Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II

By Mark Wild

In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home.

Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty.

Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780226605371

Book preview

Renewal

Edited by Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda I. Seligman

James R. Grossman, Editor Emeritus

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Renewal

Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II

Mark Wild

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60523-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60537-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226605371.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wild, Mark, 1970– author.

Title: Renewal : liberal Protestants and the American city after World War II / Mark Wild.

Other titles: Historical studies of urban America.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: Historical studies of urban America

Identifiers: LCCN 2018031115 | ISBN 9780226605234 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226605371 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cities and town—Religious aspects. | Cities and towns—United States. | Protestantism—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC BR115.C45 W55 2019 | DDC 277.3/0825091732—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031115

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

1  The Urban Problem

2  The New Generation

3  The Holistic Church

4  Cleaving

5  Secular Ministries, Secular Theologies

6  Renewal and the African American Mainline

7  Boom and Bust

8  The Pluralistic Church

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1: Note on Denominational Terms

Appendix 2: Postwar Urban Populations

Appendix 3: Ministry Projects by Service or Activity

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Introduction

In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity tried to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American life. Their campaigns spanned religious and secular arenas, from foreign policy to labor relations, sexual morality to liturgical reform. To accomplish their objectives, they set up ministries alongside any number of social institutions and groups: colleges, scientific research centers, apartment complexes, coffeehouses, music clubs, prisons, and farmworkers’ communities among them. Yet the most extensive labor of what some called the renewal movement occurred in the struggling, working-class, and increasingly nonwhite districts of urban America.¹ Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust and embarrassed by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, these liberal Protestants redirected their energies back home. It was in the city, long a site of Protestant anxiety, where the church was weakest and most needed.²

Renewalists took up this work during a troubled period for urban America. The exodus of its middle-class residents, jobs, and capital to suburban areas destabilized neighborhoods, drained tax revenues, and exacerbated long-standing racial inequalities. Many mainline churches followed their congregants to outlying areas. Those that chose to remain in the cities faced an uncertain future. In confronting the consequences of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and racial tensions that became encapsulated in the term urban crisis, these liberal Protestants were not only attempting to maintain their churches. They joined innumerable efforts to preserve communities in cities whose fates seemed unclear, thereby refracting a larger struggle among the mainline to control its urban future.

The renewal movement fits awkwardly into conventional narratives of postwar religious and urban history. True, it emerged during a broad religious revival that swept the American middle class from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. But historians tend to locate that revival in the suburbs, where most congregational growth took place, and which shared the anti-urban animus that drove so many middle-class Americans to the metropolitan periphery. The city, after all, is supposed to be toxic to religion. It corrodes the beliefs and practices carried by settlers newly arrived from the countryside. Only the refreshing waves of new settlers, the story goes, enable urban religion to persist.³ In this understanding, the predominately white middle-class mainline denominations—the American Baptist Convention, the Disciples of Christ, the United Church of Christ, and the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran Churches—tend to disappear behind the Roman Catholic, nondenominational, and Pentecostal congregations that house most new arrivals to the city.⁴

The renewal movement, however, displayed the still-significant relationship between liberal Protestantism and the American city between the 1940s and the 1970s. Renewalists initially designed their ministries to fill a gap in mainline geography. But over time, many came to believe that the movement had embarked on a fundamental transformation of both the church and modern urban society. In arguments that traveled beyond church circles to the mainstream press, renewalists made the case that their ministries could form the backbone of a widespread civic and spiritual revitalization. If it failed to achieve these lofty ambitions, the movement nonetheless left an indelible imprint on cities and their mainline congregations.

This book contributes to recent scholarship that has sought to uncover the underacknowledged impact of liberal Protestantism on American public life.⁵ Historians have demonstrated the many ways in which church people influenced politics and culture, but the urban dimension of that story has received little attention. Its importance goes beyond rounding out the portfolio of liberal Protestant causes. Urban ministry played a crucial role in shaping the church’s approach to modern society. In the cities as much as anywhere else, renewalists and other liberal Protestants worked out the relationship between their theological convictions and the structural form that the church should take. Their ecclesiology, as this relationship was sometimes called, evolved with their experiences in urban ministry. Focusing on this evolution helps counteract the scholarly tendency to treat religious phenomena in cultural terms and secular phenomena in material terms, a bifurcation that frequently hampers our understanding of both. It helps us see how religious communities shaped and were shaped by their environments.⁶

