Mending the Christian Imagination: Place, Race, and Calling in ChristianHigher Education

y the middle of spring semester, talk with graduating seniors in my department often include the question: what will you be doing next year? That question reflects the fact that a career is an important aspect of vocation. American Christians often pray about questions of calling such as what work they will do, or who they will marry. But too often American Christians do not ask the question of where they will live out their callings, nor do they pay attention to how they live in the places to which God has called them. As pastor Eugene Peterson observed, “cultivating a sense of place as the exclusive and irreplaceable setting for following Jesus is even more difficult than persuading men and women of the truth of the message of Jesus.”¹ Failure to cultivate a sense of place is detrimental to the lives of individuals and the church, perhaps most significantly in that it continues a blindness to and perpetuation of a mangled Christian imagination, plagued by individuals’ isolation and, at the group level, racial separation and racial hierarchies.²

Places are created by the interactions between humans and their locations, and the relationships between people. Places’ contemporary manifestations are shaped by previous generations’ interactions; their history matters profoundly. Places are also cultural and social, held together by contemporary dynamics that give them meaning. Places shape people, whether they are aware of it or not. In turn, people shape places. Too often, people neglect places, viewing them as commodities to be consumed rather than shaping places for the common good. But places matter profoundly to God and, therefore, ought to matter to Christians. They are not commodities, but creation, and they are meant to be cared for. They are also where people meet God.

For many, questions of place do not intuitively connect to questions of vocation because they hold too limited a definition of vocation that equates it with career. A person’s vocation, however, includes all of whom that person is and everything that person does. Most fundamentally, vocation is Jesus’s call to be his disciples, empowered by the Holy Spirit for the Father’s glory.³ In the past few decades, supported by grants from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. and others, members of Christian colleges and universities have been working to help students find the freedom that comes when thinking expansively about vocation⁴ Nonetheless, there is more work to be done. We need to help students attend more fully to the role of place in their sense of calling, and to do so with knowledge of the history of the places where they live. Filling this gap will help students and the church in multiple ways.

First, it can help us recognize our boundedness as human beings. With the increasing hegemony of social media and video games and the resulting anxiety shaping this current generation, helping students care for and engage with the places where they live can push back against the alienation and disconnection that comes from moving our lives online.⁵ We live out our vocations in particular places and at a particular time; we cannot transcend these limitations.⁶ Consciously living within those limitations and attending to all that makes up a place is good for our well-­being.

Second, attending to place can help Christians live out the ontological reality that Jesus won for us on the cross: living together as members of the body of Christ. While many things divide us, race in America is a foundational, though unstable, division that has crippled the church’s witness in the world. Theologian Willie Jennings has demonstrated how the development of racial ideas and practices in western theology have, in the words of Jennings, mangled the Christian imagination by leading western Christians to a faith that separates people living in proximity, rather than uniting them.⁷ While Jennings approaches the question through a big-­picture lens, I want to help us zoom into the effects of that mangled imagination on the landscape of recent American history, a history that we have inherited and that has shaped the places where we live.

The problem of the twentieth century, W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1903, is the problem of the color line.⁸ DuBois was a prophet in many ways, and in this case his assessment proved to be true, and it has continued into this century. The history of American cities, suburbs, and rural places is one largely of segregation. This separation has been costly both to white people and, perhaps more, to people of color, and is the lynchpin to the racial inequalities in education and wealth in metropolitan regions. This history has shaped our students—often without their knowledge—and it has shaped our institutions. But college can be a time to equip students to repair and restore the broken places in the United States as part of their vocation.

That equipping requires, first, right knowledge. In what follows, I want to offer two historical narratives. History requires specificity, and these two stories are specific to my own place (now in a suburb of Chicago) and reflect my own grappling with the history of my place. But they also illustrate larger patterns and can model a historical reckoning with your place, a reckoning that can be helpful to walk students through. In the first narrative, I situate white evangelicalism within the histories of Chicago and its suburbs and demonstrate how evangelicals contributed to racial hierarchies and segregation. In the second narrative, I consider another resource within the evangelical tradition: the interracial Christian Community Development Organization (CCDA), which contrasted most aspects of Americans’ housing practices in the postwar United States. These two stories are focused on the dynamics between Black and white Americans, and, as is the nature of history, cannot address all the complicated dynamics of race and Christianity in America. Nonetheless, together these two histories can reveal as constructed what seems natural, and thus not worthy of much consideration: that American neighborhoods are segregated along race and class lines. They also show the dynamics we will have to address if we want to teach our students how to care for places as part of their vocations. I want to foster disenchantment with contemporary implicit narratives that (1) people ought to live in the nicest place one can afford with the most “desirable” neighbors and (2) that people can afford to be disconnected from their place⁹

Students need not only right knowledge, but also practice applying that knowledge rightly, which is wisdom. To that end, I offer six frames Christian colleges and universities can use to help students learn how to care for places, even during a season of students’ lives that is often inherently uprooted. They are the CCDA’s three practices of relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution, alongside three others I have synthesized from my reading of literature on the theology of place: rooting, reducing, and restraining. These practices, with an awareness of how our faith and our places have been shaped by generations of Christians before us, can help our students to think better about where we live and how we live there as an aspect of vocation. Re-­placing vocation, in light of the history of Christians’ lack of attention to place, is essential to joining God fully in God’s work in the world.

