congregations meeting in living rooms or garages. They came from a variety of denominations and faith traditions. Yet regardless of the theological orientation, new suburban congregations used religion to provide an essential community structure in an otherwise structureless environment. As early as cities had been settled, portions of the population had always sought to move out to newer, more open areas. The postwar suburban growth differed from earlier peripheral development in its size and composition, however. In nineteenth-century incarnations, suburbia attracted a relatively limited and elite segment of the population. While the ‘‘suburban ideal’’ of owning property on the borderlands between city and country was widespread, only a minority of people had the financial means to realize that dream.2 In the years after World War II, the combination of technology, public policy, and economics opened that dream to a mass market. Improved building techniques, the automobile, and seemingly freeflowing mortgage financing from the federal government enabled millions of middle-class and working-class Americans to buy their own piece of the suburban landscape. A similar pattern was at work in Indianapolis, where the city had been growing at its edges since its inception in the s. These suburban borderlands sometimes took the form of independent incorporated communities, such as Mount Jackson on the west side and Martindale to the northeast.3 In other cases, they were simply unincorporated developments outside Indianapolis’s formal political boundaries. With a change in the city charter in , Indianapolis began to expand formally into the suburban periphery with a series of annexations that took in the communities of Martindale and Brightwood on the northeast side and Haughville, Mount Jackson, and West Indianapolis on the west side. Indianapolis’s appetite for annexation diminished by the s, but new suburban development in Marion County continued unabated. In , on the southwest side of Marion County, just outside the Indianapolis city boundary, the Greater Indianapolis Industrial Association proposed to develop Mars Hill as an industrial suburb with factories and homes for fifty thousand workers in
Souls of the City
Stages of Development to , Indianapolis. City of Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development; The Polis Center.
a self-contained area. The intention was to make Mars Hill an industrial competitor to the city of Gary, in northwest Indiana. The intervention of World War I, among other factors, limited the influx of industries into Mars Hill, and only a small number of houses were actually built. The result was a partially developed neighborhood, which, although in a suburban setting, resembled more a
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
small rural town than a metropolitan suburb.4 More successful than Mars Hill was the west-side town of Speedway, founded in as an industrial suburb centered on the now famous racetrack. Northeast of Indianapolis, the town of Lawrence was growing as an independent municipality. Later in the s and s, other smaller suburban communities developed, including the north-side towns of Meridian Hills, Crows Nest, and Williams Creek, which offered space for wealthy families to escape the denser and more heterogeneous neighborhoods of the city. As the s gave way to the s, Indianapolis and other cities shifted from surviving the Depression to preparing for World War II. Here too, the dynamics of wartime preparation and mobilization increased Indianapolis’s need for new housing while limiting the ability to provide it. During the war, several of Indianapolis’s major companies converted to military manufacturing and opened their doors to new employees. General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Allison Engine, and Western Electric, among others, needed workers for their round-the-clock shifts and found a willing labor pool in rural migrants from southern Indiana, the upland southern regions of Kentucky and Tennessee, and other Appalachian areas. In the northeast corner of Marion County, Fort Benjamin Harrison ensured a steady stream of military personnel into the city. Some estimates place the total number of people passing through Indianapolis during the war at six million.5 Obviously, not all of these people stayed, but those who did placed a strain on an already tight housing market. In Indianapolis needed , new dwelling units for the incoming population.6 That same year the federal government imposed price controls on the city’s rental market, over the strong opposition of the real estate industry, which insisted that it could meet demands for new housing without outside interference. The fact was, however, that wartime restrictions severely limited new construction, and from to fewer than , new housing units were built in Indianapolis.7 The artificial constraints on Indianapolis’s housing market were lifted with the war’s conclusion and the ending of war-induced shortages. As the federal government poured money into Veterans
Souls of the City 1948–48
Township
1948–56
No. of No. of Subdivisions Lots
Pike Washington Lawrence Wayne Center Warren Decatur Perry Franklin
24 175 49 57 5 58 30 81 25
Total
504
571 6,858 2,407 1,510 144 1,926 1,165 3,231 570
No. of Acres
1956–58 Avg. Acre No. of No. of Avg. Acre per Lot Lots Acres per Lot
416.5 4,486.6 1,421.6 774.4 71.9 996.1 515.1 1,936.0 329.7
0.73 0.65 0.59 0.51 0.50 0.52 0.44 0.60 0.58
18,382 10,949.9
0.60
221 714 633 768 — 835 387 609 31
140.4 489.1 380.4 313.4 — 327.4 162.8 358.3 25.3
0.64 0.69 0.60 0.41 — 0.39 0.42 0.59 0.82
4,198 2,197.1
0.52
New subdivision development by township, Marion County, –. Source: Leiffer, Church Planning for Methodism, Table II-.
Administration and Federal Housing Authority loans, the city’s construction rates soared. In , there were , new housing starts in Indianapolis.8 In , Marion County recorded more than twenty million dollars in building permits, an amount that doubled the next year.9 Although there was still much space within the city limits for new construction, the bulk of developers’ attention was concentrated on the suburban areas beyond the city limits. From to , more than five hundred new subdivision projects were built or approved in Marion County. These projects were spread across the county, although three-quarters of subdivision development occurred in the four ‘‘inner’’ townships, those that lay directly along Washington and Meridian Streets (Warren to the east, Wayne to the west, Perry to the south, Washington to the north). Washington and Perry Townships alone accounted for more than percent of new suburban growth. New suburban growth continued at a rapid pace through the s. Over the next ten years, all townships except Center Township recorded population growth of at least percent. In addition, suburban expansion had evened out throughout the county; the three northern townships saw their population rise percent, while the three southern townships grew by percent. The result of the growth was that between and the balance of population shifted from the central city to the suburban periphery.
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
Township Population, –. U.S. Census Bureau.
Indianapolis’s suburban development occurred on a scale much smaller than that of other more nationally famous projects like the three Levittowns on the East Coast. Between and , the subdivisions that were approved or constructed in Marion County contained an average of only thirty-seven houses per subdivision. House lots in these subdivisions were large (more than a half-acre in size) and typically had a three-bedroom ranch house sitting in the middle of a wide lawn.10 Although no housing project was as large as Levittown, many of the construction methods used by Levitt and Sons were replicated here. In Windsor Village, on the east side at st Street and Arlington Avenue, the eight hundred houses being erected were the prefabricated kind, with the individual sections constructed in an off-site warehouse and then transported to the subdivision for assembly. Like Levitt’s homes, the one-story houses were built on a concrete slab, with radiant heating units embedded in the concrete. Another Levitt-style builder was National Homes, one of the country’s largest purveyors of prefabricated houses. On the west side of Indianapolis, National Homes
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provided housing for lower-income to middle-income families in the Eagledale neighborhood. Indianapolis’s suburban developers concentrated on building houses rather than creating comprehensive communities. Even in the larger projects, such as Eagledale, land was not necessarily set aside for churches, as it was in Levittown. As such, the development of religious congregations was left up to individual homeowners and to area denominations. The absence of congregations in these communities raised eyebrows among religious leaders both locally and across the United States. ‘‘America needs new churches— indeed it needs them desperately,’’ wrote Fred Michel, a Disciples of Christ official. The nation was experiencing a ‘‘continental movement’’ of population from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and Southwest, and a ‘‘local movement’’ from city to suburb. In cities across the country, ‘‘thousands of new neighborhoods have been created [and] unless America is to become even more pagan and materialistic, churches must be planted in these new neighborhoods.’’ Michel estimated that the nation needed twenty thousand new churches, although he admitted that this number was just a guess.11 It was just known that there were lots of people moving to these new neighborhoods and that these new neighborhoods had no churches. Seeing themselves as the protectors of the nation’s religious landscape, the dozens of city and regional church federations across the United States undertook systematic surveys to understand the postwar metropolitan dynamics. In city after city, Protestant church leaders issued reports with titles such as ‘‘Protestantism in Norfolk’’ or ‘‘The Pittsburgh Church Survey.’’ Each of these took a similar approach to studying the expanding metropolis. The first section usually contained a demographic analysis, based on census data. A second section examined the general Protestant landscape. A third section broke down the Protestants into different denominations or perhaps the city into different sections. A final section presented recommendations for church planning. Almost universally, the recommendations pointed church leaders toward cooperation and coordinated planning. One of the primary tools for such coordination was the use of comity, which had been
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
an issue for mainline Protestants since the s and the founding of the Federal Council of Churches. The theory behind comity was that competition among denominations and churches was detrimental to religion as a whole. It was unseemly for churches to market themselves in an aggressive manner and to ‘‘steal’’ members from other churches. In the words of one Congregationalist denominational leader in California, ‘‘The conduct of churches toward each other ought to be on an ethical plane quite above the level of competitive supermarkets.’’12 Competitive geographic clustering of churches also resulted in the ‘‘over-churching’’ of a particular area, while other areas would be left without any religious services. Dozens of reports and analyses of cooperative activities were written by comity advocates such as H. Paul Douglass, whose Comity Report served as a blueprint for Indianapolis’s comity effort. In his report, Douglass laid out some of the basic principles of comity. An area should be considered ‘‘adequately churched’’ when it had a ratio of one congregation to two to four thousand people. Churches of the same denomination were to be no closer than one and three-quarters of a mile apart, while those from different denominations could be closer if their proximity did not create too much competition.13 In addition to producing formal comity manuals and metropolitan church surveys, national church groups published handbooks for new church growth that spoke to ecumenical cooperation. One such pamphlet, distributed by the National Council of Churches in , was ‘‘dedicated to the development of mutual understanding between the personnel of the several hundred city, county, and regional planning bodies throughout the United States, and the many churchmen who are actively engaged in planning for the location of new churches, and for adjustment of site, building, and program of already established churches.’’ Another booklet, published by the Disciples of Christ, argued that the success of new suburban congregations depended ‘‘largely on the number of organizations, churches and individuals that can be committed to the new church project in the beginning.’’ Too often, the booklet explained, a single minister or layman tried to start a church, only to find himself floundering for outside support. Instead, he should have begun
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with assistance from denominational officials and other neighboring churches, which would always be ‘‘more willing to help if they were consulted from the beginning.’’14 Individual denominations also published their own magazines to target the growing suburban population. In the Methodist Church began to publish The Methodist Story, a lifestyle publication that presented readers with an image of a vibrant denomination busily preparing for the future, which more often than not lay in the suburban periphery. Articles published in the early issues included ‘‘New Ways in the City,’’ ‘‘We Need Three Churches a Week,’’ and ‘‘Before You Build . . . Survey.’’ Readers were repeatedly told to plan for their church growth in orderly and systematic ways through surveying, organized fundraising, and congregational committees. The Church Federation of Indianapolis, the city’s official voice of mainstream Protestantism, followed this path of surveying and planning for metropolitan expansion through the efforts of the Comity Committee. In the Federation commissioned Frederick Shippey, a national church consultant and author of dozens of metropolitan church surveys, to study Indianapolis’s Protestant community. For over a year Shippey interviewed pastors and congregations, sent out and compiled questionnaires, and learned about the dynamics of Indianapolis’s expanding religious landscape. In he produced a report designed to ‘‘provide a factual background for dealing with church problems of relocation, merger, extension, and program adjustment in Indianapolis.’’ Although he limited his study to the churches within the official Indianapolis city boundaries, Shippey was aware of the growth of the suburbs and their future impact on the city. ‘‘Protestantism needs a metropolitan plan,’’ Shippey wrote. After all, ‘‘ percent of the residents of Marion County lived in the Indianapolis metropolitan district,’’ a statistic that provided ‘‘a significant clue to the importance of a Protestant strategy of church work which conceives the metropolitan area as an administrative unit.’’ Furthermore, ‘‘a city grows along the periphery,’’ and it was this peripheral area that was ‘‘found to be the most important territory in terms of inherent promise of new church work. Hence, a careful investigation of the
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
urban fringe is required in the development of a Protestant strategy for the city.’’15 In discussing church extension, Shippey emphasized that ‘‘an adequate strategy of churching the suburbs be inaugurated along with a wise and more unified approach in dealing with the peculiar needs of the urban community.’’ The Church Federation and its constituent denominations should ‘‘note where concentrations of population are already beginning to occur.’’ For example, ‘‘distances to the nearby church need to be considered. When churches are too far away, people tend not to go to church at all.’’ Denominations needed to act fast, Shippey advised. ‘‘Too long a delay in providing neighborhood church facilities in a growing suburban community jeopardizes efficiency in Protestant work.’’ Ultimately, the recommended course of action for churches was to act within a cooperative framework of comity. ‘‘Intensive competition among the denominations for suburban residential areas usually results in misunderstandings, feuding, and inferior church work. Assurance of prompt and unique churching may be secured under comity in Indianapolis and suburbs, utilizing a clearly defined Protestant plan.’’16 Shippey’s report served as a broad blueprint for individual denominations to approach suburban church extension. Some, like the Baptists, purchased land in advance of new congregations and then sold them to newly founded churches. Doing so would ensure that the land would have been bought ‘‘at a price much below those which will prevail as the area develops.’’ Even if a Baptist church did not develop in that site, ‘‘perhaps some other church will be inclined to do so. The site will have been held for a church location.’’ Besides, there was little risk in dabbling in real estate speculation. If, in the end, ‘‘it is not deemed wise to start any kind of new church at the particular location the land can be sold, without probable loss, and very likely with a gain which can be used to aid in starting new churches elsewhere.’’17 In some cases, suburban real estate developers who themselves were involved in their congregations and denominations donated land for new church formation. It was in this way that St. Alban’s Episcopal Church was founded, after Episcopalian developers Warren and Linton Atkinson donated
Souls of the City
land in the Devington area on Indianapolis’s northeast side in . Similarly, St. Christopher Episcopal Church in the northern suburb of Carmel emerged after members of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church donated ten acres of land for a new congregation.18 As one of the most bureaucratic denominations, the Methodists approached suburbanization systematically. To keep a close watch on newly developing suburbs around Indianapolis, Methodist denominational bureaucrats commissioned several surveys of specific congregations as well as of Indianapolis Methodism as a whole to provide ‘‘help in evolving a significant and comprehensive program for Methodism in metropolitan Indianapolis.’’19 In his report on Methodists in Indianapolis, church consultant Murray Leiffer used a variety of demographic data, including phone exchanges and subdivision permits, to identify both the major thrusts of development on the metropolitan periphery and the potential impacts of suburbanization on the inner city. With this contextualization, Leiffer then turned to a discussion of Indianapolis’s religious (mostly Protestant) landscape in general and the Methodist landscape in particular. Here he identified ‘‘an item of major significance for Protestantism’’ as ‘‘the establishment of many new churches in suburban areas and the steady movement of others from the heart of the city to the suburbs.’’ Leiffer viewed this trend both positively and negatively. On one hand, it was ‘‘understandable and commendable’’ that Protestant denominations served newer middle-class and upper-middle class populations. On the flip side, this trend reflected a tendency ‘‘to flee from the areas where housing is deteriorating and where new population groups are moving in.’’ The rest of Leiffer’s report broke down Indianapolis’s Methodist churches into four geographical areas and analyzed each congregation in terms of demographic change, worship attendance, school enrollment, financial stability, and leadership development. Leiffer then offered a list of ‘‘problems and opportunities’’ for each congregation, usually in the context of a changing inner city and an expanding suburban periphery. Although the Church Federation and its member mainline Protestant denominations were the most active in undertaking official suburban surveys, the Catholic Church also carefully monitored
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
Catholic parishes, by founding date, Marion County.
metropolitan development to gauge the need for new parishes. In the postwar period, that need was high. Just prior to World War II, the diocese created St. Thomas Aquinas and Christ the King parishes to serve the entire northern part of Marion County, and St. Christopher parish for much of the west side. In the three years immediately following the war, nine new parishes were founded on all sides of the city. Five more were added in the s, and four
Souls of the City
more in the s. Typically, the impetus for a new Catholic parish came from the central office, with input from local members, particularly those who lived in newly settled areas far from the parish church. If sufficient numbers of Catholics lived far enough away from their existing church, the diocese would usually hold worship services in a private home. Then, if these temporary services proved popular, new parish boundaries would be drawn. Members of existing churches who lived within the new parish would be transferred (regardless of whether they wanted to be), ensuring that the new church had a sizable membership base from its inception. For the new suburban churches, having systematic research avail-
Congregational Donations to Chapel Hill Methodist Church, Indianapolis.
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
able to them as well as a denominational bureaucracy assisting (directing?) many of their activities was seen as a benefit not available to independent congregations. The founding of Chapel Hill Methodist Church on the far west side demonstrated the power of denominations. In the Northwest Conference of the Methodist Church purchased land from the College Life Insurance Company, which was developing the Chapel Hill subdivision. A denominationally sponsored survey of the Farley and Chapel Hill neighborhoods identified potential members, and those expressing an interest in a new Methodist church gathered for a service at Fulton Junior High School’s cafeteria on December . A number of other Methodist congregations supplied church furnishings for the new congregation: Speedway Methodist donated an altar; North Methodist, a cross; Bethel Methodist, fifty hymnals; and First Methodist of Carmel, the offering plates.20 Such efforts not only made the initial months easier for the new congregation, but they also sent a message that it was welcomed into the denominational community. The value of involvement of denominational officials and members of fellow congregations can be seen in the founding of Crestview Christian Church, a Disciples of Christ congregation organized in the late s. Here others with experience in church development helped guide the new congregation through the many issues and problems that confront any newly formed congregation, such as fundraising, site selection, and development of leaders. The idea for Crestview Christian originated among a group of members of Northwood Christian Church, located on th Street in Broad Ripple, who had moved to Delaware Trails, Greenbriar, and other new subdivisions near th Street and Ditch Road. Rather than continue to commute back to Northwood, the group decided to work with their church to sponsor a new Disciples of Christ congregation. Following Disciples denominational policy, a New Church Study Committee, consisting of Northwood leadership, denominational leaders, and those members interested in forming a new congregation, came together to study the ‘‘need for and means of ’’ establishing a new Disciples congregation on the far north side.21 In the interest of comity, the church committee in-
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tended to work closely with representatives from the denomination and from other churches in the area so as not to duplicate services. To that end, the committee planned to contact the Williams Creek and Broad Ripple Christian Churches, both of which were in the same general catchment area as Northwood. In addition to soliciting the approval and assistance of neighboring churches, the New Church Study Committee embarked on a detailed survey of development trends in the new area. In general, the survey returned a favorable projection for a new church. Population estimates for the area within a one-mile radius of the intersection of th Street and Keystone Road projected heavy growth by . Moreover, Indianapolis’s northern periphery contained few immersionist churches of the type that Northwood was looking to sponsor. Even though First Baptist Church was in the process of relocating to th Street and College Avenue, and Williams Creek Christian Church was located at th Street and Spring Mill, neither church posed a problem for a new church. The newer First Baptist was oriented to an upper-middle-class membership, and the older Williams Creek had a longtime membership base that would be less likely to defect to a new congregation. In fact, when Northwood representatives approached them about a new congregation in the area, Williams Creek’s leadership was quite excited about helping out. The older church, which dated to the nineteenth century, had already considered expansion as a way to attract the growing population.22 Now, Williams Creek’s leadership perhaps anticipated that the new congregation would be folded into the existing church and would provide a revitalizing burst of energy. From Northwood’s perspective, cooperating with Williams Creek had practical value, since the older church owned a parcel of land along th Street. Being able to obtain this land through a joint venture with Williams Creek might save Northwood a great deal of time and effort in securing a building site. Overall, this combination of a rapidly expanding population and a generally competition-free religious landscape made it both ‘‘feasible and desirable’’ to build a new Christian Church in the area ‘‘without working hardship on other existing congregations of other denominations already in this vicinity.’’23 Securing the cooperation of neighboring churches was one hur-
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
dle; finding an appropriate lot to build a new church was the next one faced by the New Church Study Committee. Denominational guidelines recommended that new churches not purchase anything smaller than a five- to ten-acre lot to provide ample parking space and room for expansion as the congregation grew. Such lots were likely to be available on Indianapolis’s north side, since much of the area was still unsuburbanized farmland. Within two months of its formation, Northwood’s New Church Study Committee located several potential sites, ranging in size from five to sixteen acres and in price from four to eight thousand dollars per acre.24 None of these proved satisfactory, however, and the committee continued to explore its options. More sites were found near the Williams Creek church, and at a special meeting in October , board members voted to put an option on a lot at nd Street and Spring Mill. This parcel had a number of attractive features. First, it was located adjacent to a site on which Washington Township planned to build a school. Having a church nearby, it was hoped, would create a mini-community center for the neighborhood. The site also had existing water services from the city, meaning no extra money would have to be put into making these available. Finally, the owner of the lot was willing to pave two driveways for the church’s use. Attractive though it was, the nd Street site did not work out. At a meeting in mid-November, board members expressed concern that locating away from a main cross-town artery such as th Street would leave the new church ‘‘too far away’’ from the traffic patterns. In addition, a location on th Street not far from First Baptist Church’s site might create a clustering of churches that would be beneficial to all. Interestingly, while logical from a commercial marketing perspective, this second idea directly countered the conventional wisdom of postwar church planning, which recommended even spacing of churches and avoidance of congregational clustering. Despite this contradiction of denominational policy, the New Church Study Committee decided that the th Street-Ditch Road site was the best for the new congregation and authorized representatives to ‘‘get the best deal’’ they could negotiate.25 By early January , the congregation had obtained sixteen
Souls of the City
acres of land at the southern edge of the Daubenspeck farm, with an option to buy an additional five acres at a later date.26 The first worship service was planned for the beginning of April, with separate services to be held for adults and children. By May the congregation had officially adopted the name ‘‘Crestview,’’ hired a temporary minister, and closed the charter membership roll with sixty-nine individuals.27 Thus, within less than eighteen months, the Crestview Christian Church was transformed from an idea in the minds of a few Northwood church members to a functioning congregation in one of Indianapolis’s booming suburban neighborhoods. The founding of Crestview Christian Church was a classic example of the deliberate church planning undertaken by mainline Protestant denominations. Neighborhood surveys, coordination with nearby congregations, and the participation of denominational officials all marked the kinds of careful measures associated with the development of new suburban congregations. But cooperation and comity had its limitations. Sometimes by wanting to cooperate too much, a church effectively limited its own choices. When the New Church Study Committee for Cincinnati’s College Hill Christian Church evaluated the North East Hills community, for example, it found the area demographically ripe for a new Disciples of Christ church. But because it did not want to compete with other existing Protestant congregations, it could not find a neighborhood entirely ‘‘empty’’; most of the area had at least one other Protestant church already in existence. The church had to decide, then, ‘‘whether we are going to demand an indigenous neighborhood where we would serve as the principle local representative of Protestantism . . . or whether we will strive to serve the Disciples over a larger area, reaching the neighborhood as we can but not being too concerned to be entirely free of competition.’’28 Another problem with comity was that it could be a slow process—sometimes too slow for its own good. In Boston, Walter David Knight, the field representative of the Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., complained that the slowness of comity councils often meant that ‘‘we have arrived too late with too little.’’ The problem was particularly acute
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
in newly developing areas, where ‘‘real estate prices rise with the development of a community. Too often we arrive with our assignment only to find that ‘there is absolutely no suitable property.’ ’’ To exacerbate the situation, Knight continued, ‘‘the periphery denominations, sects if you wish to call them that, will walk in without comity assignment’’ and start their own congregation. As a result, ‘‘we find ourselves in the position of ‘competing,’ ’’ despite being in a supposedly noncompetitive situation.29 This problem of congregations or denominations actively working outside the comity framework was a real one and was perhaps comity’s fatal flaw. Harlan Paul Douglass, the author of the widely implemented Comity Report, recognized this problem, noting that a congregation or denomination choosing not to adhere to noncompeting principles or deciding to build a sanctuary next door to another church could easily throw a comity program out of whack. Often independent or conservative Protestant congregations that were outside a Church Federation’s orbit found little use for comity principles. Such congregations were unencumbered by denominational bureaucracies or cooperative rules and saw themselves as free to develop wherever they felt it was best to. Such independent congregations offered an alternative model of new suburban church development. Rather than being formed under the auspices of bureaucratic denominations, a new congregation might be sponsored by a single church. Individual church sponsorship benefited both the parent and daughter churches. For the sponsoring congregation, helping to form another church both fulfilled a sense of religious mission and served as a way to maintain ties with members who moved away. For the daughter church, having a sponsor ensured that the new church would have a committed group of members to provide leadership in the initial stages of growth. After all, strong leadership was crucial in the early stages of a congregation. As one writer on new church formation warned, ‘‘Ineffectual, slow-witted, and lazy people can have no part in the formation of a new congregation.’’30 One of the more successful examples of congregational sponsorship was found among Indianapolis’s Southern Baptists. The city’s first Southern Baptist congregation was founded in August ,
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following a revival sponsored by the First Southern Baptist Church of Connersville, Indiana. Within a year, and even before the congregation had constructed its own building, a small group of members from the First Southern Baptist Church of Indianapolis began a mission Sunday school in the Mars Hill neighborhood on Indianapolis’s southwest side. That mission soon evolved into the Marwood Baptist Church. A year later another group went to the growing suburban community of Speedway to form the Speedway Baptist Church. In when First Southern Baptist moved to its th Street location, some members stayed behind to form the Maranatha Baptist Church, which itself soon moved to a suburban location on East st Street. Edgewood Baptist Church (later renamed Arlington Avenue Baptist Church) was formed in by yet another mission group from First Southern Baptist. Later in , the congregation spawned the First Southern Baptist of Whiteland, Indiana, a suburban community southwest of Marion County. Finally, in , Eastern Heights Baptist Church was organized in the suburban neighborhood of Oaklandon in northeast Marion County.31 Although the correlations were not exact, the differences between denominationally planted churches and independently sponsored churches tended to break down along theological lines. Mainline Protestant denominations were usually more bureaucratic and systematic and thus usually planted their suburban churches in an orderly fashion. In contrast, most conservative Protestant groups were less bureaucratically structured and gave more control to individual congregations. These differences—between rational planning and individualized expansion—together with the theological biases of many social observers, could create serious tensions on the suburban landscape. One mainline Protestant church consultant complained that conservative Protestant ‘‘sects’’ and ‘‘cults’’ were ‘‘positively war-like in their aggressiveness’’ to found new suburban churches.32 Mainliners’ disdain for conservative Protestantism’s encroachment into suburbia stemmed in large part from their assumptions that theological conservatism was a product of the American South and of rural areas across the Midwest. ‘‘Holy rollers’’ and Bible-thumping fundamentalists had no place in middleclass suburbia, assumed mainline Protestants. Popular writers rein-
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forced these stereotypes by describing postwar suburbia as a haven for ‘‘middle-of-the road’’ religion that was either mainstream denominational or a blend of denominational styles that would be inclusive and attractive to newcomers.33 When observers noted the presence of conservative Protestant groups, they often wrote them off as irrelevant exceptions to the mainline norm. In his analysis of congregational growth in Levittown, New Jersey, Herbert Gans mentioned only in passing the presence of ‘‘fundamentalist Protestant sects’’ but provided no other information on their congregational experiences. This contrasted with his lengthy discussion of the larger Catholic and mainline Protestant churches and the two Jewish synagogues.34 Liberals also assumed that when suburbanites who had previously been associated with conservative Protestant traditions moved to suburbia, they would, by dint of their suburban relocation, migrate toward a more liberal orientation. William Whyte declared in The Organization Man that ‘‘acclimation to suburbia also stimulates switches in religious affiliations, and the couple from, say, a small Ozark town is likely to discard their former fundamentalist allegiance to become Methodists or Presbyterians.’’35 Despite these perceptions (or, perhaps, wishes) of religious liberals, conservative Protestant groups were neither irrelevant nor insignificant to postwar suburban religion. Whyte’s observations notwithstanding, suburban couples from the Ozarks were likely to keep those fundamentalist affiliations. According to one study, more than fifty ‘‘sects,’’ or mostly smaller conservative Protestant denominations, were represented in the sixty-nine largest metropolitan areas of the United States in the s. Of these, the Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, and Nazarenes, ranked as the fastest growing denominations.36 In Indianapolis, new congregations were formed in the suburban areas of Marion County (defined here as those areas lying more than a half-mile outside the Indianapolis city boundary) between and . Of these, percent were affiliated with some sort of conservative Protestant, Pentecostal, or Holiness tradition. In contrast, only percent of the new suburban churches were affiliated with mainline Protestant denominations.
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New Suburban Congregations, Marion County, –.
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Thus far, the discussion has focused on congregations that were built out of a positive desire to form new suburban communities, whether by denominational oversight or by individual congregational sponsorship. Not every new suburban congregation sprouted from such warm feelings, however. Sometimes internal dissension within one congregation prompted dissatisfied congregants to break away and form another. On Indianapolis’s west side, the founding of Messiah Lutheran Church represented a case where one church community was formed only at the expense of another one fracturing. Through the late s and into the s, Grace Lutheran Church was a growing congregation within the Lutheran Church’s Missouri Synod. Under the guidance of the popular Rev. E. H. Zimmerman, the congregation built a new building and formed a new school. As with many popular pastors, however, Rev. Zimmerman was noted for his efforts by the denomination and was promoted. His replacement, Rev. Hieber, fared less well.37 The initial point of conflict came over the school, which Hieber felt was less important to the church mission. His attitude outraged many in the congregation, who began to talk of leaving the church outright and forming a new congregation. Dissension grew when Hieber began to deny communion to his opponents within the congregation. Recognizing their disenfranchisement from their own church, and seeing an opportunity in the growth of the northwest side of Indianapolis, this group chose to leave Grace Lutheran and strike out on their own. In May , a congregational formation committee drew up a list of fifty-six potential members; and by October, Messiah Lutheran Church began to meet in a rented storefront on Indianapolis’s northwest side. In January the congregation purchased . acres, despite concern that they would be unable to raise the money needed to build a church structure. In a controversial move, they approached the local Lutheran Federation for support. Although most of the area’s Lutheran churches had accepted Messiah’s status as a small breakaway storefront congregation, they hesitated to agree to let it build a formal permanent structure. Some simply did not agree with the concept of breaking away, while others worried that the new congregation would take away their own
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members. Still, Messiah garnered enough support to obtain the financing. By , the church had grown enough to add a Sunday school wing, which it dedicated in .38 (Interestingly, Grace Lutheran’s internal problems did not end when the Messiah Lutheran faction left the church. In the early s, Rev. Hieber led Grace Lutheran Church entirely out of the Missouri Synod. Those who objected to this move left the church and founded Our Shepherd Lutheran Church as a Missouri Synod member.39) If new congregations sometimes emerged from internal controversies, they also occasionally sparked tensions with their suburban neighbors. Catholics seemed to face particular pressures when starting a new parish in an otherwise heavily Protestant city. In Fr. Leo Lindemann was appointed pastor of the newly created St. Christopher parish in the west side suburban town of Speedway, which had been established in as a town that would be supported by the concentration of automobile factories as well as by the now-famous track. Speedway’s residents were primarily workers in the various local factories and farming families already living in the area. When Fr. Lindemann came to Speedway, he found a population somewhat suspicious of Catholicism. Soon after the new priest’s appointment, a ‘‘committee of anti-Catholic men from Speedway’’ visited and informed Fr. Lindemann that a Catholic church would not be welcome in the town. Although the official history of St. Christopher does not record this, a later interview with a longtime parishioner confirmed that this ‘‘committee’’ was connected to the Ku Klux Klan. Not surprisingly, Fr. Lindemann rebuffed the men and announced that he would not leave Speedway.40 Rather than continue to face anti-Catholic pressures, however, St. Christopher soon became integrated into the town of Speedway. In fact, within a decade after St. Christopher’s founding, the town of Speedway had come to think of the Catholic church as a wellestablished part of the community. The extent to which Speedway’s residents had come to take St. Christopher for granted can be seen when Speedway Methodist Church was being formed in . When the new congregation requested permission to meet in the Speedway town hall, town leaders argued that Speedway did not
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need another church since Speedway Christian Church and St. Christopher Catholic Church were already serving the population. Only after the Methodist group pointed out that another new congregation, St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church, was already meeting in the town hall did officials ‘‘grudgingly’’ give permission. Even then the Methodists met with resistance from Speedway officials at several points. In the spring of , when the congregation wanted to move to the gymnasium of what is now Speedway Junior High School, the school board reluctantly granted permission only if the group agreed to vacate the building before school resumed in the fall. When the new church building was almost completed in , town inspectors threatened to close the building if the handrails did not meet exact zoning specifications. Moreover, the church was required to build a parking lot, although none of the other churches were required to do so.41 An even harder time was experienced by St. Luke Catholic Church in the suburban town of Meridian Hills. Founded in the late s in unincorporated Washington Township, Meridian Hills was intended as a haven for some of the city’s elite. Wanting to keep the area as nonurban as they could make it, townspeople decided to prohibit any commercial enterprise—including churches—from taking root within the town limits. In the s, however, several downtown congregations sought to relocate into Meridian Hills and met with varying degrees of success. Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation fought a protracted court battle with the town before finally succeeding in constructing its new building. In contrast, Second Presbyterian Church and First Congregational Church, while meeting with some resistance from the zoning board, faced far fewer obstacles. (Another congregation, st Street Baptist Church, failed in its attempt to relocate into the town and ended up moving elsewhere). For some, the antagonism shown toward Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation and the more amenable reaction toward the Presbyterian and Congregational churches suggested a double standard on the part of the Meridian Hills zoning board. Mainline Protestants were acceptable; Jews were not. While such biases were never made public, the idea that the town favored certain kinds of communities
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Meridian Hills and Its Congregations.