The Protestant Principle

The dynamic relationship between culture and structure in the renewal movement turned on what the theologian Paul Tillich called the Protestant principle. This principle states that the full expression of Christian faith cannot be embodied in any human institution, including the church. Protestants did not only inveigh against the sins of secular society, Tillich pointed out. They found even the earthly instrument of redemption inherently flawed. The inextricable tension between Protestant theology and its ecclesiastical form impelled renewalists to conduct a perpetual rebuilding of the church. The impossibility of perfecting that which could not be perfected did not demoralize them. On the contrary, the quest was invigorating; it sharpened ethical action and forestalled complacency. Renewalists waged a perpetual revolt against institutional inertia, and self-criticism became a defining characteristic of their movement. As the theologian Robert McAfee Brown put it, Protestantism affirms that the church must be shaken, judged, purged, and remade.⁷

Accounting for the Protestant principle helps us to understand the renewal movement’s impact on the mainline. Scholars of church-based movements for social justice often focus on the prophetic critique of secular society over issues like segregation, workers’ rights, environmental pollution, and so on.⁸ But renewalists’ criticisms fell just as heavily on the church itself. The social theorist Michael Walzer has argued that criticism follows from critics’ interest in and connection to its object, and therefore has a much stronger effect on communities to which the critics are tied.⁹ For renewalists intent on redeeming society, the church was the obvious place to start.

The Protestant principle injected a persistent sense of doubt into the renewal movement. Renewalists believed in the emancipatory possibilities of church reform, but doubted that reform could overcome human frailties. They accepted the inevitability of modern urban social institutions, but doubted their moral efficacy. They were committed to the church, but doubted its ability to commit to the project of human liberation. Though steeped in Christian theology, they doubted that theology alone could guide them in the modern world. Most of all, they doubted their own abilities, and thus felt compelled to maintain a vigilant self-criticism, to remind themselves of the experimental nature of their work. Detractors often accuse liberalism of a naïve faith in progress, but renewalists never surrendered their uncertainty. It arose, after all, from engaging their faith in the world, argued Brown. Doubt is truly real for our generation, he wrote. We must not slide too easily away from its disturbing implications, nor dispose of it by what may look like a trick.¹⁰ Earlier generations of Protestants had sometimes been troubled, even tormented, by doubt, but renewalists found it useful in negotiating the unpredictable landscapes of the city.¹¹ Doubt led renewalists to revise their theological, ecclesiological, and political views as circumstances changed, blurring distinctions between liberal and radical perspectives. Different theological approaches, easily distinguished on the page, became muddied on the streets where renewalists ministered. They felt that their movement was embedded in the flow of history, so that beliefs and structures appropriate for one age didn’t necessarily apply to another.¹²

For this reason, the battle of the church became in part a battle in the church, an internal debate over its form, purpose, and direction. This debate not only comprised contestations of ideas; it also played out in the evolution of the ecclesial bureaucracy itself. Following the Protestant principle, renewalists built an alternative set of structures designed to address the shortcomings of traditional churches. Some of these efforts stretched the definition of ministry by operating beyond church authority. As the renewal movement gathered steam, it began to draw enough resources to alert others in the church. After the 1950s, competing factions altered denominational bureaucracies to nurture or contain the movement. Despite their suspicion of human institutions, renewalists spent much of their time building institutions.

Renewal ministries were designed to inscribe themselves on the social and political landscape of urban America. Don Benedict, one of the movement’s leading lights, may have been exaggerating when he said of his adopted city that there’s hardly a community organization in Chicago that wasn’t originally put together by clergy . . . and laymen, but the church’s involvement in the civic life of cities was extensive nonetheless.¹³ Renewalists lobbied governments, protested racial discrimination and redevelopment projects, operated drug addiction clinics, formed tenants’ unions, counseled gang members, built affordable housing, employed tens of thousands of people, and trained a generation of urban residents in various forms of community work. Their ministries blurred the boundary between the church and urban society, and many clergy and laypeople used the ministry as a springboard to political careers. The renewal movement stimulated the growth of urban organizations in both positive and negative ways. The doubts that followed adherence to the Protestant principle set in motion a recurrent cycle of self-criticism and reform. Ministries begot ministries to address their predecessors’ shortcomings. This process created a constellation of opportunities for urban residents inside and outside the church to remake their lives. But it also exacerbated competition and inefficiency in ways that could destabilize the communities involved.