Big Picture Theological and Intellectual Concepts Contributing to Placelessness

Western Christian theology’s dominant streams do not help us interpret our loss of a sense of place very well, likely because they have been shaped by this loss. Some of the larger theological and intellectual frames that have shaped western Christianity in the last five hundred years offer helpful context for the more specific history of place and American Christianity I will offer below. These frames are sweeping and a historical lens would complicate them by noting the abounding exceptions. Nonetheless, they can help us see the subtexts of Western Christianity, assumptions that undergird how we view the world, which we rarely stop to consider.

Theologian Oliver O’Donovan offers three reasons why western Christian thought is plagued by placelessness.¹⁰ First, western Christians are deeply influenced by the Platonic tradition, and we extend its emphasis on our spirits as transcending spatial restraints to our whole selves transcending local relations. Second, he notes that Christians prioritize God’s universal love, emphasizing, with Paul, that the mystery of Christ is that the Gospel was made available not only to the Jews but also to the Gentiles. The thrust of Christianity as we practice it is toward the universal. Therefore, when we read what the Bible says about the land in the Old Testament, we read assuming, as the author of Hebrews emphasizes, that the promises of the Old Testament were transitory promises, intended to point to something that transcends the particularity. But we distort the frame Hebrews, within the whole testimony of Scripture, allows for by assuming that specific places no longer matter.

Third, thinking of land as a commodity leads to alienation from the land. O’Donovan argues that we are deeply influenced by Adam Smith’s eighteenth-­century argument that land is an industrial commodity. Smith observed that the price of a commodity includes profit, wages, and rent. Rent is the cost of the land. Smith’s conception of land as a commodity built on the understanding of land as privatized that European cultures held.

Conceptualizing the land as something that individuals can own is a historical phenomenon; it is not a universal idea. In what is now the United States, Native peoples, more fully prior to contact, understood themselves as belonging to the land rather than owning land.¹¹ To speak of selling or buying land was, for Native people, nonsensical. Further, their identity was (and continues to be) based primarily on where they lived and how they related to the land.¹² This dynamic, for instance, played out in Chicago in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then, the Chicago region was Indian Country, a borderland in which people from different cultural backgrounds who built vast trade and kinship networks mixed culturally. The Chicago area included the ancestral homelands of several tribal nations including the Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Ho-­Chunk, Sauk, and Meskwaki nations.¹³ These native peoples lived with and traded with European peoples from French and British backgrounds, who did not always hold allegiance to the United States after 1776. Those who led native villages and negotiated treaties were not always from the majority tribe, nor were they always the offspring of only native people.¹⁴ In Indian Country, proximity and connection to the land mattered for community and identity, rather than their racialized identities.

The locus of identity in a body rather than the land has contributed to what theologian Willie Jennings has called Western Christianity’s “mangled imagination,” as a racialized way of viewing people became a part of western Christianity. Jennings traces these detrimental effects on Western Christianity to the period of European colonization starting in the 15th century. As Europeans encountered people from what is now Africa and South America, they developed, in fits and starts, a racial hierarchy that categorized those who were white (Europeans) as superior to those who were black (native people they encountered, no matter where they lived). Therefore, even though Europeans and native people were inhabiting the same places and though they may (eventually) have shared the same faith, their racial identities kept them from true fellowship with one another and enabled terrible conditions of forced labor. Jennings argues these racial assumptions embedded in Western Christianity prevent not only the joining of people, one to another, but also enable western Christians to imagine they can transcend their creatureliness and their necessary connection to particular places.¹⁵

Despite this mangled imagination, we do have theological resources to help us recover a sense of place. O’Donovan argues that Scripture testifies to the importance of attending to particular places. He says that the tradition of local rootedness which characterized the faith of the Israelites can illuminate the universal faith and ethics of Christianity precisely because it was through the specific that God revealed himself. As O’Donovan shows, the transitory promises of the Old Testament have more than historical value. Christian faith is paradoxical and full of both/ands. We must not dispense with the apophatic tradition (which argues for what is by saying what is not) present in Hebrews that shows that the old covenant is transitory and was fulfilled in the New Covenant. But, like O’Donovan, we can draw from a cataphatic tradition that understands knowledge of God through affirmation. Seeking to understand the Hebrew people’s relationship to the land can help us know divine purpose because Israel understood their obedience to God’s laws as being lived out in the land, in local contexts. For instance, Abraham learned about heaven through his earthly fatherland. As O’Donovan writes, “if the bond between” the patriarchs “and their land was but the shadow cast by good things to come, how much more seriously must we take the natural allegiances across which such a shadow fell!”¹⁶

Attending to Israel’s relationship to the land is necessary, too, for understanding New Testament commands that draw on the Hebrew Scriptures. When we consider the universal call to love our neighbor as ourselves, which Jesus said constitute the greatest commandments, we must situate that command in its context. It comes from the holiness code, which is assumed to be local and placed in the land. In the New Testament, too, although the call to love is universal, it is lived out in the particular. The good Samaritan helped his neighbor on the road and was caring for his proximate neighbor. Universal love can only be received—and given—in the particular. Abraham knew about heaven because of what God showed him on earth; the same can be true of us.