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over others became even more plausible in when a fight broke out over a new Catholic church. That year the Diocese of Indianapolis announced the creation of St. Luke parish, to be centered on an eighteen-acre complex in the heart of Meridian Hills at th and Illinois streets.42 Immediately, the Meridian Hills Property Owners Association opposed the idea and suggested that the diocese place the church outside the Meridian Hills boundary at rd and Hoover Roads. The opposition’s attorney explained that a parish plant ‘‘dropped right in the middle of a quiet residential area would create an inharmonious use and cause a substantial decrease in property values.’’ The archdiocese wasted little time in rejecting the counteroffer, stating that the alternative proposal would place the parish plant within a few blocks of its boundary with neighboring St. Monica. Rev. Thomas J. Finneran, St. Luke’s first pastor, told the Indianapolis Times that ‘‘to move is impossible for us. It is something we cannot accept.’’43 The fight soon turned nasty. In February , the Meridian Hills zoning board formally rejected St. Luke’s request to build, saying that ‘‘the parish building proposal did not qualify with requirements in the zoning ordinances. It is felt that such a building program will substantially injure appropriate use of neighborhood property.’’ When asked how the parish proposal failed in these areas, however, board members could not cite any specifics. In response, the church’s attorney called the board’s refusal ‘‘the most ill-considered and un-American decision I’ve ever heard of in Indiana. It is more far reaching than the integration of schools in the South.’’44 The actions of their zoning board notwithstanding, some in Meridian Hills claimed that they were not anti-church or even antiCatholic. One proponent of allowing churches later explained that he believed that ‘‘as Americans we ought to give full opportunity for worship to those who wish it.’’ And some who opposed the presence of churches simply wanted to preserve Meridian Hills as a place for residents, not for outsiders. ‘‘It was not prejudice, or dislike of churches per se, that ruled them,’’ reflected one observer a few years after the controversy died down. ‘‘It was simply that churches would attract crowds, and crowds would destroy the cher-
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ished seclusion.’’45 The more people who came into the area from the outside to worship, the greater the chance that those people would want to settle in the town as well. An increase in population would lead to an increased demand for more services, such as sewage treatment. Such fears were not entirely unfounded. Between and , the town’s population grew from seven hundred to over eighteen hundred. Many thought that this growth would encourage people in and out of the town to seek annexation with Indianapolis, something that most of the original residents did not want. In attempting to keep outsiders out, then, the ban on churches simply preserved one kind of community at the expense of another. Such arguments did not wash with Indianapolis Archbishop Paul C. Schulte, who took the issue directly to the public. In an open letter to St. Luke parishioners, Schulte described Meridian Hills’s rejection as ‘‘extremely odd,’’ since the church property was purchased ‘‘long before’’ the other congregations in Meridian Hills had even begun planning to relocate. In fact, when the diocese purchased the property, it placed a sign ‘‘announcing to the world that it was dedicated to your new parish plant, so as to give fair notice for anyone who does not like Catholic Churches or Catholic Schools to save himself from being annoyed by locating his home elsewhere. In spite of the fact that the intention of the Church was general knowledge of the purchasers, quite a few who evidently do not like Catholic Churches or Schools, did elect to build their homes in the neighborhood.’’ Even more frustrating to Schulte was the fact that the town’s refusal to allow St. Luke to build came despite the fact that it had already been ‘‘forced to permit the building of the Jewish Synagogue with its attendant school, and in spite of the fact that they willingly permitted the building of the Congregationalist and Presbyterian Churches with their large attendant Sunday School buildings.’’ Schulte was ‘‘at a loss to fathom the mental gymnastics that must have gone on within the minds of the Board members for we find no trace of charity, of justice or even fairness.’’ Lacking other options, ‘‘the only thing left for us to do is to follow the example of the Jewish Congregation and fight the thing through the courts.’’ Schulte concluded his sharp remarks
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with the hope that ‘‘in His own good time, the God of the Catholics, together with the God of the Jews and the God of the Congregationalists and the God of the Presbyterians will dwell in Meridian Hills.’’46 Schulte’s letter set the tone for the ensuing court battle. In September, St. Luke’s attorney argued that the local zoning board was little more than a ‘‘kangaroo court,’’ since ‘‘the Hebrews, the Congregationalists, and the Presbyterians have been allowed to build churches in Meridian Hills, but not the Catholics.’’ The town’s attorney refuted the accusation by citing almost four hundred pages of testimony before the zoning board as proof that its conclusion had been well discussed and thought out.47 By month’s end, the court found for the church and against the town. The archdiocese had owned the land for eleven years and had made its intentions to build a church clear, and some who opposed the church had purchased property in the area with full knowledge of the diocese’s plans. The decision also noted that ‘‘it has long been decided that the conscience of civilized society dictates that wherever the souls of men are found, there the House of God belongs.’’48 Now it was Meridian Hills’s turn to appeal, this time to the Indiana Supreme Court. Again, the town cited the variety of ways that a new Catholic church would negatively affect it, including the extra traffic a church would generate and the drag on property values—‘‘between and percent,’’ it was claimed. Furthermore, the town strenuously denied the argument that it had specifically tried to exclude Catholics or Jews, although it did not explain why the Presbyterians and Congregationalists faced a far less difficult process.49 Meridian Hills’s arguments again failed to convince the jurists, and in November the state Supreme Court unanimously decided in favor of St. Luke. As with the lower court, the Supreme Court agreed that the diocese had acted correctly in planning for a new church. It had acquired land ‘‘when there was only one house existing on the perimeter of the property,’’ and it had ‘‘posted a sign of its intention to build a church and school on the site.’’ The residences that had been built on the adjoining properties were constructed ‘‘with the full knowledge of the owners of the use to be made of the church and school site.’’ More to the point,
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‘‘all the property had increased in value during that period of time, some as much as percent in the past four years.’’ Finally, the court concluded that keeping churches out was simply bad community policy. ‘‘We judicially know,’’ explained the decision, ‘‘that churches and schools promote the common welfare and the general public interest.’’50 The reaction from the residents of Meridian Hills was mixed, although most were simply relieved that the flood of negative publicity would soon dry up. Ironically for Meridian Hills, these court battles and the attendant fears of annexation became moot during the late s and early s. When Unigov consolidated nearly all of Marion County with the city of Indianapolis, the town’s cherished seclusion disappeared. The irony was further accentuated by the fact that the new churches and synagogues complemented the landscape and ambience of Meridian Hills far more than anyone might have imagined. The town soon ‘‘accepted the churches and adjusted to them as part of the community. The churches have cooperated with the town and have become a part of the town.’’51 Opponents of the churches even began to appear on the membership rolls. Regardless of whether they were founded under mainline Protestant comity principles, planted by the Catholic diocese, sponsored by an independent congregation, or broken away from an existing church, new suburban congregations did not create ‘‘instant’’ community. Merely erecting a building or holding services did not guarantee the forging of social bonds. Instead, new congregations had to work actively to develop relationships among new suburban members. But in providing space for people to find community, new suburban congregations confronted questions of what community meant, who belonged, and—often more important—who did not. For most new suburban congregations the foremost communitybuilding issue was practical: Where should the church be located? With very few congregations taking over an existing church building, new churches invariably were forced to find some temporary location. Sometimes the group shared space with another existing
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congregation, meeting in a basement or perhaps in the sanctuary but at a different time from the host church. In other cases, the congregation met in secular spaces. Because much of the suburbanizing parts of Marion County were still rural, barns and other farm buildings sometimes served as worship centers. Elsewhere, it seemed as if any public space could be outfitted for a worship service: a movie theatre, a town hall, a school auditorium, even a funeral home.52 In these temporary churches, congregational members would set up and take down the ‘‘sanctuary’’ as needed. Emmanuel Lutheran Church, housed in the Lawrence Youth Building from to , shared its space with a variety of community groups, including Boy Scouts, volunteer firemen, and even a Thursday-evening traffic and small claims court. Each Sunday morning, members came in early, set up the Sunday school, and rearranged the room for worship. Following services, they stored the altar, pulpit, chairs, organ, pictures, candelabra, hymnals, and even the crosses in closets for the week. When volunteers from Speedway Methodist Church came each Sunday morning to the CIO Union Hall to set up for worship, they had to ‘‘clean out the cigar and cigarette stubs, the beer bottles and the ash trays, arrange the chairs and have all ready for a : service.’’53 ‘‘Temporary’’ did not necessarily mean short, however. Some congregations met for several years in different places before finally building a permanent structure. For these ‘‘wandering’’ congregations, geographical convenience often took a backseat to financial considerations; wherever the rent was cheapest, they would go. When Faith Regular Baptist Church (now Heather Hills Baptist Church) was founded in , the congregation first met in North Baptist Church at nd Street and Norwaldo Avenue. A year later the church moved to the west side’s Christamore House at West Michigan Road. By December , the congregation bought land at North German Church Road—on the far east side of Marion County. Only when the new building was completed in March of did the wandering end and the congregation settle in as an east-side church.54 Experiences such as these helped to form bonds among the new congregation. As Emmanuel Lutheran’s pastor recalled, ‘‘We were
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The ‘‘Wanderings’’ of Heather Hills Baptist Church.
like one big family! We packed the Youth Building on Sunday mornings, we worshipped and prayed together and there was something about the togetherness and Christian fellowship that can never be repeated.’’55 Members who willingly attended their new church as it moved from location to location for a period of a few months or even a few years could not help but feel a bond with one another when they finally settled down. Still, wandering had its drawbacks. For the first four years after its founding in , Good Shepherd Lutheran Church met in the Millersville Masonic Temple. The church history noted that this ‘‘lack of permanent home tended to deter some potential parishioners from joining the church.’’ (Conversely, the mobility of suburbanites themselves also
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hurt new congregations. Good Shepherd Lutheran Church also claimed to have lost half of its charter membership within the first three years because they moved to other cities.56) The primary obstacle to the construction of a permanent church building was, of course, money or the absence of it. Embarking on a construction plan involved considerable financial investment, a hardship that was exacerbated by the fact that many new suburbanites had already invested a considerable amount in their homes and had little disposable income. Once the decision was made to undertake new construction, congregations faced the task of raising money. In some cases, new congregations turned to their urban counterparts for money. In Midland, Texas, the newly organized St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church raised funds by partnering with the city’s much older First Presbyterian Church. Although the campaign leadership was divided between both congregations, the majority of pledges came from the older church. Unlike the full-blown sponsorship that was discussed earlier, these kinds of financial relationships offered a way for urban churches to spend their home mission money without having to make deep organizational commitments.57 More common were the traditional fundraising activities such as dinners and bingo games. Some sold ‘‘bricks’’ for the new building. Other more creative fundraisers included men’s clubs selling steak knives, women’s groups selling quilts, and youth groups conducting car washes. Typically, churches tried whatever they could to raise money. In the early years of Nativity Catholic Church, founded in in the southeast corner of Marion County, the social calendar was full of programs that brought money into the church while bringing parishioners together. A Blossom Time Dance was followed by a Spaghetti Dinner fundraiser. Other fundraisers included weekly bingo games, card parties, bake sales, quilt raffles, and rummage sales. The annual Summer Festival, a three-day party with a fish fry on Friday night, a smorgasbord on Saturday, and a chicken dinner on Sunday, routinely served almost two thousand people and netted the church several thousand dollars. The success of these events was evident in the fact that only seven years after the parish’s founding, the congregation retired its $, debt. Equally as im-
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portant, these activities enabled parish strangers to grow to know one another and to form ‘‘the close-knit, hard working group which was to become a marvel of efficiency.’’ These events also served to integrate the parish community with the growing community of Wanamaker.58 The actual structures erected by new suburban congregations varied in architectural style and design. When they could afford to, churches hired architects to develop custom buildings. Congregations that could not afford custom-designed buildings could turn to denominationally provided ‘‘stock’’ church plans that could be constructed with little modification. Such plans often recommended a two-stage or three-stage building process, with a social hall/multipurpose room being built first for use as a church sanctuary and educational building in the early years. Once this first stage was paid off, the congregation would then build a permanent sanctuary. An educational wing would be the third stage, again built only after the sanctuary was paid for.59 In some extreme cases, congregations saved money by erecting entirely prefabricated structures. In the suburbs of Long Island, New York, three new Episcopal churches were constructed using identical pre-engineered plans that included concrete blocks, concrete floors, and asbestos roofs. ‘‘Not one item of special design is to be used,’’ declared a church spokesman, proudly noting that even the steeples and cross were prefabricated.60 Church building handbooks also advised congregations on other construction details such as site location (new suburban churches should be located not on a main street, but on an immediately adjacent road) and parking facilities (no less than a one-spot-toeight-worshipper ratio).61 Money-saving techniques even extended to the actual building process, as many congregations relied on volunteer labor from the membership. ‘‘Hundreds of man hours were expended’’ by church members during the construction of Emmanuel Lutheran Church. Although a hired contractor supervised the work, members installed roofing and gutters, finished the woodwork, painted, installed tiling, and landscaped the grounds.62 Here too, the actual act of building the church also built the community
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spirit, since members would have felt a greater sense of investment in ‘‘their’’ church after helping to erect or decorate the structure. Until a congregation was safely ensconced in its new building, efforts to build community were only partially successful. The sense of impermanence and fluctuation that accompanied a temporary church was sometimes too much for close social bonds to be formed. Furthermore, a congregation that lacked its own space simply could not undertake many of the community-building social activities typically associated with congregational life. Once in a new building, however, things changed; and new suburban churches plunged headfirst into the world of community building. Yet before embarking on a community-building mission, congregations had to determine which people comprised that community. Was the church going to be a neighborhood church or a metropolitan church? Would it seek to provide services for members only or for a wider population? Would it actively seek to include ‘‘others’’ or would it develop a homogeneous membership? Questions about who exactly were the ‘‘others’’ were tempered by the fact that most suburban landscapes had very few ‘‘others,’’ especially in racial terms. Nationally, African Americans accounted for only a small percentage of new suburbanites. In fewer than one in one hundred suburban residents was black, and fewer than one in one thousand blacks lived in suburbia. The situation in Indianapolis was similar to the national scene, as African Americans accounted for only about percent of the local suburban population in .63 Ten years later, this proportion doubled to all of percent.64 Blacks did suburbanize in greater numbers during the s, jumping to almost percent of the suburban population by . Even here the growth was deceiving, however, since more than percent of suburban blacks were concentrated in only a few neighborhoods, mostly in Washington and Pike Townships. The most prominent black suburban neighborhood was the Grandview development between th Street and Kessler Boulevard near Grandview Road. Constructed by a group of black contractors, this neighborhood contained three-bedroom and four-bedroom ranch houses on large lots. Referred to as the ‘‘Golden Ghetto,’’ Grand-
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Racial Distribution by census tract, Marion County, . U.S. Census Bureau.
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view was one of the only places in Marion County where middleclass black families could purchase modern suburban homes. In the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood near Butler University, black families first purchased homes in the mid-s. These neighborhoods were exceptions, however. A study found that Indianapolis was more racially segregated than many southern cities with much larger African American populations.65 By , Indianapolis ranked only behind St. Louis in terms of the fewest number of suburban blacks among midwestern cities.66 The absence of racial otherness on the suburban landscape extended to socioeconomic characteristics as well. In every category, suburban areas (defined here as areas with more than two-thirds of housing stock developed after ) ranked above the overall Marion County average and well above the figures for the older parts of the inner city or rural countryside. For example, in , percent of the suburban population worked in white-collar jobs, versus just percent in older areas. Median income was $, higher than in older areas. A slightly smaller proportion of suburban women were in the labor force, indicating a higher rate of stay-at-home housewives and mothers. Those stay-at-home moms were also likely to be taking care of larger families, since households in these areas averaged . people, again above the . people per household average in urban or rural parts of the county. The demographic data reported in the census matched those collected by individual developers. In a survey of the Delaware Trails subdivision, located at rd Street and Hoover Road in Washington Township, the typical family consisted of a white -year-old father, a wife (no age given), and two children. The father likely worked as an executive, a department head, or a salesman and earned between nine and fifteen thousand dollars a year.67 With minor variations in occupation, this family could have been found in all parts of suburban Marion County. For new suburban congregations of the s, then, the absence of African Americans and the narrow demographic slice found in Indianapolis’s suburban subdivisions meant that the new suburban congregations took a highly internal attitude toward community. Community was found within the walls of the church, and if the
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view turned outward, it was to people who were similar to themselves and who shared the same general set of cultural ideals and economic aspirations. As such, congregations tended to focus their community-building activities less on serving a needy population than on creating opportunities for friendship and interaction. Thus, one could find programs like Crestview Christian Church’s ‘‘Hi, Neighbor’’ project, which introduced member families to one another. Each week, the church bulletin featured two families, with photographs, telephone numbers, addresses, and biographical information such as occupation and hobbies. The office staff printed each family page on a three-hole-punched paper for insertion in a binder that members could buy from the church for one dollar.68 Such a program reflected the conscious effort to create community among families whose sense of ‘‘place’’ and ‘‘belonging’’ had most likely been disrupted in their relocation to suburbia. Even when churches opened themselves up to outsiders, their activities tended to fall into the social category of community building rather than the service category. Thus, one church in suburban New Jersey recognized that because it was ‘‘the only available public building in the neighborhood, aside from the public school,’’ it would ‘‘make it a strict policy to open its doors to scout troops, ‘Y’ activities, women’s organizations, a nursery school, leisure time activities for young people and adults, discussion groups, meetings for the consideration of the community’s needs and ways of providing for them—all the shared human concerns that make for a genuine sense of community. Hence, the church will be serving the citizens while, at the same time, enriching its contact with them.’’69 If one theme ran consistently through the new suburban church, it was ‘‘family.’’ Across the nation, the suburban family had taken on iconic status since it was seen as the fundamental unit of American society and the bedrock of American democracy.70 New suburban churches drew on this imagery as they sought to build the congregational community around the family. ‘‘The only adequate basis for our culture is found in the development of strong Christian families,’’ proclaimed the Silver Spring Congregational Christian Church in suburban Washington. To ensure that development,
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the entire ‘‘structure of our church organization, as well as the design of the building, has been dictated by family considerations.’’71 Like suburban society as a whole, new suburban congregations equated family with children. ‘‘The church fulfills its functions only when it has a program that serves the desires and interests of its children,’’ stated one church boldly.72 Congregations of all stripes expanded their Sunday school programs, built new educational facilities, and drew from the growing amount of curricular resources made available by denominations. The emphasis on education above all else was such that many new suburban churches built school facilities first and sanctuaries second. The success of such programs was measured in such factors as church school enrollment. In , more than two-thirds of the school enrollment at Indianapolis’s St. Luke’s Methodist Church, located on th Street on the far north side, were fourteen years old or younger. Similar numbers were found in the far south side’s Southport Methodist Church, which although a much older congregation, was located in a rapidly suburbanizing area. In contrast, children represented less than one-third of the school enrollment in several inner-city Methodist churches, where young families (particularly young white families who would attend Methodist churches) were few in number.73 Concern for religious education extended beyond the congregational Sunday school to all-day schools. In the s, Indianapolis’s Episcopalians, led by newspaper publisher Eugene Pulliam, began to explore the possibility of a parish day school in Trinity Episcopal Church, located at th and Meridian Street. Within a decade, St. Richard’s Day School had become firmly established, and although it was not in a suburban location, it appealed to suburban Episcopalian families who wanted the benefits of private school and a religious environment.74 For Catholics, the establishment of a new parish school was crucial to the success of a new suburban parish, and by most accounts, it was the schools that fueled church growth. When the diocese founded St. Michael Catholic Church on the northwest side of Marion County in , twenty-eight students attended the parish school. The next year enrollment jumped to
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ninety-five. By the mid-s, more than five hundred students attended the school, and by the mid-s, enrollment was almost one thousand. Holy Spirit Catholic Church’s school on the far east side had similar growth rates, growing from seven students in to more than a hundred and fifty the following year. Within a decade, enrollment averaged well over six hundred. Overall, Indianapolis’s new suburban Catholic schools quickly became ranked among the largest in the city. In , the ten largest Catholic schools had all been founded before . By , however, five of the ten largest schools were postwar suburban schools. The popularity of Indianapolis’s Catholic schools was such that, in the s and s, Indianapolis’s Catholics could claim—perhaps a bit too optimistically—that percent of the Catholic elementary students and percent of Catholic high school students were enrolled in area Catholic schools.75 In Indianapolis, the popularity of congregationally based day school and religious education complemented other metropolitanwide ecumenical educational programs. Beginning in the mids, many religious leaders in the city perceived juvenile delinquency to be a major problem and religion to be the cure. Although actual juvenile delinquency rates peaked in , many felt that Marion County’s youth had moved beyond parental and community control. The secularism of the public schools exacerbated this problem by not exposing students to religious or moral education. ‘‘While Protestants generally are adamant in insisting on churchstate separation,’’ a newspaper article explained, ‘‘there is also a widespread feeling among them that this should not involve a complete separation of religion from the state and especially the public education system.’’76 With percent of Indianapolis’s public school students having never attended Sunday school, religion was desperately needed, the newspaper claimed. Layered over these feelings were anticommunist fears and other concerns for America’s future. Two city-wide programs were introduced in the postwar period to help allay these concerns for Indianapolis’s youth. The first was the Weekday Religious Education program, called the ‘‘greatest single interdenominational effort’’ in Indianapolis church history.77 Weekday religious education had its roots in
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
in Gary, Indiana, when school superintendent William A. Wirt concluded that children who were connected to a church were less likely to become delinquent. In the Indiana General Assembly approved a bill allowing public school students up to minutes of ‘‘released time’’ for religious education. The program began in the spring of with students from three schools. That fall one full-time teacher was hired to teach students from nineteen different schools. The board of trustees was also officially incorporated as a ‘‘not-for-profit’’ organization, separate from the Church Federation. The desire to distance itself formally from the Church Federation stemmed from the refusal of certain participating churches to cooperate with the federation. The program soon gained support from a variety of secular and religious sources. In , with the new program struggling financially, the Lilly Endowment awarded a seven thousand dollar grant to expand the program to the entire county. The next year the Gideon Society donated three thousand Bibles, the largest single gift of Bibles ever given by the Society.78 The gift was well needed. From , students in , the number of participants in Indianapolis’s Weekday Religious Education program tripled in to over , children. That year percent of Marion County’s fourth and fifth graders participated in the midweek program. By , the number of participants had topped ten thousand. The ecumenical nature of Indianapolis’s Weekday Religious Education program can be seen in a number of ways. The participants included both black and white churches from across the theological spectrum. The teachers similarly represented a range of religious orientations. One review of the program noted that there had been nineteen Disciples of Christ teachers, eighteen Baptists, thirteen Presbyterians, and thirteen Methodists, but also six Church of God teachers, three Church of the Nazarene, and one Missionary Alliance. Because of this interdenominational nature, the actual religious instruction given was relatively mainstream Christian in content. Students learned ‘‘universal evangelical denominational truths,’’ leaving the individual congregational Sunday schools to teach those truths from their particular perspective. Interdenominational though it was, Indianapolis’s Weekday Re-
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ligious Education program did have its detractors. Most obvious were those who thought that religion had no place in the public schools. This position was supported by the Supreme Court case of McCollum v. Board of Education, which declared that the use of public school rooms for religious instruction was unconstitutional. In that case, the wife of a University of Illinois professor and a ‘‘self-styled atheist’’ had sued her son’s school district because of its weekday religious education program. She argued that her son had been embarrassed because he was the only one not taking religious instruction.79 The ruling had the potential of damaging the Indiana program, since the initial act had mandated that attendance at the religious classes be kept. Following the McCollum decision, the state’s attorney general advised schools to stop taking attendance so as not to appear to be forcing students into participating. The McCollum decision also prompted local religious leaders to state their belief in church-state separation. Upon receiving a set of policy guidelines from the Chicago-based International Council of Religious Education, the local program’s administrator, Dr. Florizel Pfliederer, declared that ‘‘the Indianapolis board affirms its belief in the principle of separation of church and state and is organized and administered according to the best legal advice from its legal staff and the legal staff of the International Council of Religious Education.’’80 Opposition to the Weekday Religious Education program also came from those who thought that religious instruction should be the province of churches, not schools. An editorial in the Indianapolis Star following McCollum saw the banning of public-schoolbased weekday religious education as a challenge to churches to do better: Certainly if churches need the aid of compulsion to bring youngsters into their classes there is something lacking in the churches themselves. If we must use the schools to hold up the churches, the churches must be failing somehow to provide the inspiration and religious leadership for young people. . . . If they [weekday religious education classes] are barred, let us hope that our churches will
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
accept the decision in the spirit of the Constitution that protects our liberty. Let us hope that they will step forward to meet today’s great challenge with new vigor. Unless our religious institutions can cope with the needs for social reform, for moral regeneration, and for understanding of this confused and changing world, their congregations will dwindle further. American youth needs spiritual leadership. Where else will it come from if the churches fail to provide it?81
The McCollum decision notwithstanding, Indianapolis’s Weekday Religious Education program pushed forward in the early s. By late , more than thirteen thousand students representing more than one hundred different denominations met weekly at ninety-eight different churches.82 Another Supreme Court case in , Zorach v. Clauson, seemed to relieve any anxiety over the program’s legality when the court declared the constitutionality of released time as long as no tax money was used, classes were not held on school property, and the programs were not administered or supervised by public school employees.83 Whether the program was actually reducing juvenile delinquency—its original intent—was not clear (particularly since rates were going down anyway), but from a religious perspective the program was a verifiable success. In program leaders estimated that since more than , children had begun to attend church because of their participation in weekday religious education classes.84 At the height of the Weekday Religious Education program, a second program was introduced in the city’s public school system to impart even more religious teachings. The ‘‘Religious Heritage’’ program sought to integrate fundamental religious values and the historical role of religion into lessons on the founding and development of the United States. Proposed by an ecumenical panel of fifty clergy and actively supported by the superintendent of the Indianapolis public school system, the Religious Heritage program presented a picture of early American heroes relying on their religious faith to see them through their struggles. Students were already taught to idolize historical figures such as George Washington and
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Abraham Lincoln. By simultaneously discussing the development of America and the role of religion within that development, young pupils would come to understand the significance of religious beliefs and mores within the context of their national development.85 For seventh graders, the curriculum provided a social studies unit entitled ‘‘Our Religious Heritage,’’ telling of the European search for religious freedom and the influence that religion had on the founding and exploration of America. Eighth graders learned of the ‘‘Religious Influences in the Development of Liberty’’ and the place of religion in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and the orations of many political leaders. Students in ninth and tenth grades studied the ‘‘Spiritual Ideals Held in Common.’’ Some alterations had to be made after the initial curriculum had been written, but by the fall of , social studies teachers in eleven Indianapolis elementary schools instituted the units.86 Religious education was just one way that congregations targeted youth and children. Other social and recreational activities were used as ways to provide programming for children as well as to ‘‘sneak in’’ religion in less formal settings. Most popular were denominationally sponsored youth groups. Primarily social organizations, such groups allowed teenagers to participate in group activities and to develop leadership skills in ways that paralleled their parents’ participation and leadership. Congregations also sponsored recreational programs for both members and nonmembers. After it relocated to th Street from downtown, First Baptist Church deliberately targeted the suburban youth in its church and from the area, developing programs that provided ‘‘entertainment’’ and ‘‘added to the religious atmosphere of the congregation and neighborhood.’’ The th Street building, set in the ‘‘fast-growing suburban section close to the new North Central High School’’ contained numerous facilities to minister to ‘‘the privileged children’’ in the area: a full-size basketball court in its fellowship hall; a fully equipped stage, including makeup rooms; baseball diamonds; and tennis courts. The intent of this lavish building was to allow the church to become ‘‘a fifth quarter after the football and basketball games for the boys and girls of North Central and Broad Ripple and other schools.’’87
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
An even more popular recreational program, though not located in a suburb, was that of Tabernacle Presbyterian Church. Begun in the s as a small basketball program, Tabernacle’s program expanded greatly in the s when the church obtained a large empty lot a block from the church. There the church built softball and football fields, tennis courts, and other play areas. At the time, the church’s recreational program was rated among the top five programs in the country. Although the primary activity was sports, Tabernacle’s recreational program also encouraged religious education. Participants had to attend Sunday school of some kind—it did not matter where or through what faith tradition—at least twice a month to be eligible. These general requirements proved successful. By the end of the s, almost two thousand children were participating in what had become the country’s largest recreational program sponsored by a single church. Moreover, only about one-third of the participants were Tabernacle members, with the others coming from a range of religious backgrounds, including many Catholic and Jewish children.88 The same way the programs such as Weekday Religious Education complemented the congregational schools, city-wide youth activities complemented church-based youth programming. Perhaps the most popular program in the s and s was Youth for Christ, which, although rooted in conservative Protestantism, attracted a wide range of participants. Indianapolis’s Youth for Christ activities began in . By , the organization purchased the building of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, at th and Meridian Street.89 The structure held a youth lounge, recreational room, a hobby room, a library, a snack shop, and a soda fountain, all places that provided friendly and comfortable places for teenagers to congregate. During the Saturday night rallies, which quickly became a staple among Protestant religious youth in Indianapolis, participants heard religiously traditional messages blended with middle-class values. During the s, Youth for Christ’s popularity was such that chapters were found in almost all of the Indianapolis public high schools (Crispus Attucks, the African American high school, excepted).90
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By attracting and serving children, congregations succeeded in attracting their parents. ‘‘I joined the church for my children’’ was a common refrain in this period. The increasing emphasis on religious rites of passage, whether confirmation or bar mitzvah, gave families a reason to join a congregation at least until the anticipated date. Historically, women—and older women specifically—had always served as the backbone of congregations, sometimes accounting for as much as three-quarters of some membership rolls. However, in the newer suburban congregations, where children were present in large numbers, the male-female ratio was far more balanced. In the ten Methodist churches with the highest proportions of children in the church school also had the most equal distribution of men and women. With a couple of exceptions, these were all located in suburban areas. By contrast, the churches with the fewest children had the highest proportions of women—and specifically of older women—and these were almost all inner-city churches.91 For these suburban congregations, then, services and programs had to be provided for the parents, most of whom were looking to fit into some form of community. Congregations usually had separate men’s clubs and women’s sisterhoods. Typically, men’s activities involved service, both to the congregation and to outsiders. In thirty-five men signed the Speedway Methodist Church’s Methodist Men charter. Among the projects they undertook over the next few years were a steak knife sale to raise money for a new church sign, a food drive for the Methodist Children’s Home in Lebanon, Indiana, and an annual Father-Son banquet. One of the most successful fundraisers took advantage of the church’s proximity to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indianapolis . Each Memorial Day weekend, the Methodist Men parked the cars of race goers in the church lot. The money collected was the ‘‘major source of income’’ for the group.92 Women’s activities also involved service and fundraising, but these often took on a more social tone. Programs for women were also essential ingredients in the growth of a new suburban church. Here one saw a transition from the more ‘‘traditional’’ sewing circle kinds of activities to more ‘‘lifestyle’’ oriented activities, such as
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
exercise classes or, later in the s, aerobics. Because women were generally confined to social activities and were shunted away from positions of formal leadership within congregations, many church women funneled their energies into city-wide programs. Catholics had the Indianapolis Council of Catholic Women, Jews had the National Council of Jewish Women, and Protestants had Church Women United. Another popular ecumenical program was the Guiding Light Christian Service (GLCS). Founded by Birdie Whiteside, an African American woman, GLCS became one of the largest interchurch service groups for women in Indianapolis. The GLCS’s activities included distributing Christmas stockings to needy children. Such city-wide programs provided outlets for women to develop leadership roles and to find a religiously based community outside their immediate congregation.93 Men and women also socialized together within churches. One of the most popular activities for suburban churches was bowling. In almost two hundred teams participated in religiously sponsored bowling leagues. Only six years later, the number of teams had doubled to , and the number of leagues rose to . By , there were different leagues being run by religious groups around Marion County. That year, the popularity of bowling in Indianapolis was such that seven new bowling centers opened, most of which were located on the suburban periphery.94 By the end of the s a general sense of maturation was settling over Indianapolis’s new suburban congregations as membership rolls and school enrollments grew and new church additions were being built. Churches were becoming fixtures in their neighborhoods, and even if the membership did not come entirely from the immediate area, there was considerable demographic similarity between church and neighborhood. But just as these congregations were finally settling in, they were being severely criticized by many for that very sense of comfort. The most prominent critique came from Gibson Winter, who lashed out at the ‘‘suburban captivity’’ of churches. Congregations were too involved in their own activities and expressed little concern for more needy populations and neighborhoods. Others joined in the discussion, calling suburban
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churches vacuous and empty, places that provided social activities but not true social bonding.95 To a degree these attacks were correct. New suburban churches of the s concerned themselves with their own members. Yet they did so primarily because they were new congregations trying to establish themselves. There was little social capital among members; such capital had to be developed. Furthermore, to say that these congregations were not interested in outsiders is not true. There was an interest in reaching out to others, if only as a way to grow the church. But because those outsiders looked the same as the insiders, because they were primarily white and middle class, the ‘‘outreach’’ activities of new suburban churches appeared to be self-serving and inauthentic. Defenders of suburban congregations protested that they were receiving ‘‘the full blame for the ills of suburban society’’ and that suburban religion was ‘‘treated as an innocuous faith preoccupied with trifling pursuits.’’ They also criticized the arguments of people like Gibson Winter. In proposing that suburban churches should have a focus on needy, inner-city churches, Winter was merely replacing ‘‘suburban captivity’’ with an ‘‘urban captivity of the churches.’’96 Furthermore, to call these churches uninvolved in society missed what they were involved in: taking care of their own members. Although these people might have had different sets of social problems or might not even have had ‘‘problems’’ in the traditional sense of the word, they had needs that they wanted to be filled by the church. The recreational leagues, the church suppers, and the bingo nights were all activities that built community from within. Yet the overly internal focus of many new suburban congregations did in some cases come back to haunt them, particularly as the suburban areas that were so new in the s matured and began to have population turnover in the s and s. As the first generation of suburban families moved from an area, perhaps after their young children had grown up and left the home, and newer, younger families came in, congregations were suddenly faced with the question of community in a way they had not been before. No longer were the members inside the church as demographically
‘‘Hi, Neighbor!’’
similar to the neighbors outside the church. Suddenly, questions arose as to who the community actually was. Such an issue faced St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in the suburban town of Speedway on Indianapolis’s west side. Founded as a mission church of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in , St. Andrew’s had already outgrown its first building by the end of the s. The church had more than members by this time and was an important fixture in the Speedway area. As a way to connect with its neighbors and to extend its own outreach efforts, the church opened a coffeehouse for community youth. Within a few years it added a local youth community center. Initially, the youth center was a ‘‘major community draw, and lots of kids were always there.’’ It was a ‘‘good place to hang out,’’ recalled the church’s pastor. Before long, however, the facilities became ‘‘overcrowded,’’ with ‘‘loud music and sometimes smoke.’’ Drugs became a problem, although they ‘‘almost certainly came from outside the kids from the church.’’ The church closed the community center, cancelled most community-oriented youth activities, and, when it built its new building in , did not even construct a youth facility or a community center. The church had tried to extend its community and failed, and, in a form of retrenchment, it ‘‘put its blinders up’’ and continued to look inward. Their decision to be membership oriented rather than neighborhood oriented was further demonstrated by the fact that by the s only about one-quarter of the members even came from the town of Speedway.97 In the end, the new suburban church saw community as something to be built from within rather than something to be bridged from the outside. In this way it was different from the community experiences in the existing congregations of the rural periphery, where, rather than creating a new status quo, new suburbanites challenged existing community structures. It is to this topic that the discussion now turns.