The agglomeration of renewal ministries constitutes an important dimension of postwar urban history. A voluminous scholarship has detailed the various interest groups that operated on their own or in coalitions to shape American cities. Many of these groups were grounded in working-class, often nonwhite neighborhoods; they offered rare opportunities to empower local residents. Yet much of this scholarship treats faith-based actors as the church arm of nonreligious movements, whose theological dimensions are either assumed or ignored. But renewalists weren’t simply in thrall to the New Left, black power, and other elements of that era’s countercultural zeitgeist, as some observers alleged.¹⁴ Often, in fact, the renewal movement preceded them and helped them flourish. And the movement’s urban impact extended beyond the church. To the degree that renewalists grappled with the relationship between social vision and organizational form before the emergence of better-known sixties-era social movements, they likely exerted at least some influence on those efforts as well.¹⁵

This relationship becomes apparent when we understand renewal ministries as a conduit between political liberalism and liberal Protestantism. Both kinds of liberalism are notoriously difficult concepts to pin down, not least because of how they have influenced each other over generations of American history.¹⁶ No less an authority than Alan Brinkley, a premier historian of modern political liberalism, has suggested that there are no satisfactory answers to questions about its nature. But political liberalism is generally associated with the principles of liberation, reason, and progress. Over time, its working definitions came to turn on the confidence, grounded in the New Deal and postwar economic prosperity, that rational state intervention could support democracy, freedom, equality, and prosperity.¹⁷ Liberal Protestantism, a similarly expansive term, is most frequently defined by an Enlightenment-influenced preference for reason over sacred authority and by its commitment to the fulfillment of humanity.¹⁸ As they evolved into the twentieth century, each set of ideas produced a corresponding institutional expression. Political liberalism endorsed the growth of government and interest-group organizations to adjudicate social conflicts, while liberal Protestantism spawned organizations to embed the church in secular society.

The renewal movement bridged political liberalism and liberal Protestantism by trying to shape their form and objectives. It was inspired by several early twentieth-century liberal traditions. The principles forming the social gospel, as developed both at home and in foreign missions, envisioned a church that brought order and justice to modern society. The emerging field of church planning, which drew from social science and technical expertise, sought to adapt congregations to the city. At the same time, the community church movement and neo-orthodox theology fed skepticism of ecclesial bureaucracy. Renewalists applied these ideas to a postwar urban landscape where mainline congregations joined an exodus of middle-class residents, jobs, and capital from the central city. Several clergy began to search for new methods of restoring the church’s presence to these neighborhoods. They appeared alongside campaigns to arrest congregational flight as African Americans and Latinos moved into white neighborhoods. Integrating congregations offered an obvious way to anchor the church and to transcend the class, ethnic, and racial divisions that fragmented the metropolis. Befitting their elision of the sacred and the secular, this first generation of renewalists came to see their project as part of the broader revitalization of the city, not unlike the urban renewal projects that were reshaping American urban areas.

Just as the urban Catholics studied by John McGreevy understood their surroundings in religious terms, so, too, Protestant renewalists interpreted the transformations racking postwar urban America according to their faith.¹⁹ The first generation was acutely aware of the church’s diminished strength in the cities. Like many theologians and social scientists, these renewalists understood this loss as one facet of a larger social atomization wrought, ironically, by the proliferation of organizational forms—governmental, economic, and social. The marginalization of the mainline Protestant churches was obvious in cities, where they were far outnumbered by congregations of Catholics, Jews, and nonmainline Protestants. But renewalists believed that the church could reverse these trends by challenging the social injustice and spiritual isolation, by placing itself at the forefront of political liberalism’s appeal to the common good. They hoped to restore a social-spiritual unity that supposedly preceded modern urbanization—not necessarily through mass conversion but by serving as a counterweight to secular political power, by advancing residents’ dignity under terms of ultimate concern. Ecumenism, the movement to dissolve denominational distinctions among liberal Protestants, was one manifestation of this impulse.²⁰

