Category Archives: Religion

Evangelicals and suburbanites: individualistic and “populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian”

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Historian Mark Noll described the cultural ethos of American evangelicals in his 1994 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:

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To put it most simply, the evangelical ethos is activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian. It allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment. (12)

Does this cultural approach to life among American evangelicals match the cultural life in American suburbs?

I make the argument in Sanctifying Suburbia that there is significant overlap in the cultural toolkits of evangelicals and American suburbs. Suburbanites might not always be activistic – or might rally to a few particular causes that threaten their way of life – but the description above generally holds. Suburbanites often want to know what works to achieve the American Dream where they can own their own home, ensure a good life for their kids, and control their surroundings. They do not need experts or intellectuals to tell them about loftier goals or long-term projects; they want a good life for themselves and their households.

One important element I would add to Noll’s description above is “individualistic.” Suburbanites and evangelicals both privilege their standing before considering the collective fate of their neighborhoods, communities, and country. They envision social change starting with the efforts of themselves and a few others around them. They spend much of their energy focused locally. They think less about larger social structures.

Evangelist Billy Graham adopted this approach when considering the world’s ills. In his messages across decades, he often started with the issues facing the world. Crime, communism, war, unrest. And the answer Graham provided to all this was not to listen to experts and scholars talk about social factors that provoke bad activity but rather to address the issue of sin in every person and for people to turn to Jesus. By transforming individual hearts, Christians could then positively influence society and address the social ills Graham started with. I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 8 of the book.

Thus, evangelicals found suburban settings to be welcoming or comfortable as their approach to the world complemented and was influenced by suburban settings.

Living in a deserted English church as a “guardian”

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Here is one way those needing lower rents and those wanting to protect empty buildings, such as churches, can find common ground:

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Three people have lived in the deserted cathedral in the past two years, with each occupant — an electrician, a sound engineer and a journalist — paying a monthly fee to live in the priest’s quarters.

The cathedral is managed by Live-in Guardians, a company finding occupants for disused properties, including schools, libraries and pubs, across Britain. The residents — so-called property guardians — pay a fixed monthly “license fee,” which is usually much lower than the typical rent in the same area…

The practice of populating disused properties with guardians is unregulated in Britain and comes with fewer legal protections for the residents than renting. Guardians have also complained of inconveniences and outright hazards, such as no access to drinkable tap water and rickety ceilings…

The practice started in the Netherlands in the 1980s and has long attracted artists, musicians and other creatives in search of enough square footage to do their work, as well as those prepared to live more precariously. For example, in Britain, guardians can be asked to vacate the property with 28 days’ notice, compared with the two months afforded to most private renters…

The UK housing ministry states in its guidance on guardianships that it “does not endorse or encourage” the practice because people “can be asked to live in conditions that do not meet the standards of residential properties.”

This seems like a short-term solution to two big issues facing a number of cities. Where is the affordable housing? How might older but unused buildings be preserved or used again? Each issue is complex. Each would take a long time to address.

In the meantime, what truly happens to these buildings? It seems like they have some use but given the stories shared here, it sounds like they are slowly deteriorating.

And what are the experiences of residents? Based on what is shared here, it sounds like it might be a less than positive experience overall as people are able to get by and not much else.

Are there any cities in the United States that have similar programs and, if so, what are the outcomes?

The normal suburban buildings where the National of Association of Evangelicals operated from for decades

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In Sanctifying Suburbia, I look more closely at the locations of the National Association of Evangelicals in Chapter 4. As a group that purported to represent the interests of a growing evangelical movement from the 1940s onward, where did they locate their headquarters?

For decades, their headquarters were in two adjacent suburban communities roughly 25 miles from Chicago: Wheaton and Carol Stream. These two suburbs contain a cluster of evangelical organizations (discussed further in Chapter 5 and 6 of the book). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the NAE had multiple locations in downtown Wheaton. According to the local phone books, their location in 1957 was 108 N Main. Here is a Google Streetview image of that address from June 2019:

This is the same block that was briefly shown in a Walmart Super Bowl ad a few years ago. When I walked past the location earlier this week, the building is undergoing a massive renovation.

In the 1960s, the NAE moved a few miles north to Carol Stream. They concluded their time in the suburb in an office building within an office and light industrial area. Here is what the property looked like a few years ago (a Google Streetview image from October 2016):

The organization was there until 1999 when they had a short sojourn to suburban southern California before moving the headquarters to Washington, D.C. in 2002.

These headquarters fit in a suburban landscape, the first in a two story brick building in an older suburban downtown with the second looking like many other small office buildings dotting suburbia, with little more than a sign marking them as spaces occupied by a religious organization. And from these suburban locations, the National Association of Evangelicals supported a growing evangelical movement across the United States.

Shopping malls and blue laws in New Jersey

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Can stores in a shopping mall be open on a Sunday? One Bergen County mayor is not happy about open retailers:

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Paramus officials say they’re exploring a lawsuit against American Dream, after learning that retail shops at the Meadowlands megamall are open for business on Sundays in defiance of Bergen County’s Blue Laws.