Naming these subtexts in western Christianity and intellectual history allows us to see the frameworks undergirding the very mundane history of housing. But we are not without hope, and O’Donovan’s and Jennings’s calls to restore a sense of place and in doing so, grow in our love of our neighbors, provides a theological underpinning for the practices I describe below.

Practicing Place in the United States: The Construction of Segregated Neighborhoods

Many white American evangelicals not only fail to account for place, they think of where people live in the United States as shaped by free choice, a decision made voluntarily and unstructured by systemic forces. Many considerations go into a person’s decision about where to live, such as job locations, proximity to activities, church community, neighborhood of origin, quality of schools, community “feel,” and where friends and family are living. These factors can be amoral, but they operate in a larger system marked by racial segregation, and understanding those systems can help divest them of their hidden power in our lives. Christians must recognize that the elements they consider when choosing where to live are part of structures riddled with sin, and that they are not absolved from responsibility for that sin because structural forces not of their own making are at play. To understand those structures requires knowing their history.

While each city and suburb has its own particular story, there are common themes in the history of housing and race in the United States. The development of the Chicago region’s racial segregation works as a case study because it was a major destination for African Americans during the Great Migration, and because of how extensive segregation is in the area today.¹⁷ Chicagoland became so segregated not simply because of individual choice and impersonal markets. White people’s violence, governmental policies, and broader structures of discrimination embedded in the market that benefited white investors and catered to whites’ racial preferences also contributed.

In the 1910s, Black southerners began moving to northern cities, including Chicago, and they found their residential options limited by white people. They were drawn by the prospect of jobs in these industrializing regions and pushed by the violence of the Jim Crow South. They came to cities full of immigrants and their children, who constituted nearly 80 percent of Chicago’s inhabitants by 1890. In 1910, right before African Americans’ mass movement away from the South, only two percent of the city’s population was African American and Black Chicagoans were actually more residentially integrated than Italians.¹⁸ But quickly, white northerners, including Christians, instituted Jim Crow in their housing to keep new Black residents in a bounded—if expanding—geographical area.¹⁹ This process was all the more insidious because, although many of the policies were racially biased, they had the appearance of sound economics.

Violence was one strategy white residents used to resist Black neighbors. When Black families moved into a white neighborhood, they were often greeted with arson and mobs of angry whites. If one were to read Chicago’s white newspapers, one would see little evidence of this racial violence because the white press agreed to the city government’s request not to cover cases of racial violence in an attempt to keep “outsiders” from amplifying it.²⁰

A second strategy was racially restrictive covenants. Common by the 1920s, they forbade homeowners and landlords to sell and rent to minorities, most often African Americans. In practice, they failed to keep property out of Black families’ hands, and when the Supreme Court declared them unenforceable in 1948, the dual housing market created by the government-­influenced mortgage industry was the prime driver for segregation.

By the 1930s, the federal government and then private banks helped create and maintain segregated communities. These two sets of actors may have made the most significant contributions. Two New Deal-­created institutions, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) developed policies that helped sustain segregated housing. Trying to make “safe” loans during the Depression, the HOLC developed a series of secret maps that indicated the “productive life” of the housing it appraised. A green designation indicated a safe loan because the neighborhood was homogenous, new, and would be in demand no matter the market. A blue designation was still desirable and stable but had reached its peak. A yellow area was “definitely declining,” and loans there would be riskier, while a red area indicated the riskiest loan because the neighborhood had already declined. Assuming that the natural state of neighborhoods was to decline, and that African Americans contributed to decline, HOLC officials gave areas with Black residents a red designation, no matter the housing stock’s quality. This was red lining.

Of course, the story is complicated. The HOLC did issue mortgage assistance in yellow and red areas, and the homeowners there were actually more likely to pay back those mortgages than those in green or blue districts. Nonetheless, by creating the maps, the HOLC built on a long tradition of racial assumptions in appraisals that universities had endorsed and systematized discriminatory appraisal methods. When private banks accessed and used the maps, they magnified the racial logic. The HOLC’s real damage, then, was due to private banks’ decisions to not make loans in red or yellow areas, and the FHA’s adoption of the appraisal methods and likely the maps.²¹ The FHA applied the HOLC’s logic on a vaster level and discriminated against African Americans and lower income people more generally in its lending practices. When it refused to insure homes in declining industrial areas, it caused them to stand vacant for months, contributing to even greater declines in quality and values for those areas.