However, the renewalist ecclesiology of a holistic ministry dedicated to urban reconciliation contained inherent contradictions. First and foremost, the desire for unity conflicted with an equally powerful desire to preserve the autonomy of the various communities comprising urban society. Renewalists weren’t the first to identify this tension, of course; it had represented a key feature of liberal thought for more than a century.²¹ But in mid-twentieth-century America, left-of-center politics were often defined by other dichotomies: between a liberal faith in the state or an antiliberal distrust of the state; between a liberal faith in capitalism or a radical critique of capitalism; and, by the mid-1960s, between a liberal commitment to nonviolence and the beloved community versus a separatist politics that sanctioned disruption and violence. Renewalists, however, understood these tensions in terms particular to the church: between the sacred and the secular; between remnant notions of a Protestant establishment (the long-standing idea that the mainline constituted the country’s primary religious and moral authority) and a new, more pluralistic, post-Protestant conception of the American religious community that was taking hold;²² between ecumenism and the cultural/theological divisions manifested in denominational identities; between a largely white middle-class church and increasingly nonwhite working-class urban populations.

Renewalists based their ecclesiological responses to these tensions on their own experiences and priorities, along with deep study of the city. They displayed an acute sensitivity to the class and cultural differences between the mainline and the parish populations where they worked. While they succeeded in bridging these divides only sporadically, they learned from their experiences and adapted their ministries to compensate for their shortcomings. But renewalists betrayed certain blind spots as well, most notably when their work marginalized the role of women. This was perhaps not surprising, given that the movement was led by clergy at a time when there were few female pastors. Many renewal ministries viewed the city as a primarily masculine environment centered in industry, and defined lay activity primarily in terms of a male workforce. Restoring the church’s urban presence entailed reversing the feminization of the Church, an old fear given new urgency by the urban downturn. Although some ministries avoided this trope, and many women carved out vital careers in the movement, it attracted far fewer female participants compared to other renewalist efforts—in foreign missions and student Christian groups, for instance, where women had more opportunities for leadership roles—and suffered as a result.²³

In part because some of them devalued female congregants, renewalists struggled to develop an adequate method of evaluating the progress of ministries that often fell short of both traditional church metrics and renewalists’ criteria. Indeed, recurrent setbacks prompted renewalists to reconsider their objectives. By the early 1960s, different factions of the movement were pursuing different strategies, a development that encouraged new ministries while compromising the movement’s cohesion. One path dismissed reconciliation as an enervating, insufficiently masculine ideal that glossed over chronic injustices. Its followers embraced instead a combative church that championed the oppressed, prized community and congregational independence, and drew hard lines between allies and opponents. Saul Alinsky’s model of community organization attracted many in this group; it freed them from the burdens of mediating different interests which, experience had taught them, were not morally equivalent. Many renewalists on this path turned against urban redevelopment, which they recognized as harmful to central city communities. Their actions opened fissures within the movement—between them and people who believed that contentious forms of ministry sabotaged the goal of church renewal.

Stepping away from the church offered another strategy for resolving the contradictions that vexed the renewal movement. The advent of the War on Poverty provided an avenue for some in this camp. Poverty programs were much more extensive than any campaign the church could mount. Some renewalists considered them to be secular forms of ministry, evidence that renewalists should be free to pursue ministry without ecclesial ties. Secular theologies and postrenewalism resolved the tension between sacred and secular by abandoning the institutional church. Yet neither the poverty programs nor secular theology were panaceas. Renewalists who left their denominations gained freedom at the cost of spiritual material and support; from these positions they were on balance no more effective than they had been in ecclesial posts.

The tension between unity and pluralism turned most sharply on race. Early on, some white renewalists had viewed race as a subset of larger cultural forces. But black mainliners challenged white renewalists’ assumptions about integration and reconciliation. Some of them viewed integration as an essential component of church renewal, but pointed out how it could mask continuing inequalities. Others feared that church unity would rob African American churches of ecclesial and cultural autonomy. By the 1960s, many black and a growing number of white renewalists were downplaying integration in favor of directing more resources to black congregations and communities. A new group of black caucuses and related bodies formed to represent black congregations and communities. They hoped to build unity among African American Protestants to counter inequalities within the church. But their efforts encountered the same kinds of obstacles that had weakened the broader renewalist effort to build a holistic ministry. Denominational allegiances and disputes over strategies combined to undermine their quest for unity.