III FROM SMALL TOWN TO MALL TOWN: RURAL COMMUNITIES AND THEIR CONGREGATIONS
In the town of Castleton was ‘‘one of the honest little Hoosier settlements, whose founding antedates the Civil War by more than a score of years.’’ Tucked in the northeast corner of Marion County ‘‘just twelve miles from Monument Circle,’’ Castleton was ‘‘holding its own’’ against the big city.1 Two decades after being lauded for withstanding the pressures of urbanization, however, Castleton found itself in a more difficult predicament as suburban development closed in. The expansion of State Road (Allisonville Road), which linked Castleton to Indianapolis, and of the east-west State Road (nd Street) hastened the conversion of farms to residential subdivisions and commercial properties. Although the population of Castleton proper only increased slightly by , the surrounding Lawrence Township had more than doubled from just under , people in to , people in .2 By the mid-s the community had begun to lose its independent identity. Castleton ‘‘used to be real country-like out here,’’ one resident said in ; now it had become ‘‘almost like living in Indianapolis.’’3 Many of Castleton’s residents took a ‘‘wait and see’’ attitude toward Indianapolis’s encroachment, although there were clearly defined positions favoring and opposing suburban development. The community’s older generation generally wanted to maintain Castleton’s small town atmosphere. The town’s youth, by
From Small Town to Mall Town
contrast, were ‘‘eager’’ to become part of Indianapolis. Caught in between were Castleton’s business owners, who did not know what to expect from the suburbanization and from the new interstate highways that were being built around and through the area. From their perspective, the new expressways would either isolate Castleton to the point of squeezing businesses out of the area or turn Castleton into an ‘‘off-highway pocket of shopping centers and motels.’’4 Of Castleton’s several institutions, perhaps none was more closely identified with the town than Castleton Methodist Church, a congregation that had served the farming community since . In its first three decades, the congregation grew from its original fifteen members to more than sixty individuals, although any sense of stability was countered by the fact that thirteen pastors passed through the church in that period. The small—some might have said comfortable—size of the congregation was such that the building that was erected in sufficed for the next half century. Only in , when membership finally passed two hundred, did the congregation build a larger structure. Despite having just built a new building, Castleton Methodist emerged from the national economic crisis of the s in reasonable shape. By , the congregation’s financial situation had improved to the point that it could refinance its debt and establish itself within the Methodist Church as a ‘‘single-point charge,’’ a congregation with its own pastor rather than a circuit-riding minister. By , the membership remained at about two hundred members.5 The external changes occurring around Castleton Methodist Church after World War II could not help but shape the congregation internally. After gaining only members over the previous fifty years, the church added another members in only the next eighteen. By , when Methodist church consultant Murray Leiffer issued a comprehensive report on Indianapolis Methodists, Castleton Methodist Church appeared to ‘‘have a good future.’’ Almost half of the members lived within a mile of the church, and another large proportion lived within three miles. The church had an ‘‘excellent’’ adult education program and a ‘‘good’’ spread of responsibilities among the lay leadership. If Leiffer had any concerns about Castleton Methodist, it was that the church was not taking advan-
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tage of the rapidly growing suburban population. The congregation’s membership boom notwithstanding, it had failed to keep pace with the Lawrence Township population growth. More could be done, Leiffer argued, to ‘‘strive to win younger families moving into the vicinity,’’ including an improved children’s education program and newer and better facilities to care for the church’s children. In short, Castleton Methodist Church needed to ‘‘exert itself constructively if it is to take advantage of the growing opportunities before it.’’6 Opening itself up to newcomers was only part of the challenge for Castleton Methodist Church. The practical issue of space also presented a problem. Not only was the church building strained to capacity, but the possibility loomed that the church might not even be able to expand. In the Indiana State Highway Department announced designs for Indianapolis’s new interstate highway system that included an extension of State Road into Interstate , a path that would cut through much of the town of Castleton. Even more important, a proposed cloverleaf intersection with I- would slice right through the property of Castleton Methodist Church. Although highway planners did not intend to build the new road until the late-s, the future problems lay plainly in front of the church leaders. Should they actively recruit new members, knowing full well that their building could not support such growth—but also knowing that they could not expand on their own site because the church would be torn down within a decade? Should they move to another location outside of Castleton, perhaps closer to the areas of new growth but further from their core members and their historic ties to the town? Castleton Methodist Church was not the only rural congregation to face such questions in the postwar period. The new suburbs that were discussed in the previous chapter were rarely built on virgin landscapes. Rather, they were subdivisions of existing properties, typically farms or other large rural lots owned by residents of the dozens of small towns that dotted the metropolitan peripheries. Although most new suburbanites joined newer congregations, many looked instead to older, historic congregations that had existed in relative isolation from the big cities. Joining an historic church of-
From Small Town to Mall Town
fered a sense of instant stability to newcomers. Here they could join without the accompanying struggles to create a congregation from the ground up. They could participate at the level at which they felt most comfortable with the knowledge that the church was already functioning and self-sufficient. Or at least they thought this was the case. In reality, the absorption of new suburbanites was as difficult a process for America’s rural-fringe congregations as the development of new congregations was for new suburbanites. Most rural congregations were insular, inward-looking gatherings that did not absorb outsiders well. Such was the case in the Marion County town of Clermont, northeast of Indianapolis, where the congregations were ‘‘self-contained, like the town’’ itself.7 Thus, what new suburbanites saw as fitting into an existing community structure, old timers often saw as encroachment and disruption. The absorption of newcomers could mark a smooth transition in the life of the church as it shifted from insulation to communication with the broader metropolis, or it could pit ‘‘the pushy, progressive, and plastic world of the newcomers [against] the accustomed world of the old-timers, the villagers.’’8 Layered over the social dimensions of change were the physical realities of metropolitan growth; as Castleton Methodist found out, highway construction not only disrupted the inner city but also the rural periphery. Between the social and the physical changes wrought by suburbanization, rural congregations on the metropolitan fringe faced many questions about their sense of community. ‘‘Sometimes the readjustment of a rural church to its new suburban opportunity is a painful process,’’ one church expert noted in . ‘‘At best it is one of joy and exhilarating growth.’’9 For most congregations the experience lay somewhere in between. But whether they turned inward and sought to keep out newcomers or saw suburbanization as an opportunity for growth and expansion, their sense of community was irrevocably changed with the encroachment of suburbia. Looking around much of Marion County today, it is easy to forget that the area surrounding Indianapolis was once filled with a patchwork of farms and small villages, communities tied to the rhythms
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Selected Rural Congregations, Marion County, .
of rural life and socially anchored by their local schools and churches. In Indianapolis, these towns were typically found along the many transportation routes leading in and out of the city: in the northwest, New Augusta and Traders Point along Michigan Road and Lafayette Road, respectively; on the west side, Clermont on Crawfordsville Road; in the southwest, Valley Mills and West Newton along Kentucky Avenue and Mooresville Road; and to the east, Cumberland along the National Road, or Washington Street.
From Small Town to Mall Town
Though located along roads that led to Indianapolis, many of Marion County’s small towns lagged behind the big city in terms of levels of development. In a large majority of rural farm houses in Washington, Wayne, and Warren townships were in need of major repair. More than percent of rural farm houses in Lawrence, Decatur, and Franklin Townships lacked running water. More than percent of the rural farm houses in Franklin and Lawrence townships had no electricity either. For the most part, Marion County’s small towns emphasized their political separation from Indianapolis. Places like Cumberland, Southport, and Clermont had their own elected officials, with town councils and town marshals. Other towns collected their own property taxes to pay for local services. Still other small communities, such as Acton, a small town tucked in the southeast corner of the county, chose not to organize themselves formally. With only six hundred residents, Acton had neither a local government nor a town marshal, and frankly, according to a newspaper account, had ‘‘no reason’’ to have either one.10 Similarly, the community of Oaklandon never incorporated itself and had no police, fire, or water departments.11 At the same time, these small towns could never fully shed the influence of the big city. Many residents relied on Indianapolis for employment and shopping. Indianapolis was also the state capital and the county seat, making it not unimportant even for local matters. The awkward relationship the outlying communities had with Indianapolis was manifested in many ways. Street names were one example. In Warren Township on the county’s far east side, the east-west roads shared the same names as those streets in Indianapolis; Washington Street and th Street were merely extensions from the central city outward. In contrast, the north-south streets of Warren Township had no relationship with the central city and had names that hearkened to their pre-urban origins. German Church Road led, not surprisingly to the German church in Cumberland, while Mitthoeffer Road was named for an early German settler. Similar situations were found in the other rural townships, where locally named streets mixed with those extending from Indianapolis.12
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Even in the early stages of suburbanization, small towns still sought to define themselves as ‘‘not in the city.’’ A description of New Augusta, a town about ten miles northwest of downtown Indianapolis along Michigan Road, noted that the community was ‘‘practically a suburb’’ of its neighbor, with many residents working in defense industries elsewhere in the city. Nonetheless, because of ‘‘the quiet of its shaded streets and the simplicity of its town life it appears to be an oasis of content in the midst of traffic, hurry-up, and confusion.’’13 Within a few years, however, this quiet disappeared. Much of the change could be attributed to the demographic transformation of these rural areas as suburbanization brought a degree of middle-class cosmopolitanism that had been absent from these rural areas. As early as , the differences between the oldtimers and the newcomers were already evident. That year census data revealed that rural nonfarm residents averaged more years of education than did rural farm residents and were more likely to have some high school or college education. The higher levels of education corresponded with a much higher proportion of nonfarm residents working in professional or managerial positions. It was also clear that Marion County’s farm families were aging, as the proportion of rural farm residents between ages and fell by half between and , while the over- population grew.14 One interesting measure of the changes in these rural areas is the way local newspaper reporting changed. On October , the Indianapolis Star reported in its lead article that the governor of Oregon was killed in a plane crash. A smaller article on the same front page discussed the Republican nominee for mayor of Indianapolis. That same day the Marion County Mail, a publication aimed at the rural parts of the county, discussed Indianapolis’s mayoral nomination but not the Oregon plane crash. Instead, the bulk of the Mail’s news focused on issues such as the price of milk being Rural Farm Years of Education Professional or Managerial Occupation
10.1 11.7%
Rural Non-Farm 11.4 23.2%
Rural versus Non-Rural Demographics, Marion County, –.
From Small Town to Mall Town
Age Distribution on Rural Farms, Marion County, –.
paid to farmers as well as notes from Bridgeport, Franklin Central, and Warren Central schools. The last day of October also marked the first day of publication for the Cumberland Courier, a local newspaper targeted at the far east side community of Cumberland. The opening editorial clearly defined itself as a ‘‘community’’ newspaper, and promised that state and national events would be covered only when they ‘‘directly affect’’ eastern Marion and western Hancock counties. Not surprisingly, the paper mentioned neither the plane crash nor the mayoral election. Over the next two decades new development reshaped the edges of Marion County and, in the process, reshaped these local newspapers. The Marion County Mail continued to publish articles aimed at a rural readership, with features such as ‘‘Dairyman’s Column’’ and ‘‘Around the Farm.’’ But the paper also began to reprint more articles from the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News, suggest-
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ing an awareness—but not necessarily an acceptance—of the big city. In fact, the Mail’s already right-wing political outlook became even more stridently conservative and reactionary as more suburban development occurred. During the presidential election, for example, the newspaper ran articles, advertisements, and even cartoons in support of Richard Nixon. Following Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in , the paper blamed Goldwater’s defeat on the ‘‘eastern me-too’’ Republicans. In an editorial on communism, the paper asked God to ‘‘have pity’’ on the leftists. For the Cumberland Courier, the transition from rural to suburban newspaper appeared less traumatic. By the paper had changed its name to the Cumberland-Marion County Courier. In addition, individual columns reported on events in various communities throughout the eastern half of the county: the ‘‘Twin-Aire Beacon,’’ ‘‘Northeast Notes,’’ ‘‘East of Shadeland,’’ ‘‘The Warren Wire,’’ ‘‘Irvington News Vignettes,’’ and the ‘‘Parish Post.’’ For many of Marion County’s small towns, the increasing connections to the central city provided an impetus to seize upon any opportunity for modernization and growth. In southeast Marion County, proponents of suburban expansion claimed that ‘‘the little town of Wanamaker can hardly wait to become a city and it isn’t hesitating until the last minute to prepare for the change. It’s willing—and eager—to expand into the metropolis. It would turn flipflops in welcoming new industry and residents.’’ In , Cumberland officials sought to connect the telephone system to the larger Indianapolis telephone system so as to eliminate toll charges between the two places. A few years later in Oaklandon, Indiana Bell took over the local telephone company, providing residents with -hour phone access and direct service to Indianapolis. Both Valley Mills and Bridgeport, historically plagued by a lack of reliable water sources, hoped that integration into the Indianapolis metropolitan area would allow them to tap into the city’s water service. A new bridge over the White River completed in effectively opened up previously isolated Pike Township for new development. At times growth seemed to overwhelm the bureaucratic capacity of these once-quiet places. Developers of new subdivisions needing to assemble land parcels often faced difficulty hunting down records
From Small Town to Mall Town
of who owned what land. In rural areas like Acton, the few existing records showed overlapping and conflicting claims; even the county surveyor was ‘‘stumped’’ by Acton’s land confusion.15 Even specific businesses were not immune to change, as New Augusta’s barbershop found out. In the owner ‘‘modernized’’ by finally adding facilities for running water. Local businesses also began orienting themselves to nonlocal markets as improvements in the transportation infrastructure brought new traffic. In Trader’s Point, U.S. was a new four-lane highway that connected Indianapolis to Lafayette and beyond to Chicago. The new road sliced ‘‘the hamlet through the middle. All night, every night, huge trucks with the names of distant cities on their sides come roaring down into the village from the hills bordering each side of the Big Eagle Creek valley.’’ When they passed through the village, these trucks found ‘‘filling stations, a garage, restaurants—all catering chiefly to whatever part of the highway traffic stops at their door.’’16 The influx of so many newcomers to the small towns could not help but raise eyebrows. In Trader’s Point, ‘‘for a time after the arrival of the first Indianapolis families there was an air of almost mutual suspicion in the village and surrounding countryside.’’ Though they lived in the country, the newcomers were not fully of the country, preferring instead to maintain links to the city. Others worried that new suburban growth would come at a cost, the price being the disappearance of places like Wanamaker, which remained ‘‘one of the few places near Indianapolis where you can stand on your front porch and hear nothing but birds singing and the faint trickling of the brook that twists through the neighborhood and always seems nearby.’’ In Clermont, a town that had never had a murder, the encroaching ‘‘big city’’ brought fears of crime.17 Still, to many on the rural periphery, the growth of suburbia was not a matter of if but of when farms would be transformed into subdivisions. There was, as one observer described it, one question that ‘‘every farmer in Marion County would have to answer sooner or later: To sell or not to sell.’’ Many of Marion County’s farm residents had bought their land specifically because it had been so removed from urban development. Wanting to ‘‘get away from the city,’’ Colleen Thiede had moved from the outskirts of Chicago to
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Warren Township in ‘‘with the idea we would be out in the country.’’ At the time, Thiede did not see ‘‘any hint of development.’’ By Thiede’s four-acre horse-boarding farm was up for sale. Nearby subdivision activity had raised property values and property taxes to the point that it was ‘‘hard to make small farming pay.’’ If nothing else, the lure of financial reward sometimes proved too great. After all, Thiede explained, ‘‘developers pay well.’’18 Thiede was not alone in her ambivalence and, ultimately, her resignation to change. The scene was repeated in rural communities across the nation, which had ‘‘little hope of surviving unchanged, because the forces behind metropolitan expansion are irresistible.’’19 In the s, Chatham, New Jersey, had been ‘‘a small town with no mail delivery, no supermarkets or apartment houses. At that time everyone knew everyone else and they all worked for the good of the town.’’ Over the next three decades, new growth changed Chatham ‘‘from a small rural town to a fair sized suburban town.’’ As if following a script, ‘‘the influx of new people has resulted in ever increasing demands for an enlarged school system, improved streets, improved sanitary sewer facilities, more police and fire protection.’’ But more important than the impact on the physical infrastructure, Chatham’s growth affected the social structure. With ‘‘so many moving in from cities the attitude seems to be more for the individuals than for the whole town.’’20 Places like Chatham might have tried to ‘‘resist by elaborating zoning requirements or other legal barriers to invasion, but these are at best delaying actions. The tides of urbanism may be diverted for a decade or so, but what direct assault has failed to do a fifth column will accomplish. The city will seduce the young people of the village; they will go to urban colleges, take jobs in the metropolis, extend their range of contacts, and eventually adopt an urban (suburban) way of life.’’21 The mixture of ambivalence and resignation felt by residents on the metropolitan periphery was mirrored in their churches. In many rural communities the congregation was the preeminent local community institution, and often it shared the same name: West Newton Methodist Church, Augusta Christian Church, First Baptist Church of Cumberland. As the town church, these congregations
From Small Town to Mall Town
functioned as important social centers for the local population. ‘‘We went to church all the time,’’ recalled one lifelong member of St. John’s United Church of Christ in Cumberland, ‘‘because it was the only place to go.’’ Devona Hill, a member of Cumberland’s First Baptist Church for most of her seventy-six years, recalled that the annual church picnics along Buck Creek were ‘‘very important to the community.’’22 This was also the case for the Methodist church in the village of Allisonville, in northeast Marion County. ‘‘Here were held the weddings and the funerals of many of the community,’’ one community historian recalled. The church also hosted wintertime oyster suppers, summertime ‘‘basket socials,’’ and Methodist camp meetings in the late autumn, all events that brought the community together to raise funds for the church and to spend time together.23 Small-town congregations not only built community but also reflected local nuances. ‘‘The power structure of the church is nearly the same as that of the community,’’ one report explained.24 The close relationship between church and community meant that formal denominational affiliations often mattered less than Protestant inclusiveness. To be sure, the rural churches that surrounded Indianapolis were generally drawn from the mainline Protestant denominations that dominated central Indiana—Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ in particular. But many of these denominationally affiliated congregations began their life either outside of traditional denominations or as de facto nondenominational churches. For most of the nineteenth century, Castleton Methodist Church was the town’s only church. As a result, many members who identified themselves as Presbyterians worshipped with the Methodists because of a lack of nearby Presbyterian church.25 Further west in the Nora area, Union Chapel Methodist Church functioned as a nondenominational congregation through the late nineteenth century. In the s, the congregation briefly flirted with Lutheranism when a Lutheran minister offered to move to Nora from Millersville. When the pastor left for Illinois, Union Chapel turned to a Methodist circuit rider, who ultimately brought them into his fold.26 The Camby Community Church in the southwest corner of the
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county began as a Sunday school for area residents, meeting in an abandoned saw and grist mill. By the mid-s, a full congregation had evolved to serve the town of fewer than three hundred residents. But rather than affiliate with any single denomination and risk excluding any of the precious few worshippers, the church became intentionally interdenominational. In twelve different denominations were represented, with the minister coming from a Baptist background. Lacking a specific denominational tradition, the church did not celebrate any of the traditional rites of passage such as baptism or confirmation. And to spread the wealth, so to speak, each month the congregation took up a missionary offering for a different denomination. This practical ecumenism, while not promoting any one brand of Christianity, seemed to work for the small community. ‘‘There’s never been an argument over doctrine in the five years I’ve been here,’’ explained the church’s pastor, which was ‘‘more than most denominational churches can say.’’27 It can be noted here that the community church phenomenon was not limited to rural areas. A study of the Los Angeles religious landscape found that only the Methodists had more congregations than those listed as community or ‘‘undenominational.’’ Perhaps the most famous community church of the postwar period was created in Park Forest, the Chicago suburb made famous by William Whyte in his study of the Organization Man. The Park Forest United Church brought together several Protestant denominations in a generally nondenominational mode of worship. Although formally affiliated with the Evangelical United Brethren Church—mostly for bureaucratic and financial reasons—the church went out of its way to downplay any particular denominational theology so as to make everyone feel comfortable. More recently, Willow Creek Community Church, also located in suburban Chicago, gained notoriety for its massive size (more than , members) and entertainment style of worship. Although fashioning itself as a community—and hence, nondenominational—church, Willow Creek has to some degree created its own denomination by franchising out its church model.28
From Small Town to Mall Town
Although the changes of the postwar period were perhaps more dramatic than they had been in earlier decades, congregational and denominational observers had long recognized that the rural-tosuburban transformation could be a major problem for congregations in a number of ways. For much of the early twentieth century, the sheer movement of people from countryside to city often translated into shrinking rural congregations. For denominational bureaucrats already concerned with their churches’ financial stability and with the over-churching of certain areas, the prospect of increased numbers of smaller and poorer churches raised red flags. How would such churches be able to attract clergy? How could they maintain their physical structures? Schooled as much in the emerging sociological methods as they were in theological methods, rural church reformers spent the first few decades of the twentieth century developing systematic tools to measure rural church needs and to solve rural church problems. The Presbyterian Church took the first step in addressing rural church issues by establishing the Department of Church and Country Life of the Board of Home Missions. A few years later the Federal Council of Churches began to examine the issue as well. It sponsored a Conference of Church and Country Life in in Columbus, Ohio. The Methodist Church joined the battle in when it opened its Department of Rural Work. Later the Interchurch World Movement and the Institute for Social and Religious Research both undertook the mission of studying rural church problems by combining ‘‘the scientific method with the religious motive.’’29 In Indiana, the Methodist Church had the largest representation of rural congregations in the state and thus had a particular stake in their future. In , the Methodist Church’s Indiana Conference established a Commission on Town and Country Work to address the problems of rural congregations. One of the commission’s first recommendations was a minimum standard for parsonages, with such features as linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom, a kitchen stove, heat, shades and curtain rods, running water, electric lights, screens on windows and doors, and a ‘‘sanitary outdoor toilet.’’ The state of many rural churches was so poor that the commis-
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sion even had to note that an indoor bathroom was part of the ‘‘desirable minimum standards’’ for any church.30 Despite the poor physical state of rural churches, exacerbated by their shrinking memberships, many rural church supporters took solace in what they perceived were the benefits that rural-to-urban migration bestowed upon cities. A rural Methodist newsletter trumpeted that ‘‘if it were not for this steam of influence from the country to the city, our industrial centers would quickly be consumed by the virus of class strife and the growth of crime.’’31 As troubling and demoralizing as the country-to-city migration was for many rural congregations, the city-to-country migration could be equally troubling. As rural folk departed for the city, former city dwellers arrived in the countryside in search of a quieter lifestyle. Would they be attracted to these smaller, often provincial churches? A report by the Indianapolis Baptist Association noted that as the ‘‘city-fringe area’’ grew, ‘‘it is likely that within a very short time some differences in the kind of community will be noted.’’ Because of these changes, ‘‘a transition from a quiet country village to a thriving suburban area will be experienced. Residents will feel themselves more and more a part of the metropolitan area.’’ The result? Changes will ‘‘of necessity be reflected in the spirit and program of the church.’’32 Church consultant Murray Leiffer came to a similar conclusion in his analysis of country churches included in his report on Methodism in Indianapolis. Leiffer acknowledged that most of Marion County’s rural Methodist congregations were ‘‘still little country churches ministering much as they did fifty years ago to a village or agricultural community’’ and meeting in a building ‘‘constructed and paid for two or three generations ago [and] thought to be sufficient for current needs.’’ These inward-looking (and to him, backward) congregations ‘‘obviously will make little appeal to suburban dwellers whose background is urban and who travel easily and with little strain ten or twenty miles to work and to shop.’’ Moreover, ‘‘if these people wish to attend church, many would rather drive five miles to one which makes good provision for their children than five blocks to one which convenes the Primary Department in the basement.’’33 Denominational officials across the nation echoed Leiffer’s con-
From Small Town to Mall Town
cerns about Indianapolis’s Methodists. In an address to the Plymouth Rock Association of Congregational Christian Churches in Geauga County, Ohio, just east of Cleveland, Roy Bowers argued that the ‘‘main failure’’ of rural congregations on the metropolitan fringe was ‘‘their mental attitude. We have tended to be exclusive, to welcome chiefly those of like . . . ancestry and to be making little effort to assimilate the newer elements coming among us.’’34 Shirley Greene, the secretary for town and country church for the Evangelical and Reformed Church, reserved even harsher words for the hundreds of rural-fringe churches suffering from ‘‘high blood pressure . . . in the swirling tides of community transition associated with the expansion of our cities and metropolitan areas.’’ Although one might have thought that the prospect of new suburbanites offered ‘‘nothing but pure and golden opportunity,’’ the typical rural-fringe church ‘‘simply fails to notice what is happening.’’ Here, ‘‘the same people show up Sunday after Sunday, sit in the same pews, greet the same neighbors, are elected annually to the same offices, fulfill the same functions in the same way and this can go on until they are all dead, without regard to the burgeoning community outside the walls of the church house.’’ Occasionally, ‘‘a few of the newcomers make a tentative gesture toward the church. They come to Sunday worship but nobody speaks to them. They send their children to the church school but they overhear grumblings that ‘our’ basement is getting overcrowded. Some of the more persistent may even venture into the organizational life of the church a bit, only to discover that their strange ways and foreign ideas are resisted and their bids for leadership roles resented. Thus the newcomers are effectively, although often unintentionally, ‘frozen out.’ ’’ Even when a pastor or other alert ‘‘lay people’’ begin to talk about changing the congregation, whether through enlarging the building or adding new classes, what usually happens is that ‘‘conservative leadership may rise up in all its magnificent laziness and slap down those who would bestir the church from its habitual placidity.’’35 The solution to this backwardness? Open up, embrace suburban change, and welcome newcomers into the congregational community. ‘‘Successful’’ rural congregations were those that sensed ‘‘the opportunity for ministering to a growing population.’’ These
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churches would ‘‘sell the small plot of ground on which the church has stood for decades, buy a new and ample site, and proceed to build for the future.’’ Having such foresight benefited congregations in more ways than just increased membership, rural church reformers argued. ‘‘The interesting thing,’’ Leiffer explained, was ‘‘that where there is courage to face the changing situation in such a manner the newcomers respond not simply by joining the church but also by opening their checkbooks.’’ In short, the task of the older congregations in particular was to ‘‘break through the shell of comfortable tradition which has accustomed them to their small size and pretty little church.’’ Doing so would move them ‘‘to a period of greater strength and service.’’36 The argument for opening up and embracing suburban change was one repeated in the Federal Council of Churches’ magazine Town and Country Church. Intended to ‘‘give voice to the particular needs’’ of nonurban congregations, Town and Country Church was part denominational newsletter, part rural life newsletter, with articles ranging from descriptions of successful rural parish structures to discussions of federal farm policy. Although never explicitly articulated, the magazine’s editorial stance toward rural congregations on the metropolitan periphery is clearly seen when examining the kinds of articles that were published. ‘‘The Church in the RuralUrban Fringe,’’ ‘‘Challenge of the Rural Nonfarm Population to the Churches,’’ and ‘‘Problems in Meeting Religious Needs in the Rural-Urban Fringe’’ were typical Town and Country Church articles in the early s. These articles followed a standard narrative, first describing the physical and socioeconomic changes to the areas around rural congregations, then raising the issues where conflict between old-timers and newcomers might arise, and concluding with recommendations to congregations for resolving the conflict. Consider Betty Westrom’s article titled, not unexpectedly, ‘‘The Church and the Rural-Urban Fringe.’’ Westrom opens with a description of the problem: ‘‘For many years the little country church has stood beside the road which leads to the big city, quietly serving the surrounding farmland as a center for Christian worship. Boys who were born on the surrounding farms were baptized, confirmed, and married in the little church, and now their children
From Small Town to Mall Town
attend its Sunday school.’’ But life on this rural-urban fringe was not static. ‘‘On both sides of the road, beginning at the city limits and continuing to within the shadow of its steeple there is an assortment of new buildings—modern homes, shanties, country estates, and sprawling industrial buildings.’’ These physical changes create other social problems. Newcomers desire new city services—water, sewers, streets, and new schools—that the farming community might have lived without. Property taxes might rise as the areas are built up, perhaps pricing farmers off their land. Local stores that catered to a small population might be unable to keep up with demand. In light of these changes, Westrom asked, simply, ‘‘Can there be a true ‘community’ in this area?’’ Yes, if those rural churches now surrounded by all the new growth respond in the right way. If they have enough foresight, the rural church could become the ‘‘force which resolves the conflicts so that the people can learn to live together in the fringe.’’ But if churches were content ‘‘with being an exclusive club for the long-time residents of the area,’’ they would only add to their problems. To Westrom, resolving the conflicts meant opening up to newcomers, and particularly to families with children. A church might start a recreation program for youth or operate a church bus for Sunday school pupils. More important, Westrom argues, the fringe church should turn its reins of leadership over to the newcomers, who would bring ‘‘fresh ideas’’ and ‘‘add to the vitality of the program of the church.’’ These new leaders would provide a ‘‘ ‘shot in the arm’ to a church which has become too ‘comfortable.’ ’’ The onus was not entirely on the existing congregation, however. Newcomers were instructed not to grab the leadership roles right away, as they were ‘‘not ready immediately to run the affairs of the congregation.’’ They needed time to ‘‘become acquainted with the parish first,’’ learning the history of the congregation and of the personalities involved.37 Despite the urging by denominational officials, planners, and other observers, the actual experience of transforming a church was rarely as simple as opening the doors and letting the newcomers in. There was, not surprisingly, much resistance to change. In Geauga County, Ohio, many members of older churches freely admitted
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their desire to maintain the status quo. One pastor even attributed his successes to his simply ‘‘not trying anything new.’’ Others looked around at the increasingly transient nature of their surroundings and threw up their hands in despair. ‘‘How can my church serve the community?’’ asked one pastor. ‘‘There isn’t any community!’’38 The difficulty was exacerbated by the fact that congregations were not isolated institutions. Rather, they sat amidst a rural environment that itself was undergoing considerable change. As the beginning of this chapter explained, Castleton Methodist Church was forced to relocate when a new interstate highway was pushed through its property. On the northwest side of Marion County, Trader’s Point Christian Church experienced a similar upheaval because of circumstances entirely beyond its control. After a flood of Eagle Creek caused considerable damage across the west side of Marion County, the city of Indianapolis purchased a large nature reserve in Pike Township owned by Purdue University. The city then proposed to dam the creek and to create a reservoir in the valley upstream. Standing in the way of the project was much of the town of Trader’s Point, including the Trader’s Point Christian Church. The project proceeded apace, although negotiations to purchase the land from various owners were sometimes difficult. The city appealed to landowners by emphasizing the overall economic benefit that the reservoir would bring to Pike Township. ‘‘Property values in the vicinity of the reservoir definitely will be enhanced,’’ a report argued. ‘‘After the reservoir construction has been started, and even before it is completed, nearby farm land will be turned into ‘home land’ because land developers certainly will not overlook the competitive advantage which the nearby park will create. Further, commercial developments—such as filling stations, restaurants, etc.—may be expected in appropriate locations in the immediate vicinity of the park.’’39 Such arguments proved persuasive and, indeed, accurate. Land prices in the area jumped after the project began, and many longtime farmers sold their holdings to developers for considerable profit. By , the town of Trader’s Point had been completely bulldozed, with only the Farm Bureau building and a Pike Township fire station remaining.40 Yet amidst
From Small Town to Mall Town
these changes, one irony stood out: one of the prime beneficiaries of the destruction of Traders’s Point was the Trader’s Point Christian Church. Although the congregation had to leave its historic building, it could afford to build a larger and more modern structure because many members had reaped the benefits of the land development. As one church member described it, suburbanization made several millionaires in the church.41 Elsewhere the rural-to-suburban transformation was not something imposed on a church but crept in imperceptibly, slowly transforming the area around the congregation. When Pike Township’s Bethel Methodist Church was founded in the s, the area was ‘‘forest, wilderness, swamps, and farm land.’’ Well into the s, ‘‘all the people knew each other—rarely would a stranger come into the church.’’ And as late as the s, ‘‘the community was primarily rural, with small communities or groups of families, and th Street was a narrow two-lane road between White River and Georgetown Road.’’ Over the next couple of decades, however, ‘‘the development of Lafayette Square, the building of the interstate highways, many, many new homes, large rental complexes, and groups of condominiums . . . changed the complexion of our community’’—without anyone really noticing until after the fact.42 In the case of Pleasant View Lutheran Church in Washington Township, suburbanization not only brought new homes and apartment complexes but also changed the area’s religious character. Since the s, the little white clapboard building of Pleasant View Lutheran Church had sat amidst farmland in Washington Township at the corner of th Street and Hoover Road, serving a Lutheran population scattered across the north-central parts of Marion County. Pleasant View’s rusticity began to disappear in the s when a series of subdivisions between th and rd Street, including Spring Mills Estates and Delaware Trails, and the decision of the Jewish Community Center and Congregation Beth-El Zedeck to relocate northward brought an influx of Jewish families to the area. Construction south of th Street included other residential subdivisions and a new campus for the Orchard School. Clearly, this ‘‘once-rural parish had become quite suburban.’’ In , under the direction of their pastor, Alan Kieffer, the Pleasant
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View Lutheran congregation purchased a $, site at rd Street and Hoover Road about one mile north of its building. There they built a modern facility with ample parking. The congregation in turn sold its building to the Etz Chaim Synagogue, a Sephardic Jewish congregation that was moving from the south side.43 Even when rural congregations anticipated suburban change and planned accordingly, there was no guarantee those plans would work. Consider the experiences of Crooked Creek Baptist Church and Augusta Christian Church, two nineteenth-century congregations on the northwest side of Marion County. Since its founding in , Crooked Creek Baptist Church had organized religious life for farmers and townspeople who lived along Michigan Road and in the towns of Augusta and New Augusta (at about st Street) nearby. Indianapolis, though only about ten miles to the southeast, was clearly a separate and distinct place. In the mid-s, however, this insulated and isolated church community shifted gears dramatically when it announced plans to build a ‘‘city-type’’ of church that would ‘‘bear no likeness to the usual stark country church whose only equipment is a pulpit and benches which feature little more than preaching and Sunday school lessons.’’ The reasons for such a shift were clear. The expanding urban influence was proving too great on rural youth, and unless the church began to provide proper religious guidance, ‘‘rural youth coming into the city will become pagan or join the less formal cults and sects becoming so prevalent in the nation.’’44 Mediating the experiences of urbanization for its own members was not the only reason for the church’s expansion. Crooked Creek Baptist also sought to ease the transition for those moving out to the countryside. Many ‘‘Indianapolis folk who have moved from the city to its suburban neighborhood’’ were accustomed to the ‘‘more formal, comparatively luxurious city church.’’ Seeing these new suburbanites as potential worshippers, Crooked Creek’s leaders hoped to create a more comfortable church setting for newcomers. By ministering to the existing rural membership and attracting new members, the church sought to become ‘‘the center of the community from which the whole pattern of its life, social and cultural as well as religious, will radiate.’’45 When measured in membership
From Small Town to Mall Town
totals, these changes clearly paid off. From members in , the membership rolls rose, if somewhat erratically, over the next two decades, reaching a high of members in . Just west of Crooked Creek Baptist Church sat Augusta Christian Church, which also sought to change itself in the face of suburbanization. Founded in in the village of Augusta, Sixth Christian Church was a fixture in the town even after the development of New Augusta a mile away drained many businesses and residents in the s. In the s, the congregation built a new church on Michigan Road despite the absence of a regular pastor. (A variety of traveling evangelists and students from the Butler School of Religion would preach each Sunday.) In the s, when the congregation outgrew its building, rather than build a new structure, they lifted the church off its foundations, turned it around, and dug a new basement underneath.46 By the s, the church experienced some membership growth as new housing sprang up around Augusta. About this time some of the businessmen in the congregation began to claim that the church’s ad hoc financial organization was inadequate, and they persuaded the congregation to adopt an annual budget. Active church membership nearly doubled between and , and a full time pastor was hired. In the s a young minister tried to include some of the area’s growing black population in the church, but this caused too much dissension, and the effort failed. The growth the church experienced in the s and early s seemed to show the direction the church should go. Its leaders were intent on continued expansion but were limited by the size of their building to which they could no longer hope to add. Additionally, the area around New Augusta, just to the west, seemed to offer more possibilities for continued growth. Ultimately, they decided to sell the old building even before the congregation had acquired a new home. The church found a temporary meeting place in a lodge hall in New Augusta and eventually decided to buy twelve acres of farmland along the south side of st Street between Old and New Augusta. A site planning study predicted an explosion of growth along st Street, and the congregation decided to put itself right in the middle of it. They occupied their new building in .