By the late 1940s, the federal government’s policies directly financed middle-­class, white Americans’ move to the suburbs, and thus their wealth accumulation. After World War II, the G. I. Bill created the Veterans Administration (VA), which offered low-­interest loans with no down payment and favored new construction. During the 1950s and 1960s, the FHA and VA financed nearly half of suburban mortgages.²² Technically, Black veterans could earn the same benefits as white veterans, but it was much harder for them to purchase a home in the suburbs. They could not get mortgages because of red-­lining policies.²³ In addition, the federal government built the highway system as a Cold War defense, which also benefitted new suburbanites.²⁴

Despite these behind-­the-­scenes factors limiting Black families’ housing options and expanding the possibilities for white families, Black families continued to want to move to quieter, less crowded, and healthier neighborhoods. In Chicago, the “Black Belt,” where most Black residents lived, was overcrowded and overpriced, and during the suburbanization boom it expanded. Because of limited supply and massive demand, African Americans paid more money for worse housing. White landlords illegally subdivided properties into profitable “kitchenettes” and let them slide into disrepair despite efforts by Black advocates to make landlords meet housing codes. Fires frequently burned apartments, tuberculosis ran rampant, and mothers feared that rats would bite their children as they slept. The situation was all the more complicated by the fact that some of the “slumlords” were Black or were white people who genuinely wanted to maintain the apartments they owned but found that cost-­prohibitive red-­lining dried up mortgage loans in Black or interracial neighborhoods.²⁵

Cut out of the legitimate mortgage market, during the 1950s and 1960s building boom, many middle-­class Black families bought homes on contract in an exploitative secondary market. A white speculator would buy a property in a neighborhood and then sell it “on contract” to a Black family for two to four times the cost. The contract terms often stated that if the Black homeowner missed one payment, the property’s ownership would immediately revert to the contract’s owner. Faced with the prospect of losing the house, paying two to four times the value of the home, and working jobs that paid less because of employment discrimination, Black families often took in borders and put off repairs to make their contract payments. Some succeeded in keeping their homes, but many failed. The speculator would then turn around and sell the property to another unsuspecting family.

Speculators, however, were not the only ones implicated in contract buying. They often resold the mortgages to a broader market, and many white civic, business, and social leaders—many, even, who affirmed racial justice—owned stock in what was known as contract paper.²⁶ Only during the civil rights movement in the mid-­1960s, after three decades of these policies and practices, did activists make the connections between red-­lining, disinvestment in urban communities, and those communities’ subsequent decline. In sum, the segregation that characterized American housing by the 1960s did not just “happen” because of a neutral housing market and individual decisions.

Perverting the Place of the Church: Evangelicals and Segregation

This big-­picture narrative of United States housing practice and policy is the context within which white evangelicals bought, sold, and lived in houses. Few in these time periods would have been aware of how these systems were intersecting to shape their housing decisions and expectations, in part because the mechanisms of segregation were not always obvious, and it has only been in retrospect that historians, activists, and other scholars have pieced together the various factors. Most white evangelicals living in the suburbs after World War II argued that housing was about individual preference, though many knew the pain of feeling forced to leave a neighborhood that was changing racially. Their homogenous context, theology that prioritized individual choice, and particular history contributed to their inability to see the structural forces shaping America’s racial geographies.²⁷

Like their mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish counterparts, white evangelicals left cities after World War II. Contrary to popular conceptions, the phrase “white flight” does not accurately describe the complicated, and often varying, nature of what happened.²⁸ White evangelicals had strong attachments to their neighborhoods, but when they did move, the rate of change was astonishing. Churches with more congregational autonomy made the move more easily than their counterparts that were part of stronger denominational structures.²⁹ Like white people more generally, the church communities evangelicals built in the suburbs were largely homogenous, reflecting both the demographics of their locations as well as their implicit theologies about what Christian life ought to look like. Many white suburban evangelical churches prioritized building friendships within the church’s walls and fostered an insular culture that favored the nuclear family.³⁰ While they often maintained a missional perspective, they prioritized missions abroad over the concerns of their brothers and sisters living just miles away in the city. They were living into a universalizing conception of love of neighbor, rather than a more particular one that accounted for proximity.

As white evangelicals built new suburban churches, Black and white civil rights activists, many of whom were Christians, worked for open housing legislation.³¹ They drew on a long tradition within American Christianity that argued that integration and (sometimes, depending on the time period) racial equality were fundamentally Christian. During the early 1960s at the state level, Black activists and a minority of white mainline partners worked for an open housing bill. They wanted to prohibit discrimination in housing according to race, creed, color, national origin, and ancestry.³² Open-­housing supporters argued that their position matched Judeo-­Christian values.³³

Many white evangelicals, however, disagreed with the open housing movement’s goals. The Illinois Association of Real Estate Boards (IAREB) coordinated religious opposition. White evangelical ministers working with the board called the proposed legislation “forced housing,” and insisted that “we don’t doubt the words of Him who said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ but we do doubt, gentlemen, that He meant to disturb our American heritage and freedoms by picking these neighbors for us.” They opposed what they called the “element of force embodied in so-­called open occupancy legislation,” because it destroyed individual, civil, and religious liberty and understood individual liberty to be the “distinguishing characteristic of Christianity.”³⁴ In their minds, open housing would hinder religious liberty because it destroyed their right of voluntary association, and it would only be a matter of time before, “the liberal, ecumenical movement” would force religious organizations to open their doors to anyone. Open housing, they argued, prevented the individual Christian from, “a free exercise of his conscience and his religion” when determining to whom to sell his home.³⁵

White evangelicals also disagreed that integration, even if chosen, was a necessary part of faithful Christian practice. Drawing on the arguments Christian segregationists (and before that white Christian slaveholders) in the South were making, they argued that “for 3,500 years, prior to this century, neither Judaism nor historical Christianity, has ever held that integration of the White, Black, or Yellow races in social life was necessary to obey God or comply with the teachings of the Bible.”³⁷

They also connected the government’s increasing incursion in their everyday life, which had grown significantly through civil rights and Great Society legislation, with the end times. They argued that the bill would help, “set the stage for the totalitarian government forecast in the Bible,” and bring the premillennial tribulation (which they did not want) more quickly. ³⁸From their perspective, the federal government was forcing their hand by dictating that they must sell their homes to all financially qualified buyers. But, like most people in their context without knowledge about the history of housing, they failed to see that the very same expanding government had dealt them their hand by helping finance the white suburbs.