By the late 1960s, the renewal movement had become so large and unwieldy that it could no longer maintain a common vision for the church, much less a cohesive presence in the city. Religious, secular, and government-funded organizations were feeding off one another, in both senses of the phrase; more organizations prompted the formation of new umbrella bodies to streamline efforts, but nonetheless competed with or cannibalized one another, drawing away talented staff and funds into an expanding lattice of civic engagement. A last set of renewalist efforts to remedy this situation was quickly rendered obsolete, however. At the end of the decade, the conditions that had fueled the renewal movement abruptly reversed. A shrinking membership, roiling discontent among laity, and a deteriorating economy robbed denominations of the resources that had supported renewal ministries. Cutbacks in funding claimed many of the movement’s iconic ministries. Renewalists not only had to scale back expectations, they had to reconceive the form of church renewal now that many of their models had become unfeasible. They returned to the local congregation as a church form suited to an age of austerity, and invested their diminished funds in nonwhite churches and pastors. Some mainliners embraced evangelical ecclesiology as an alternative to the secular, sponsor-dependent models that once predominated in the movement. The triumph of pluralism, whether by choice or necessity, aligned with a broader rejection of centralized authority and the end of the midcentury liberal consensus on what defined the common good.

The Scope of This Study

Renewalists were young, educated people convinced of the movement’s profound implications for the church and society. Don Benedict admonished his colleagues in 1949 to document their work so others could learn from it. New body of knowledge hasn’t yet been passed on, he told one group, according to its meeting minutes. People need to write books! And they did, along with articles, reports, memos, and notes that circulated during a period when the liberal Protestant book culture was in full swing. Their collected works could fill a library. Loyde Hartley’s bibliography of church writing on cities runs three volumes; it’s a magisterial effort, and incomplete.²⁴ Not long into my research, I realized that any attempt at a comprehensive survey would devolve into a morass of acronyms and repetitive summaries. Defining the scope of this book thus requires me to explain what is left out as much as what is included.

I have focused on a group of key ministries in several different cities. But I have omitted many prominent persons, congregations, and church organizations because I covered counterparts with similar beliefs, strategies, or experiences. Furthermore, I have paid closest attention to those renewalists who tried to alter the structural makeup of the church, either by devising new forms of ministry or by building new kinds of congregations. Left out are conventional social welfare ministries and advocacy organizations, which seldom figured in ecclesiological debates about renewal. While representatives of all mainline denominations appear in this book, it focuses more on the Methodist, Episcopalian, Congregationalist, and Presbyterian Churches, and less on Baptists, Lutherans, and Disciples of Christ. Each denomination had its unique renewalist expression, but enough commonalities emerged to warrant some generalization.²⁵

Finally, when addressing the subject of race, both within the church and in urban neighborhoods, I focus primarily on interactions between blacks and whites, and less so on those involving Latinos and Asians. African Americans were by far the largest, oldest, and most established racial minority group in the mainline. While many renewal ministries catered to other racial groups, the discourse of the movement, at least in the cities, clung to black/white dichotomies. Not until the 1970s did renewalists move beyond this binary in any meaningful way.

ONE

The Urban Problem

On the surface, the young minister’s career was blossoming. For more than a decade since 1915, he had been the popular and energetic leader of a healthy, middle-class church of the ethnic German Evangelical Synod of North America in northwestern Detroit. Away from the pulpit, he played influential roles in various civic organizations dedicated to race and labor relations. Yet the minister’s diary revealed profound misgivings about the city’s future. It was not a society at all, he wrote, but a mass of individuals, held together by a production process. Its people are spiritually isolated even though they are mechanistically dependent upon one another. He was equally pessimistic about the church. The minister was frustrated at the political apathy of his congregants, and blamed Protestant culture for failing to nurture the courage needed to cope with the real problems of modern society. The church, he wrote, is like the Red Cross in wartime. It keeps life from degenerating into a consistent inhumanity, but it does not materially alter the fact of the struggle itself. Ultimately, he concluded, the pastorate’s requirements prevented him from living out his Christian principles. Thus in 1928 the minister, Reinhold Niebuhr, left to join the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.¹