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Unfortunately for the church, the growth that was predicted for the neighborhood failed to materialize. Instead, new residential and commercial development was centered along th Street about two miles to the north. As the center of gravity in Pike Township shifted northward, Augusta Christian seemed to stagnate in its new building. Although new members joined the church, the congregation’s size remained the same as older members either left or died off. By the mid-s, the congregation had shrunk to just over ninety members, none of whom had been members prior to . The experiences of Crooked Creek Baptist Church and Augusta Christian Church raise the important question about the ‘‘success’’ of rural congregations undergoing suburban change. To many consultants and denominational officials and even to pastors and lay leaders, success equaled growth. Or put a bit differently, a rural congregation that successfully adapted to a changing suburban environment was one that opened itself up to newcomers and expanded its ministry. Thus, Crooked Creek Baptist might have been deemed ‘‘successful’’ because of its membership growth, and Augusta Christian unsuccessful because of its decline. But looking at membership figures alone obscures other trends that point to different measures of success. For example, if one were to use Crooked Creek’s self-defined standard of becoming a ‘‘center of the community,’’ then it fared less well. By the end of the s, Crooked Creek Baptist was joined by several other congregations in the area and was in no way the center of the neighborhood. Similarly, at the same time that Augusta Christian’s membership numbers declined, annual contributions to the local church rose. The congregation became engaged in a number of community activities that reflected an increasingly activist social agenda. Although it was a mostly white congregation, Augusta Christian shared its building and a variety of projects with a predominately African American Disciples congregation. The church began to provide food and money for a local food pantry, started a clothing program, and sponsored foreign refugees. Thus, one might have declared Augusta Christian very successful, even as it declined in size and even miscalculated the geography of suburban change when it built a new building. Even if one measured ‘‘success’’ solely by growth, the numbers
From Small Town to Mall Town
could be misleading. From to , a sample of seventeen rural Methodist and Baptist congregations from around Marion County grew from an average of members to almost members. To a church consultant or a denominational or congregational leader, these growth numbers provided evidence of a successful adaptation to the suburban environment. But when compared to the overall population growth of the suburban periphery of Marion County, these numbers are far less impressive. Between and , the combined population of Pike, Lawrence, Franklin, and Decatur Townships grew by more than percent, far outpacing the percent growth rate of these seventeen congregations. In Chatham, New Jersey, the town’s four Protestant churches (Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Episcopalian) fared somewhat better, as the tripling in membership from in to in barely kept pace with the overall population growth in the town.47 Given the long histories of many rural congregations, suburban change was rarely tension free. Even when newcomers were accepted, rural congregations sometimes sensed a loss of an earlier community structure with strong historical roots. For Bethel Methodist Church in northwestern Marion County, having an ‘‘ever changing membership’’ was ‘‘both sad and very nice, too.’’ Amidst all the new faces, at least the church was ‘‘fortunate’’ to be able to ‘‘trace our ‘Bethel Family Tree’ for years, counting in our membership today a backbone of families who have literally lived their lives in service at Bethel.’’48 In other cases, the resentment of newcomers by longtime members was more evident. Newcomers would bring ideas and expectations of how churches should be run, while old-timers would see little reason to change. The facilities—and the need for new ones— were often a sore point, as newcomers preferred to pray in more modern facilities and old-timers resisted taking on the extra financial burden. Educational facilities were another issue, as newer and younger families wanted new buildings for Sunday school. In an interesting reversal of this common pattern, a rural Connecticut congregation undergoing suburban change found the old-timers pushing for expensive modernizations rather than then newcomers.
Souls of the City
To longtime church members it seemed as if they had spent many years paying off church debts, and only after their church was free of its mortgage did newcomers suddenly appear. Partially as a deterrent to newcomers not wanting to invest financially in a church and partially as a way to capitalize on the wealth of newcomers, the oldtimers ‘‘began to champion those church causes that were particularly expensive,’’ such as a new Sunday school building and a finer parish house. ‘‘The villagers have been on the side of free and easy spending by the church ever since the suburban influx began.’’49 Sometimes the strains on internal communities led to outright splits such as happened in New Bethel Baptist Church in the town of Wanamaker in southeastern Marion County. New Bethel began its life in as a log cabin church erected by four Kentucky families who had recently settled along the Old Michigan Road. These original settlers called both their church and their town New Bethel (its subsequent change to Wanamaker was a matter of losing a dispute with neighboring communities over a post office). One of the original settlers established a tavern to take advantage of the increasing traffic to Indianapolis, then still a small village itself, and both the church and the tavern acted as anchors for a developing community. By , residents replaced their drafty log church with a new clapboard structure. Over the rest of the century, membership in the church grew gradually as the town of Wanamaker grew. By membership had expanded to people, then to in , and in . In the late s problems arose between factions in the congregation and the longtime pastor, Frank Bukner. In Bukner was dismissed. In February a group of his supporters met in the Maple Hill Chicken Dinner Place to discuss a plan of action. After much internal discussion, they decided to leave the church altogether and form a new congregation, this time affiliated with the Methodist Church, with Bukner serving as pastor. The new congregation eventually purchased the diner in which they had met and converted it to their church.50 As for New Bethel Baptist Church, almost two hundred members left the congregation for the new Maple Hill Methodist Church. More actively targeting the growing suburban population of Franklin Township, New Bethel was able to rebuild its membership to more than five hundred
From Small Town to Mall Town
members by . It also began new programs for the area, including a youth athletics program and Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops. Interestingly, when one examines changing rural congregational life, one finds few examples of theological transformation. Occasional references are made, for example, to the introduction of family pews. Until , churchgoers at Cumberland Methodist Church sat in separate groups of men and women. That year, however, a ‘‘Mr. Rolland Sprunger was the instigator of getting families to sit together.’’51 In Franklin Township, both Pleasant View Baptist Church and Big Run Primitive Baptist Church stopped using the separate doors that had been built for men and women. Other theological changes resulted from the ecumenical ferment that ran through churches in the postwar period as well as the practical considerations of sometimes being the only church in a community. In the s Zion United Church of Christ in Stemmer’s Run, Maryland, outside Baltimore, was faced with a suburban population with southern and Baptist roots, two characteristics not typically associated with the church’s German Evangelical heritage. But by switching to an open communion and by having ‘‘no rigorous denominational standards,’’ the congregation was able to attract newcomers who might otherwise have avoided the church.52 In Long Grove, Illinois, about thirty miles north of Chicago, the Long Grove United Church of Christ removed the Apostles’ Creed from the liturgy entirely, ‘‘out of deference to the strong objection of some members from other denominational backgrounds.’’ Ecumenical considerations were forefront at Long Grove. Although the church’s name reminded the community of the official denominational affiliation, ‘‘as the only Protestant church in the community, we felt that we should operate as a community church. Therefore our appeal has been on an ecumenical basis.’’ To that end, the church rarely used the ‘‘United Church of Christ’’ label, preferring to refer to itself as the Long Grove Community Church or even just Long Grove Church.53 By the late s, Town and Country Church, which had championed the rural-to-suburban cause over the previous two decades, seemed to shift gears again. Articles on the rural-urban fringe
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stopped appearing, to be replaced by a more concentrated focus on the ‘‘country’’ theme. Whether this was a conscious decision on the part of the editorial staff is unknown, but one senses that, as the suburbanization of the rural countryside siphoned off congregations into the metropolitan orbit, a magazine oriented to rural readers was no longer attractive. Rather than continue to target these now-metropolitan readers, Town and Country Church returned to its rural roots and focused on those who were left in the original rural churches far removed from major metropolitan areas. Locally, Marion County’s small towns had similarly all but disappeared by the early s, overrun by suburban subdivisions that replaced farmlands. In many former rural communities, longtime local institutions closed up, while those that remained often shifted their orientation. Thus, in the west side town of Clermont, the Good Grain Elevator, which ‘‘once supplied neighboring farmers with tons of cattle feed, hog feed, sheep feed, and chicken feed, now caters to suburban dwellers by furnishing them with seed for finches, cardinals, chickadees, etc.’’54 Some residents of the county’s small towns continued to resist metropolitanization. In , a community fair in Wanamaker sought to ‘‘recapture’’ the country community spirit that had disappeared with new suburban development. Two years later opponents of a new sewer system in Wanamaker argued that ‘‘it is only right’’ that some parts of Marion County remain ‘‘free of the encroachment of the metropolitan way of life.’’55 But even here the tide could not be stopped. By , Wanamaker’s sesquicentennial celebration included an ‘‘old-style service’’ at New Bethel Baptist Church, with women in bonnets with fans sitting on one side, and bearded men sitting on the other.56 It was clear that such practices were of an era never to be seen again. On the other side of the county, the passing of an era was in clear view in the town of Castleton and its Methodist church. Faced with the impending interstate to be bulldozed through their property in the late s, Castleton Methodist’s leaders purchased property at st Street and Shadeland Avenue, a couple of miles south of the original church site. Not only would the church move to a new location, but it would embark on a journey that shed any
From Small Town to Mall Town
remnant of its rural roots. In , one month before the church’s th anniversary celebration, the new pastor, J. Richard Yeager, declared that he was ‘‘convinced that the church has a mandate from history, or properly stated, from the current sociological situation—to update its language or perish. There simply can be no debate here. Grow or die.’’ Grow they did, and by the s Castleton Methodist Church had become the largest Methodist congregation in Indianapolis. It was also one of the wealthiest, with its minister among the highest-earning pastors in the Indianapolis district. Whatever criticism one might have had of the congregation intentionally moving away from its rural past, it was probably just as well, considering the dramatic restructuring—or perhaps destruction—of the town of Castleton. First with the construction of Interstates and in the late s, then with the development of Castleton Square Mall in , and finally with the building of dozens of smaller strip centers, the town of Castleton disappeared under paved parking lots and fast-food restaurants. By the s, Castleton had become Indianapolis’s version of Tysons’s Corner, Virginia—a hodge-podge of retail and commercial development with snarled traffic patterns.57 Yet the disappearance of Castleton under miles of concrete contained a wonderful irony. Whereas few in the early twentieth century knew much about the sleepy town of Castleton, by the s and s everyone knew where Castleton was. But the Castleton they knew was not a small town but a mall town. As one woman who grew up in Castleton noted, when the mall was built, few people were aware that Castleton was more than one hundred and twenty years old. In a former resident declared that ‘‘the little town of Castleton that we knew as kids is gone,’’ its historic associations buried under the concrete pavement.58 The same might have been said for the church, where hundreds of newcomers attended a church that was linked to its rural past in name and rapidly fading memories only.
IV W H AT I S ‘‘O U R’’ COMMUNITY? THE DILEMMA OF THE INNERCITY CONGREGATION
In December , the Association of the Christian Churches in Indiana announced the purchase of two Disciples of Christ church buildings in downtown Indianapolis for the purpose of conducting ‘‘inner city’’ ministry programs.1 The two churches, Hillside Christian and Third Christian were both relocating to suburban sites. In their place, the Disciples planned to develop ‘‘creative grass-roots churches’’ that targeted a ‘‘neighborhood constituency.’’ More specifically, the new congregations would be deliberately ‘‘inter-racial,’’ as opposed to the all-white churches that were departing for the allwhite suburbs. Even more than simply trying to retain a presence in a changing urban neighborhood, the Disciples saw this ‘‘historic’’ urban ministry program as a way to gain ‘‘a better understanding of one of the most crucial problems of Protestantism, namely, the inner city.’’2 The announcement of the Disciples’ urban ministry project, though tucked on page fourteen of the Indianapolis Star, was actually far more important than it appeared. Within this single episode were contained the very elements that comprised the experiences of religion in the changing inner city in the postwar period. White churches moving to suburbia, neighborhoods undergoing racial demographic changes, mainline Protestant denominations trying to keep a foothold in these areas—these ingredients made for a volatile
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
recipe of demographic and religious change in urban neighborhoods in the three decades following World War II. More important, these developments did not occur in isolation from those on the suburban periphery. Demographic changes at the heart of the city were connected to issues of congregational relocation, and secular programs such as urban renewal and highway construction linked city and suburb while pitting them against each other. Thus, the story of religion in the changing inner city forms the third side of the triangle that was metropolitan and religious change in postwar Indianapolis. In the face of these postwar urban transformations, religious congregations in the inner city faced numerous challenges. How were these congregations to respond to the relocation of their members, to the demographically changing neighborhoods, and to the sometimes-disappearing urban landscape? Should the churches join their members by relocating to suburbia as well? Should they stay behind? How, in short, could they ensure the congregation’s stability and growth? Layered over these practical questions regarding congregational survival were more emotional issues of historical ties to a particular neighborhood or building. Many of Indianapolis’s inner-city churches were edifices in which the congregations had invested considerable sums of money. Some, like Second Presbyterian Church or Christ Church Cathedral, stood physically in the downtown area as tributes to the supremacy of the central city. Other less centrally located churches nonetheless harked back to a time when mainline Protestantism occupied the city’s cultural core. Questions of ‘‘Christian mission’’ and ‘‘neighborhood responsibility’’ were also raised. What did it mean to be an inner-city church at a time when the term ‘‘inner city’’ had taken on the actual and symbolic meaning of ‘‘otherness’’? Everywhere one turned, one found indications that this inner city was becoming an identifiably ‘‘different’’ place. ‘‘In recent years,’’ one report began, ‘‘many groups and individuals have expressed concern over the physical and social problems present in the area of Indianapolis generally defined as the ‘inner city,’ ’’ a place where ‘‘not much is known about . . . its definition and limits, its processes and life cycle.’’3
Souls of the City
Questions about the changing inner city asked by Indianapolis’s denominations and congregations were ones that religious groups across the nation were asking in the s and s. In the National Council of Churches held a convocation in Columbus, Ohio, to address the problems of the urban church. The core of the conference centered on ten seminars on a variety of topics pertaining to urban ministry work, such as the urban church and social welfare, race relations, cooperation among urban congregations, and churches in good residential neighborhoods. Attended by more than people—one hundred more than were expected—the conference made clear that even at a time when the thrust of congregational work was suburban-directed, mainline Protestant officials recognized the need for an urban-specific program. True to mainline Protestant concerns about congregational cooperation and competition, some viewed the problems of the urban church as being a result of congregational and denominational inefficiency. There were ‘‘too many subsidized small churches’’ in the inner city to sustain a coherent strategy, argued one St. Louis pastor.4 While the Columbus convocation represented a conscious shift in thinking by the NCC and its constituent denominations to respond to the changing urban landscape, others saw few new ideas in the conference. One attendee lamented that he had attended a similar conference twenty years earlier. ‘‘Obviously, the whole thing is repetitive,’’ he wrote, adding that he ‘‘did not find anything new except possibly new concerns about old problems.’’5 Whether old or new problems, the changes to the inner city were realities that confronted urban congregations in Indianapolis and elsewhere, and they fell into one of two categories: demographic change and physical change. The primary demographic change was, of course, racial. Between and , Indianapolis’s Center Township went from being percent African American to percent. For the township as a whole, educational levels fell, median incomes rose only half as fast as the rest of the county, and the unemployment rate rose to double that of the suburban areas. The white-black turnover was most pronounced in the northern half of Center Township, where the pro-
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
portion of African Americans rose to percent. In some census tracts the black proportion went as high as percent. The transformation of certain neighborhoods, such as MapletonFall Creek, was equally dramatic. Through the s, MapletonFall Creek was a stable, mostly white neighborhood that had long served as home to middle- and upper-middle-class families. The neighborhood’s population in stood at just over , people, percent of whom were white. The neighborhood had a small foreign-born population, mostly Russian Jews. Thirty years later the white population had fallen to fewer than , people. The few foreign-born whites became even fewer as Jews left the neighborhood for newer suburban subdivisions further north. Replacing them were now more than , African Americans. With this population shift came a series of other demographic changes. The neighborhood’s median income, median housing values, and proportion of high school graduates all went from being well above the city average to well below it. An even more explicit example of the complete transformation occurred in Census Tract , a small triangular area in MapletonFall Creek bordered by Central Avenue on the west, th Street on the north, and Fall Creek running at an angle from th and Keystone to th and Central. Through the s, the neighborhood had been spared the infusion of black middle-class families that affected areas to the south, east, and west. In fact, in , only of the , individuals in the neighborhood were black. Educationally, the neighborhood ranked above the Indianapolis average, which translated into a higher median income and a higher proportion of managers and professional workers than could be found in most parts of the city. In all, Census Tract reflected a classic white, middle-class, neighborhood; a snapshot of the census gave little indication of the drastic changes this neighborhood was about to experience. In a person would have needed a map to tell that census tract filled the same geographical space as it had ten years earlier, since the demographics betrayed almost no similarities. In absolute numbers, the population rose from , to , people. But this increase was not just the result of , new people moving
Souls of the City
Census Tract , Indianapolis, –.
in. The white population decreased from , to , while the black population increased from to ,. Put differently, in turning from percent white to percent black, the neighborhood population had actually turned over almost percent in ten years. On a range of other sociodemographic statistics, the change in neighborhood composition was just as stark. The proportion of two-parent families fell, the average of persons per household rose, and the median value of owner-occupied housing units dropped in a decade of strong inflationary pressures. More than percent of the neighborhood’s residents lived in poverty, well above the Indianapolis average. Educational levels fell as the proportion of adults with less than an eighth-grade education almost doubled and the
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
proportion with college education was cut in half. Mobility statistics revealed that six in ten people had moved into the area in the five-year span between and . This was a neighborhood in transition. Though more dramatic than most areas, the changes in Census Tract represented an important dimension to the white-toblack turnover in Indianapolis. Unlike in most cities in this period, the white neighborhoods into which blacks moved in Indianapolis were almost all middle-class and upper-middle-class areas. There was almost no black in-migration into working-class white areas. In contrast, Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago all had working-class white neighborhoods that were being ‘‘invaded’’ by blacks.6 This difference was important in that there was comparably less tension produced by the demographic transition in Indianapolis. Middleand upper-middle-class whites, when faced with new black neighbors, more often than not simply left the neighborhood. They did not stay and fight as did whites in Detroit and Chicago. As a result, Indianapolis had far less racial violence than did other cities, although there remained a sense of hostility and frustration on the part of blacks. One of the best indications of the peripheral status of African Americans was the way this group was described in newspaper articles during the s and s. Simply put, there was little ‘‘political correctness.’’ Consider a article about Barrington Heights, a low-income housing complex for African Americans on the south side of the city. With many in the city already suspicious of lowincome housing and even more suspicious of the ability of African Americans to keep up their neighborhoods, the Indianapolis Times published an article that gave readers a glimpse into this world of ‘‘others.’’ Although the reporter described the neighborhood as having ‘‘almost no crime, fires, and disease,’’ he betrayed his biases by adding that there were ‘‘very, very few Cadillacs.’’ The Cadillac stereotype was a recurring theme in Indianapolis’s print media. In a article presumably about the positive aspects of housing integration, a reporter for the Times explained that ‘‘anyone who has walked through the Negro slums will testify they are as neglected and filthy and foul-smelling as any human habitation anywhere.’’
Souls of the City
While some blame fell to municipal housing officials, most of it rested on the residents themselves. After all, ‘‘the Cadillac parked outside belies the complaint that the Negro can’t afford paint.’’7 Although the north side’s ‘‘white flight’’ and black in-migration gained more public attention, Indianapolis also had a sizable Appalachian white in-migration into working-class neighborhoods on the southern and western sides of the city. The increasing white Appalachian presence in Indianapolis in the postwar period befuddled some observers, who saw them differently from African American migrants—but still saw them as ‘‘different.’’ In fact, Appalachian whites often fared worse than blacks in the public media. A senior official with the Indianapolis Redevelopment Commission explained in that the influx of white southerners after World War II was the ‘‘triggering force behind the deterioration’’ of many neighborhoods. ‘‘These people simply do not know how to live in a city,’’ he explained. ‘‘They can’t adjust to our standards. They think nothing of driving their car up on the lawn so that they can get right off onto the porch.’’ In fact, many people ‘‘are glad to see the Negroes come because the hillbillies do not know how to care for their homes and most Negroes do.’’8 This awareness of the ‘‘difference’’ of Indianapolis’s Appalachian population was such that the city’s public school board issued a report on Appalachian students and their special needs.9 Accompanying the social changes, and in some cases accelerating them, were physical changes to Indianapolis’s urban landscape. National urban renewal programs, including slum clearance, downtown expansion, and highway construction, were manifest locally in the s and s as municipal officials sought to eliminate blighted neighborhoods on the edges of downtown and improve the city’s transportation infrastructure. Concern for ‘‘slums’’ in Indianapolis dated to the early twentieth century, when social workers and other observers of the growing city took notice of the squalid living conditions of the city’s immigrant and black populations. Those with a nativist bias saw such neighborhoods as evidence of immigrant and African American pathologies; one student noted contemptuously that ‘‘Syrians are sat-
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
isfied with the worst housing conditions of any nationality having a similar financial status,’’ while ‘‘the Macedonians have the reputation of living the cheapest of any of the foreigners, and hence under the most unsanitary conditions.’’10 A more sympathetic social work student lamented that Indianapolis’s African Americans lived in ‘‘alleys, which are streets in name only.’’ For blacks who lived in such dilapidated neighborhoods, ‘‘nothing else but discontent with such conditions could be expected from men who differ in color more than in aspiration from the white man.’’11 Although few whites worried about the living conditions of African Americans, there was enough concern about the city’s slums to lead to urban renewal legislation that would give Indianapolis the power to redevelop blighted areas. The Indiana Redevelopment Act, passed by the state legislature, created the Indianapolis Redevelopment Commission as the city’s official urban renewal overseer. The Redevelopment Commission immediately announced plans to rehabilitate Area ‘‘A,’’ a neighborhood bounded by th Street, West Street, th Street, and the White River that was known for its ‘‘wretched housing’’—housing of a kind that ‘‘a resolute man could demolish with a small sledgehammer in about one day.’’12 Over the next two decades, the Redevelopment Commission expanded its scope to include areas on all sides of downtown. In each case, elaborate plans were designed to clear slums and replace them with modern housing. In addition to rebuilding neighborhoods, Indianapolis undertook plans to expand its road and highway system. Even before the federal government offered to pay for percent of new limitedaccess highways in , Indianapolis had a relatively extensive road system that connected the inner city to the outlying county. As early as the s, as part of a national ‘‘Good Roads’’ movement, a number of Marion County’s roads were turned into official state roads and national highways. Pendleton Pike became State Road ; the National Road, or Washington Street, was designated U.S. ; and Michigan Road became U.S. .13 The city’s hub-and-spoke road system successfully funneled traffic into downtown from all parts of Marion County, but traffic congestion, the lack of parking in the center city, and limited facili-
Souls of the City
ties for traveling across the county remained problems. To solve the last issue, civic leaders proposed in to build a belt highway around the perimeter of Indianapolis. Such a perimeter road would benefit not only the existing residents of the many small towns on the edges of Marion County but also the growing number of people who were moving to newly developing suburban neighborhoods. With approval of the state legislature, State Road was developed during the s as such a belt highway. Although not an expressway in modern terms, Route nevertheless allowed for much quicker travel than was previously available. On the north side the route followed th Street, which was then a rural route that connected the small villages of Castleton and Nora. Shadeland Avenue on the east side provided access to several new industrial factories locating there. At the same time that Route was being developed, civic leaders also considered creating a larger, limited-access-style network of highways. This network was intended to parallel (and perhaps even replace) the existing pattern of roads, with a series of highways radiating out of downtown in the same spoke model. Connecting the roads in the downtown area would be an ‘‘inner loop’’ around the central core, while an outer loop would ring the perimeter of Marion County. Despite these conversations, little action was taken on this new highway system. When the Interstate Highway Act made federal money available for such road projects, Indianapolis’s political leadership chose not to partake of the government’s largess. Generations of Hoosier conservatism manifested itself in distrust of federal intervention and federal dollars; thus, little money flowed from Washington to Indianapolis through the mid-s. This attitude changed in with the election of Democratic mayor John Barton. The new mayor argued that it was foolish for the city not to accept federal money for highways or other urban renewal projects. The need for highway money was especially important to cover relocation costs, since the inner-city portions of the proposed highway system were displacing thousands of residents and businesses. This ‘‘inner loop’’—the parts of Interstates and that ringed the north, east, and south parts of downtown— proved to be the most difficult parts of the new highway system. In
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
Fountain Square, just south of downtown Indianapolis, construction of the ‘‘inner loop’’ of I-/ displaced more than six thousand residents, or about one-quarter of the area’s population. The highway also eliminated most of the neighborhood’s housing stock built between and . Northeast of downtown, highway construction in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood led to a population decline of more than six thousand residents between and —almost one-quarter of the neighborhood’s population. On the northwest side, the UNWA neighborhood lost three thousand people with the coming of I-. More than just losing housing and people, the interstate highways cut off the remaining people from one another and from other parts of the city. Although white flight attracted a great deal of attention, its impact on the religious landscape was less clear. In Baltimore in the mids, a United Lutheran congregation planned to open its doors to incoming blacks while simultaneously establishing a suburban branch for white congregants moving out of the neighborhood. In St. Louis, Protestant churches were reported to be ‘‘fleeing as Negro residential areas expand,’’ although some tried at least to sell their church buildings to incoming black congregations.14 Congregations rarely invoked race as an explicit factor in the decision to leave for the suburbs, yet certain ‘‘code words’’ could usually be detected. For example, after his church relocated to st Street on Indianapolis’s far north side, the pastor of First Congregational Church said that the church ‘‘ought to be safe’’ from the changes in the downtown area, which ‘‘like rippling circles from a pebble dropped in a pond, swam over it and left [the church] without a community it could call home.’’ Moreover, with those changes, the downtown neighborhoods had become a place for ‘‘transients’’ and others, rather than for the church members.15 Even if religious people did not articulate their feelings, their actions spoke clearly, particularly during the peak period of congregational racial change in the s. Between and just over half of all census tracts in Marion County within the boundaries of the city of Indianapolis (rather than in the unincorporated suburban parts of the county) lost population. In these tracts con-
Souls of the City
tained churches, of which percent were conservative Protestant congregations; percent were mainline Protestant; and the rest were split among Catholics, non-Christian, and other nonMainline Protestant congregations. Over the next ten years the number of congregations in these areas fell by only percent—a not-so-alarming number except for the fact that the departing churches were almost exclusively white mainline Protestant churches. More telling, in those census tracts where the population fell by more than percent and the black population increased by percent, the number of conservative Protestant congregations rose by percent, while the mainline Protestant presence fell by percent. Other demographic evidence highlighted the racial dimension of congregational suburbanization even more. From to , thirty-five congregations relocated from Center Township to other parts of Marion County. In that period, these thirty-five congregations sat in census tracts that went from an average of percent to almost percent African American. By contrast, the tracts that these congregations moved to were only percent African American in . As much as the demographic changes, the physical changes to Indianapolis’s urban landscape also affected dozens of the city’s urban congregations. In , congregations stood within a quarter of a mile of a proposed highway or exit ramp on the newly designed interstate system that cut through the heart of the city. Ten years later, after most of the land reclamation for the highways had occurred, almost half of these congregations had moved or closed altogether. The redevelopment of the northwest side and the later expansion of Indiana University and Purdue University’s joint Indianapolis campus on the west side of downtown forced another twenty-four congregations to relocate or close. Because these areas tended to have African American or Appalachian white populations, three-quarters of the congregations that were affected by the highways and by IUPUI’s redevelopment came from conservative Protestant backgrounds. Only a small proportion were mainline Protestant churches. Still, even the elite churches were not immune to disruption because of urban redevelopment. Consider that both First Baptist and Second Presbyterian churches,
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
Congregations Displaced by Highway Construction, s and s.
two of the city’s most prestigious congregations, had known since the s that they would one day be forced to relocate from their properties on Vermont Street between Meridian and Pennsylvania Streets. In the s, the state of Indiana and the city of Indianapolis went ahead with plans to erect a World War Memorial in the space right between the two churches.16 Both congregations considered relocating at that time, and in First Baptist even acquired
Souls of the City
land at Meridian and th Street to prepare for such a later move. Despite this acquisition, the congregation was not particularly enthusiastic about having to relocate. Moving to a residential neighborhood would have meant that First Baptist would change from being a centrally located ‘‘city-wide church to a community church, drawing its congregation principally from a limited area,’’ a change that one of the city’s largest and wealthiest churches preferred to avoid.17 For the next two decades, then, First Baptist held its site on North Meridian in reserve and remained, with Second Presbyterian, as a visible testament to mainline Protestantism on the northern edge of downtown. By the mid-s discussions reopened about the city’s completion of the War Memorial, and with it, discussions reopened about the future of the two prominent churches. In the two decades since its original relocation plans, First Baptist had revised its outlook. No longer was it looking to move to a site on the near north side at th Street and Meridian. Instead, the congregation and its neighbor looked much further north to the rapidly developing area on Indianapolis’s far north side along th Street. Washington Township had built its new North Central High School at th and Westfield Road. Demographically, the upper-middle-class area was becoming home to the types of members who already attended First Baptist and Second Presbyterian or who would likely join the congregations if they were closer. Leaders of both congregations rightly foresaw that suburbanization meant that downtown would become less central to people’s daily paths; a suburban-based individual would be less likely to travel downtown for church on Sunday if he or she did not travel downtown to shop or to work during the week. As First Baptist’s pastor succinctly and bluntly argued, ‘‘Downtown churches have been in trouble ever since memberships began to move to suburbia; attendance and endowments fell and people began to have less time for church and more time for entertainment.’’18 As the city pushed the churches for their land on Vermont Street, Second Presbyterian received an anonymous bequest of property on the east side of Meridian Street just north of th Street—land that ‘‘just so happened’’ to be appropriate for the construction of a new
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
church. In later years, this anonymous donor was revealed to be Charles Lynn, an executive with the Eli Lilly Company and an elder of the Second Presbyterian Church. Looking back, one sees a degree of irony in Lynn’s role as donor. In an interview in , Lynn predicted that, although certain factions within the church might have wanted to remain downtown, the congregation would move northward within three years.19 Of course, having donated the land, Lynn was in a rather good position to make such a prediction! With the newly donated land, Second Presbyterian commenced its building shortly thereafter, sold its downtown location, and moved into its new structure in . Meanwhile, First Baptist Church obtained land on th Street at College Avenue. In the congregation received permission to construct a new church, and three years later, it held its first service in its new building.20 Although First Baptist and Second Presbyterian no longer occupied prominent positions in downtown Indianapolis, their move to the northern suburbs did little to damage their status as two of the city’s elite congregations. For one thing, their new locations were not random. In Second Presbyterian’s case, they had relocated to Meridian Hills, one of Indianapolis’s wealthiest and most exclusive residential areas. (Meridian Hills was one of the few areas in Indianapolis developed during the Depression.) Furthermore, the buildings constructed by the congregations reflected their own sense of wealth and power—in First Baptist’s case a traditional building with a soaring steeple; in Second Presbyterian’s case a large Gothic structure set amidst a park-like setting of rolling hills and woods. To erase any doubts about Second Presbyterian’s social status, the congregation moved into its $ million building—which included a $, custom-designed window above the entrance—free of any debts or mortgage.21 Within five years of these churches’ relocation northward, their membership’s geographical structure had been altered. By only a narrow band of Second Presbyterian’s membership still lived along Meridian Street on the near north side. Almost everyone else spread out across a semi-circle north of th Street and as far north as the suburb of Carmel above the Marion County line. Now, rather than being located at the center of the city but on the mar-
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gins of the membership, the church was situated on the fringes of the city but at the center of its membership. One might argue that First Baptist and Second Presbyterian churches would have moved to suburbia regardless of whether they were pushed out by the city. This might have been true, although in the case of Second Presbyterian Church, there was considerable hand wringing over the decision. Second Presbyterian recognized that its departure for th Street would handicap those members remaining downtown. In , as the church prepared for its northward relocation, it issued an ‘‘Important Statement’’ promising to ‘‘keep faith with our entire constituency, doing everything within our power to make it possible for all of our members to remain with us.’’ To that end, a transportation plan was being developed so that ‘‘no one need feel, no matter where his present residence may be, that because the church is moving far out, it will no longer be convenient and possible for him (or her) to remain with the church as a vital part of it.’’22 Even in the final worship service downtown, Second Presbyterian’s leadership expressed disappointment (or maybe guilt) at not staying downtown. ‘‘We never deserted this area,’’ the Rev. Jean Milner declared. ‘‘We never of our own free choice abandoned it! We were forced by events completely beyond our control to go. When we leave this sacred place today we can do it with clean hands that have betrayed no trust, with hearts that tell us in God’s sight we have done the best we could over the long years in a very frustrating and trying situation.’’23 In the case of the south side’s St. George’s Episcopal Church, the diocese’s decision to close the church and reopen a new parish in the southern suburbs occurred despite the pleadings and protests of the pastor. St. George’s priest, the Rev. Malcolm Boyd, urged his parishioners not to leave the -year-old church. He argued that suburbia was causing people to ‘‘lose focus’’ on the things that mattered most in life. Boyd also disagreed with the denominational policies that pumped millions of dollars into building new churches for people who had the means to move to the suburbs yet refused to support older churches in areas where lower-income people still lived.24 Despite Boyd’s protestations, the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis proceeded to close St. George’s in and to open St.
