Tag Archives: evangelicals

The suburban dimension to “The Christian Women Who Power the American Right”

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Sociologist Katie Gaddini argues in Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right that conservative women in the suburbs helped Donald Trump become president twice. Here is how she describes “the white suburbanites” (the title for Chapter 6 in the book):

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The debate Rebekah had with her Bible study group exemplifies how American suburbia has emerged as a political battleground for the Left and Right. Poised between the Republican-dominated rural areas and the Democratic stronghold of many American cities, the suburbs have been up for grabs since the Republicans lost their dominance there in the 1990s. The partisan nature of suburbia means that when political polarization ripples across the nation, it often feels acute there. This heightened sense of division was especially pronounced during the peak of the pandemic. (136)

But that’s where the commonality between my story and that of the women I researched ends. I moved to Boston in 2008 and continued to hop from one city to another over the next fifteen years: from Boston to Johannesburg to San Francisco, Madrid, London, and then, finally, returning to the American suburban sprawl of my childhood. Along the way, I left evangelicalism, and the Republican party. Meeting women like Rebekah, around my age, who shared a similar background, help up a mirror of what my life might have looked like if i had never left. Maybe I, too, would have taken up the mantle alongside other White middle-class Christian women to defend the suburbs from outsiders. (139)

“I wept when I heard him say that he would protect us,” a wealthy Christian suburban woman told me after hearing Trump at a rally in Coachella, a city in California. Among the diverse groups of people who brought Trump back to the White House in 2024, White Christian suburban women were some of his most enthusiastic supporters. His message of preserving the version of suburbia they knew and loved resonated with them. A solid 60 percent voted for him, Rebekah and Aimee included. (150)

In this sense, Trump endorses suburban women’s role. When he vows to protect the suburbs through strict immigration and housing policies, he is promising to maintain the racial and class homogeneity that has long defined American suburbia. His message validates White Christian women’s decision to live there, framing it as a moral reward. (154)

When Americans started moving to the suburbs in large numbers, first at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s and then more so in the postwar era, commentators expected the suburbs to be conservative. These were suburban residents with means, homeowners, people who emphasized family life away from the big city. (This addressed broader patterns but did not consider the broad range of people and communities across suburbia).

As Gaddini notes, the suburbs have changed as they are more diverse now in terms of race and ethnicity, social class, and religion. This has intersected with politics as plenty of suburbanites vote for Democrats and some suburban communities pursue what might be perceived as more liberal policies.

By considering gender among conservative voters, this book contributes to understanding the American suburbs. Gaddini argues conservative suburban women saw their suburban life and communities as under threat, whether from political liberals and their policies or responses to the pandemic or discussions and actions related to race. The suburban communities to which they had moved – and they would often see as having done so by their own efforts – could decline and they did not want to see this happen. They wanted to hear a national leader push back and say that the idealized suburban life would be defended.

What happens to these more conservative suburban pockets and communities will be interesting to see in coming years. Part of the history of the American suburbs includes exclusion and this will likely continue by a variety of means, including by politics and religion.

I went to the local suburban megachurch satellite location (as many do)…

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I recently was in the suburbs of a major city on a Sunday morning and looking for somewhere to go to church. I used this megachurch database, searched a few congregational websites, and ended up in a satellite congregation. It was a newer building amid newer subdivisions and green spaces. The local pastor and band led worship: there were lights, fog, and people moving to the worship music. The sermon came from the home church with a charismatic pastor who shared from personal experience and a number of Bible passages on how to counter social and cultural pressures and instead follow God. People were friendly. I could text to give or to ask for more information.

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Even as the median congregation size in the United States is around 70, there are many satellite church locations in the United States. Researcher Warren Bird recently shared this:

The congregation I went to was part of the 416 mentioned above: numerous campuses scattered throughout a portion of a metropolitan region. In the service, they shared Easter Sunday figures across their locations. They had big crowds – possibly several multiples of normal Sunday attendance – and a number of baptisms. They want to reach their communities for Jesus. There are regular connections to a main campus but also a good amount going on at each satellite.