Twenty years later, Niebuhr had become one of the world’s most prominent theologians and a major intellectual influence on a budding renewalist movement. Placing his theology in the long narrative of the church’s work with the city helps explain the origins and significance of the postwar renewalists. They shared Niebuhr’s doubts about the church and urban society, but nonetheless resolved to restore mainline Protestantism to a central role in the city. They adapted Niebuhr’s theology and other influences from the early twentieth century—the social gospel, community churches, and church planning—to the novel challenges posed by the post-1945 urban environment. Understanding the genealogy of the movement allows us to identify its innovations and contributions to urban ministry.

Protestant anxiety about American cities is as old as the cities themselves. During the early days of the republic, the church’s assumption of responsibility for the spiritual and moral health of urban communities accompanied growing numbers of Roman Catholic, Jewish, and, especially, unchurched city residents. Its ministrations mixed genuine concern for marginalized groups with fears of their potential threat to the social order. The gradual parsing of urban residents by socioeconomic status into separate neighborhoods—ranging from wealthy protosuburbs to tenement-filled slums—accelerated Protestants’ involvement in this area. The advent of streetcars and automobiles allowed middle-class residents to live farther from central cities, and the accompanying dispersal of commerce and industry further reduced their dependence on the city.²

New populations—immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, along with native-born white and black migrants from the South—replenished central city neighborhoods, and an array of formal and informal discriminatory practices confined them to certain districts. As a result, the early twentieth-century city was fragmented by race, class, and ethnicity. Yet civic leaders and academics—most notably sociologists at the University of Chicago, whose pioneering research laid the groundwork for generations of urban analysis—remained convinced that each community, despite vast discrepancies in wealth and power, contributed to the health of the metropolis. The fundamental unity of the city remained unchallenged. These experts had little reason to worry about the dispersal of population and capital, especially because peripheral settlement areas often remained within municipal boundaries and consequently the polity and tax base. Civic leaders took comfort in the continued growth of the city’s population and economy, however unevenly its benefits were divided.³

Leaving the City, and Reentering

As the overwhelming majority within America’s elite and middle classes, white Protestants profited handsomely from urban expansion. Social segregation allowed them to extract benefits from the city while insulating themselves from its costs. The church benefited in kind, and liberal Christianity emerged in step with the new middle class. Its adherents devised forms of belief and practice suited to modern urban life. Possessed with the desire and the resources to achieve genteel respectability, upwardly mobile congregants funded church growth at home and missionary projects abroad. At the same time, modernization marginalized clergy, once considered civic leaders but now often excluded from the increasingly complex worlds of business and politics. As women came to predominate in the pews, some worried that the feminization of the church undermined its civic authority.⁴

Suburbanization provoked similar agitation, for it removed congregations from areas where social cohesion seemed under threat. Many city churches followed their members to outlying areas, particularly when incoming populations were poorer and non-Protestant. One Episcopal congregation left its original home in the notorious New York slum of Five Points in the 1840s due to the presence of what its rector called classes of persons inferior alike in character and resources, and generally having little or no sympathy with our Protestant Episcopal Church. The pattern was repeated across urban America, with congregations sometimes relocating multiple times to escape neighborhood transitions.⁵ Church leaders wondered who would bring the new residents of American cities into the Christian fold.

Relocation could traumatize congregants as well. Members rarely moved en masse, and those who remained frequently fought to preserve a church to which they had deep attachments. Larger churches, especially if located downtown or in middle-class port-of-entry neighborhoods, could sometimes have it both ways, preserving the original mother church while seeding new churches in outlying areas.⁶ But this wasn’t an option for most. While completing a doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, a Congregational minister named Samuel Kincheloe took a pastorate at a small church on the city’s West Side, in an area he described as the rear guard of white American Protestantism. His experience became the basis for an article elucidating the behavior sequence of a dying church in a neighborhood beset by disinvestment, delinquency, substandard housing stock, and demographic turnover. His church’s initial attempts to evangelize non-Protestant newcomers, Kincheloe began, had predictably failed. After the Home Missions board converted the church to mission status (relieving the congregation of the burden of financial self-support), a succession of young ministers tried to build an activist program of community service. When their efforts proved futile, the local seminary dispatched its students for on-the-job training. Finally, the church’s overseers decided to secularize its activities, admitting community residents to its social programs without regard for religious affiliation. Kincheloe’s church ran this gamut of strategies to no avail. By the time he finished his article, it had sold the building to a bottle works and was meeting in a rented hall.⁷