In the end, the debate over open housing legislation in Illinois became a moot point when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which included a fair housing provision. In 1974, Congress passed the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which required banks to make their lending practices accessible, and in 1977 Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, which mandated that banks invest in under-­resourced communities. Both acts were influenced by the work of those Black and white Catholics, Black Protestants, and mainline white Protestants who had been advocating for open housing.³⁹ In subsequent decades, minorities who could afford to often moved to the suburbs, leaving behind the poor in inner cities. Their decisions led to a new urban poverty, in which many people living in inner-­city communities either dropped out of the formal labor force or were unemployed.⁴⁰

But while open housing legally opened white neighborhoods to minorities, America continues to be marked by a racial and economic geography that is divided by neighborhood, even as more people of color move to suburbs. In Chicago, 1970 was the height of black/white segregation. Since then, the index of residential segregation has fallen, particularly in the suburbs. In 2016, the index of residential segregation in Chicago was 79, which indicated high residential segregation, but in the surrounding counties, the number was lower.⁴¹ Nonetheless, segregation has not declined at the rate one might expect, and it has profound impacts in many spheres, including wealth acquisition.

The reasons for this continued segregation are myriad. They include a lack of generational wealth among potential homeowners because of previous discrimination, white people’s racial preferences, and the influence of people’s social networks on their housing choices. Whites are the choosiest racial group, and while they report that they want to live in diverse neighborhoods, they search for housing in neighborhoods where current residents match their own race and are less inclined to live in a neighborhood as the percentage of Latinos and African Americans increases.⁴² Sociologists have found that Latinos and African Americans also want to live in diverse neighborhoods, but their definition of diversity is more expansive. They assume a diverse neighborhood would have half to three quarters of the people from different racial backgrounds, while white people prefer less than twenty percent from different racial backgrounds. Social networks and perceptions of neighborhoods also contribute to continuing segregation. As two scholars put it, “segregation begets segregation,” in part because people who have grown up in segregated neighborhoods and attended segregated churches and schools rely on their segregated social networks to help them determine suitable neighborhoods in which to look for a house.⁴³

For the most part, evangelical Christians have been no different from the broader trend among whites. Most white evangelicals and Black evangelicals live in communities with others of their own race and class.⁴⁴ In short, evangelicals from different racial and ethnic backgrounds are unlikely to live by each other.

The High Costs of Segregation

What have been the consequences of this history? Most foundationally, the segregation has prevented people from being in community with their neighbors who are different from them. While people certainly flourish in communities with those similar to them, there are at least two negative consequences we must consider. First, homogeneity in local bodies of Christ too easily leads to “cultural captivity.”⁴⁵ When we are always with people like ourselves, it is harder to discern our blind spots and to experience the fullness of the Body of Christ. Scholars and Christians from various racial backgrounds have argued that white evangelicals are—often unknowingly—bound by a culture of individualism, consumerism, materialism, and racism.⁴⁶ These bonds are often invisible because they are embedded in American culture, and because they have become a part of the American church. But they prevent the full flourishing of Christians from all racial backgrounds and set us on a path that leads toward isolation from God and others. People of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, however, can be released from bondage through fellowship in the Body of Christ, in all its diversity.

Crossing racial and class barriers can strengthen the church. I (a white evangelical from Chicago’s northern suburbs) had this experience when living in a lower-­class Black Chicago neighborhood and attending Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church, a local interracial church. The majority of our congregation lived in the surrounding community and endured the hardships so common there. Through their witness, I learned different lessons than I had growing up in my “safe” neighborhood where people could be independent because they had the financial means. I learned what it meant to trust God on a daily basis to provide for financial needs and to share resources. In a neighborhood with higher violent crime rates, I learned what it meant to trust God for personal safety and to walk in the power of the Holy Spirit as I traversed my neighborhood’s streets. Our church was a part of the Black church tradition, and very sensitive to the Spirit’s movement. I learned, therefore, that church was not about me and my schedule (in my background, church was a maximum of one and a half hours), but about the movement of God in the body. I learned a grace-­filled way to talk about race and to submit to others’ cultural norms, while appreciating my own background. Because I was present in the community, I learned to see beauty in people and places most white evangelical Christians would miss or dismiss, from the way a neighbor who used drugs also faithfully tended the community garden, to the deep loyalty extended families held for each other as aunts and grandmothers cared for their sisters’ and daughters’ children. While I still can grow in all the ways I described, in that place, I grew in Christ’s likeness and saw God.⁴⁷

I also brought my gifts and knowledge of God there, strengthening the neighborhood and church. My husband and I, both with seminary and education training, taught a new believers’ class, helping new Christians see the broad strokes of Christ’s kingdom. We opened our home to teenagers raised in the church. We brought our social capital to the community, connecting specialists with the neighborhood school where my husband taught. The exchange between people from the different backgrounds was mutual. Ultimately the church was strengthened and Jesus used the diversity of the body to expand his kingdom in the community. Reciprocity was a key aspect of this dynamic. I came to the community with elements of a white savior complex, but learned quickly that my neighbors could teach me a lot and help me.