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
Membership of Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, and . Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis.
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Timothy’s Episcopal Church to serve many of the former St. George parishioners who had moved southward.25 It is clear, then, that no single factor drove churches or their members out of Indianapolis’s inner city. Race certainly played a role, particularly for white congregations on the near north side. But other factors such as urban redevelopment and highway construction also forced congregations to move. And the desire to be in a more convenient location for members, often in a larger, more modern building on a larger property outweighed any sense of ‘‘mission’’ or responsibility to the inner city. Because most Christian congregations felt at least some sense of mission to the inner city, their debates over suburban relocation, if not leading them to change their minds, at least raised a red flag of concern or guilt. For Indianapolis’s Jewish community, however, such a mission responsibility did not exist; thus, there was far less concern about synagogue relocation.26 For much of its history, Indianapolis’s Jewish community had demonstrated a south-to-north migration pattern. The first wave of German Jewish immigrants who came in the s and s settled on the near east and south sides of the city. As they gained affluence, however, they moved to the near north side along Meridian Street south of Fall Creek Parkway. Even as the German Jews moved northward, they kept their synagogue, Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation (IHC) at th and Delaware streets. The next wave of immigrants, this time from central and eastern Europe in the s and s, again settled in neighborhoods south of downtown. Again, a number of new synagogues sprouted on the south side, divided mostly along ethnic or occupational lines. By the early s one could find the Polish Shaarei Tefilah, the Hungarian Ohev Zedeck, and the Russian Knesses Israel, as well as the Peddler’s Schule. Finally, in the s, a Sephardic Jewish community from Greece and Macedonia immigrated to Indianapolis and also settled on the south side with their own synagogue, Etz Chaim, as the community anchor. On the south side, one could also find a Jewish community center and several kosher butchers and grocers. It was clearly the center of the community. By the s, upward mobility once again prompted some of the
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
city’s Jews to move to the near north side, essentially following the same track laid down by their German brethren two generations earlier. But unlike the earlier migration, which was residential in nature only, the northward movement of Jews in the s also included new synagogues. Congregation Beth El was a new Conservative synagogue formed at th Street and Ruckle Avenue, while Central Hebrew Congregation served the north side’s Orthodox Jewish community at nd Street and Central Avenue. By the s, suburbanization up the Meridian Street corridor stretched the Jewish community even more and further weakened the ties to the south side. New subdivisions north of th Street and west of Spring Mill Road were built by Jews and populated by Jews. The relocation of the synagogues would not be far behind. Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation was the first to move. As early as , IHC’s board of directors held discussions regarding relocating away from the building at th and Delaware Streets, which had numerous safety flaws, including the lack of adequate fire escapes. The fire hazard was so great that the congregation debated holding its High Holiday services at the Murat Temple because the sanctuary would be too crowded. Vandalism also spurred the debate to find a location in a less dangerous neighborhood. But despite the recommendation to find a new site, the board concluded later in that a ‘‘lack of interest’’ among congregants had doomed plans for a new building. Congregational disinterest could not do away with the synagogue’s physical inadequacies, however, and the board decided to proceed even without secure financial footing. Over the next several years, plans for a new building proceeded apace. A site in the town of Meridian Hills, at th and Meridian Streets, was identified as a possibility. From many perspectives the site was ideal, located as it was along Indianapolis’s main north-south artery in the heart of one of the most prestigious neighborhoods and near the proposed sites for the elite Protestant churches, Second Presbyterian Church and First Congregational Church. But Meridian Hills had not achieved its reputation for exclusivity for no reason, and the town’s zoning board turned down IHC’s request to build. An ensuing lawsuit dragged through the courts for three years, reaching all the way
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Movement of Jewish synagogues, s–s.
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
to the Indiana Supreme Court in when the synagogue finally won its case. Soon after IHC began its relocation process, Beth-El Zedeck built a new building at th Street and Spring Mill Road in . That same year a new Jewish Community Center was built at th Street and Hoover Road. In the Sephardic congregation Etz Chaim relocated to the former building of Pleasant View Lutheran Church, and the Orthodox-affiliated B’nai Torah Congregation moved from th Street to th Street in . That same year, the three remaining synagogues on the south side consolidated under the name United Orthodox Hebrew Congregation and moved to a new building at th and Central Avenue. With this last consolidation and relocation, Indianapolis’s Jewish community had, institutionally at least, abandoned the downtown neighborhoods entirely. The evacuation of the inner city by suburbanizing congregations opened opportunities for the reuse of churches and synagogues. Between and there were over one hundred instances of church building reuse. The popular stereotype of building reuse was that of a white congregation selling to a black congregation, and Indianapolis was no exception. All five Jewish congregations as well as the majority of mainline Protestant congregations sold their buildings to African American congregations. But these white congregations were, in fact, the minority of cases of building reuse. Instead, true to the transient nature of inner-city storefront congregations, a majority of both the outgoing and incoming congregations came from conservative Protestant (including Holiness and Pentecostal) denominations. In several cases, specific church buildings underwent multiple changes. Typical of this phenomenon was the building at North Belleview on Indianapolis’s near west side. Memorial Baptist Church occupied the building until the mid-s. When that church left, the First General Baptist Church moved in for about a decade before finally being replaced by a Church of the Living God congregation. In congregations that stayed behind and among denominational leaders trying to maintain a hold on the inner city, the suburban relocation of people and churches created feelings of anger and be-
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Congregational Building Reuse, –.
trayal. ‘‘Urban churches should continue to function in the neighborhoods where they are located, despite the fact that the population pattern continues to change,’’ argued a professor from Atlanta’s Morehouse College. ‘‘Urban churches should not run away from neighborhoods because the population changes.’’27 Even more angrily, in one Indianapolis pastor called the church evacuation of downtown a ‘‘tragedy’’ that contributed to ‘‘moral, spiritual, and even economic decay.’’28 A decade later another minister described how ‘‘the church has too often been seen as a parasite. When the resources of a neighborhood dwindled, the church
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
moved out.’’ Even the local press chimed in, with one reporter stating that ‘‘the exodus to the suburbs has put Moses to shame. As blight and dirt settled on the city, the people of God girded their loins and ran away. They fled not only the grim but the undesirable elements that began to ‘take over.’ ’’29 Such fiery rhetoric notwithstanding, the urban landscape was far from denuded of a religious presence. There remained churches like Indianapolis’s Central Christian Church that saw themselves as urban fixtures. As early as , the church declared that ‘‘when a group of Christians, called the church, is located in a given community, it would expect to leaven that community, to affect the individuals, its corporate activities and its public opinions. When a church establishes itself in a particular location, it is reasonable to say that it should assume responsibility for serving the people who dwell in that community.’’30 Most congregations shared this sense of responsibility. Even though congregational transience (mobility plus closing) was higher in the s and s than it had been than in earlier decades—about one in three congregations moved or closed in this period—the statistics still favored the two-thirds of the congregations that did not move. Those that stayed realized that it was a ‘‘mistake,’’ as a St. Louisbased Methodist minister stated in , to assume that ‘‘there is nobody left in the city to whom to minister.’’ To the contrary, ‘‘there are countless thousands left . . . to be loved and served in the city.’’31 The problem was, however, that these ‘‘countless thousands’’ were likely to be racially, socioeconomically, and theologically different from the members inside the church. It was this growing sense of ‘‘otherness’’ that dominated the conversations among inner-city congregations. Whereas congregations that left the inner city responded to urban ‘‘otherness’’ by leaving, those that stayed shifted their emphasis toward reconciling the differences between ‘‘us’’—the membership within the congregation—and ‘‘them’’—the neighborhood population. The extent to which a sense of ‘‘otherness’’ shaped those in the inner city can be seen in the language used by denominational and congregational officials. Throughout the early s, the importance of churches to urban neighborhoods was taken for granted.
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Congregational Transience, Indianapolis, –.
By the next decade, however, this importance was called into question. A group of inner-city Protestant congregations in Indianapolis created Operation Prove It, a program deliberately designed to ‘‘prove that the Christian church has a place in the city, in the crowded areas near downtown where ‘parishioners’ move in one month and out the next.’’32 Other local programs, such as North Methodist Church’s ‘‘Indianapolis Pastoral Care and Counseling Center,’’ Meridian Street Methodist Church’s low-cost housing program, and Irvington Methodist Church’s free Counseling Center, intentionally catered to those ‘‘outsiders’’ from the neighborhood rather than to their own members.33 As Byron Stroh, the pastor of North Methodist Church explained, ‘‘what is important is that the church is involved and that it is listening and learning rather than being so busy talking that it can’t hear of the needs around it.’’ The result would be inner-city congregations ‘‘working together, reaching out to people’s lives, showing their commitment and speaking the people’s language.’’34 Clearly, Stroh’s ‘‘people’’ were not his own Sunday morning parishioners. The most visible issue of urban ‘‘otherness’’ that confronted white congregations trying to stay in the inner city was race.35 To
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
help its constituent congregations, Indianapolis’s Church Federation in undertook a study of racial attitudes of Protestant churches in Marion County. The goal was to ‘‘gather factual materials’’ so that a program of racial and cultural reconciliation could be developed. The survey of churches reported that congregations recognized at least one racial problem in their church, such as ‘‘unfriendly racial attitudes’’ among members or changes in their neighborhood’s racial composition. Seventy-two churches reported that their membership was all-white ( churches) or all-black ( churches). Another claimed some form of interracialism, although only of these were white-black mixed. (The others included Asians, American Indians, and Puerto Ricans.) As to whether those single-race churches would accept members from other races, said yes, no.36 Indianapolis’s racial situation was no different from that in other cities. Though choosing to remain in a neighborhood where the black population was increasing, Cleveland’s Calvary Presbyterian Church had only four black members out of a total membership of nine hundred. Most members reportedly would have welcomed other African Americans, although not all at once. As one elder put it, a gradual integration would allow Calvary members to ‘‘come to know them individually and thus get rid of our prejudices.’’37 Although the results of the Church Federation study appeared somewhat hopeful regarding the blending of races in inner-city churches, the reality was far more complex. Only a handful of congregations, white or black, succeeded in achieving any degree of interracialism. Indianapolis’s local black newspaper, the Recorder, described how ‘‘many local churches are ringing their doors to Negro worshippers and moving from changing communities rather than yield to democratic principles.’’ The paper singled out All Souls Unitarian Church for standing ‘‘among these ugly practices like the brilliant crown of a lighthouse shining through the foggy mist of a stormy sea.’’ Belying the paucity of interracial churches, All Souls won this praise from the Recorder for having twelve African American members out of a total of six hundred.38 In theory, Indianapolis’s Catholic churches were more integrated than their Protestant neighbors because of their territorial parish structure, al-
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though the nature of segregation in Indianapolis ensured that blacks would be confined to only a few parishes, such as St. Rita and St. Bridget. True to the biracial roots of Pentecostalism, several Indianapolis Pentecostal churches were integrated, the most prominent being Christ Temple Apostolic Church. Located at Fall Creek Parkway on the northwest side of downtown, the church had gained a reputation as the city’s premier interracial church with a blackwhite ratio of about :. Christ Church was also joined by the intentionally named Interracial Church of God in the Martindale neighborhood. Perhaps the most prominent Indianapolis congregation that actively promoted interracialism in the changing inner city was the People’s Temple Full Gospel Church led by Rev. Jim Jones. Jones began his career at Somerset Methodist Church on Indianapolis’s south side in . Two years later he founded ‘‘Community Unity’’ as an integrated congregation. By the end of the decade, Jones had renamed the church the ‘‘People’s Temple’’ and had moved into the former building of the Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation at th and Delaware Streets. The People’s Temple provided a mix of Pentecostal worship—prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues were key elements—and social services, including a soup kitchen and nursing care. To promote his interracial vision, Jones hired Archie James, an African American, to be associate pastor. Though Pentecostal in nature, the People’s Temple affiliated in with the Disciples of Christ, which looked favorably on its social service programs. In , Jones chaired the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission and used his public position to promote racial integration and reconciliation. In , Jones and more than of his church members left Indianapolis for Redwood Valley, California, where they reestablished the People’s Temple. From there, Jones opened other interracial churches in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in California. By the time of the mass suicide at his commune in Jonestown in Guyana, Jones had moved the People’s Temple beyond the pale of mainstream Protestantism to a cult-like orientation, yet the interracial nature of his churches never disappeared. The integrated congregation was the exception in Indianapolis,
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
not because churches did not want to integrate, but because it was so difficult to do so. In an analysis of Memorial Presbyterian Church, national Presbyterian Church consultant Charles Thorne noted that it made good sense for the white church to minister to the black neighbors. After all, African Americans tended to own their homes and kept their neighborhood more stable than did whites. ‘‘From the point of view of both logic and Christian idealism,’’ Thorne wrote, ‘‘this would appear to be what the church ought to have been doing in this community for many years.’’ Memorial Presbyterian did not do that for the simple reason that ‘‘custom has prevented it.’’39 The difficulty was also compounded by even the smallest of cultural differences between white Christians and the inner-city black population. Thus, a article about urban ministry work showed a photograph of Charles Marble, a Methodist divinity student from Detroit, in which Marble was described as ‘‘getting firsthand experience in inner city work’’ at Fletcher Place Methodist Church on Indianapolis’s near south side. What was Marble doing? Bouncing a basketball, which, according to the newspaper caption, had become ‘‘practically a symbol of inner city church work.’’40 Even when churches did try to overcome custom, they often failed. In the aforementioned Census Tract sat Broadway Methodist Church, one of Indianapolis’s largest and wealthiest Methodist congregations. Through the early s membership at Broadway stood at more than three thousand individuals, most of whom were middle- and upper-middle-class white families—the very people who were leaving Mapleton-Fall Creek for the northern suburbs. In an attempt to hold on to suburbanizing members, Broadway conducted a ‘‘Loyalty Campaign’’ in the early s. Designed to secure pledges from lapsing members, the campaign produced several pages of notes on individual families and their attitudes toward Broadway. Not surprisingly, most of those who were not financially supporting the church were the ones who had left the church neighborhood. The reaction of many was candid and blunt. For example, one woman only attended the church because her mother lived in the neighborhood. She expected, however, to move her mother soon ‘‘because of the changing neighborhood,’’ and she planned to
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switch churches at that time. Another women declared her desire to move out of the state altogether ‘‘because of the color problem.’’ Although most did not give race or a changing neighborhood as a reason, the notes reveal a clear trend of people preferring to attend congregations nearer to their homes on the suburban fringe.41 Ironically, several families were noted as attending Forest Manor Methodist Church, then located at th Street, which would go through a wrenching internal debate over racial change less than a decade later. Those who stayed at Broadway supported the idea of keeping their church located in the heart of Mapleton-Fall Creek and becoming a self-consciously ‘‘inner city’’ church where ‘‘urban ministry’’ was a primary focus. Nearby, other Mapleton-Fall Creek churches came to similar decisions, including North Methodist Church at th and Meridian Street, Tabernacle Presbyterian Church at th and Central, and Our Redeemer Lutheran Church. In the case of the last church, after deciding to stay and ‘‘minister to the community,’’ Our Redeemer Lutheran actually sold off a five-acre north-side property that it had previously acquired in case of a suburban relocation.42 Having committed to become a presence in their neighborhood, white Protestant churches that stayed in racially changing areas did their best to bring African Americans into the church. The results were decidedly mixed. After deciding not to move, Broadway’s membership grew to , people in and was lauded in the local press as a ‘‘truly integrated church.’’43 Yet within seven years this membership boom had turned to a bust. By , Broadway’s membership had declined by more than half, its active members falling to fewer than one thousand, and its attendance numbers standing at just over four hundred.44 Nearby in the Forest Manor neighborhood, Forest Manor Methodist Church was also trying to integrate with similar difficulty. Founded in , Forest Manor had survived as a small neighborhood church until the early s, when Rev. Lawrence Cooper was appointed as pastor. Rev. Cooper typified the s ‘‘growthoriented’’ minister who spent much time cultivating his relationships with his parishioners and potential parishioners. During this
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
period, the church’s ‘‘denominational ties were rather loose, with neither the pastor nor the people being involved with much programming outside the local congregation.’’ The church could afford to be internally focused, since the demographic composition of Forest Manor Methodist Church closely resembled that of the Forest Manor neighborhood: white and middle class. Only in the southern end of the church’s ‘‘parish’’ could a sizable black population be found, and this population remained outside the orbit of the congregation.45 All of this changed in when the first black families began to move northward and sparked ‘‘a blazing panic’’ among whites, who moved ‘‘many miles away.’’ When the first black family joined Forest Manor in , one white member approached the pastor and stated simply, ‘‘Well, we might as well sell the church.’’ For a time, selling the church looked like the only option, as longtime members of Forest Manor and residents of the neighborhood seemed to pick up their belongings and move out overnight. From more than , members in , Forest Manor Methodist’s membership went into a free fall, declining to members by and to by . The depletion of members left the congregation ‘‘engaged in a fight for its life.’’46 If Forest Manor’s congregants were clear in their preferences for a racially homogeneous church, Methodist denominational officials were equally clear in reaffirming ‘‘that the church should be for all persons who wish to come, and that the church should be actively engaged in serving its immediate community,’’ regardless of race or color. This denominational support for Forest Manor helped to keep the church alive, and in fact, the church displayed a degree of integration rarely found in mainline Protestant churches. During the late s and early s, attendance at worship services was about to percent white, while the youth Sunday school classes had a black proportion of close to percent. That same white parishioner who had suggested selling the church decided to stay and even changed his mind somewhat on the presence of blacks in the white church. ‘‘I’ve been thinking,’’ he told the pastor in , ‘‘if I were in Africa, I’d probably want to go to one of their churches. I suppose it’s the same here in reverse. More of us should
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think about that.’’ As the pastor commented, ‘‘Granted that he hasn’t moved very far, even this shift is significant.’’47 By the mid-s, however, the disparity between membership and neighborhood demographics proved too strong for Forest Manor. The appearance of stability quickly became an illusion as more whites moved out of the neighborhood and out of the church. Those who left rarely articulated their motivations so blatantly, substituting abstract language of ‘‘church direction’’ for concrete references to the neighborhood’s racial composition. The underlying sentiment, however, was clear. ‘‘It is with regret that we wish to have our names removed from the membership roll of Forest Manor church,’’ wrote Don and Mary Harpold in . They no longer could support the church ‘‘physically, monetarily, and philosophically,’’ explaining that their decision was ‘‘neither anti-church or anti-Christ’’ but was based on the fact that ‘‘the direction the church has taken at this time doesn’t coincide with our basic convictions.’’48 The Hapolds, like many others at Forest Manor Methodist Church, chose to live and worship in a community that had few ‘‘others.’’ One should note that conflicts between Appalachian whites and other white Indianapolis residents were fewer than between African Americans and whites. As mentioned earlier, Appalachian whites tended to move into white working-class neighborhoods on the west and south sides (and to a lesser extent in the remaining white areas of Brightwood), areas that received little media attention. Mainline Protestant denominations with existing congregations in these neighborhoods tried to appeal to the white newcomers, but as one report on Presbyterianism in Indianapolis explained, Appalachians brought a ‘‘different cultural background’’ and were often ‘‘ill at ease and timid about venturing into the large city churches near their new homes.’’49 Because of the racial similarity and the lack of overt ‘‘otherness,’’ many white Protestant churches simply ignored this population altogether. For Indianapolis’s African American churches, the inner city’s changing demographics presented a different challenge than they did for white congregations. Here the issue was how to assimilate the newcomers into the established religious communities. A
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
study of African Americans in the areas undergoing urban redevelopment found that two-thirds were born in the ‘‘South-Central’’ district, a region of the American South that stretched from Kentucky and Tennessee to Texas. Of these migrants, only a handful belonged to the mainline black Protestant denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church; the rest belonged to Baptist churches or smaller Pentecostal, Holiness, or other conservative Protestant churches.50 In Second Christian Church, one of Indianapolis’s more prestigious black mainline Protestant congregations, percent of the membership in had been born in Kentucky, Tennessee, or Mississippi, and almost percent of the membership had arrived in Indianapolis since .51 Reflecting the difficulty in merging longtime residents with newcomers, many African American migrants to Indianapolis joined smaller storefront congregations rather than the more established churches. The phenomenon of the storefront church was not a postwar development, however. In Indianapolis, storefront churches were as much a part of the black neighborhoods along Indiana Avenue in the s and s as were the billiard parlors, restaurants, and other retail establishments. In the s and s, it seemed that more people took note of this type of religious congregation. One indication of the growing awareness of the storefront congregational landscape was a series in the Indianapolis News. Written by reporter L. J. Banks, the series looked at the role played by these congregations in the black community. (One of the articles did point out that storefront churches also attracted whites, although the main focus of the series was on African Americans.) Banks explained that storefront churches represented ‘‘hope for the black man, hope for America, and hope for the world.’’ These articles communicated a sense that these kinds of congregations and this type of religious experience was different from what most News readers would have been familiar with. The inner city’s new religious landscape, with its heavy emphasis on ‘‘sectarian’’ groups, also took on a patina of otherness. From to the overall number of congregations in Indianapolis’s Center Township rose from to . This growth was disproportionately weighted toward conservative Protestant, Pentecostal, and
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Holiness congregations. From a percent market share in , these brands of conservative congregations had grown to capture percent of the religious market by . One saw particular growth in traditionally African American Missionary Baptist and Pentecostal churches, which rose from and congregations respectively in , to and in . For Center Township’s mainline Protestant churches, this influx of ‘‘others’’ was an eye-opening experience. Roosevelt-Temple Methodist Church in the rapidly changing Martindale neighborhood conducted a neighborhood survey to ‘‘learn precisely who was in the neighborhood and to acquaint leaders of the present membership with those families, their backgrounds, and their present standard of living.’’ Such a survey was necessary, given the ‘‘highly transient nature of families’’ moving into the Roosevelt-Temple neighborhood. Of the families queried in a one-block radius of the church, more than a third claimed an Appalachian heritage, with fourteen of them having moved within the previous two years. Religiously, this Appalachian influence translated into a predominance of conservative Protestant denominational affiliations such as Church of Christ, Church of the Nazarene, Apostolic, Church of God, and Pentecostal. The religious disconnect between the leaders of this Methodist church and the residents in the immediate area was a point hammered home in the final report. Those who had moved away from the Roosevelt-Temple neighborhood but returned each Sunday to worship had not seen the extent to which the old neighborhood had changed. ‘‘Some of the most crucial lay people of this church refused to admit that people now living in the neighborhood are any different than they were when they lived here ten years ago,’’ the report concluded. The hope was, of course, that because the survey ‘‘made these people walk up to the doors and talk with people in the neighborhood,’’ congregational leaders would ‘‘see the neighborhood and those who live in it as it is now, and not as it was when they lived here.’’ The ‘‘persons living here now are different: their standard of living is different, their background is different, etc. Until this difference is recognized and then overcome, the ministry of this congregation would only be lame and faulty.’’52 Of
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
course, understanding the differences did not necessarily translate into a transformed church; within a decade, Roosevelt-Temple Methodist Church closed. The difficulty of many mainline Protestants in coming to grips with the growing conservative Protestant sector was compounded by the fact that for many years they had heard church officials use derogatory language to describe these ‘‘others.’’ Earlier religious scholars such as H. Paul Douglass had described Pentecostal and Holiness churches as ‘‘vagrant forms of Protestantism’’ with ‘‘wild religious tendencies’’ that attracted ‘‘many persons of low-grade intelligence.’’53 Another pioneer of urban religious sociology, Samuel Kincheloe, used the term ‘‘emotional primitivism’’ in reference to Pentecostal churches. Even those who concentrated on rural churches could not avoid this kind of stereotyping. In his report on The Rural Church of the South, given before the National Convocation of Churches in Town and Country, President Harry V. Richardson pointed out that ‘‘a stream of migrants, white and black, who for the most part have been trained in the Protestant way’’ was flowing into America’s cities. To their credit, ‘‘these migrants maintain the population of our declining cities, and they also maintain the membership of our big sterile city churches.’’ Nonetheless, Richardson concluded, ‘‘it is to our shame that we permit so many of them, as they move from the south to our Eastern and Western cities, to be lost to active church membership, or worse, to become members of the erratic sects that crowd the big city bottoms.’’54 As the inner city was becoming populated with racially, economically, and religiously different people, religious leaders began to reassess the urban landscape’s mission potential. Previously, missions were seen as activities for some other part of the world. One Presbyterian minister described this ‘‘salt-water complex’’ as ‘‘the misconception that missions is legitimate only when it is on the other side of a body of salt water.’’55 But with the changes to the inner city, what was once the ‘‘Siberia of ecclesiastical preferment’’ was becoming the ‘‘number one mission field of America.’’ As suburban congregations lost their luster of the previous decade and as religious critics lambasted those congregations for their insularity,
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dullness, and obsession with things such as ‘‘size of congregations [and] bigness of budget,’’ inner cities became ‘‘exciting frontiers,’’ where pastors could engage in a ‘‘completely different kind of ministry’’ using ‘‘bold, fresh, creative’’ methods.56 Moreover, because of the physical and demographic changes occurring in cities in the postwar period, those bold, fresh, and creative activities were as likely to concern secular matters as theological ones. Poverty relief, slum housing, and highway construction and relocation moved to the top of the urban church agenda. Though these were ‘‘hardly the agenda for a church meeting,’’ they represented the reality for white urban congregations seeking to survive in a rapidly changing urban environment.57 Many of Indianapolis’s urban ministry activities took their cues from more nationally prominent programs such as New York’s East Harlem Protestant Parish (EHPP). Founded in by a group of mainline Protestant clergy, the EHPP sought to offer nondenominational Christian services to East Harlem’s Puerto Rican population. The out-migration of several white churches and the influx of Pentecostal and other storefront churches had alerted mainline Protestant leaders to the failure of their churches to appeal to local residents. The answer was to compete with the storefront churches at their own game, with storefront ministries of their own that provided social services, job training, and neighborhood beautification in addition to more traditional worship and evangelization. East Harlem Protestant Parish’s success was copied in other cities, including Chicago, where the West Side Christian Parish served as a ‘‘pathway for ecumenical operations in the inner city.’’58 The Episcopal Church, whose Christ Church Cathedral on Monument Circle was Indianapolis’s most visible religious presence, was particularly attuned to urban change. In and the Indianapolis diocese, led by Bishop John Craine, embarked on a program titled ‘‘Our Diocese Faces an Industrial Culture.’’ As Craine articulated it, the program’s purpose was to help parishes ‘‘see the surrounding community as God’s concern and the parish’s responsibility, and to find some ways in which the parish might make a new response to the love of God for the community, through total parish involvement.’’ With the participation of thirty
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
out of the diocese’s forty-five parishes, the program involved lay leaders and clergy actively studying the issues facing Indianapolis and other industrial cities: traffic and highway construction, urban relocation, race and civil rights, poverty and unemployment, public welfare, housing, and youth. Throughout the sessions, participants were urged to identify the ways that their own parishes had changed in the face of these secular changes.59 Another area of activity for urban ministry programs was housing. The involvement of ecumenical groups in housing programs for low-income citizens and African Americans was intimately connected to the fact that Indianapolis had a notoriously poor record of open housing. Through the early s, the white Indianapolis Real Estate Board (IREB) would not sell to African Americans unless there were already two other black families on a block. The IREB defended its unwritten policy by claiming they did not want to be accused of ‘‘blockbusting’’ and creating panic among white homeowners who would inevitably seek to sell their own home when a black family moved down the street. Prompted by complaints from civil rights and other activists, the IREB agreed to change its policy in , although few realtors expected the behavior to change. The IREB was not alone in its efforts to keep whites and blacks apart as white suburbanites did their best to maintain physical distance from blacks. Popular opinion was that as soon as a black family moved to a street, that street ‘‘lost its social quality as far as they (whites) are concerned.’’ In some white neighborhoods that bordered on black areas, whites formed companies to purchase homes as soon as they went on the market. The Fairmap Realty Company in the Crown Hill area and the Fourth Ward Improvement Association in the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood were both intended to snatch up available homes as quickly as possible. Such methods did not always work. In Mapleton-Fall Creek, one white homeowner sold her home to a black family in ‘‘retaliation’’ for her neighbors’ refusing to allow her to operate a kindergarten in her home. In some cases, opposition to African Americans turned violent. In February , shots were fired into houses being erected in Grandview Meadows, an intentionally interracial subdivision in the Grandview area in
Souls of the City
Washington Township. The next year, vandals cut awnings, spilled paint, drew swastikas and obscenities, and tore up the lawns of two black-owned houses on the block of North Illinois Street.60 Nationally, the Episcopal Church, United Presbyterian Church, United Church of Christ, and the Methodist Church joined with Urban America, Inc., in to ‘‘stimulate interest in the sponsorship of housing by local churches and other nonprofit groups.’’ Although the language of such projects was technical in tone and practical in goal, a religious mission underlay the efforts. After all, ‘‘man’s quest for adequate shelter has long been a concern of the Church,’’ explained one article.61 In Indianapolis, the religious concern for housing predated these national efforts and coincided with the city’s slum redevelopment efforts in neighborhoods just west of downtown, where the lack of running water, indoor bathrooms, or even electricity was the norm. Because of Indianapolis’s insistence (some might have said intransigence) on not accepting federal money to pay for housing redevelopment, the city looked to the private sector, and to religious groups in particular, for assistance. One of the earliest and most successful programs was Flanner House Homes, a self-help housing project run by the Methodistaffiliated Flanner Settlement House. Modeled after an American Friends Service Committee housing project in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Flanner House Homes was a ‘‘sweat-equity’’ project in which homeowners ‘‘paid’’ for their homes in part by doing the construction themselves. In , after the Redevelopment Area ‘‘A’’ had been cleared, Flanner House Homes, Inc. was awarded the contract to erect homes on thirty-five lots. Fourteen of the houses were to be used as rental homes, primarily for families displaced by slum clearance. The other twenty-one were to be inhabited by those who worked on the project. Veterans received highest priority for the owneroccupied houses, which cost between six and nine thousand dollars each.62 Although Flanner Homes was primarily a housing program, its underlying religious values were never far below the surface. ‘‘Indianapolis builds a new community,’’ one promotional brochure declared. Over a two-year period, twenty-one men ‘‘shed blood, sweat, and tears’’ to build their homes, while their families ‘‘sacri-
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
ficed the companionship and helpfulness of husbands and fathers for two years’’ and ‘‘gave up leisure and spending money.’’ The result was that Indianapolis saw ‘‘improved property values,’’ ‘‘better health and sanitation,’’ ‘‘improved moral and spiritual vitality,’’ and ‘‘a community sense of accomplishment.’’ Interspersed throughout the brochure were before-and-after photographs of the neighborhood, men building homes, women cooking in their new kitchens, and children kneeling in prayer next to their beds.63 The success of the first Flanner Homes project led to a second phase in the Martindale neighborhood with a similar self-help orientation. But in a city where slum neighborhoods received considerable public attention and municipal dollars, these efforts were minor. Much of the postwar urban redevelopment occurred with little regard for the human impact. Occasionally, however, one could detect a glimmer of religion’s influence on the urban renewal process. For example, in Redevelopment Area ‘‘H,’’ a section on the northeast edge of downtown designated for redevelopment, the Redevelopment Commission proposed replacing run-down houses and industrial buildings with several high-rise luxury apartment buildings in a complex known as Riley Center. As part of the project, Riley Center officials turned to the clergy of area churches to learn the effects of slum clearance. Charles Wagner, president of the Redevelopment Commission explained that ‘‘we are in danger of becoming fascinated by only what we can see: the bricks and steel of growing buildings. We need the help of clergymen to know the things we can’t see.’’ Ministers of Roberts Park Methodist Church, St. Mary Catholic Church, and Central Christian Church were all enlisted to gauge the community’s reaction to this massive project.64 In the late s, religious groups moved from working with the Redevelopment Commission to embarking on their own housing programs. In November , Housing Opportunities Multiplied Ecumenically (HOME) was founded at a meeting at North Methodist Church.65 With congregations paying a $ membership fee, HOME had a goal of constructing or rehabilitating forty housing units per year in the inner city. Within a year of its founding, the group had six members and had gained the support of six local insurance companies, a local bank, the Federal Housing Adminis-
Souls of the City
tration, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. HOME’s first project was Hometowne I, a $, project in the block of North Central Avenue to turn eight houses into thirty-nine smaller units.66 HOME was joined on the housing front in August by the Community Inter-faith Housing (CIH) program, which focused on rehabilitating existing single-family housing.67 HOME’s executive secretary, Rev. Dr. William E. Ramsden, explained that the program’s ‘‘primary motivation [was] not urban renewal in the traditional sense but concern for people which is based in our religious faith.’’ Ramsden, who also served as director of urban missions for the Methodist Church, said that HOME was rooted in both Hebrew and Christian Bible traditions. From the former, the program learned a sense of ‘‘justice and the maximum participation of all citizens in the community.’’ The latter provided models of helping those in need. HOME’s religious orientation was not confined to its leadership. For example, Don Fisher, an architect with the group, was a member of First Church of Christ, Scientist.68 Religious involvement in highway construction was yet another area of activity for those concerned with urban ministry. Most residents living in the path of the highways accepted their fate with little protest or noise. They received their reimbursement for their property and found new homes, sometimes in the same neighborhood, and other times on the suburban periphery. Others, however, responded less favorably to the highway construction. The most vocal religious participant in the highway debates came from Boniface Hardin, the priest of Holy Angels Catholic Church, an anchor for a middle-class African American neighborhood that also happened to sit in the path of the proposed I- highway. Hardin was assigned to Holy Angels in and immediately jumped into the world of urban redevelopment politics. He took on city hall and the state transportation department in an effort to redraw the path of I-. As it was initially drawn, the highway was to cut a twoblock wide swath northward along Missouri Avenue before it turned west along nd Street, in the process removing several hundred homes and dislocating thousands of individuals. Hardin proposed to shift the route slightly to the east to abut Crown Hill Cemetery, a move that would have significantly reduced the num-
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
ber of homes taken. Hardin also argued that the highway should be depressed rather than elevated. With the elevations, cross streets would be transformed into dead-end streets, and residents on streets adjacent to the highway would have to look at high grassy embankments. By depressing the highway, cross streets would connect both sides of the highway. Hardin’s proposals reflected the popular opinions across the country regarding highways, but the reaction of highway planners similarly reflected those elsewhere: there would be no changes. I- remained where it was drawn, and with the exception of a pedestrian bridge, no route shifts were made. Church involvement in the fight against the highways also contributed to the development of a new neighborhood organization on Indianapolis’s south side. Led by Rev. David Bobo of the Fountain Square Church of Christ in the s, the United Southside Community Organization brought together more than twenty smaller organizations to promote community spirit and to advocate for fairer settlements for residents displaced by highway construction. Church involvement in neighborhood organizations occurred elsewhere, particularly in neighborhoods undergoing demographic change. The Butler-Tarkington Neighborhood Association (BTNA) was founded in the s through the cooperative efforts of several area congregations to help combat white flight. BTNA became a model for other neighborhood groups. Across Meridian Street, Bethlehem Lutheran Church and other nearby churches formed the Meridian-Kessler Neighborhood Association a decade later. At a time when the church ‘‘began to receive its first Negro members,’’ Bethlehem commissioned a study of the relationship between the church and its neighborhood. The study recommended that the church self-consciously define itself in terms of ministry and service to the neighborhood.69 The most prominent example of church participation in community organizing was the Mid-North Church Council. In October , pastors and laymen from three mainline Protestant churches in the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood formed the TriChurch Council. Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, North United Methodist Church, and Our Redeemer Lutheran Church were each experiencing the relocation of its members to the northern suburbs.