It is helpful to keep this in mind when considering the large number of evangelicals or conservative Protestants in the United States. Some of those folks go to small congregations. Others go to big churches or to satellites of those big churches who have lots of attendees, lots of programs, and numerous locations throughout regions. The big church with satellites is not the only model of congregational life but it is a popular and visible one.

Will there be another Colorado Springs/”Jesus Springs”?

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In recently reading Jesus Springs by historian William J. Schultz, I was reminded of the social factors that contributed to the city becoming an evangelical center by the 1990s. As Ben Norquist and I found about Colorado Springs and several other evangelical centers in Chapter 6 of Sanctifying Suburbia, these centers could come together over time – and the evangelical center could change over time. For example, some of the evangelical organizations that ended up in Colorado Springs came from other places with lots of evangelical organizations like Wheaton and the suburbs east of Los Angeles.

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Since multiple evangelical clusters have arisen, will another place become the Colorado Springs of the 2030s? Could a similar process happen in another location?

There are several ways to think about this. What places now have conditions that evangelical organizations would find favorable? Perhaps it is a particular political climate or an influential local evangelical institution or an offer for land or a building.

Or what might occur in Colorado Springs that would prompt organizations to leave for somewhere else? A new evangelical center could emerge from organizations leaving a place they no longer consider hospitable.

Or maybe this is about whether physical proximity matters as much in today’s world. Technology enables organizations to be located all over or employees to be located all over. Will organizations continue to value a possible face-to-face interaction and synergy with like-minded people and organizations?

Or this might be connected to broader religious patterns. What happens to the number of evangelical Americans in the coming years and what effect does this have on evangelical organizations?

A lot would have to happen for another a Colorado Springs like place to emerge as an evangelical center.

The suburban contexts of James Dobson and Focus on the Family

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In reading multiple obituaries upon the passing of Dr. James Dobson, I was interested to read about where he lived and where his ministry operated. In my book Sanctifying Suburbia, I examine how evangelicals embraced the suburbs, and I discussed in Chapter 6 two of the evangelical centers where Dobson spent much of his adult life: the suburbs east of Los Angeles and Colorado Springs, Colorado. But his suburban experiences also predated the professional career for which he became know. Here is what the New York Times reported:

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James Clayton Dobson Jr. was born in Shreveport, La., on April 21, 1936, the only child of James and Myrtle (Dillingham) Dobson.

He was the son, grandson and great-grandson of Church of the Nazarene ministers. The family avoided dancing and movies. His father, who never attended college, was a traveling evangelist, primarily in the Southwest, and young James lived mostly with his mother in Bethany, Okla., and graduated from San Benito High School, in San Benito, Texas, in 1954.

He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1958 from Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University) and a master’s degree in 1962 from the University of Southern California.

In 1960, he married his college sweetheart, Shirley Deere. She survives him, as do his son; a daughter, Danae Dobson; and two grandchildren.

After four years as a teacher and counselor at high schools in Hacienda Heights and Covina, Calif., he earned a doctorate in child development in 1967 from U.S.C. He was then on the faculty of the Keck School of Medicine for 14 years and simultaneously on the staff of Children’s Hospital.

Looking more closely at these early locations shows some connections to suburbs. Shreveport is a small big city with over 76,000 residents in 1930. Bethany is a suburb west of Oklahoma City created by Nazarene founders that grew from 485 residents in 1920 to 22,694 residents in 1970. San Benito is a small community within the Browsnville-Harlingen-Raymondville combined statistical area today that is not far from the Mexico border. It had between roughly between 13,000 and 16,000 residents in the 1950s while Brownsville at that point had between 35,000 and 48,000 residents.

Dobson went to college at Pasadena College. This college started as Pacific Bible College in Los Angeles. In 1909 it moved to purchased land in Pasadena, a suburb east of Los Angeles. When Dobson was in college, the suburb was finishing a growth spurt: it had grown from 9,117 residents in 1900 to 116,407 residents in 1960. In the early 1980s, a proposed move of Pasadena College to Santa Ana, another suburb southeast of Los Angeles in Orange County, failed and the college occupied a former college campus in San Diego (and became known as Point Loma).