Regular, true fellowship between rich and poor Christians, Black and white Christians, or minority and majority Christians is rare. Despite historical moments and seasons of physical proximity, this pattern has been consistent throughout the history of the United States and is pleasing to Satan and not to God. Crossing cultural boundaries challenges one of the most fundamental assumptions of American culture today: that we should be comfortable. We live in a society that allows us, even encourages us, to cater to our personal preferences. White Americans in particular have been able to dictate the terms of their comfort and are able to express that in their mobility.⁴⁸ Even in many of the less than ten percent of American churches that are more racially diverse, minorities must cater to the preference of white members to keep white members in the congregation.⁴⁹

But does God call us to comfort? Scripture is clear that our vocation includes taking up our cross and following Jesus. The cross in Jesus’s context was a symbol of death, and in taking up our cross, as with our baptism, we die to our control over our lives and our ideas of what is “good.” For this generation of college students, the assumption of comfort in terms of where people live plays into the moralistic therapeutic deism that characterizes young people’s faith.⁵⁰ Christian colleges and universities can help disrupt this narrative by offering a better way, the way of the cross. That way is intimately connected with place.

Second, people of color have born the costly burden of segregation. Housing segregation has benefitted white people and hurt people of color at the systemic level by creating wealth and other benefits for those living in white neighborhoods. One study showed that between 1980 and 2015, home values in white neighborhoods increased by nearly $200,000 more than home values in neighborhoods of color. The rate of change in the gap increased over time. This wealth creation for white homeowners is not earned and has contributed to a wealth gap of white people having a 20 to 1 advantage over Black and Hispanic people today, compared to the 10 to 1 advantage in the 1980s.⁵¹

For those living in poor communities, the consequences are even more dire.⁵² Research on the effects of economic and racial segregation overwhelmingly suggests negative consequences from cognitive growth to physical health, and full flourishing as humans is elusive for children raised in poverty. Certainly, personal choices also contribute to these negative effects, but the structures within which people make those choices are significant.⁵³

This injustice is structural and rarely personal, but Scripture is clear: God rebukes his people when they do not care for the poor among them and put their own comfort above that of their neighbor.⁵⁴ While not the only factor contributing to this structural sin, white evangelicals’ embodiment of the upward mobility/comfort narrative has contributed. Because middle-­ and upper-­class (often white) evangelicals can live in more well-­off neighborhoods, they often do.

But there is another way. As Steve Garber argues in in his book on vocation, “in our own different ways we are responsible, for love’s sake, for the way the world is and ought to be. We are called to be common grace for the common good.”⁵⁵ We now turn to the history of the CCDA, with a focus on how its priorities can be helpful in disrupting the placelessness of white American evangelicalism for our students.

A Counter Cultural Story of Place and Vocation

Those who founded the CCDA in 1989 prioritized seeking the common good. Their history offers a second story about evangelical Christians and housing. Those associated with the CCDA share the same core theological commitments as most evangelical Christians: they emphasize the saving grace of God the Father through Jesus’s atoning death on the cross, the need for a personal relationship with Jesus, and the inerrancy of Scripture. But more like 19th century evangelicals than their twentieth and twenty-­first century contemporaries, they view an individual’s transformation by the power of the Holy Spirit as the starting point for seeking the good of particular (and often impoverished) places.⁵⁶ To understand the CCDA, we will look at John Perkins, who is widely known as the father of the CCDA’s philosophy of Christian community development.

Perkins’s story of being Jesus’s disciple is inseparable from where he lived; he knew his calling was tied to place. Perkins was born in Mississippi in 1930 and grew up under the oppression of the Jim Crow South. After his brother Clyde, a World War II veteran who stood up to white people in Mississippi, was killed by a white police officer, Perkins joined the mass of Black Southerners who left the South. His family feared that if he stayed, white men would kill him too. In California, Perkins married fellow Mississippian Vera Mae and found economic success. Their young son Spencer’s budding faith nurtured by a local church led Perkins to become a Christian. Life for them was good. They knew, of course, that although things were better in the North racially, it was not the racial Promised Land they had envisioned. The racial norms, attitudes, and structures developing in Chicago were also shaping the Los Angeles area.

Perkins soon believed God was calling his family to leave their relative comfort and to care for a particular place. He would later remember that he “couldn’t escape a conviction growing up inside of me that God wanted me back in Mississippi, to identify with my people there, and to help them break up the cycle of despair—not by encouraging them to leave, but by showing them new life right where they were.”⁵⁷ To move to Mississippi in 1960, a place where Black people who claimed their human dignity could be killed for getting out of place, would mean giving up what seemed to be a good life. Like many who follow this path, well-­meaning friends discouraged the Perkins family. Vera Mae did not want to move, but she submitted to God’s call. Where the Perkins family lived was part of their vocation, and they identified with the people and the land of Mississippi.