The stores at American Dream have been operating in violation of those laws for nearly a year, The Record and NorthJersey.com reported last week, despite the county’s longstanding prohibitions against the sale of nonessential items such as furniture, appliances and clothing. The restrictions, in place since the 17th century, exempt some services, including groceries and drugstores.

Paramus residents in particular have been proponents of the Blue Laws over the years. Supporters say they grant them a day of reprieve from heavy traffic that plagues the town the rest of the week due to the borough’s four malls…

“Being mayor of Paramus, I know how important the Blue Laws are to our way of life and the peacefulness of Sundays,” he said in an interview. “[It gives us] the ability to move around town, the ability for our emergency services to have less calls and regroup. As mayor, I’m going to fight like heck for Paramus and the county as a whole.”

Such regulations used to be more common across the United States. It can be surprising for some to hear that places would continue to follow these guidelines or businesses might choose to follow them (see some of the conversations around Chik-Fil-A in different parts of the country regarding their practice of not being open on Sundays). Even the article above notes that these restrictions date back hundreds of years; are these simply archaic local idiosyncrasies?

The explanations given by these suburbanites regarding the purposes of the blue laws are interesting in today’s context. Is Sunday a day of rest from traffic? Are the malls bringing in so many vehicles from outside the county that their closure on one day makes it easier for locals to get around? Do the EMTs and police need time on Sunday to regroup from all of the accidents and calls on the other six days of the week? The website of another suburb in the county highlights the Sunday prohibitions but does not say why they exist.

My guess is that the Bergen blue laws originate in religious motivations. Sunday is the Christian day of rest. I wonder how much of the current support for the blue laws is religious support as opposed for other reasons for having a day of rest.

Many municipalities in the United States want more local revenue. Having multiple local shopping malls is a good thing because it can increase commercial activity and sales tax revenues. Can communities still thrive if they limit shopping mall activity on one of the weekend days?

“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” hymns, and civil religion

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The song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written in 1900:

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Often referred to as “The Black National Anthem,” Lift Every Voice and Sing was a hymn written as a poem by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900. His brother, John Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954), composed the music for the lyrics. A choir of 500 schoolchildren at the segregated Stanton School, where James Weldon Johnson was principal, first performed the song in public in Jacksonville, Florida to celebrate President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

At the turn of the 20th century, Johnson’s lyrics eloquently captured the solemn yet hopeful appeal for the liberty of Black Americans. Set against the religious invocation of God and the promise of freedom, the song was later adopted by NAACP and prominently used as a rallying cry during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 

How many hymnals is the song in? Hymnary.org lists the song being in 46 hymnals. For some quick comparisons on the same site, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is in 446 hymnals, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is in 557 hymnals, “A Mighty Fortress” is in 681 hymnals, and “Amazing Grace” is in 1,459 hymnals.

Americans are used to civil religion where religious concepts are mixed with public and political rituals. What are the boundaries for this regarding hymns? I imagine there are long histories and discussions about whether songs about one’s country should be in the hymnal and used within congregations.

Sanctifying Suburbia is out! Explaining the forces behind the evangelical embrace of the American suburbs

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If observers in the United States in the late nineteenth century had to predict the geography of American evangelicals in the year 2000, what would they have said? Would they have foreseen an evangelical presence in the biggest cities? Important evangelical congregations, organizations, and institutions resided in New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago. From these population centers (and ones that emerged in the twentieth century like Los Angeles or Dallas), evangelicals could reach the masses. Or would they have selected small towns and more rural areas? Perhaps they would have thought of evangelicals living in particular regions, in the kinds of places that would be called “the heartland” or “flyover country” or “the Bible Belt.” These places with a slower pace of life and traditional values may have aligned with everyday evangelical life.

I argue in Sanctifying Suburbia (out in paperback today!) that by the turn of the twenty-first century American evangelicals were firmly suburban. Evangelicals did not simply follow many other Americans to the suburbs (the country was majority suburban in the 2000 Census); evangelicals actively chose to locate in the suburbs.

Why? Multiple factors led to this and different chapters in the book discuss the components that contributed to the evangelical embrace of the growing American suburbs. The story includes:

  1. Racial and ethnic change in cities and evangelicals moving to whiter suburbs.
  2. The National Association of Evangelicals operating from suburban settings for much of its existence after its founding in the 1940s
  3. Locating in some evangelical clusters – like Wheaton and Carol Stream, Illinois and Colorado Springs, Colorado – that offered particular amenities and synergy between evangelical congregations and organizations.
  4. Seeing cities as incompatible with evangelical lifestyles and goals.
  5. An individualized view of engaging with places and society while also holding up heaven as the ultimate city/place.

And this is not just a story of the twentieth century; some of the seeds were sown prior to mass suburbanization and developed over decades.