His first jobs involved teaching in two suburbs east of Los Angeles. Hacienda Heights is an unincorporated community that had 35,969 residents in 1970. Covina is also in the San Gabriel Valley and its population exploded in the postwar era, expanding from 3,956 residents in 1950 to 30,395 in 1970.

Without closer study, it is hard to know exactly how these suburban experiences shaped Dobson’s views and work. But going to school and starting work in a hotbed of growing evangelicalism in the post war era – suburban Los Angeles – plus his own experiences in small communities outside bigger cities echo broader evangelical patterns. Emphasizing nuclear family life and conservative political values also aligns with reasons evangelicals could embrace suburban life.

Sanctifying Suburbia reviewed in Christianity Today

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My book published in early 2025, Sanctifying Suburbia: How the Suburbs Became the Promised Land for American Evangelicals, was just reviewed in Christianity Today. I found two quotes from the review helpful for summing up the argument of the book and its implications. From earlier in the review:

In light of all this, it would be surprising if suburban sensibilities have not shaped evangelical faith and practice. As Miller argues, “It is not enough for researchers and pundits to consider the theological positions and political behavior of evangelicals; accounting for their spatial context is part and parcel to understanding the whole package of white evangelicalism” (italics mine).

And from a later part of the review:

Miller’s point is that the evangelical cultural toolkit appears to have been calibrated by patterns, experiences, and commitments common to suburban life. He’s careful to avoid claiming a direct, causal relationship between suburban norms and prevailing traits among evangelicals. But he makes a compelling case for drawing arrows of motive, means, and opportunity.

It should be easy enough to accept a narrower version of Miller’s thesis that suburban evangelicalism is “formed in regular moments in daily life and in interaction with the social and physical realities of the American suburbs.” It will be harder for many to accept that American evangelicalism in general is essentially suburban in its values and sensibilities…

In the aggregate, as Miller sees it, these institutions take a fundamentally suburban vision and prescribe it as an objectively Christian vision that can guide evangelical faith and practice in any environment. This doesn’t feel like a stretch to me. My own ministry experience and professional work has primarily involved churches in rural and urban environments. Pastors in both places frequently lament that the resources they rely on are clearly tuned to social realities outside their own. It’s fair to say, at minimum, that suburban sensibilities dominate American ministry materials.

Thanks to the magazine and Brandon O’Brien for reviewing the book.

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.

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.

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.

Evangelicals and when the “postmodern” and “urban” came to the American suburbs

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A reflection on pastor and author Tim Keller’s life includes this line involving distinctions between American places:

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His insights hit a nerve at a time when evangelicals were realizing that “postmodern” and “urban” challenges—religious diversity, isolation, transience—were becoming common in rural and suburban contexts as well.

In the American context, suburbs often served as a refuge from perceived problems of the city. Religious diversity in cities involved all sorts of religious traditions as people flocked to cities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Even with the number of people in cities, Americans often celebrated an ideal of families living in suburban single-family homes rather than feeling atomized in large cities. Whereas people moved in and out of cities and urban neighborhoods, Americans often perceived suburbs as built around family and children, neighbors, and community groups.

How might we evaluate these features separating places? It is hard to discuss religious diversity without addressing race and ethnicity. As suburbs often excluded people who were not white, religious diversity was limited. Suburbs are increasingly diverse in terms of race and ethnicity and social class. Regarding isolation, plenty of narratives have been shared and told where individuals found the suburbs to be isolating. Compared to suburbs, cities offer opportunities for exploration and finding a place among other similar people. The suburbs may have celebrated certain social relationships but they were also quite transient for decades in the postwar era as people took advantage of opportunities.

If the lines between cities, suburbs, and rural areas are now more blurred, are evangelicals better equipped to address a changing world? How might they address complex suburbia?