Souls of the City
Despite disagreement with many of their congregants on this matter and extravagant offers to move north (apparently one church was offered forty acres of land and $ million to relocate), the three pastors agreed to remain in the neighborhood and to provide a ministry that would be responsive to the neighborhood’s changing nature. Over the next two decades, the council added other area churches, most of which were large, white, and mainline Protestant like the original three. Broadway United Methodist Church joined in , Third Church of Christ Scientist in , Trinity Episcopal Church in , and St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in . By this point, the name changed (for obvious reasons) to the MidNorth Church Council. Most urban ministry programs at the national or local level emerged from mainline Protestant denominations. These groups carried on the Social Gospel tradition of looking to society rather than to the individual as a source of religious problems. In contrast, evangelical Protestants had long looked to the individual, believing that a person’s theological orientation had as much to do with success or failure as did economics or politics. In the context of massive urban change in the s and s, however, even evangelicals could not avoid recognizing the role played by social forces beyond the control of the individual. One can see this transformation in Action magazine, the publication of the National Association of Evangelicals. Through the mids, the magazine focused on ‘‘traditional’’ evangelical issues, such as personal salvation. As events in urban America in the s took center stage, Action could no longer avoid addressing the ‘‘secular world.’’ ‘‘Have Evangelicals Abandoned the Cities?’’ asked one article in the Spring issue. Richard Falconer, administrative secretary of the Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society, answered that question by admitting that ‘‘all too often . . . nothing was done to integrate newer though different peoples who became part of a community surrounding the city church.’’ Instead, congregations simply sold their buildings and relocated elsewhere, usually to suburbia. But, Falconer continued, because of increases in crime, poverty, mobility, and other factors, ‘‘we can no longer think of the
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
inner city as something different from the rest of society or the rest of the nation.’’ Even as Falconer admitted that problems of the inner city posed challenges for evangelicals, he envisioned the solutions as staying within the evangelical framework. Unlike mainline Protestants who saw urban ministry in terms of social service programs, Falconer defined ‘‘city ministry’’ as ‘‘a matter of one person witnessing or ministering to another.’’ Moreover, evangelicals need to be involved in the inner city, not because they could solve social problems, but because cities have a ‘‘relative lack of evangelical witness.’’ The sense of denominational and congregational independence also emerged in Falconer’s discussion as he stated that most specialized urban ministry programs were independent efforts that ‘‘are supported by the general evangelical community’’ rather than by any one group.70 Falconer’s vision of urban ministry as a one-to-one relationship likely resonated with Action’s readers. William Pannell’s scathing racial critique of evangelicals, published one year later, likely did not. Pannell’s essay, titled simply ‘‘The Black Community,’’ represented his reflections on his own experiences ‘‘as an evangelical and a black man.’’ To Pannell, the racial problems of America in the s were as much theological as they were political. After a long exposition on the urban crisis from the black perspective, and after arguing that it was the imposition of white power and white control over African Americans that created Black Power, Pannell directly challenged the ‘‘repeated premise that evangelicals believe the Bible and want to follow its precepts.’’ If that was the case, how could one ‘‘explain the evangelical exodus from the city? Do we dare say that this was in obedience to Scripture?’’ Pannell took his critique further by flatly declaring that ‘‘evangelicalism is white, AngloSaxon, Republican and suburban.’’ Furthermore, the ‘‘real reason we are not in the cities with any force is because we are more concerned with property than with people.’’ Evangelicals might pretend to be ‘‘simply Bible-believing Christians with heavenly citizenship,’’ but in fact, they had a ‘‘vested interest in the American system,’’ and ‘‘our God has become a naturalized American who supports the great white dream.’’71
Souls of the City
Immediately following Pannell’s African American critique came another one focusing on the ‘‘poor white community,’’ another group that was clearly an ‘‘other.’’ Though less angry than Pannell’s article, this one, written by Donald Buteyn, a pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, similarly chastised suburban evangelicals for assuming that people were ‘‘poor because they have wasted their substance in riotous living.’’ Buteyn proceeded to detail the urban ministry activities of his church as they addressed the two primary groups of poor whites, Southern and Appalachian migrants who were poor because of no fault of their own, and the ‘‘hippies’’ and ‘‘flower children’’ who made a conscious decision to live a life of poverty. For both groups, evangelicals needed to ‘‘learn love that goes beyond fear, antiseptic formulas, and preconceived notions.’’ As with Richard Falconer, Buteyn’s solution to dealing with people in poverty was the one-to-one style of witnessing and caring, rather than working through the larger secular networks of social service provision.72 Even at the height of the urban ministry activities of the late s, some observers raised questions about the kinds of programs being developed. ‘‘Are pastors shunning ministry to the wealthy?’’ asked one columnist in the Indianapolis News in . Clergy ‘‘want to be in the ‘thick’ of things where they can show their concern for people,’’ explained Robert L’Homme, a reporter for the News. In so doing, they have developed a ‘‘kind of prejudice’’ against ‘‘those whose lives are not torn by poverty and disease.’’ Such attitudes were fostered nationally by intellectuals such as Gibson Winter, who railed against the lack of urban involvement by suburban congregations.73 Others argued that the congregational focus on social services had become too dominant. Rev. David Perkins of Indianapolis’s Northside Church of Christ articulated as much in , claiming that programs such as day care centers and other social services ‘‘should not be the focus of an urban church’s ministry.’’ By engaging in these secular activities, the churches lost their religious and theological purpose, particularly given the fact that there were secular social service programs available from other sources.74 Perkins’s comments harked back to those of Samuel Kincheloe,
What Is ‘‘Our’’ Community?
who was a major figure in the sociological—and some might have argued, less theological—study of urban churches. Yet for all his social analysis, Kincheloe still believed that a church’s central role was to be a ‘‘salvation organization.’’ Perhaps this tension between social service and religious service was best articulated by an editor of one of the leading urban ministry magazines, who stated that a basic test of a church’s effectiveness was not how many people it served, but rather ‘‘how many folks are being saved through the fellowship of your church?’’75 These kinds of reactions—both from within the world of urban ministry and from without—make it clear that changes to the urban religious landscape did not occur in a vacuum. The suburbanization of individuals and institutions, and the policies and programs of governments and businesses all left their footprint on the inner city. The congregations that decided to stay or go, the new congregations that opened up, and the old ones that reoriented their activities all operated within a larger environment that was increasingly making distinctions and judgments about metropolitan ‘‘others.’’ To suburbanites, the city was the ‘‘other.’’ To whites, blacks were ‘‘other.’’ The increased mobility and transience of congregants and congregations in the s and s only heightened the awareness of these metropolitan distinctions. But the fluctuations of the s and s were not infinite, and in the decades that followed, a sense of calm returned to American cities. In Indianapolis, this calm was accompanied by the metropolitan reorganization that occurred on January with the formation of Unigov, the unified government consolidating Indianapolis with the surrounding suburban Marion County. In this single stroke, the suburban and urban became one. What this meant for the religious landscape is the topic that will be explored in the following chapter.
V TYING THE METROPOLIS TOGETHER
On January , the city of Indianapolis and the surrounding suburban Marion County officially merged into a single political entity. This new ‘‘Unified Government,’’ or Unigov as it was called, represented the triumph of a vision of a new era of metropolitan governance in which bureaucratic inefficiencies would be streamlined and the deleterious effects of suburbanization would be halted. Unigov positioned Indianapolis to become a unified community where city, suburb, and even rural countryside shared a common destiny. After three decades marked by metropolitan fluctuation and divisiveness, the Unigov era was expected to herald a calmer sense of metropolitan togetherness. Although Unigov was a secular program, the presumed stability that it was supposed to bring had analogs in Indianapolis’s religious landscape. The rates of congregational transience—the proportion of congregations that closed or moved—declined in the s and s in contrast to the higher rates during earlier decades of metropolitan instability. Such a decline indicated that Indianapolis’s residents were more willing to keep their churches and synagogues in place even as their own individual rates of residential mobility continued apace. Thus, unlike the s and s when demographic fluctuations led people to relocate their churches from one neighborhood to another, in the s members of Indianapolis’s religious congregations seemed to become more comfortable with the idea of living in one part of the region and worshiping in another part. It was as if they accepted the idea that Indianapolis was a
Tying the Metropolis Together
unified whole and that they and their religious communities were interconnected across the region. To frame the formation of Unigov and the associated data about Indianapolis’s religious landscape in this way is to be overly celebratory, however. As much as Unigov unified city and suburb, and as much as the religious landscape seemed to stabilize, many other signs pointed in an opposite direction. The metropolitan consolidation introduced by Unigov was far from complete, and beneath the religious stability lay many undercurrents of tension and division. Community cohesiveness had long been a problem in an Indianapolis region that encompassed dense urban neighborhoods, sprawling suburbia, and rural farmland and that was segregated between blacks and whites, rich and poor, farmers and urbanites, and northsiders and southsiders. Through the early twentieth century, Indianapolis had turned to annexation as the solution to metropolitan fragmentation. Between and , the city annexed the suburban towns of Brightwood, Haughville, Mount Jackson, West Indianapolis, Irvington, University Heights, and Broad Ripple, as well as other pockets of unincorporated land.1 If the powers of the city of Indianapolis viewed annexation in a positive light, many of these smaller towns preferred to maintain their own identities and control. Many already had their own fire and police protection as well as their own schools, and as long as they could keep the same level of service as their larger neighbor, they saw little reason to join the big city. In a few cases, these suburban communities were able to hold off annexation. In the town of Woodruff Place had incorporated itself on the eastern edge of downtown Indianapolis to preserve the community’s unique Victorian-style garden plots and to avoid paying city taxes. When Indianapolis attempted to annex Woodruff Place in , the town sought the protection of the state legislature to stop the process. Indianapolis tried to withhold city services in retaliation, but the state legislature supported Woodruff Place by voting that suburbs could contract services from larger cities without having to join them.2 As Indianapolis’s annexation efforts slowed after about , the suburban parts of Marion County took on a sense of
Souls of the City
distinctiveness from the big city. The towns of Speedway on the west side, Lawrence on the northeast side, and Meridian Hills and Williams Creek on the north side, all saw themselves as wholly different from Indianapolis, which in their minds was one big urban mass. From the time that the city of Indianapolis stopped annexing large portions of the surrounding residential areas to the beginning of World War II, the population balance began to tip toward the suburban townships, and this reinforced the distinctions between city and suburbs. Ninety percent of Marion County’s residents lived within the Indianapolis city borders in , but that proportion fell to percent in and to percent in . Moreover, during this period, several newer neighborhoods, including Williams Creek in and Meridian Hills a few years later, were cre-
Population Distribution, Marion County, –.
Tying the Metropolis Together
ated in the far north of Marion County as refuges for the city’s most elite residents. Even middle-class residents were moving further away from the inner city to neighborhoods on the west, east, and south sides of the city; and commercial development was following them as well. In short, it was clear to civic leaders that something had to be done to ensure that the expanding suburban areas would not fragment the region too much. The mechanism for promoting this sense of unification was the Committee on Post-War Planning, a -person committee appointed by wartime Mayor Robert Tyndall and headed by local businessman George Kuhn. As happened in cities across the United States, Indianapolis saw the wartime mobilization as an opportunity to develop a comprehensive and coherent plan for life after the war. After two years of work, Kuhn laid out his ideas in October at a special dinner for local businessmen held at the Block’s Department Store. Kuhn’s vision encompassed a range of activities that included the expansion of the city’s road and highway system, increases in parking spaces, improvements in air quality through smoke abatement programs, redevelopment of slums, cleaning up and beautification of streams and rivers, and the construction of a large public auditorium. Even more striking than the inventory of programs—many of which actually came to fruition over the next half-century—was Kuhn’s attitude that such activities would result in a reunification of the region. By enacting the committee’s proposals, Indianapolis could reverse a ‘‘trend toward decentralization.’’ Once Indianapolis was made ‘‘more attractive,’’ the city would see a ‘‘successful integration of old and new suburban areas with the city proper.’’3 This attitude represented a new approach to metropolitan community. Rather than forcibly incorporating into the city residents who lived outside Indianapolis as happened with the annexation efforts of earlier decades, Kuhn’s proposals sought to entice those residents back, or at least make those who considered moving out think twice about leaving. A decade after Kuhn issued his proposals, yet another round of efforts was undertaken to solve the problem of regional fragmentation. While Kuhn and others sought to reunify the region through
Souls of the City
urban redevelopment, others saw the fragmentation as a structural and bureaucratic problem that could be solved through administrative processes. The issue was governmental efficiency rather than community cohesiveness, the main culprit being the several layers of administrative overlap that existed between Indianapolis and Marion County. In a report submitted to the Indiana General Assembly, the Metropolitan Area Study Commission explained that rates of Marion County’s decentralization and fragmentation had accelerated in the s, while the governmental structures remained unchanged. Specifically, between and more than half the growth of Marion County had occurred in the unincorporated areas—places under the least amount of control and that could provide the least amount of services to local residents. Moreover, several layers of administrative duplication existed among the city of Indianapolis and the smaller incorporated towns, which exacerbated the sense of fragmentation and lack of interdependence. This duplication included thirteen different school boards; three health and hospital departments; three full-time, plus a dozen volunteer fire departments; and twenty different planning and zoning bodies. To resolve this situation, the Commission recommended the creation of some form of Greater Indianapolis government that would encompass Indianapolis and the whole of Marion County. Administrative departments in the city and county that provided similar services would be combined, and various regional boards would be created to oversee various metropolitan issues, such as planning.4 Indianapolis’s proposals for municipal reform and streamlined bureaucracy paralleled trends emerging elsewhere throughout the United States and Canada in the s. In that decade Toronto, Nashville, and Jacksonville all implemented some form of metropolitan government, each with a slightly different twist. In Toronto, individual municipalities maintained their own political administrative identities, while an added layer of federated government addressed regional issues such as transportation and planning. In Nashville and Jacksonville, the central city and surrounding county merged into a single unit, abolishing the local governmental structures entirely. Still, for several reasons—Hoosier conservatism and
Tying the Metropolis Together
the suburban fear of annexation being the two most important— little was done to implement these metropolitan reforms in Indianapolis during the rest of the s. Suburban Marion County continued to gain population at the expense of Indianapolis, and metropolitan fragmentation continued into the s. The impact of this outward demographic expansion was exacerbated by the economic growth in Indianapolis’s suburban areas. Through the s, downtown Indianapolis remained Marion County’s primary shopping district, housing the region’s major department stores as well as many specialty shops. As late as , a survey of consumer spending habits found that more than percent of consumers in Indianapolis made most of their major household purchases at downtown stores. In the city’s central business district brought in an estimated $ million in retail sales.5 Despite these numbers, other signs pointed to a suburban boom
#
Shopping Center
Area of City
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
Town and Country Windsor Village Irvington Plaza Eastgate Twin-Aire Eageldale Plaza Meadows Keystone Plaza Westlane Devington Glendale Nora Plaza Southern Plaza 500 Plaza Speedway Augusta Plaza Marwood Esquire Plaza North Eastwood Linwood Square Brightwood Plaza Lafayette Square Norgate
North East East East Southwest Northwest Northeast North Northwest Northeast North North South West West Northwest Southwest Northeast East East Northeast Northwest North
Opening Date
Distance from Downtown (miles)
Size (sq. ft.)
Parking Spaces
September 1950 June 1953 November 1954 March 1957 June 1957 August 1957 October 1957 November 1957 June 1958 August 1958 August 1958 May 1959 April 1961 May 1961 May 1961 September 1962 October 1962 November 1962 April 1963 November 1963 October 1965 August 1968 November 1970
5 5 4.25 6 2.5 4 4.5 5.5 8 6.75 6.75 8.5 4.5 4 6 8 5.5 8.5 8.5 3.5 3.5 5.5 8
196,020 217,800 914,760 2,570,040 522,720 958,320 1,742,400 392,040 261,360 1,546,380 2,395,800 696,960 2,003,760 914,760 1,838,232 435,600 522,720 1,089,000 653,400 1,089,000 217,800 3,702,600 1,045,440
550 500 2,000 3,000 1,100 2,500 2,000 2,000 400 2,000 4,000 1,900 2,500 1,564 3,700 750 1,500 1,500 1,500 1,320 300 6,600 1,000
New Shopping Centers, Marion County, s–s.
Souls of the City
in commercial activity. In , one of the area’s first suburban shopping centers opened at North Keystone. At only , square feet, Town and County Shopping Center was small compared to today’s mega malls, but it offered shoppers a different experience than they could find downtown, most notably a variety of stores and free parking in one compact area. Two years later the national planning firm of Homer Hoyt Associates proposed to build the Meadows Shopping Center at th Street. The Meadows would succeed, Hoyt predicted, ‘‘if shoppers can buy here practically everything that is available both in downtown Indianapolis and in local neighborhood centers, and if they can avoid central business district congestion and park near the stores.’’ Furthermore, by clustering some of the city’s major department stores and smaller specialty shops in a single shopping center, ‘‘there would be little reason for families in northern and eastern Indianapolis or in Washington, Lawrence, Pike or Warren Townships to go to downtown Indianapolis for any major purchases. The convenience of ample free parking and the ease of shopping in a center with stores grouped around a mall from which all automobile traffic is excluded, would be a powerful attraction that would bring most of the middle and higher income families in northern and eastern Indianapolis to the Meadows for most of their shopping needs.’’6 Such predictions were not far off the mark. Over the next fifteen years, Indianapolis’s consumers shopped at almost twenty new shopping centers that were typically located about five and a half miles from downtown, contained over , square feet of selling space, and had almost two thousand free parking spaces. By the late s, downtown businesses felt the impact of these new suburban shopping centers as the central business district’s share of area retail sales fell to $ million dollars, or only one-fifth of all retail activity in the Indianapolis region, by the end of the decade.7 The suburbanization of shopping continued in with the opening of Lafayette Square, Indianapolis’s first major enclosed shopping mall, at th Street and Lafayette Road on the city’s northwest side. The success of the million-square-foot mall spurred the opening of Castleton Square on the northeast side in and Washington Square on the far east side in .8
Tying the Metropolis Together
Indianapolis’s growing interstate highway system similarly emphasized the suburban periphery over the downtown business district. Although the bulk of political and bureaucratic attention was paid to negotiations over the specific route of the ‘‘inner loop’’ around downtown, most of the actual highway miles were located at the edges of Marion County, along the ‘‘outer loop’’ of Interstate and the several highway spokes of I-, I-, I-, and I-. As these outer roads were laid out and constructed, it became clear that their value lay as much in the connections they offered across and around the region as they did in the access to the downtown core. Indianapolis’s civic and political leaders could not help but notice these trends during the s. John Barton, elected mayor in , tried again to seize the initiative to confront the problems caused by Indianapolis’s metropolitanization. But while Barton recognized the bureaucratic inefficiencies created by the duplication of administrative services among the city, county, and smaller municipalities, his solution was to return strong annexation powers to the city and specifically to the mayor’s office. If Indianapolis could simply annex the surrounding areas, Barton argued, the city would eliminate waste and gain new room to expand. Not surprisingly, Barton’s proposal to expand the powers of the mayor’s office met with considerable resistance from several places. It was a ‘‘power grab,’’ Republicans claimed, that would give the mayor almost dictatorial control over municipal bureaucracy. Independent suburban municipalities feared any increase in Indianapolis’s annexation power. Most important, Barton’s reforms failed to convince Indiana’s state legislature, which legally controlled Indianapolis’s municipal flexibility. Barton remained a ‘‘weak’’ mayor, and the suburban municipalities could put to rest their annexation fears.9 Even as Indianapolis’s Republicans were lambasting Barton’s attempted metropolitan reorganization, they were developing their own ideas about the very same issue. Led by Richard Lugar, member of Indianapolis’s School Board, the Republican Action Committee (RAC) had been created in to develop a plan both to win back the mayor’s office and to find a solution to metropolitan change that was better than piecemeal annexation. The RAC’s con-
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versations evolved into an idea for metropolitan consolidation whereby the city of Indianapolis and the suburbs of Marion County would be fused into a single governmental entity. Bringing city and suburbs into a single unified government was different from traditional annexation. Rather than have the annexed areas subsumed under Indianapolis city government, the new governmental system would entirely replace Indianapolis’s city government with a new county-wide administration. Lugar unveiled the full Unigov picture in , immediately after he had beaten Barton in the mayoral election and Republicans had gained control of the County Council, City Council, and the Marion County seats in the Indiana General Assembly. The extensive nature of Lugar’s vision was clear: more than forty county and city departments would be consolidated into five executive departments directly under mayoral control.10 When making the claims for Unigov, its supporters usually pointed to the same benefits that had been bandied about in earlier proposals. A new, streamlined government would not only cut waste but would also free up money for revitalization efforts, which would then attract new businesses and create growth. New to the debate this time, however, was Lugar’s introduction of the moral and ethical dimension to the metropolitan reorganization of Indianapolis. Throughout and as he campaigned for the new system, Lugar took every opportunity available to him to preach about the benefits of consolidated government, invoking quasireligious language to forward his cause. Unigov was a ‘‘moral force’’ because it was the most effective and efficient way to deal with urban problems, he claimed.11 Moreover, Unigov would help reverse the community fragmentation caused by white flight. ‘‘Everyone who has the cash to do so is getting out of the cities,’’ Lugar argued. ‘‘This is no good. If we really care about our fellow men, we must become involved with each other and not just run in and out of the cities.’’12 The moral argument also helped Lugar in his numerous speeches to church groups. In March , the mayor spoke at East Park Methodist Church on his plans to improve the city’s government. The following week, he spoke at a Lenten Breakfast at Central Avenue Methodist Church, which was attended by
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members of Bellaire, North, Broad Ripple, University, St. Luke’s, and Central Avenue Methodist churches as well as by Broadway and White Harvest Evangelical United Brethren churches.13 The next month Lugar addressed the Indiana State Baptist Youth Fellowship Convention. In May John W. Walls, an aide to the mayor, spoke at All Souls Unitarian on ‘‘Indianapolis—City of Problems and Promise.’’ Attendees at the Methodist Youth Fellowship banquet at East th Street Methodist Church in June heard Lugar speak on ‘‘United We Stand—Christians and Good Government.’’ The July meeting of the Indianapolis Methodist Men’s Group at University Heights Methodist Church found the mayor speaking on ‘‘The Christian and His Community.’’ Churches could help to improve city administration problems, Lugar told the Indianapolis chapter of the Lutheran Human Relations Association who met in October at Our Savior Lutheran Church. In November the mayor spoke at St. Paul’s Lutheran about community concerns.14 Lugar’s use of religious language not only helped to put a moral stamp on his campaign but also marked the first time that religion had been invoked in the decades-long discussions over Indianapolis’s metropolitan future. Until that point, the problems of Indianapolis’s metropolitan fragmentation had been debated without any reference to religion. George Kuhn’s speech in which he laid out his vision for a postwar Indianapolis contained nary a reference to religion or churches. This is not to say that the civic leaders of years past were not religious, but rather that they saw religion as a private matter with little to say about public issues such as metropolitanization. Yet religion was an active participant in the changing metropolis, not only because congregations and members were themselves contributing to the mobility and transience of the postwar period but also because it was in the religious world that one found some of the only examples of metropolitan-oriented institutions. The Church Federation included both congregations located within the city of Indianapolis and those beyond its borders in the suburbs. The Archdiocese of Indianapolis similarly controlled churches both within Indianapolis and in the suburban areas of Marion County. The local districts of the Methodist Church were split into east, west, and north sections, with each sector including
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inner-city and suburban areas. The Indianapolis Baptist Association, the denominational body for local American Baptists, included congregations from both the city and suburb. At the congregational level, the fact that so many churches had large proportions of members who commuted provided another indication that Indianapolis’s religious people and institutions helped to unify the region. But just as Lugar invoked religion and the concepts of religious connectedness to frame his campaign for Unigov, critics of the new system could well have pointed to the other side of religion to make their point. After all, religion not only promoted community by bringing people together, but it also promoted community by keeping them apart—and that was what Unigov seemed to be doing. Congregations remained highly segregated and homogeneous throughout the postwar period; interracial or interclass membership was very much the exception. When congregations had members who commuted to worship—thus connecting suburban residents and urban churches—there remained a clear distinction between those who drove into a neighborhood to worship and those who lived in that same neighborhood but did not worship there. Even when congregations embarked on urban ministry programs, there was often a patronizing sense of ‘‘us’’ serving ‘‘them.’’ This side of religion—the side of religion that promoted fragmentation and a sense of ‘‘otherness’’—fit with many of the critiques of Unigov, particularly in the ways that it failed to eliminate the very city-versus-suburb divisions that it was intended to remove. Indianapolis’s African American community, for example, saw Unigov as a challenge to its growing political power in the central city. Although still a minority of Indianapolis residents, blacks had grown from percent of the city population in to percent in . Continued white flight and black in-migration in the s positioned African Americans to becoming more than percent of the population by . In the northern half of Center Township, the proportion was even higher, with some census tracts coming in at over percent African American. Although they still lacked the votes to ensure an African American mayor, blacks nevertheless represented a clear voting bloc that any political
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candidate would have to address. Unigov would change all that. The addition of almost one hundred thousand suburban voters— nearly all of whom were white—would immediately dilute African American voting strength. Moreover, these newly added citizens would likely lack any interest in the problems of the inner city; after all, many had just left the central city for the ‘‘safety’’ of the suburbs. Unigov’s supporters countered that the merger would ensure that Indianapolis’s open housing laws would be extended to new suburban areas and thus facilitate black suburbanization, but many African Americans remained suspicious. Other critics argued that Unigov would give the newly added suburban population unfair influence in Indianapolis’s politics. The new city would ‘‘permit suburbanites to have a disproportionate voice in how the city is governed,’’ claimed James Beatty, chairman of the Marion County Democratic Committee. Democrats had their own bones to pick over the Republican-backed Unigov, because similar proposals offered by Mayor Barton only a few years before had been trashed as a power grab.15 Republicans tried to deflect the criticisms that Unigov would disenfranchise inner-city residents and Democratic voters. In Beurt Servaas, City Council member and one of the original architects of Unigov, even invoked the ‘‘together’’ theme to promote the new political structure, explaining that the objective was ‘‘to blend the core of the city into the suburbs, to make Marion County again one community.’’16 (After the fact, however, there was less of a need to be diplomatic. In , just one year after Unigov was implemented, chairman of Marion County’s Republican Party Keith Bulen proudly told the Wall Street Journal that Unigov was a ‘‘political coup’’ for his party.17) Given the Republican dominance of the City and County Councils and its strength in the Indiana State Legislature, the opposition to Unigov had little success in derailing the consolidation efforts. The local opposition’s lack of influence stemmed from the peculiar relationship between Indianapolis and the state of Indiana. Unlike many cities that controlled their own administrative fate through home rule laws, Indianapolis lacked any ability to change its charter or political structure. Instead, the state legislature held the power
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for municipal change. Because of this, a new Unigov structure did not require a public referendum but a vote by state lawmakers. In mid- the General Assembly’s Unigov bill passed with mostly Republican support but also with the support of Indiana’s other metropolitan counties. Legislators from Allen, Delaware, Lake, Marion, St. Joseph, and Vanderburgh counties all voted for the measure, and their county chairmen started dreaming of the day when they could request similar legislation.18 At long last Indianapolis seemed to have achieved a rare municipal triumph: to manage successfully the unification of a fragmented metropolitan region. City and suburb were united under one administrative umbrella, thus giving official validation to the metropolitanization trends that had been occurring over the previous thirty years. Overlapping bureaucratic functions of the city of Indianapolis and Marion County were streamlined and consolidated. Whole departments that duplicated one another were removed. With Unigov, Indianapolis immediately jumped from being the nation’s twenty-fourth largest city to being the twelfth largest city. To his credit, Lugar recognized that Unigov was foisted upon Marion County’s residents without their formal approval. He made it a point to argue that the mayoral election would serve as a referendum on metropolitan reorganization. If voters did not like Unigov, they could vote the mayor out of office. There was little chance of that happening, however, given the nature of his opponent’s campaign. Rather than target residents of the central city and discuss ways to make Unigov work for them, the Democratic candidate, John F. Neff, appealed to suburban voters with a ‘‘Picket Fence’’ motif, which talked about the importance of returning to a pre-Unigov system that kept a clear separation between city and suburb. Neff also warned suburban voters that, while the school systems were excluded from the initial Unigov format, Republicans were planning to merge the township schools with Indianapolis Public Schools. As much as they might have disliked Unigov, African Americans disliked Neff ’s campaign even more, claiming it appealed to suburban segregationist emotions. For his part, Lugar also directed his politicking to suburbanites by denying Neff ’s claims
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about school consolidation. Instead, he emphasized the fact that Unigov deliberately kept education and public safety outside the Unigov umbrella.19 In the end, Lugar’s appeal to suburbanites beat out Neff ’s appeal to suburbanites, and the incumbent was reelected by a margin of fifty thousand votes. Republicans also won twenty of the twenty-nine Unigov Council seats. The key issue was the future of the township school systems. Lugar promised suburban voters that he would not seek consolidation of their schools as Neff had charged. With their schools safe and new services promised them, suburban voters were more than willing to give Lugar a second term as mayor.20 While Lugar and his colleagues pushed Indianapolis’s administrative reach outward toward the edges of Marion County, they also worked to keep the city’s focus squarely on the downtown center and to give this newly expanded region an identifiable core around which to coalesce. Articulated in a series of Regional Center Plans, the s and s programs for downtown Indianapolis looked more like George Kuhn’s s-era proposals and less like a program for a region growing at the margins. The idea for a downtown redevelopment plan originated in a grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded to Indianapolis’s local Department of Metropolitan Development. Known as the Unified Planning Project, the goal was to reverse urban deterioration by creating an environment hospitable to new development projects. Included in the program were proposals to create more parks along the White River, to renovate Union Station and Monument Circle, and to redevelop the City Market and the surrounding area. With several of these proposals either completed or in process by , the city developed a new Regional Center Plan, which, when published three years later, included proposals for new office construction, convention center expansion, and the development of a major retail mall in the downtown core. Working behind the scenes to facilitate much of the development were groups like the Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee (GIPC). Founded in by Mayor John Barton, GIPC was intended to help civic and business leaders develop strat-
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egies for the city’s growth. Despite its implied regional orientation—it represented, after all, Greater Indianapolis—GIPC focused primarily on downtown. At the same time that these downtown-focused projects were being explored, a separate initiative to recreate Indianapolis as the nation’s Amateur Sports Capital helped bring more development to the central business district. Between and the city, supported in large part by the Lilly Endowment, spent more than $ million to develop a comprehensive sports infrastructure that included a new natatorium and track and field stadium on the campus of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, a downtown skating pavilion, and the Hoosier Dome.21 The last facility, completed in , helped to bring the Baltimore Colts professional football franchise to Indianapolis and added to the city’s sports image.22 In the s more money went to build Victory Field, a new minor league baseball stadium on the western edge of downtown, and Conseco Fieldhouse, a new basketball arena on the southern edge. To some degree, these urban redevelopment projects of the s and s directly countered Unigov’s thrust toward the periphery. Downtown projects and sporting facilities benefited only a small core of civic and economic elites. Yet the parallels to Unigov were not difficult to miss. Although downtown redevelopment gave the whole Indianapolis region an identifiable center, it primarily benefited the wealthy residents of new, flashy downtown high-rise apartments and the suburban elites who worked in the new downtown office buildings and spent their leisure time in the new sporting arenas. In contrast, ‘‘the supposed benefits of Downtown Development for inner-city neighborhoods [were] non-existent.’’23 The structure of Unigov, like downtown redevelopment, remained ‘‘more responsive to suburban pressures which are not only not supportive, but hostile, to city needs.’’ Paul Cantwell, minority leader of the City-County Council, argued that Unigov’s gerrymandered electoral districts ‘‘created a suburban monster that doesn’t deal with the inner city. All the problems are in here and all the votes are out there.’’ Mayor William Hudnut denied the existence of such geographical divisions, lamenting that it was ‘‘unfortunate
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that some people try to polarize the old city and suburbs.’’24 Whether this metropolitan polarization was between the old city and suburbs or between the new city and suburbs, it nevertheless continued. Critiques of downtown redevelopment and of the general imbalance of the new Unigov structure also emanated from people on the south side of Indianapolis who historically had seen their part of the city play second fiddle to the north side’s elites. ‘‘Since the day when it came into existence,’’ one south-side resident noted in , ‘‘the South Side has waged a constant war with its wealthier neighbors of the North Side in an effort to get a just proportion of the improvements.’’25 Evidence for this viewpoint included the argument that the south side had a ‘‘poor class of street cars,’’ while the north side had ‘‘elegant, Pullman-like cars.’’ The sense of metropolitan bifurcation was reinforced by the belt of railroad tracks south of downtown that created a formidable physical barrier between the south side and the rest of the city. Southsiders proposed various ways to remove their sense of urban fragmentation. Even a simple remedy like having the city spend its money more equally would have enabled the south side to be integrated better into the city, many observers claimed. Others suggested more complex solutions, including the elevation of the railroad tracks over major north-south thoroughfares, which would increase communication between the north and south sides and thus unify the city. Few of the metropolitan proposals introduced during the twentieth century ever addressed the north-south split. Unigov was no different, and it contributed to the ‘‘inferiority complex’’ of Indianapolis’s south side.26 ‘‘The city put the dump down here, they put the stockyards down here, and they put all the dirty industry down here,’’ one southsider complained. By contrast, he argued, ‘‘anything positive, like the Children’s Museum or the Zoo, goes north.’’27 The lack of attention paid to the south side—or at least the perceived lack of attention—had many sources, most notably the fact that all but a handful of the city’s elites lived north of downtown. In the mid-s the mayor and the department heads of the city-county government all lived on the north side.28 Seven of the nine state government officials who were elected statewide
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lived on the north side of metropolitan Indianapolis. None of the members of the boards of the Indianapolis Zoo, the Indianapolis Repertory Theatre, or the Indianapolis Museum of Art lived south of Washington Street. For many northsiders, there was simply no reason to have any connection—social or economic—to the south side. As the editor of Indianapolis Monthly recalled, when she grew up in the city, she ‘‘didn’t know there was an Indianapolis south of th Street.’’29 In the common image of Indianapolis residents, the south side was perceived as a distinct place of ‘‘otherness.’’ The south side’s white, working-class residents with southern and Appalachian roots were turned into caricatures, stereotyped as parochial and culturally backwards hicks. ‘‘My impression of the Southside is that they are rednecks, hillbillies, and country folk,’’ said one northsider in .30 Southsiders were supposedly not very educated either. There was no major book store on the south side, one person claimed, because ‘‘they’d have a pioneering effort of a couple of years just getting the fact that here’s a major bookstore and it’s good to go in and fortify your knowledge and further your education.’’31 To be sure, southsiders themselves were not immune to generalizing about their north-side neighbors, particularly in economic terms. Southsiders might not have had white-collar jobs like the north-side residents, explained one southsider, ‘‘but I’ll tell you one thing: Most of us don’t owe anything.’’32 These cultural stereotypes persisted even in the face of increasing demographic and religious similarities between the north and south sides of Marion County. Through the s, south-side neighborhoods consistently ranked lower than their north-side counterparts in terms of educational levels, income, and house values. As newer suburban areas developed further away from downtown on the south side, however, this sociodemographic imbalance began to disappear. In only three south-side tracts ranked among the top twenty tracts for income and percentage of college graduates. But by , newly developed areas on the south side resembled newly developed areas on the north side. In census tracts where more than half of the housing units were built between and , income and education levels were almost identical on the north and south
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sides. Data from showed that these convergent trends in median income levels, educational levels, and proportions of whitecollar workers continued. Religiously as well, the congregational landscapes of the north and south sides of Marion County saw a fair amount of convergence by the end of the century. In Indianapolis’s north side (north of th Street) was almost entirely populated by mainline Protestant churches and had no conservative Protestant congregations. This contrasted with the south side (south of Washington Street), which had a roughly even split between mainline and conservative Protestant churches. Sixty years later, both sides of the county were dominated by conservative Protestant churches, with mainline Protestant and other types of congregations in the minority. Still the stereotypes remained, to the point that the pastor of one the largest conservative Protestant congregations on the south side proudly noted in the mid-s that ‘‘God chose a south-side church to become the largest church in the city, and not a northside church.’’ After all, citing the words of Corinthians , ‘‘God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.’’33 The persistent cultural imbalances of Unigov and of downtown redevelopment were not the only indications that the metropolitan
Religious Congregations, –.