Relocation, Reconciliation, and Redistribution:
Practices for Healing Christ’s Broken Body in Particular Places

In Mississippi, John and Vera Mae developed a philosophy of mission characterizing the CCDA that is based on where a person lives. Perkins’s and the CCDA’s theological reflections and practices offer countercultural arguments about place that can help Christians walk more faithfully in all aspects of their calling. By the 1970s, Perkins used the “3 R’s” of relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution to describe the core of Christian community development. These 3 R’s can help people live well in a place and can help us push against the lure of individualism and self-­sufficiency—our identities in our bodies alone, rather than the Body of Christ, embodied in particular contexts.

The first R, relocation, attends to where a person lives, and calls those who could choose not to, to live among those unable to move. The CCDA frame for relocation draws from Jesus’s incarnation, emphasizing that as Jesus emptied himself and lived among people, they too ought to do the same. Jesus, they quip, did not commute between earth and heaven. He made his home among people. Some, like Perkins, who grew up in a poor place may be “returners.” They may move home after going to college, countering the narrative that it is best to move up and out of poor neighborhoods. Others will choose to remain. Significantly, the relocation is not just for the benefit of those who cannot move; the relocators need the fellowship of those in the communities to which they move. As white CCDA leader Wayne Gordon has said, “relocation transforms ‘you, them, and theirs’ to ‘we, us, and ours.’”⁵⁸

Few Christian higher education institutions are located in impoverished places and so students attending our schools will not easily be participating in relocation. Christian colleges and universities should be clear about their particular histories and relationships with their communities and racial dynamics. Did a school’s board decide to leave the city during white flight? Does a school exist in a suburb that worked to keep people of color out?⁵⁹ We can help our students taste relocation through off-­campus opportunities that put them in positions of learning from and partnership with local churches in poor places. Developing partnerships with Christians in poor communities can help our students experience God and learn from brothers and sisters there. These experiences would help all students fulfill their vocation of loving God and loving neighbor.

Students who graduate and relocate will be faced with questions about their contributions to gentrification. Gentrification is the displacement of poor people when neighborhoods become more economically viable and desirable for middle-­ and upper-­class people. People and organizations affiliated with the CCDA have grappled with gentrification helpfully, and attending to the geographic specificity of gentrification sheds light on the complexity of gentrification but does not suggest that middle-­class people ought not relocate.

While many think of ‘urban pioneers’ as causing gentrification, studies have shown that state-­private partnerships are the main drivers.⁶⁰ CCDA organizations have prioritized looking for ways to help low-­income people remain in, or move to, their neighborhoods through private development and other market-­driven solutions. Advocacy around fair housing policy, like making it more difficult to demolish houses in low-­income neighborhoods, expecting new developments to have low-­income housing available, or freezing property taxes for low-­income or fixed-­income homeowners, can effectively respond to state-­influenced gentrification.⁶¹

Nonetheless, relocation is fundamentally a form of gentrification. But it is gentrification not driven by an economic motive but driven by a desire to develop communities to contribute to the flourishing of all people. It does expect some expulsion from a community—drug dealers are no longer able to operate on the corners, for instance. Good intentions, however, can have detrimental and unintended effects. Evidence from CCDA organizations suggest that they think about community development through a place-­based analysis of poverty that also accounts for individuals’ choices. That is, they think about how places contribute to poverty, and how poverty shapes the places, alongside how individual people’s decisions influences their life outcomes. This approach wisely accounts for both structural and personal causes of poverty.

Scholars have shown how some relocators also assume their cultural norms are inherently right or even universal, and can fall into a savior complex, thinking they are the solution to the problem. That is, while relocators may have a posture of seeking to learn from a community and serve it, they think of themselves as primarily helping a community and as their life choices as good examples for poor neighbors.⁶² These scholarly critiques are important correctives. But a right theological perspective on the incarnation can also be a helpful corrective to the savior complex. CCDA leader and theologian Soong-­Chan Rah helpfully observes that the Body of Christ in the world is not an individual, but the church. An individual can never mirror all of Christ’s power, but that individual can join with the church in the community to which they move and, as Jesus humbled himself, serve under the leadership of local people. Together, members of an urban church can practice humility by putting the needs of their neighbors over their own.⁶³

A robust understanding of the incarnation can foster the second R, reconciliation. CCDA proponents mean that people ought to first be reconciled to God, and also to one another to promote human flourishing.⁶⁴ Reconciliation happens as Christians from different racial, economic, social, and political backgrounds come together to solve the problems in their community jointly; the vision is not one of creating a holy huddle bounded by the walls of a physical church building, but of joining God in his work in the community. Continuing to increase diversity among faculty, staff, and students at Christian colleges and universities can set the table for students to practice reconciliation. But as with the CCDA, all stakeholders must be included as full members of the whole and they need to address institutional or other injustices to develop true unity.

For the CCDA, redistribution is a key way to address injustice. As people from different racial, ethnic, or class backgrounds live together, joining God in God’s work of reconciling people to God and to one another as they seek the good of marginalized places, they will redistribute resources justly. Fundamentally, redistribution is about seeking the common good inside and outside the church by seeking justice. As Gordon puts it, “redistribution brings new skills, new relationships, and new resources and puts them to work to empower the residents of a given community of need to bring about a healthy transformation.”⁶⁵ It empowers people by helping them make a living, and by accounting for the broader structural forces that oppress and marginalize people. It can be a way to repent of, to turn away from, the sin of not doing justice that has plagued white evangelicalism.