Who besides its own members mourned the demise of a church like this one? Plenty of church people, it turned out, because of the trend it represented. The migration of mainline churchgoers out of the city posed problems of moral jurisdiction and social concern. The Protestant parish system, where one church served a small surrounding community, had prospered in the relatively homogeneous towns and small cities of early America. But the modern metropolis upset this arrangement. In ethnically and denominationally diverse neighborhoods, multiple churches served subsets of the population in overlapping parishes. Unlike Catholic parishes, which remained in place for succeeding waves of residents, Protestant parishes tended to move with their members. As congregations departed for the suburbs, denominations gave up oversight of ever-larger swaths of the city. Since the nineteenth century, the church had returned to these neighborhoods with evangelical and temperance campaigns, Sunday schools, and European imports such as the YMCA and the Salvation Army. These efforts invoked an imagined social cohesion by bringing diverse urban populations under the church’s protection. Clergy and laypeople, many of them women, ventured into working-class districts where, through instruction and good works, they hoped to narrow the social distance between themselves and urban residents.⁸

Around the turn of the century, these efforts culminated in the Social Gospel movement. Social gospel proponents argued that urban conditions rather than personal failures accounted for the squalor of inner-city slums. Walter Rauschenbusch, an ethnic German Baptist minister in New York’s roiling Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and one of the movement’s leading lights, argued that the church should Christianize the social order by reforming labor laws, improving slum conditions, and promoting citizenship. But the social gospel was equally focused on the church itself. Castigating Christians for forsaking the city, its advocates called for a coordinated campaign that subordinated denominational interests to a larger, pan-Protestant cause. They hoped that central city churches, replenished by new proletarian congregants, could become self-regenerating engines of spiritual and community empowerment. The church would renew itself alongside secular society.⁹

As a major strand of the American liberal theological tradition, the Social Gospel movement bled into secular affairs. Its reduction of the distance between the church and the world registered in the influence of secular ideas on liberal theology, the migration of clergy into politics, and the increasing similarity of form between church and secular organizations of the Progressive Era. The best-known of these forms, the settlement house, placed middle-class volunteers in working-class neighborhoods to deliver the panoply of services ranging from child care centers to medical clinics. Many settlement houses operated as secular institutions, in part to avail themselves of different funding sources. But religious principles remained at their core. Jane Addams, who founded the best-known settlement, Chicago’s Hull House, infused her rhetoric with Christian themes. Church-operated settlements (sometimes called institutional churches or neighborhood houses) were often founded by congregations who subsequently left the area; others were defunct churches repurposed by denominational leaders to maintain a presence in the district.¹⁰

H. P. Douglass and Church Planning

Institutional churches became favored pastorates for Social Gospel ministers, but they had a mixed appeal to immigrants and other working-class urban residents, who seldom wanted to trade their religious and cultural traditions for mainline Protestantism. By the 1920s, various church voices were pressing for a coordinated effort to marry the social programs of institutional churches with conventional congregations. They wanted to use social science and planning techniques to build a unified church that could minister, systematically and comprehensively, to an increasingly diverse and fragmented American city. At the center of this effort were a group of church planners whose careers bridged the Social Gospel and postwar eras. Its most prominent member, Harlan Paul Douglass, developed a series of prescriptions that undergirded many subsequent renewal ministries.