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consolidation unified Indianapolis in name only. Unigov also failed to solve the problems of local municipal parochialism that plagued American cities after World War II. By bringing Indianapolis city and Marion County suburbs together under one administrative umbrella, Unigov was expected to remove issues such as competition for resources and conflicting development agendas. But a closer look at what Unigov left out reveals a different story, a story of continued local particularism and cultural fragmentation. Although Unigov consolidated most departments that overlapped between Indianapolis and Marion County, it did not consolidate the two public safety departments. By maintaining the separation between the Marion County Sheriff ’s Office and the Indianapolis Police Department (IPD), Unigov perpetuated a sense that ‘‘urban, inner city’’ crime was distinct and unconnected from the issues of suburban public safety. Crime statistics were reported separately for the two districts. Another significant implication was the level of funding for the two different police forces. Property taxes provided the primary source of revenue for police services, but whereas the Marion County Sheriff ’s Department levied its property tax on the assessed valuation for the entire county, IPD had a smaller tax district in only the central part of the city. With almost all of the new growth occurring in the suburban parts of Marion County, the assessed valuation taxed for the sheriff ’s services rose as well. In contrast, the assessed valuation grew very slowly in the Indianapolis Police District, while demand for services increased dramatically.34 Unigov also left some of the suburban areas of Marion County outside the new consolidated city structure, preserving a degree of local independence through the categorization of ‘‘included towns’’ and ‘‘excluded cities.’’ Included towns were the sixteen smaller municipalities that gave up their independence in the merger but that were allowed to maintain some local control. Places like Cumberland, Homecroft, Meridian Hills, and Wynndale continued to provide local services and impose some additional local property taxes. Excluded cities were the four largest municipalities in Marion County that were permitted to opt out of the metropolitan consolidation altogether. Lawrence, Speedway, Beech Grove, and Southport had all opposed the merger with Indianapolis, and as a
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compromise strategy to reduce local opposition, Unigov’s architects permitted these places to exclude themselves from the unification. Strangely, they still voted in the election for Indianapolis’s mayor since the same person was also the chief executive of Marion County. For those not living in one of the excluded towns, this dual citizenship seemed like yet another example of Unigov giving extra benefits to suburban voters. Finally, Unigov left Marion County’s township system in place. A vestige of an earlier agricultural era, the townships retained their importance primarily because of their local control of education. Unigov very intentionally did not combine the mostly white and affluent township-controlled school systems with the mostly black and lower-income Indianapolis public school system. To critics of Unigov the exclusion of the educational system laid bare the true intent of Unigov: to give white suburbanites political power without forcing them to give up any social power. In a classic case of having one’s cake and eating it too, white suburbanites gained effective control over the political future of Indianapolis by merging together city and suburb but made sure to also keep control of their educational systems by keeping the school systems apart. On the flip side, inner-city African Americans lost out on two counts, having seen their political power diluted while gaining no access to the suburban school system. That the exclusion of education lay at the heart of Unigov’s ‘‘success’’ was demonstrated by the reactions to federal desegregation activities in the s and s. Efforts to integrate Indianapolis’s schools had been underway in Indianapolis since the mid-s, with various lawsuits winding their way through the court system. In these early years, the problem was seen primarily as an inner-city issue. ‘‘Busing is not the answer’’ to racial inequalities in school systems, argued the superintendent of Perry Township schools on the south side of the county. ‘‘If others want to be served, they should move into the community.’’ Racial inequities extended beyond Marion County’s borders to the suburban school systems, particularly in the municipalities of Carmel and Greenwood—both of which lay outside Marion County. In Judge Hugh Dillin attempted to include these suburban areas in the desegregation case,
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reasoning that because they were on the immediate edge of Indianapolis, and because so many Indianapolis residents were moving to these suburban municipalities to avoid the racial problems of Indianapolis schools, they should be included in the overall discussion. Not surprisingly, both school districts protested and promised to ‘‘vigorously resist any attempt to substitute outside authority for the authority invested in our board.’’35 Dillin’s attempts to bring the non–Marion County schools into the desegregation battle not only failed but his ruling to desegregate Marion County’s schools helped to emphasize the distinctiveness between the newly enlarged city of Indianapolis and its surrounding suburban counties. In finding that the school system supported de facto segregation, Dillin ordered the creation of a forced busing system whereby black students in the Indianapolis public school system would be bused to predominantly white suburban districts within Marion County. The reaction was swift. Fearing the integration of their school system, thousands of Indianapolis residents left Marion County for the safer confines of the surrounding counties. Data from the census showed that the seven counties contiguous to Marion County collectively gained , people for a growth rate of percent, with Hamilton County registering the highest growth rate of percent. In the same ten-year period, Marion County lost , people, or percent of its population. The school desegregation decision affected more than those living in the Indianapolis region, however. It also became a point of reference for those who were coming to Indianapolis from elsewhere in the United States. Given similar neighborhoods inside and outside Marion County, increasing numbers of newcomers were electing to settle in neighborhoods located outside Marion County, often attributing their decision to the school systems. In these instances, it was Hamilton County that benefited the most. In , percent of all those who moved to the Indianapolis region settled in Hamilton County. By , almost percent of newcomers went to Hamilton County. In the same period the proportion of newcomers who moved to Marion County fell from percent to percent.
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What Unigov presented Indianapolis with, then, was an administrative solution to the decades-old problems of metropolitan fragmentation but not a social, cultural, or geographical solution. It was up to other groups—some secular, some religious—to try to provide those nonbureaucratic mechanisms to bring the region together. In George Sweet, a member of Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce, began to examine the way counties surrounding Indianapolis marketed themselves to businesses and potential residents. He found that one of the biggest marketing tools was their proximity to Indianapolis. Yet Sweet also found that these various outlying communities rarely communicated with one another about their efforts, successes, and problems. Reasoning that county boundaries were artificial political distinctions that were ultimately irrelevant to business, Sweet approached the Chamber with the idea of studying how the counties and towns that surrounded Indianapolis could benefit if they conceived of themselves as a region as opposed to a collection of municipalities. Out of these discussions came the Metropolitan Area Greater Indianapolis Committee (MAGIC) to encourage greater cooperation between the counties surrounding Indianapolis.36 Complementing MAGIC’s top-down, business-oriented approach was a daughter organization, CIRCL, or Central Indiana Regional Citizens League. Promoted as a grassroots effort for individuals to think regionally, CIRCL was set up by MAGIC in . Although formally a secular organization, CIRCL’s first executive director was John Hay, a Nazarene pastor with a clear ‘‘metropolitan ministry’’ perspective. To Hay, religious congregations were crucial to CIRCL’s mission to talk about ‘‘civic engagement and about citizens becoming more a part of the decision-making process of central Indiana. If we bypass congregations, or don’t see their incredible civic involvement, I don’t think we can be very effective.’’ On the flip side, Hay explained, churches have their own responsibility to think beyond themselves. They needed to ‘‘think about the city and the region as a whole; to talk about [how] deterioration over here is related to growth over there, [and] to understand that the city is much bigger and the region’s issues are much bigger and more in flux than we ever thought.’’37
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Other faith-based efforts sought to bridge the social divisions within the region. The Interfaith Hospitality Network, a collaborative project among Indianapolis congregations to provide services to homeless families, began as the Indianapolis Northside Interfaith Hospitality Network operating out of Carmel United Methodist Church. While the program attracted other partners, the leaders quickly realized that the name was too local and constricting. The ‘‘Northside’’ title was removed, and in time the network included several south-side congregations.38 The growth in urban-suburban partnerships was another example of the growing metropolitan dimension to religion. Programs like the Community Resurrection Partnership, a collaboration between the white suburban East st Street Christian Church and several African American churches in Martindale-Brightwood, sought to combine the resources of suburban congregations with needs of urban ones. At other times, the urban-suburban partnership occurred on a one-to-one basis, with suburban congregations working with a particular ‘‘mission’’ church. One of the most prominent efforts to promote race relations was the Celebration of Hope, an annual event that focused on interracialism in congregations. Celebration of Hope began as a partnership between two of Indianapolis’s most prestigious congregations, the primarily white Second Presbyterian Church and the primarily African American Light of the World Christian Church. Initially, the project represented the efforts of the senior pastors of each church. Within a few years, however, Celebration of Hope had outgrown the congregations and was held in Market Square Arena, the downtown sporting facility. Participants included more than fifty white and black churches, mostly from across the north side but also from selected parts of the south side. For one Sunday a year, members of mostly homogeneous churches came together to pay homage to the ideal of interracialism and of overcoming a sense of segregation and fragmentation. Despite efforts by people like Hay and organizations like CIRCL, and despite city-wide programs like the Celebration of Hope, Indianapolis and its religious landscape remained strongly divided. While the growth of urban-suburban partnerships among congre-
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gations suggested an awareness of the religious interrelatedness of the metropolis, they also reinforced the idea that the city and suburb remained very different places, with the suburb continuing to be the privileged environment and the city as a place in need. That is, there were no partnerships in which the ‘‘have’’ congregation was urban and the ‘‘have-not’’ congregation was suburban. Even certain religious administrative boundaries reinforced the regional divisions. As mentioned earlier, in the years prior to Indianapolis’s rapid metropolitan growth, the fact that all of Marion County was part of the same Catholic archdiocese meant that urban, suburban, and rural parishes were bureaucratically united. As growth occurred to the north in Hamilton County, for Catholics at least, that growth occurred in an entirely different diocese. The th Street boundary that separated Marion and Hamilton counties also separated the Archdiocese of Indianapolis from the Archdiocese of Lafayette, which extended northward from Hamilton County all the way to Lafayette. As a result of this division, the rapidly growing Catholic parishes of Hamilton County—which also were becoming the wealthiest in the Indianapolis region—had no bureaucratic relationship with their neighbors south of th Street in Marion County. Instead, their financial and administrative relationships were oriented to the diocesan offices some fifty miles to the north. Such an administrative bifurcation reinforced the clear break away from Indianapolis that Hamilton County’s suburban migrants were making. More important to the sense of division was the racial landscape, with Indianapolis ranking among the most segregated cities in the United States. The census showed, for example, that threequarters of all African Americans lived in only one-quarter of the census tracts. One of every four census tracts in Marion County had fewer than percent African Americans. The connections between racial demographics and the congregational landscape were clear. According to the census, about percent of the census tracts in Marion County were predominantly African American in population (more than percent). Those tracts housed religious congregations, four-fifths of which were ‘‘conservative Protestant’’ (Fundamentalist, Evangelical or Pentecostal). Only of the
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Racial Distribution by census tract, Marion County, . U.S. Census Bureau.
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churches were affiliated with mainline Protestant denominations. At the other end of the racial spectrum, percent of census tracts in Marion County had an African American population of less than percent. These areas had more than six times as many mainline Protestant congregations as did the African American neighborhoods. Notwithstanding this larger mainline Protestant presence, the religious landscape of the white areas was also dominated by conservative Protestants, which still accounted for more than percent of congregations. Although these data show that conservative Protestantism is attractive to both whites and blacks, they also show important differences in the kinds of conservative Protestant congregations in white and black areas. In most of the Holiness churches, for example, were found in those areas in Marion County that had few African Americans, whereas more than percent of Pentecostal congregations were concentrated in the small number of census tracts with a primarily African American population. The regionalization of religion was not confined to Marion County. North of Indianapolis, Hamilton County demonstrated a strong Catholic and mainline Protestant presence, while the counties to the south had comparatively fewer of either group. In fact, the percent of Hamilton County population that was Catholic represented more Catholics than lived in the southern Shelby, Johnson, and Morgan counties combined. By contrast, Johnson County had more than twice the percentage of Southern Baptists as did Marion, Hamilton, or Boone counties.39 The implications of these wildly divergent religious landscapes were subtle but important. Different theological orientations lend themselves to different kinds of congregations with different kinds of emphases. Conservative Protestant congregations emphasize the individual’s relationship to the congregation and to God, while more liberal congregations tend to emphasize the relationship with the community and the wider world. Some congregations look inward to their members, and others look outward to their neighborhoods. Some offer more secular programs for the community than do others. One survey of congregations found, for example, that churches on Indianapolis’s south side—a sample dominated by conservative Protestant congre-
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gations—averaged fewer secular outreach programs than did congregations on the north or east sides with a proportionately smaller conservative representation.40 In short, the expansion of Indianapolis’s religious landscape to include a wider range of faith traditions was itself an impediment to the success of community-building activities at the metropolitan scale. After , Indianapolis’s religious core was occupied by more than just the few privileged mainline Protestant denominations that had long dominated Indianapolis’s civic and economic life. Catholic, Jewish, and conservative evangelical Protestant perspectives began to be found in positions of power. By the s, Indianapolis residents had elected Stephen Goldsmith, a Jewish mayor whose wife was a member of a large evangelical Protestant church. Goldsmith, echoing national political trends, introduced several programs that promoted the idea of using local churches as neighborhood resources and even as social service deliverers. But although these once-peripheral religious groups, particularly the conservative Protestant community, now joined the religious center, their message was often one that directly countered any sense of community togetherness. For most conservative Protestant groups, interfaith and ecumenical activities were anathema to their belief systems. Social problems were attributable not to society but to individuals and their faith; the solutions, therefore, needed to be personal and not organizational. Thus, a program for homeless families should involve evangelism and religious counseling as much as the provision of shelter and clothing. And even when the aims and methods were similar, most conservative Protestant congregations shied away from partnering with liberal Protestant or even non-Christian groups. Despite the fact that there was a wide geographical range in the types of religious groups found across the Indianapolis metropolitan area, congregations from all parts of the region still shared a common goal: to provide a place for members to connect to some form of community structure. The geographical location might have changed—from Marion County outward to one of the surrounding counties—but the problems of transience and connected-
Tying the Metropolis Together
ness remained the same. Thus, St. Mark’s United Methodist Church sprang to life in the Hamilton County suburb of Carmel after a denominational survey found almost two hundred potential new church members who lacked connections to other congregations. This absence of affiliation was not surprising, given that ‘‘no one is born in Carmel. Everyone is transferred into this suburban community. As the moving van pulls away, it becomes all too apparent that the roots are shallow in this transient world. Gone is a life where a favorite aunt lives across town and Grandma’s home cooking awaits each Sunday.’’ Although it is not entirely clear that that world ever existed, St. Mark’s saw itself as filling this community gap and providing a place of rootedness in such a transient world. ‘‘The church means people that care and can give support. The church means family and belonging.’’41
VI FINDING COMMUNITY IN THE MODERN METROPOLIS At the end of the s in the town of Westfield, a Hamilton County suburb north of Indianapolis, the development firm of Paul Estridge Company took the triangular relationship between religion, community, and suburbia in a new direction. The new development was called ‘‘Centennial’’; and to help ‘‘keep folks ‘home’ there,’’ explained the promotional brochure, the neighborhood included Centennial Square, a small shopping area with a restaurant, cafe´, and community grocery; Central Park, with an ice-skating pond, ball fields, and jogging trails; a state-of-the-art day care center for neighborhood families—and a New England–style ‘‘community’’ church. Although the brochure’s text downplayed the presence of the church, three different sketches depicted the church building with its tall steeple looming above the landscape.1 The centrality of the church building became even more obvious when one actually saw Centennial. Directly opposite the main entrance to Centennial, at the end of a grassy, tree-lined, elliptical driveway, sits a traditional white church with a steeple soaring up to the clear blue skies. On the opposite side of the Indianapolis region, tucked in the southwest corner of Marion County along the border with Morgan and Johnson counties sits Heartland Crossing, another large-scale residential project. Like Centennial, Heartland Crossing was intended to provide more than just houses. ‘‘If you could build the perfect neighborhood, what would it be like?’’ asked the Heartland Crossing Web page. Would that neighborhood have ‘‘parks for morning walks and family outings? How about soccer fields, base
Finding Community in the Modern Metropolis
ball diamonds, and basketball courts for your kids? And good schools, which are a part of any perfect neighborhood?’’ It would also have, as the developers of Heartland Crossing figured, immediately accessible shopping facilities along the outer edge of the project, a golf course, and an office/business park for residents to work at. All these were provided at Heartland Crossing because its developers were ‘‘dedicated to the principle that communities are about people, not just the streets and homes.’’2 However, one important feature was missing from Heartland Crossing: religion. Unlike Centennial, there was no centrally planned church, no implicit assumption that a new metropolitan community needed a visible religious presence. If Centennial and Heartland Crossing both sought to create community in the modern metropolis, they went about it in very different ways. These differences—the deliberate linking of neighborhood, church, and community in Centennial and the laissez-faire approach of Heartland Crossing—make clear the extent to which Americans are still trying to figure out where religion fits into their changing metropolitan landscapes. The Centennial approach seemed to match the widespread public rhetoric on both the civic importance of ‘‘local congregations’’ and their potential for propping up the supposed decline in community within metropolitan society. The Heartland Crossing approach seemed to match the increasingly personalized nature of religion whereby increasingly mobile individuals are seeking out their own particular faith that might or might not be connected to traditionally organized institutions. But in an atmosphere of heated rhetoric and often-unexplored assumptions regarding religion, community, and metropolitan development, we sometimes forget that mobility, suburban expansion, and religious community are not themes that just appeared at the end of the twentieth century. As this book has shown, metropolitan regions have continually grown in size and social composition, and as they have done so, they have challenged and reshaped the ways communities are structured. For at least as long, people have turned to religion and religious congregations as a way to maintain or to create new community structures in the face of those
Souls of the City
changes. Rather than try to understand what is occurring today based only on what we see around us now, it has been instructive to step back and see how many of the issues that confront society today were addressed in earlier decades. This look back has shown that, as people have negotiated the various secular changes in the metropolis, they have consistently looked to the religious congregation as a place of community rootedness. In newly developing suburbs, in changing rural areas on the metropolitan periphery, and in the inner city, the congregation has been a primary environment for finding and defining one’s community. Such a conclusion might seem to hearten the many cultural observers and political policy makers who lament the disappearance of community in the modern metropolis and who campaign for congregations to step into the role of community providers. As for the feeling that the sprawling metropolis creates a sterile environment that lacks any community-enhancing institutions or places, a simple perusing of recently published books makes clear the extent of this feeling: Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream; The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, –; Once There Were Greenfields: How Urban Sprawl Is Undermining America’s Environment, Economy, and Social Fabric; and Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl. These works lament the growth of the ubiquitous suburban shopping mall as a poor replacement for the ‘‘Main Street’’ of yesteryear—a bland, homogeneous, and private substitute for the vibrant, diverse, and public spaces of an earlier generation. The residents of these metropolitan spaces are said to feel alienated and without community connections, their lives too harried and the city too sprawling to permit meaningful interaction with one another.3 As for what should provide those community-building settings, policymakers are increasingly turning to religious congregations. In Indianapolis and elsewhere, government leaders are increasingly seeking to improve neighborhoods by working with churches, under the belief that congregations are community resources with members connected intimately to their local environment. Beginning with the Welfare Reform Act, which included the Chari-
Finding Community in the Modern Metropolis
table Choice provision for federally funded faith-based social services, and extending to President George W. Bush’s creation of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, these policies are rooted in the premise that religious congregations are neighborhood assets and local actors. These supposed relationships between congregations and their local community are considered important in strengthening neighborhoods specifically and civil society generally. For such policymakers, the vision of a strong congregation-community relationship taps into the pastoral ideal that permeates American culture—the idea of how things ‘‘ought’’ to be.4 If the finding of this book—that people have consistently turned to congregations for community—seems to fit with the desires of policymakers and cultural critics, there is one important difference that challenges those very policy assumptions and highlights the chasm between the ‘‘ought’’ and the ‘‘is.’’ The ‘‘ought’’ says that congregations should not only be community-building institutions but also that they should be local community-building institutions. The entire federal program for faith-based initiatives is premised on the idea that congregations are inherently local and thus ‘‘ought’’ to have a stake in their immediate environment. Such assumptions are not limited to policymakers but have seeped into the general consciousness of local neighborhood groups. For example, at a zoning hearing in Indianapolis’s suburban Pike Township, representatives from local neighborhood associations protested a Serbian Orthodox church’s request to build a new complex. They based their protest on their assumption that congregations ‘‘should’’ provide social services to their neighborhoods and that in this case, the congregation was not fulfilling its responsibility. As a condition of the congregation’s being allowed to rezone, the protesters argued, it should have to provide both youth and senior citizen services at their new location. One protester took this point even further, claiming that President Bush’s faith-based initiative proved that the government required churches to provide local services.5 So much for the ‘‘ought.’’ The ‘‘is’’ tells a different story, one that says that the communities being built in congregations often have very little to do with particular local spaces. In fact, much evidence suggests that people have actually behaved otherwise,
Souls of the City
treating their church communities and neighborhood communities as two separate entities. To wit: • A study conducted in Windsor, Connecticut, in the mid-s found that at least one of every four Protestants belonged to churches in another town.6 • Another study from in Macon, Georgia, found that almost three-quarters of the Methodists who lived in the study area attended church outside their neighborhood—despite having two other Methodist churches nearby! This large Methodist out-migration also meant that the two local Methodist churches had an overwhelming proportion ( percent) of members who drove in from outside the neighborhood.7 • A study of congregations in Indianapolis found that almost half of the church members lived more than two miles away from their church building. Even more telling, almost one-fifth of all members lived more than five miles from their place of worship.8 • A study of church participation among new suburbanites in Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul, found that participation decreased for only percent of the people who moved further away from their church. Similarly, percent of those whose move to suburbia did not measurably increase their distance to church actually raised their level of participation after the relocation to suburbia. Both findings suggested that for many, suburbanization was not a hindrance to participation in religious communities but was actually a boon.9 • A study of East Cleveland, Ohio, found that more than half of the members of the town’s Protestant churches came from outside the community, while two-thirds of Protestants living in East Cleveland attended congregations outside the neighborhood. As the report stated, ‘‘not only do a majority of the members of East Cleveland churches live outside the community, but . . . a majority of East Clevelanders who belong to churches belong to churches outside the community.’’10 • A study of more than a hundred churches in rapidly grow-
Finding Community in the Modern Metropolis
ing areas, conducted by the Southern Baptist Convention, found that almost half of all members lived at least three miles from their church, including percent of members who lived more than five miles away.11 Finally, recent analyses of the Indianapolis religious landscape confirmed these trends toward geographical dispersion. These analyses included: • A geographical analysis of the memberships of more than a dozen congregations from across the Indianapolis region (inner city and suburban) in the s showed that members lived an average of five miles from church. • About half of churches that were surveyed reported that a majority of their members come from ‘‘outside the neighborhood’’ to attend worship. • Only a quarter of residents in four inner-city neighborhoods attended church in their own neighborhood; most drove elsewhere in the metropolis to worship. • More than percent of a sample of pastors reported living more than three miles from their church. This last statistic shows the extent to which religious commuting has become ingrained into the American religious landscape, since one might expect clergy to have some spatial relationship to their own churches.12 That suburbanizing Americans have become religious commuters in order to maintain their participation in religious communities should not be surprising. The historian Robert Fishman argued that because of changes in transportation and communication technology, the metropolis is now structured around time rather than distance.13 Because people can travel great distances quickly, they perceive things as ‘‘close’’ even when they are not physically nearby. According to census data, the average American worker had a -minute commute to work. Moreover, from to the
Souls of the City
number of people who worked outside their county of residence— let alone their neighborhood—increased from to percent. To people who already spend every working day outside their neighborhood, doing the same on a Sunday morning does not seem strange or abnormal. These commuters already think beyond their own neighborhood and thus see little problem embarking on a religious commute of several miles. In short, if policymakers and others think congregations ought to be neighborhood institutions, congregants themselves have demonstrated a very different set of beliefs. It is clearly fruitless, then, to expect that most churches will act locally when very few have members who do so. Whether from a perspective of social service or social capital, one should not try to return churches to their ‘‘rightful’’ place as local institutions. Most religious congregations never were locally rooted, and there is no reason to expect them to change today. To make the leap from ‘‘most religious congregations never were locally rooted’’ to the conclusion that the metropolis does not support community is wrong nevertheless. Community does exist, and it exists in those same religious congregations that are not particularly local. Religious commuters often display a very strong sense of community, albeit one based on shared interests rather than geographical proximity. For religious commuters, ‘‘community’’ is found within the congregation, among the tens or hundreds of fellow congregants who voluntarily travel to a particular church. They might come because of the specific faith tradition, the pastor, the Sunday school, or even the convenient location. But regardless of why they come, religious commuters make a conscious choice to attend a particular church and to join with others who have made the same choice. Ironically, the very act of religious commuting, the experience of traveling from one part of the city to another, has clear potential for community building on a wider metropolitan level. A white person who drives to a white church that sits in a black neighborhood, or a suburban middle-class African American who returns to his home church in the old neighborhood, or even a resident of one inner-city neighborhood driving to another inner-city neighbor-
Finding Community in the Modern Metropolis
hood all experience different parts of the metropolis through their commute to church. Even if they do not maintain any connection to the neighborhood around their church, the very act of driving from one place to another means that they experience a different environment. Rather than see religious commuters as insulated from the wider community, advocates of stronger connections between congregations and their neighborhoods can point to these kinds of eye-opening experiences made possible by religious commuting. Finally, it is entirely possible that, as metropolitan regions grow, people’s sense of ‘‘neighborhood’’ and ‘‘place’’ grows as well, so that people in one corner of a region might feel comfortable driving five or ten miles to another part of the region because it is all part of what they perceive to be their ‘‘neighborhood’’ even if technically it is not. This would hold true for people commuting from one suburb to another or even from a suburb back to an inner-city neighborhood. They are comfortable driving these distances because they have a larger sense of place and space in this growing region. In the end, religious commuting offers a wonderful comment on the paradox of religion in the modern metropolis. While rhetoric abounds for a strong relationship between churches and their local neighborhoods, few congregants seem to act in ways that build such relationships. People choose the place where they worship as much as they choose where to work or shop. Although one might wonder why the rhetoric persists in the face of this behavior, perhaps the rhetoric persists because of the behavior. Even as the city becomes more metropolitan, many are unable—or unwilling—to reconcile this reality with the idealized neighborhood of old, particularly because religious congregations are seen as an important and traditional symbol of community connectedness. But within this paradox lies the potential for an even greater understanding of the role of religion in the modern metropolis. The fact that people travel across the city to attend a particular worship service suggests that religion is highly relevant to individual lives. People care about where they worship and with whom they worship. If they did not
Souls of the City
care, the logic of time and distance suggests congregants would simply go to the nearest church. Though scattered across wide spaces, worshippers come together to form meaningful social connections with one another. In so doing, the congregations they build—these souls of the city—become important centers in an otherwise centerless metropolis.
NOTES
I. METROPOLITAN GROWTH AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE: AN INTRODUCTION . Walter Smith Jr., ‘‘Report No. : Urban Church Commission,’’ Evangelical United Brethren Conference Proceedings, . . Frederick Shippey, Protestantism in Indianapolis (Indianapolis: Church Federation of Indianapolis, ), . . Central Christian Church, Annual Report (Indianapolis, ), in Christian Theological Seminary Heritage Room [CTSHR], Christian Churches Historical Information—Indiana—Cities—Indianapolis A—Indianapolis COL, Central Christian Church Folder . . For a case study of one religious group’s suburbanization experiences, see Etan Diamond, And I Will Dwell in Their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). . See, for example, James Kunstler’s scathing critique of suburbia, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), which indicts metropolitan residents for their sense of civic bankruptcy. . For a self-critical analysis by an urban historian, see Kathleen Neils Conzen, ‘‘Forum: The Place of Religion in Urban and Community Studies,’’ Religion and American Culture (Summer ): –. . Will Herberg, Protestant Catholic Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, ). . Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches: An Analysis of Protestant Responsibility in the Expanding Metropolis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, ). . Donald E. Miler, Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . Clifford Green, ed., Churches, Cities, and Human Community: Urban Ministry in the United States, – (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, ). . The City Church , no. (November ). . James P. Morton, introductory editorial to Church in Metropolis (Spring ): . . Ralph D. Gray, ‘‘Transportation,’’ in Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (EI), ed. David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –. . ‘‘What Is the Best Way to Advance the Interests of the Southside?’’ Indianapolis Star series, – January . . James J. Divita, Ethnic Settlement Patterns in Indianapolis (Indianapolis:
Notes to pages –
Marian College, ); Lamont J. Hulse, ‘‘Neighborhoods and Communities,’’ EI, –. . Indianapolis News, March . . Indianapolis Star, September . . Albert E. Dickens, The Growth and Structure of Real Property Uses in Indianapolis (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, ). . Indianapolis Star, November . . Indianapolis News, August . II. ‘‘HI, NEIGHBOR!’’ . Indianapolis Star, December . . See Sam Bass Warner Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (–) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). . For a broader cultural treatment of the zones where the urban and rural landscapes met, see John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, – (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ). . Cathleen Donnelly, ‘‘Mars Hill,’’ EI, . . Timothy Crumrin, ‘‘World War II,’’ EI, . . Indianapolis Star, April . . Indianapolis News, September . . Indianapolis News, January . . Indianapolis Times, July . . Murray H. Leiffer, Church Planning for Methodism: Indianapolis and Vicinity (Evanston, Ill.: Bureau of Social and Religious Research, ). . Fred W. Michel, How to Start a New Church (Indianapolis: Department of Church Development and Evangelism, United Christian Missionary Society, n.d.), –. . The City Church , no. (May–June ), . . H. Paul Douglass, The Comity Report: Some Protestant Churches in America (New York: The Commission on Planning and Adjustment of Local and Inter-Church Relations, ), cited in The City Church , no, (March ): –. . Michel, How to Start a New Church, –. . Shippey, Protestantism in Indianapolis, , . . Ibid., . . American Baptist Home Mission Societies, Church and Community Study of Thirteen American Baptist Churches, Indianapolis, Indiana (Indianapolis: Department of Cities, ). . Jason Lantzer, ‘‘Tradition, Transition, Turmoil, and Triumph: Indianapolis Episcopalians Confront the s and s’’ (master’s thesis, Indiana University, ), , . . Leiffer, Church Planning for Methodism, ii. . Chapel Hill United Methodist Church, History: – (Indianapolis, ). . Letter from George G. Storey, Chairman, General Board Northwood Christian Church, to Beauford A. Norris, Chairman, Comity Committee,
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Church Federation of Indianapolis, January , CTSHR, Christian Churches—Historical Information files, Indiana Cities (Indianapolis CRE-Indianapolis GRA) box, Crestview Christian Church folder. . Minutes of Special Committee Meeting of the New Church Study Committee, June , Crestview Christian Church folder, CTSHR. . Memo from New Church Study Committee to General Board of Northwood Christian Church, May , Crestview Christian Church folder, CTSHR. . Minutes of the Fifth Meeting of the New Church Study Committee, April , Crestview Christian Church folder, CTSHR. . Minutes of the Thirteenth Meeting of the Steering Committee for the New Church on the Far Northside, December , Crestview Christian Church folder, CTSHR. . Minutes of the Fourteenth Meeting of the Steering Committee for the New Church on the Far Northside, Jan , Crestview Christian Church folder, CTSHR. . Crestview Christian Church, Celebrating a Quarter Century, – (Indianapolis, ), Crestview Christian Church folder, CTSHR. . ‘‘A Study of the North East Hills Community’’ (typescript manuscript, n.d.), Christian Churches—Historical Information, Ohio C-D box, Ohio. Cincinnati: College Hill Christian Church folder, CTSHR. . The City Church , no. (November ). . Michel, How to Start a New Church, –. . History of First Southern Baptist Church, Indianapolis, Indiana (Indianapolis, ), –. . Frederick A. Shippey, Protestantism in Suburban Life (New York: Abingdon Press, ), . . See, for example, Herberg, Protestant Catholic Jew. . Herbert Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books, ), –. . William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Touchstone, ), . . Estimates of average church growth, taken from Lewis W. Bloede, ‘‘Development of New Congregations in the United States and Canada by the Evangelical United Brethren Church’’ (Th.D. thesis, Boston University, ), quoted in Shippey, Protestantism in Suburban Life. . Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, A Brief History (Indianapolis, ); Messiah Lutheran Church, Messiah Lutheran History (Indianapolis, ; Byron Northwick, ‘‘The Development of the Missouri Synod: The Role of Education in the Preservation and Promotion of Lutheran Orthodoxy, –’’ (Ph.D. diss., Kansas State University, ), , . . Rev. Richard E. Kurth, interview with Jason Lantzer, The Polis Center, June ; Indianapolis Star, May ; Rev. R. F. Rehner, History of the Federation of Lutheran Churches of Greater Indianapolis (Indianapolis, ), –; Messiah Lutheran Church, History; Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, A Brief History.