Where does this leave American evangelicals in the third decade of the twenty-first century? As a whole, they may feel most comfortable in suburban settings where day-to-day life focuses on families in single-family homes, middle-class and populist activities and values rule the day, and attracting attendees and gathering resources from growing suburban populations occupies their organizational efforts.

Sanctifying Suburbia out early in 2025

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I am looking forward to the release of my book Sanctifying Suburbia: How the Suburbs Became the Promised Land for American Evangelicals on January 14, 2025. Preorder at Oxford University Press and Amazon. Throughout the early part of this year I will be publishing posts about the argument of the book and its implications, surprising things I found while researching, and ongoing possibilities for analyzing religion and the suburbs.

Here is the description of the book:

The suburbs are home to the majority of Americans, including millions of evangelical Christians and thousands of evangelical congregations and organizations. And while American evangelicals are a potent force in society and politics, their connection to and embrace of the suburbs are rarely examined. How did white evangelicals come to see the suburbs as a promised land, home to the evangelical good life and to dense concentrations and networks of evangelical residents, churches big and small, and nonprofit organizations? This book systematically assesses how evangelicals became intertwined with the suburbs and what this means for evangelical life.

Brian Miller shows how evangelical views of race and ethnicity, social class, and gender led to anti-urban sentiment, white flight, and the pursuit of racial exclusivity-all of which has led evangelicals to make the suburbs their physical and spiritual home. At the same time, clusters of evangelical organizations were planting themselves in the suburbs, drawing evangelicals out of the cities. Through sociological analysis, case studies of multiple communities with clusters of evangelical residents, and examinations of evangelical culture, Miller shows that in order to fully understand American evangelicals we must take a deeper look at how evangelicals embraced suburbs and how the suburbs shaped them.

More to come.

Papal visits and large crowds

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Pope Francis visited East Timor earlier this week and many people came out to see him:

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opes are popular. So much so that nearly half the population of East Timor gathered Tuesday in a seaside park for Pope Francis’ final Mass in the small Southeast Asian country whose people are deeply Catholic…

East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, has been overwhelmingly Catholic ever since Portuguese explorers first arrived in the early 1500s and some 97% of the population today is Catholic. They turned out in droves to welcome the first pope to visit them since their independence in 2002, on the same field where St. John Paul II prayed in 1989 during the nation’s fight to separate from Indonesia.

Here is how this crowd compares to other crowds for papal visits:

Other papal Masses have drawn millions of people in more populous countries, such as the Philippines, Brazil and Poland. But the estimated crowd of 600,000 people in East Timor was believed to represent the biggest turnout for a papal event ever in terms of the proportion of the population…

While the East Timor gathering stands out, experts caution against relying on crowd counts that cannot be independently verified. The Vatican communicates crowd estimates that come from local organizers — who have an interest in overestimating the popularity of the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Crowd counting can be a tricky process. Does it get more difficult if it is a religious crowd as opposed to another kind of crowd?

More broadly, is the experience of a religious large crowd different? It is a unique experience to be crowds of hundreds of thousands of people or more. It does not happen often. The crowd can have a collective experience that is hard for individuals to have on their own. Such a crowd can help produce change or sentiment.

New mosque on 248th Avenue in Naperville almost complete after a long process

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There is an update on a case of zoning conflict in Naperville regarding a proposed mosque (see a 2019 journal article here and two blog posts here and here):

An aerial view of the property circa 2011 when originally purchased by the Islamic Center of Naperville.

Nearly two years after breaking ground, the first phase of the Islamic Center of Naperville’s mosque complex on 248th Avenue is nearly complete.

Phase one work — the construction of a 28,400-square-foot mosque — is set to finish in October, according to Islamic Center President Anees Rahman. As of mid-August, Rahman estimated the mosque was about 90% to 95% complete…

It took 15 meetings held over nine months for the proposed complex to receive a positive recommendation in October 2021 from the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission. The Naperville City Council unanimously OK’d the venture a month later — with a slate of restrictions.

Those included conditions aimed at addressing traffic, parking, fire safety and noise concerns raised by neighboring residents. As part of the approved plans, ICN agreed it would not proceed past phase two — a 41,749-square-foot school — until improvements to 248th Avenue are complete…

With traffic projections estimating the road will average 18,000 vehicles daily by 2050, the city is planning to widen 248th Avenue to five lanes between 95th and 103rd streets and to add storm sewers, curbs, gutters, street lighting, sidewalks and noise walls.

This sounds like a good outcome for the group and its members as the building will open soon. This provides space for worship and fellowship.

At the same time, this was a long process with a lot of public involvement. The property was originally owned by a church who did not build a church building on it. When it was sold to the Islamic Center of Naperville and they put forward plans, neighbors and others responded.

Given what I found in two studies (see more about the second one involving the New York City area) regarding local zoning conflict and religious buildings, proposals from Muslim groups receive more scrutiny. This particular building is almost complete but what are the consequences of longer processes and more questions compared to what others face?