Douglass started his career as a Congregational pastor to several churches in the Midwest, but in 1906 he took an administrative post with the American Missionary Association, the abolitionist organization that had transitioned after the Civil War to building black schools, colleges, and churches. He developed a specialty as a researcher, and began to lay out a remarkably cohesive program linking the social gospel, comity, ecumenism, and modern social science as the bases for the twentieth-century Protestant Church.¹¹ Like other social gospel devotees, Douglass viewed modern urban society as an enlarged moral realm; to retain its privileged position, he argued, the church must immerse itself in civic life. He wanted church structures to mimic the integrated and diverse form of metropolitan society. He likened home missions to a city water system, with a particular set of pumps and engines, which raise and distribute the flow through a particular system of pipes and sluices upon particular areas, and compared church reform to the rebuilding of Grand Central Station (the station kept on serving while experiencing complete reconstruction).¹²

Such language illustrated an affinity for masculine industrial imagery, a businesslike bureaucratic ethos, and a consequent attraction to organizational integration that were seeping into church culture. The 1908 founding of the Federal Council of Churches, a national organization promoting social gospel principles, established an institutional vehicle for ecumenism within the Protestant establishment.¹³ In 1919, Douglass joined a similar organization, the Interchurch World Movement, newly formed by the financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. During its brief life, Rockefeller’s creation promoted scientific methods of survey and analysis. Church planners had used surveys to gauge Protestant potential in urban neighborhoods before 1920, but Douglass’s work there and at a successor organization refined techniques and expanded their utility. He was assembling a science of city churchmanship, a comprehensive strategy for urban church development.¹⁴

Over a career that culminated with a stint as director of the Federal Council of Churches’ research program on home missions, Douglass produced dozens of studies tackling Protestantism’s urban problem. Despite their valiant efforts, he reported, mainline churches had failed to expand much beyond their middle-class, native-born white base and struggled to maintain their congregations in a shifting urban landscape.¹⁵ Mainline congregations had been designed for towns, he argued. Because urban residents organized themselves less by geographic proximity than by group affiliation, churches had to adapt to the city by performing other functions—entertainment, social service, and so on. In a sense, Douglass wanted to extend the settlement/institutional church model, with its emphasis on the total life of the parish, to all congregations. He was building as well on arguments emerging from missionaries overseas that the church should deemphasize evangelism and respond to the stated needs of parishioners (Douglass participated in research for, and according to one scholar, may even have helped write Rethinking Missions, the influential 1932 exegesis of this missiological approach). Integrating pastoral care and social work was a primary feature of his science of churchmanship. The evolution of urban society required that churches be continually recreated into more complex forms.¹⁶

Nor was reforming the individual congregation sufficient, Douglass continued; more comprehensive changes were in order. While Catholics could allocate resources efficiently through their unified hierarchy and geographic parishes, he lamented, the fragmented mainline burned precious resources competing against one another for parishioners. The church is so lacking in actual direction by central authority, and its coherence through tradition is so slight, Douglass wrote, that it is little more in the community than the aggregate of its separate churches. He championed a robust version of comity, whereby denominations cooperated in the establishment of new churches and the closing of old ones (he described it as a combination of ecclesiastical eugenics and planned parenthood), with similar coordination in social welfare efforts.¹⁷ He believed that ecumenical cooperation enacted from the neighborhood to international levels would end the Babel of Gospels and turn ministry toward the entire urban problem. Doing so, however, required suppressing the church’s self-serving impulses; liberal Protestants, he contended, must subordinate the institutional means to the social end.¹⁸

Postwar renewalists left Douglass’s dry sociological terminology behind, but the theme of urban adaptation remained a key component of their ecclesiology. In this respect, their work represented an evolution, rather than a break, from prewar church activities. Comity in Douglass’s time was hampered by an institutional resistance to on-the-ground ecumenism. City church councils typically focused on new areas of settlement, especially in the suburbs, and often spent more time mediating disputes than implementing proactive plans. A few progressive church bodies tried to implement his ideas more forcefully. The Chicago City Missionary Society, for instance, beefed up its research and survey operations in 1929 out of concerns that suburbanization had depleted so many central city congregations. It even drew up plans (likely torpedoed by the Depression) to recirculate resources back to congregations which had seeded prosperous churches on the periphery.¹⁹

Downtown churches, generally a denomination’s flagship city congregation, often became the locus of urban adaptation projects. Many of them had been built in the nineteenth century to symbolize Protestantism’s civic centrality, and boasted large facilities and endowments. Their location, close to city hall or along prominent church avenues like Woodward