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. Our Shepherd Lutheran Church, Our Shepherd Lutheran: By the Grace of God, – (Indianapolis, ). . St. Christopher Catholic Church, St. Christopher Catholic Church, Years of Service: A History of St. Christopher Catholic Parish in Speedway, Indiana, – (Speedway, Ind.: ); Shirley Volz, interview with author and Jessica Needham, The Polis Center, July . . Speedway United Methodist Church, The Beacon on Sixteenth Street: Celebrating Fifty Years, – (Speedway, Ind., ), . . Indianapolis News, December . . Indianapolis News, December ; Indianapolis Times, December . . Indianapolis Times, February , February . . Indianapolis Times, January . . Archbishop Paul C. Schulte to St. Luke Catholic Church parishioners, letter, February , St. Luke Catholic Church folder, Project on Religion and Urban Culture Archival Files, The Polis Center. . Indianapolis News, September . . Indianapolis News, September . . Indianapolis Star, October . . Board of Zoning Appeals v. Schulte, etc., Ind. (Indiana Supreme Court, ). . Indianapolis Times, January . . Eastgate Christian Church held its first Sunday worship service in the Dorsey Funeral Home. Christian Church Union of Greater Indianapolis,‘‘ Annual Report’’ (Indianapolis, ). . Speedway United Methodist Church, The Beacon on Sixteenth Street, :. . Heather Hills Baptist Church, ‘‘Our Church History’’ (n.d., mimeograph), The Polis Center files. . Emmanuel Lutheran Church, A Half Century of Divine Grace, – (Indianapolis, ), . . Henry G. Waltmann, ed., History of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod of the Lutheran Church in America: Its Development, Congregations, and Institutions (Indianapolis: Central Publishing Company, ), . . The City Church , no. (November ). . Church of the Nativity (), . . Ibid., , –, –. . The City Church , no. (March ). . Robert C. Hoover and Everett L. Perry, Church and City Planning (New York: Bureau of Research and Survey, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, ), . . Emmanuel Lutheran Church, A Half Century of Divine Grace, . . United States Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Population, : Vol. , Census Tract Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, ), Table . . United States Bureau of the Census, United States Censuses of Population and Housing: . Census Tracts, Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, ), Table . . Indianapolis Star, September .
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. Robert E. Mendelson and Michael A. Quinn, ‘‘Residential Patterns in a Midwestern City: The St. Louis Experience,’’ in The Metropolitan Midwest: Policy Problems and Prospects for Change, ed. Barry Checkoway and Carl V. Patton (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ), . . Indianapolis Times, February ; Indianapolis Star, August . . Indianapolis Star Magazine, December . . William Francis Benjamin Rodda, ‘‘An Exploration of the Response of Organized Protestantism in an Expanding Commuter Suburb’’ (Ed. diss., New York University, ), . . Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, ). . ‘‘Building Program of the Silver Spring Congregational Christian Church’’ (n.d.), Christian Churches Historical Information Louisiana-Mississippi box, Maryland, Silver Spring, Silver Spring Congregational Christian Church folder, CTSHR. . Ibid. . Leiffer, Church Planning for Methodism. . Lantzer, ‘‘Tradition, Transition, Turmoil, and Triumph,’’ . . Data from various parish folders, Catholic Archives, Archdiocese of Indianapolis. . Indianapolis News, August . . Indianapolis Star, January , quoted in Edwin Becker, From Sovereign to Servant: The Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis (Indianapolis: Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis, ). . Indianapolis News, January . . McCollum v. Board of Education, U.S. (); Indianapolis News, March . . Indianapolis Times, April . . Indianapolis Star, March . . Indianapolis Times, November . . Zorach v. Clauson, U.S. (). . Indianapolis Times, November . . Indianapolis Star, January . . Indianapolis Times, November . . Indianapolis News, April . . Indianapolis Star, February , April ; Indianapolis News, December . . Indianapolis News, March . . Wheeler Mission Collections, Series , Leonard Hunt, IUPUI Collections, Box , Folder . . Leiffer, Church Planning for Methodism. . Speedway United Methodist Church, The Beacon on Sixteenth Street, –. . Margaret Puskar, ‘‘Working Together, Working Apart: A Study of Three Women’s Church-Based Service Organizations in Indianapolis, –’’ (unpublished research paper, The Polis Center, Summer ). . Sarah Wagner, ‘‘Bowling Together in Postwar Indianapolis, –’’
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(unpublished seminar paper, History Department, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Spring ). . Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches. . Frederick A. Shippey, Protestantism in Suburban Life (New York: Abingdon Press, ), . . Joyce Johnson, interview with Albert Kovacs, The Polis Center, June ; St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church Share Group, interview with Albert Kovacs, The Polis Center, June ; St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church Religious Organization Census Form ( June ), Project on Religion and Urban Culture Research files, The Polis Center. III. FROM SMALL TOWN TO MALL TOWN . Indianapolis News, May . . United States Bureau of the Census, Seventeenth Census of the United States: , Population (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, ). . Indianapolis Times, April . . Indianapolis Times, January . . Leiffer, Church Planning for Methodism, Table IX-. . Ibid., IX: –. . Indianapolis News, November . . William Dobriner, Class in Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, ), –. . The City Church , no. (December ). . Indianapolis News, April . . Indianapolis Times, June . . George S. Wehrwein, ‘‘The Rural-Urban Fringe,’’ Economic Geography (July ): –. . Indianapolis News, July . . United States Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: . Population (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, – ), Table : Composition of the Rural-farm Population, by Counties: ; United States Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Population, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, ), Table : Characteristics of the Rural-Farm Population, for Counties: . . Indianapolis Star Magazine, December ; Indianapolis Star, December , November ; Indianapolis Times, April , July ; Northside Topics, March ; Indianapolis News, October , March . . Indianapolis News, July ; Indianapolis Star, March . . Indianapolis Star, March ; Indianapolis Times, January ; Indianapolis News, November . . Indianapolis Times, March . . Dobriner, Class in Suburbia, . . Rodda, ‘‘An Exploration of the Response of Organized Protestantism.’’ . Dobriner, Class in Suburbia, . . Devona Hill, interview with Lisa Gilman, The Polis Center, June .
Notes to pages –
. Maria Woollen Hyde, ‘‘Allisonville: A Crossroads Village’’ (master’s thesis, Indiana University, ), . . Commission on Town and County, Official Journal of the Indiana Conference of the Methodist Church (), . . Elizabeth Perkins, telephone interview with Kevin Corn, The Polis Center, June . . Russell Kerr, telephone interview with Kevin Corn, The Polis Center, May . . Indianapolis News, May . . Ross W. Sanderson, The Churches of Los Angeles, California: A Decentralized Urban Area Where Tomorrow Has Already Begun, West Coast Urban Area Studies, No. (New York: Committee for Cooperative Field Research, ); Whyte, Organization Man; Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, ). . James H. Madison, ‘‘Reformers and the Rural Church, –,’’ Journal of American History , no. (December ): –. . Cliffford L. Carmichael, ‘‘Town and Country Commission Report,’’ Indiana Conference One Hundred Seventeenth Annual Session (): –. . Methodist Rural Fellowship Bulletin (Spring ). . Church and Community Study of Thirteen American Baptist Churches, . . Leiffer, Church Planning for Methodism, IX-, IX-. . Lyle E. Schaller, Planning for Protestantism in Geauga County: The Church in Rural Suburbia (Cleveland: Regional Church Planning Office, ), . . Shirley E. Greene, Ferment on the Fringe: Studies of the Rural Church in Transition (Philadelphia: Christian Education Press, ), –. . Leiffer, Church Planning for Methodism, IX-. . Betty Westrom, ‘‘The Church and the Rural-Urban Fringe,’’ Town and Country Church (): –. . Schaller, Planning for Protestantism, . . Mayor’s Eagle Creek Advisory Committee, ‘‘Report on the Eagle Creek Project, Marion County, Indiana’’ (Indianapolis: Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee, ), –. . Indianapolis News, August . . Nelson Roetter, telephone interview with Kevin Corn, The Polis Center, May . . Bethel United Methodist Church, A History of Bethel United Methodist Church (Indianapolis, ), . . Pleasant View Lutheran Church, Sesquicentennial Commemorative Booklet, – (Indianapolis, ), . . Indianapolis Times, February . . Ibid. . In the s, s, and s, it was common for churches to implement this ‘‘Akron Plan’’ of church renovations. Since labor was cheaper than land and building materials, even extensive reconstruction of an existing structure proved cheaper than purchasing a new lot and constructing a new building. . Rodda, ‘‘An Exploration of the Response of Organized Protestantism,’’ –. . Bethel United Methodist Church, A History, .
Notes to pages –
. Dobriner, Class in Suburbia, . . Maple Hill United Methodist, History of Maple Hill United Methodist Church (Indianapolis, ). . Cumberland United Methodist Church, Cumberland United Methodist Church – (Indianapolis, ). . Greene, Ferment on the Fringe, , . . Ibid., , . . Indianapolis News, October . . Indianapolis News, June ; March . . Indianapolis Star, June . . Indianapolis Times, January ; Indianapolis Star, November . . Indianapolis News, October . IV. WHAT IS ‘‘OUR’’ COMMUNITY? . Indianapolis Star, December . . Christian Church Union of Greater Indianapolis, Annual Report (Indianapolis, ), . Community Service Council of Metropolitan Indianapolis, ‘‘Inner City—Indianapolis’’ (Indianapolis, ). . The City Church , no. (March ): . . The City Church , no. (June ): . . Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ); John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the TwentiethCentury Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ). . Indianapolis Times, August , August . . Indianapolis Star, October . . Marilynn Bickley, The Appalachian in Indianapolis (Indianapolis: Community Service Council of Metropolitan Indianapolis, ). . Crystal Benton Fall, ‘‘The Foreigner in Indianapolis’’ (master’s thesis, Indiana University, ). . Nelda Adaline Weathers, ‘‘How the Negro Lives in Indianapolis’’ (master’s thesis, Indiana University, ), , . . Indianapolis News, November . . Glory-June Greiff, ‘‘Roads and Highways,’’ EI, –. . The City Church , no. (May–June ): . . Indianapolis News, January . . See Etan Diamond, ‘‘Places of Worship: The Historical Geography of Religion in a Midwestern City, –,’’ Pennsylvania Geographer , no, (Fall ): –. . Indianapolis News, February . . Indianapolis News, March . . Indianapolis Times, April . . Indianapolis Star, October , June .
Notes to pages –
. Indianapolis News, Oct . . Second Presbyterian Church, ‘‘Important Statement for the Members of The Second Presbyterian Church, Indianapolis, Regarding the Sale of Our Property and the Removal of Our Work to Meridian Hills,’’ April . . Indianapolis Star, September . . Joyce Marks Booth, ed., A History of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis, –, Sesquicentennial Edition (Dallas, Tex.: Taylor Publishing, ), ; Indianapolis Times, July ; Indianapolis News, August . . Booth, A History of Episcopal Diocese, . . Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ) . The City Church , no. (December ): . . Indianapolis News, January . . Indianapolis News, May . . Central Christian Church, ‘‘Bulletin,’’ November , Christian Churches Historical Information, Indiana Cities (Indianapolis A–Indianapolis COL) box, CTSHR. . Milton M. Thorne, ‘‘A Church That Will Not Move,’’ The Methodist Story , no. (December ): . . Indianapolis Times, March . . Indianapolis News, March ; Indianapolis News, October . . Indianapolis News, May . . See S. Garry Oniki, ‘‘Interracial Churches in American Protestantism,’’ Social Action , no. ( January ): –. . Church Federation of Indianapolis, ‘‘Official Report of the Study on Racial Attitudes of the Protestant Churches of Indianapolis and Marion County (First Draft)’’ (Indianapolis, ). . Carl G. Karsch, ‘‘Where Strangers Find a Home,’’ Presbyterian Life ( April ): . . Indianapolis Recorder, January . . Charles Thorne, A Survey of the Memorial and Sutherland Presbyterian Churches, Indianapolis, Indiana (New York: National Missions Committee of the Presbytery of Indianapolis and the Department of City and Industrial Work Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian Church USA, ), . . Indianapolis Times, July . . Broadway Methodist Church, ‘‘Reports from Loyalty Campaign’’ (Indianapolis: n.d., c. ). . Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, –: The Fiftieth Anniversary (Indianapolis, ). . Robert L. Gildea, ‘‘The Church that Refuses to Die,’’ Together (October ): –. . Richard A. Myers, Broadway United Methodist Church: A Church Analysis (Indianapolis, ). . ‘‘The Role of This Parish in the Community,’’ Report for United Methodist Black Strategy Study, February , Depauw University Methodist Archives, Forest Manor United Methodist Church Folder.
Notes to pages –
. Letter from Rev. Jerry Hyde to Membership, November , Depauw University Methodist Archives, Forest Manor United Methodist Church folder. . ‘‘The Role of This Parish in the Community.’’ . Letter from Don and Mary K. Harpold to Rev. Jerry Hyde, August , Depauw University Methodist Archives, Forest Manor United Methodist Church folder. . Charles Thorne, Presbyterians in the Inner City of Indianapolis, Indiana (New York: Presbytery of Indianapolis and Department of City and Industrial Work, Board of National Missions, Presbyterian Church in the USA, ), . . Flanner House, A Study of Negro Households in the Redevelopment Area, Indianapolis, Indiana (Indianapolis, October ). . Samuel Wilbur Hylton Jr., ‘‘A Survey of the Membership of the Second Christian Church of Indianapolis, Indiana’’ (bachelor’s thesis, Butler University, ), –. . Roosevelt-Temple Methodist Church, ‘‘Roosevelt-Temple Neighborhood Survey’’ (Indianapolis, July ) . H. Paul Douglass, The St. Louis Church Survey: A Religious Investigation with a Social Background (New York: George H. Doran Company, ), ; idem, The Springfield Church Survey: A Study of Organized Religion with Its Social Background (New York: George H. Doran Company, ), –. . The City Church , no. (March ); Yoshio Fukuyama, ed., The Church in the City: Samuel C. Kincheloe and the Sociology of the Church (Chicago: Exploration Press, ), –. . Donald P. Buteyn, ‘‘The Poor White Community,’’ Action (Spring ): –. . Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches; Byron F. Stroh, ‘‘Executive Assistant Report,’’ Indiana Annual Conference, The Methodist Church, One Hundred Thirty-First Session (): . . Indianapolis Times, July . . Beverly W. Dean, ‘‘Trailblazing in City Jungles,’’ The City Church , no. (May–June ), –. . ‘‘Indianapolis Looks at Its Industrial Culture,’’ Church in the Metropolis (Summer ): . . Indianapolis News, October , November , November , February . . D. Barry Menuez, ‘‘Why Get Involved,’’ Church in Metropolis (Summer ): –. . Flanner House, Division of Self Help Services, ‘‘Monthly Report’’ (May– June ), Flanner House Collection, IHS, M, Box Folder ; Indianapolis Times, May . . Flanner House Homes, Inc., ‘‘Indianapolis Builds a New Community,’’ brochure, Indiana State Library clippings file. . Indianapolis Times, August . . Indianapolis News, November . . Indianapolis News, September . . Indianapolis News, August . . Indianapolis News, January . . Waltmann, History of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod, –.
Notes to pages –
. ‘‘Have Evangelicals Abandoned the Cities?’’ Action , no. (Spring ): –. . William Pannell, ‘‘The Black Community,’’ Action , no. (Spring ): –. . Buteyn, ‘‘The Poor White Community.’’ . Indianapolis News, May . . Indianapolis News, July . . The City Church , no. (September-October ), ; Fukuyama, The Church in the City. V. TYING THE METROPOLIS TOGETHER . Jon C. Teaford, City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, – (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –, . . Ibid., , , –, . Woodruff Place remained independent for another sixty years, until it was finally annexed by Indianapolis in . . Post-War Planning Committee, The Post-War Plan for Indianapolis (Indianapolis, ), . . Metropolitan Area Study Commission, Report with Recommendations for the Eighty-Eighth Session of the General Assembly, State of Indiana (Indianapolis, ). . ‘‘Consumer Analysis of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Market’’ (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Newspapers, ), . . Homer Hoyt Associates, Market Survey of the Meadows, th and Rural Streets, Indianapolis, Indiana, for Leo A. Lippman (New York, September ), –, . . Richard Hebert, Highways to Nowhere: The Politics of City Transportation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, ), . . Richard W. Worth, ‘‘Shopping Center/Malls,’’ EI, –. . Clarence N. Stone and Heywood T. Sanders, eds., The Politics of Urban Development (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, ), ; Richard Myers, Center Township Study, vol. : Historical Perspective (Indianapolis: Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis, ), ; Teaford, City and Suburb, ; Indianapolis Times, February and , . . Stone, ; ‘‘Indianapolis for Journalists: Unigov,’’ http://www.indy.org/ unigov.htm (accessed on April ); William Hudnut, Indianapolis: Past, Present and Future (New York: Newcomen Society, ). . Indianapolis Star, October . . Indianapolis Star, October . . Indianapolis Star, March , March . . Indianapolis Star, April , April , April , April , July , October , November . . Indianapolis News, December . . Cincinnati Enquirer, June . . Indianapolis Star, January .
Notes to pages –
. William Blomquist and Roger B. Parks, Unigov: Local Government in Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana (Indianapolis: Center for Urban Policy and the Environment, ), ; David A. Caputo, Urban America: The Policy Alternatives (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, ), –. . Indianapolis Star, October , October , October , and October . . Indianapolis Star, November , November . . Randy Roberts, ‘‘Sports,’’ EI, –. . Some local wags commented that the poor play of the Colts gave credence to the city’s amateur sports image. . Downtown Development Research Committee and the Indiana Christian Leadership Conference, ‘‘Indianapolis: Downtown Development for Whom?’’ (Indianapolis, ). . Indianapolis Star, January . . ‘‘What Is the Best Way to Advance the Interests of the Southside?’’ Indianapolis Star series, – January . . Indianapolis Star, July . . Indianapolis Star, September . . Indianapolis News, March . . Indianapolis Star, July . . Indianapolis Star, July . . Indianapolis Star, July . . Indianapolis News, March . . Greg Dixon, interview with Ted Slutz and Arthur Farnsley, The Polis Center, June . . John Neal, urban research analyst at The Polis Center, provided this explanation of Unigov’s implications on the public safety. Conversation, July . . Indianapolis News, September . . ‘‘Metropolitan Association of Greater Indianapolis Communities Research Report’’ ( June ), Project on Religion and Urban Culture Research Files, The Polis Center. . John Hay, quoted in Etan Diamond, ‘‘Faith and Place: Religion and the Metropolis in Historical Perspective,’’ Research Notes from the Project on Religion and Urban Culture , no. (April ). . Interfaith Hospitality Network folder, Project on Religion and Urban Culture Research Files, The Polis Center. . Arthur Farnsley II, ‘‘Religion and the Regional Metropolis,’’ Research Notes from the Project on Religion and Urban Culture , no. (January ). . Dawn L. Parks and Susanna R. Quern, ‘‘An Analysis of Congregational Programs,’’ Research Notes from the Project on Religion and Urban Culture , no. (February ). . St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, Always Becoming: A History of St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, Carmel, Indiana (Carmel, Ind., , revised ). VI. FINDING COMMUNITY IN THE MODERN METROPOLIS . Paul Estridge Company, ‘‘Centennial Brochure’’ (Indianapolis, ).
Notes to pages –
. ‘‘Heartland Crossing by Cedar Run Limited,’’ http://www.heartland crossing.com/index.html (accessed on June ). . Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, ); Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, – (New York: Free Press, ); F. Kaid Benfield, Donald D. T. Chen, and Matthew D. Raimi, Once There Were Greenfields: How Urban Sprawl Is Undermining America’s Environment, Economy, and Social Fabric (New York: National Resource Defense, ); and Richard Moe and Carter Wilkie, Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl (New York: Henry Holt and Company, ). . See Arthur E. Farnsley II, Rising Expectations: Urban Congregations, Welfare Reform, and Civic Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ). . Susan McKee, e-mail correspondence, July . . N. L. Whetten and E. G. Devereaux Jr., Studies of Suburbanization in Connecticut. . Windsor (Storrs, Conn.: AES Bulletin , ), cited in Jacob A. Toews, ‘‘Change in Church Participation of Migrants to the Suburb of Roseville’’ (master’s thesis, University of Minnesota, ), . . James D. Reese, ‘‘Study of a Religious Census of a Suburban Area with Reference to its Church Needs’’ (unpublished bachelor’s thesis, Emory University, ), –. . Indianapolis Family Life Clinic, Report of the Study Committee (Indianapolis: Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis, ), –. . Toews, ‘‘Change in Church Participation.’’ . Lyle Schaller, The Church in a Changing Suburb: Planning for Protestantism in East Cleveland (Cleveland: Regional Church Planning Office, ), . . Clay Price, The Rural-Urban Church on the Metropolitan Fringe (InterAgency Council Southern Baptist Convention, November ), Table : Church Membership by Distance from Church Building for Rural-Urban Fringe Churches, . . Data from various studies conducted by The Polis Center’s Project on Religion and Urban Culture during the period to ; Eric R. Wright and Arthur E. Farnsley II, ‘‘Neighborhood Communities: Report on the Faith and Community Telephone Survey of Urban Neighborhoods’’ (Indianapolis: The Polis Center, ). See also Arthur E. Farnsley II, ‘‘Urban Congregations as Local Actors,’’ Research Notes from the Project on Religion and Urban Culture , no. (August ). . Robert Fishman, ‘‘Megalopolis Unbound: America’s New City,’’ Wilson Quarterly , no. (Winter ): –.
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INDEX
All congregation and place names are located in the Indianapolis area, except where noted. Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Acton, , African Americans: in African American churches, –; attitudes toward, – ; in Indianapolis, –, , , , – , –; in suburbia, –; and Unigov, –; and urban ministry, . See also race; white flight All Souls Unitarian Church, Allisonville, Americanization, Appalachians: attitudes toward, , , ; in Indianapolis, –, ; religious affiliations of, ; urban ministry to, Asian religions, Atkinson, Warren and Linton, Atlas Engine Works, Augusta Christian Church, , – B’nai Torah Congregation, , Baptists: and church planning, ; and rural churches, , ; in Indianapolis, ; regionalization of, Barrington Heights, Barton, John, , , , Bethel Methodist Church, , , Big Run Primitive Baptist Church, Boone County, Bowers, Roy, bowling leagues, Bridgeport, Brightwood, . See also Martindale-Brightwood Broad Ripple Christian Church, Broadway Methodist Church, –, Butler Tarkington Neighborhood Association, Calvary Presbyterian Church (Cleveland), Camby Community Church, – Cantwell, Paul,
Carmel, , , , . See also Carmel United Methodist Church; Hamilton County; St. Christopher Episcopal Church; St. Mark’s United Methodist Church Carmel United Methodist Church, Castleton, –, – Castleton Methodist Church, –, , , – Castleton Square Mall, , Catholic churches: diocesan structure of, , ; founding of, –; growth of, –; and race, – Catholics: education of, ; immigration of, ; opposition to, , , . See also Indianapolis Council of Catholic Women Celebration of Hope, Centennial, – Central Christian Church, Central Hebrew Congregation, . See also B’nai Torah Congregation Central Indiana Regional Citizens League (CIRCL), Chapel Hill Methodist Church, , Charitable Choice, . See also faith-based social services Chatham (N.J.), , Chicago. See West Side (Chicago) Christian Parish Christ Church Cathedral, , Christ Temple Apostolic Church, church building reuse, , , Church Federation of Indianapolis: and church planning, –; and metropolitan growth, ; and race, church federations, . See also comity church formation: by church conflict, –; by denominations, –, –; by independent congregations, –; opposition to, –. See also comity; suburban churches
Church Women United, Cincinnati. See College Hill Christian Church CIRCL. See Central Indiana Regional Citizen’s League cities: in the Hebrew Bible, ; immigration into, ; in medieval Europe, ; migration out of, ; municipal reform, ; religion in, –; rural migration into, ; Social Gospel in, Clermont, , , ; fear of crime in, ; suburbanization of, College Hill Christian Church (Cincinnati), comity, –; problems with, – Committee on Post-War Planning, community: assumptions about, –; congregational perceptions of, –; critiques of, –, ; loss of, ; in new churches, , –, –, –; in rural churches, –, –, –; in urban churches, – community churches. See non-denominational churches Community Interfaith Housing (CIH), Community Resurrection Partnership, Congregation Beth-El Zedeck, , , , Congregationalists, ; and rural churches, Conservative Protestants: and African Americans, ; and church planning, –; growth of, ; in Indianapolis, –, , , ; suburbanization of, , ; and urban ministry, – Craine, John, Crestview Christian Church, –, Crooked Creek Baptist Church, –, Cumberland, , Cumberland Methodist Church, Decatur Township, Delaware Trails, , , Devington, Dillin, Hugh, – Disciples of Christ: and church planning, , –; in Indianapolis, ; and urban ministry, Douglass, Harlan Paul, , , Eagledale, East st Street Christian Church, East Cleveland (Ohio), East Harlem (N.Y.) Protestant Parish,
Index Emmanuel Lutheran Church, –, Episcopalians, ; and urban ministry, – , – Etz Chaim Synagogue, , , , Evangelical and Reformed Church, Evangelical United Brethren, , excluded cities, . See also Unigov faith-based social services, , Falconer, Richard, – Federal Council of Churches, First Baptist Church of Cumberland, , First Baptist Church of Indianapolis, , , ; suburbanization of, – First Congregational Church, , First General Baptist Church, First Methodist Church of Carmel, First Presbyterian Church (Midland, Tex.), First Southern Baptist Church of Indianapolis, Fishman, Robert, Flanner House Homes, – Fletcher Place Methodist Church, Forest Manor Methodist Church, – Franklin Township, Gans, Herbert, Geauga County (Ohio), – Gibson, Winter, –, GIPC. See Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee Goldsmith, Stephen, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, – Grace Lutheran Church, Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee (GIPC), – Green, Clifford, Greene, Shirley, Greenwood, Guiding Light Christian Services, Hamilton County, , , , Hardin, Boniface, – Haughville, Hay, John, Heartland Crossing, – Heather Hills Baptist Church, , Herron, Carl, highway construction: displacement by, , , ; in Indianapolis, –; and metropolitan growth, ; opposition to,
Index –; and rural churches, , , , ; and urban churches, , Hillside Christian Church, Holiness churches, , , Holy Spirit Catholic Church, Homer Hoyt Associates, Housing Opportunities Multiplied Ecumenically (HOME), – Hudnut, William, – immigration: and cities, , ; into Indianapolis, – included towns, . See also Unigov independent churches, – Indiana Avenue, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), Indianapolis: African Americans in, –, , –; as amateur sports capital, ; annexation by, , –; Appalachians in, –, ; demographics of, , –; economic activity in, –; ethnicity in, , , –, ; Great Depression and, ; housing in, –, –; municipal reform in, –; new suburban growth in, –; north-south divisions in, –; religious landscape of, –, , –, ; settlement of, –, ; social geography of, ; urban redevelopment of, – , –, –; during World War II, ; zoning laws in, Indianapolis Baptist Association, . See also Baptists Indianapolis Council of Catholic Women, Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, , – Indianapolis Public Schools, – Indianapolis Real Estate Board, Indianapolis Redevelopment Commission, , , Interfaith Hospitality Network, Irvington Methodist Church, Jews, –, , ; immigration of, ; suburbanization of, –, –. See also B’nai Torah Congregation; Central Hebrew Congregation; Congregation Beth-El Zedeck; Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation; National Council of Jewish Women Johnson County, Jones, Jim,
Kincheloe, Samuel, –; and conservative Protestants, Kingan and Company, Knight, Walter David, – Ku Klux Klan, –, –, Kuhn, George, Lafayette Square Mall, , Lawrence Township, , Lawrence, ; and Unigov, Leiffer, Murray, , , Levitt and Sons, Levittown, , Light of the World Christian Church, Lilly Endowment, , Long Grove (Ill.) United Church of Christ, Los Angeles, Lugar, Richard: election of, ; reelection of, ; and Unigov, – Lutherans, – Lynn, Charles, McCollum v. Board of Education, Macon (Ga.), Maimonides, Moses, Mainline Protestants: and Catholics, ; and church planning, –; and conservative Protestants, –, ; and housing, ; in Indianapolis, , ; and race, –, , Maple Hill Methodist Church, Mapleton-Fall Creek, –, –, Marion County: demographics of, ; migration out of, ; and race, ; religious landscape of, –, –; rural nature of, –, ; suburbanization of, , – , –; townships of, Mars Hill, , – Martindale, Martindale-Brightwood, , Memorial Baptist Church, Memorial Presbyterian Church, men in churches, Meridian Hills, , , , , ; opposition to churches in, –, – Meridian Street Methodist Church, Messiah Lutheran Church, – Methodist churches: in cities, –, –; and church growth, , , ; geography of, ; local nature of, ; in rural areas, , ; women in, ; youth in, ,
Metropolitan Area Greater Indianapolis Committee (MAGIC), Metropolitan Area Study Commission, Michel, Fred, Mid-North Church Council, – Morgan County, National Council of Churches: and church planning, ; and urban ministry, National Council of Jewish Women, National Homes, – National Malleable Castings Company, Nativity Catholic Church, – Neff, John, –. See also Unigov New Augusta, , , , New Bethel Baptist Church, –, New York. See East Harlem (N.Y.) Protestant Parish non-denominational churches, –, North Methodist Church, , , , Northwood Christian Church, – Oaklandon, , Operation Prove-It, Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, , Pannell, William, Park Forest (Ill.) United Church, Paul Estridge Company, Pentecostal churches, , , People’s Temple, Perry Township, , Pfliederer, Florizel, Pike Township: development of, , , –; race in, Pleasant View Baptist Church, Pleasant View Lutheran Church, – Presbyterians: and race, ; and rural churches, race: in Catholic churches, –; Church Federation of Indianapolis and, ; congregational relocation and, –; housing and, –; in Indianapolis, , , , –; and metropolitan growth, ; Mainline Protestants and, , ; in Marion County, , ; in Pentecostal churches, ; in Presbyterian churches, ; religion and, , –; schools and, ; in suburbia, –; in urban churches, –; Unigov and, –. See also African Americans; white flight
Index Ralston, Alexander, , Regional Center Plans, – religious commuters, – religious education, – Religious Heritage program, – Republican Action Committee, – Roosevelt-Temple Methodist Church, – Roseville (Minn.), rural churches: building standards for, –; conflicts in, –; criticisms of, ; growth of, ; and highway construction, , ; in Marion County, ; outsiders in, –, –, – St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church, , St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Midland, Tex.), St. Christopher Catholic Church, – St. Christopher Episcopal Church, St. George’s Episcopal Church, St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church, St. John’s United Church of Christ, St. Louis, St. Luke Catholic Church, – St. Luke’s Methodist Church, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, St. Michael Catholic Church, St. Richard’s Episcopal Day School, St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, school desegregation, – Schulte, Paul, – Second Presbyterian Church, , ; and race, ; suburbanization of, –, Servass, Beurt, Shelby County, Shippey, Frederick, , – shopping malls, , . See also Castleton Square Mall; Lafayette Square Mall; Washington Square Mall Silver Spring (Md.) Congregational Church, – Smith, Walter, Jr., Southern Baptists, –; in Indianapolis, –, Southport, , Southport Methodist Church, Speedway, , , ; and Unigov, ; opposition to churches in, – Speedway Methodist Church, , –, ,
Index storefront churches, , Stringtown, suburban churches: community building in, –; construction of, ; critiques of, –; denominational affiliations of, – , ; family in, –; fundraising in, –; locations of, –. See also men in churches; women in churches; youth Sweet, George, Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, , , Thiede, Colleen, – Third Christian Church, Third Church of Christ Scientist, st Street Baptist Church, Town and Country Church, –, – Trader’s Point: development of, , –; newcomers to, Trader’s Point Christian Church, Trinity Episcopal Church, , Unigov: as moral idea, –; opposition to, ; origins of, –; passage of, ; public safety and, –, ; schools and, –, ; townships in, . See also excluded cities; included towns Union Chapel Methodist Church, United Southside Community Organization, Urban America, Inc., urban churches: and neighborhood organizations, –; outsiders in, –; racial issues in, –; suburbanization of, – urban ministry: critiques of, –; growth of, – urban renewal: and churches, –, ; in Indianapolis, – urban-suburban partnerships, –
Valley Mills, , Wanamaker, –, , , Warren Township, Washington Square Mall, Washington Township, , , ; growth of, , –; race in, ; religion in, ; rural nature of, Wayne Township, Weekday Religious Education, – welfare reform, – West Newton Methodist Church, West Newton, West Side (Chicago) Christian Parish, Westfield, Westrom, Betty, – white flight, –, –, , –, –, , . See also race Whiteside, Birdie, Whyte, William, , Williams Creek, , Williams Creek Christian Church, Willow Creek (Ill.) Community Church, Windsor (Conn.), Winthrop, John, Wirt, William, women in churches, –, Woodruff Place, Youth for Christ, youth: in churches, –, ; groups, ; and recreational programs, . See also religious education; Weekday Religious Education Zion United Church of Christ (Stemmer’s Run, Md.), Zorach v. Clauson,
Etan Diamond is a social historian whose research interests lie at the intersection of urban history and the history of religion. He is author of And I Will Dwell in Their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia.