The local church holds together the three R’s of relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution. Within the church, the body of believers ought to love one another so well that their love overflows into the community as they attend to the spiritual, economic, and educational welfare of all the families in their community, thus drawing others to Jesus. The local church should value different backgrounds equally, sharing power, rather than assuming that minorities ought to assimilate into majority culture.

The CCDA model also offers a way of addressing poverty that cuts through liberal/conservative divides. Liberals commonly rely on governmental institutions or organizations that are not part of the community to improve a place, but they less frequently cite personal choice as a factor that can help people move beyond poverty. Conservatives, on the other hand, typically cite individual initiative as the problem, and less frequently account for structural factors limiting a person’s prospects. The CCDA model, however, can account for both the broader structures and the individual.⁶⁶

At first glance, the CCDA model seems to suggest that everyone who is a relocater or a returner must be involved professionally in local community development, which is the traditional CCDA model. But sociological research suggests other possibilities. The presence of people who hold professional or managerial jobs in a community can increase the quality of life for everyone in a neighborhood. Those who relocate to a poor community need not work there to use their social capital to benefit their neighbors.⁶⁷ College graduates could live in a lower-­income neighborhood, work in a financial district and still contribute to bettering their neighborhood because they worship locally and seek its good in their day-­to-­day lives outside of work.

These CCDA ideas are crucial to seeking the good of the places to which God calls his people and this alternative narrative and set of practices is disruptive. Perkins’s story and the CCDA philosophy raise questions about where we live and about how we live there, no matter if that place is an inner-­city neighborhood, a holler in Appalachia, a working-­class suburb, or a relatively affluent suburb. Perkins and other CCDA leaders have argued that not all people are called to be relocaters.⁶⁸ But we all can heed the witness of relocation because it is countercultural, resisting implicit assumptions that prioritize upward mobility in American society. Relocaters’ actions can disenchant American narratives, even suggesting that downward mobility, not upward mobility, should be our default assumption. Nonetheless, all Christians are called to a ministry of reconciliation, bringing people to God and people to one another, and to redistribution by sharing generously with one another. No matter where people live, how they live in particular places will not only help conform them to the image of Christ but will extend Christ’s kingdom as they love God and love their neighbors.

Reducing, Rooting, and Restraining: Additional Vocational Practices to Live Well in a Place⁶⁹

Christians can practice three additional “R’s,” which I call reducing, rooting, and restraining, to live well in any place. Reducing means to make one’s life smaller physically. It could involve making everyday habits local—in grocery shopping, going to the doctor, or recreation. It may also mean resisting the easy-­everywhere lure of buying online and encouraging students to reduce their carbon impact by instead walking to a local store. In sum, decreasing the size of one’s life footprint can help one embrace one’s humanity and limits, and challenges the gnostic view of the world so common in American Christianity that detaches people from particular times and places.⁷⁰

Reducing our ambits can help us root ourselves in a place. It may be easier to convince students of the importance of rootedness today than at other times in American history. Andy Crouch notes that Americans moved less frequently in the first decade of the twentieth century and suggests that “the 21st-­century dream seems to be to put down deeper roots. This quest for local, embodied, physical presence may well be driven by the omnipresence of the virtual and a dawning awareness of the thinness of disembodied life.”⁷¹ Faculty can help students root, even during the liminal time of college, by helping them learn the history of their college, town, and region, attending especially to how that history has been one of joining together or segregation. Faculty can choose examples for course material that are local and partner with local institutions for experiential learning. Students can go to local churches within walking distance, participate in free events in town and read at the local library. As we all root ourselves, we make places, creating homes, which are not just houses or neighborhoods but a set of relationships with people and creation that can only develop over time.⁷² 

To cultivate relationships so central to place-­making, Christians must restrain, the last R. Restraining may mean slowing down physically—bicycling or walking instead of driving, which not only makes one aware of physical surroundings (that slight hill is more obvious on a bicycle than in a car), but also makes one able to see, and, when invited, participate, in the lives of others. “I” becomes “we,” and the Body of Christ can flourish as people’s lives are transformed.⁷³ Restraining means creating margin in our lives, doing less so we can be more. Restraining may also mean rethinking economic assumptions and limiting our own acquisitive natures to prioritize our neighbor in need.⁷⁴ It will likely mean turning away from one-­size-­fits-­all techniques of church growth and paying attention to the specific strengths and needs of a place, and the Spirit’s leading in how we might bring Shalom.⁷⁵

Reducing, rooting, and restraining will help us and our students regain a sense of place. If we practice these habits as part of a community, our colleges or our local churches, their significance will be magnified. Like the CCDA’s model, the local church can be the center of living well together in a place.

Concluding Thoughts

We need all the disciplines to fully engage with our places and to teach students how to live well in the places to which they are called once they graduate. The social sciences can explain how places, their systems, and the people within them relate. The arts can cultivate beauty and display how physical places shape people. The humanities can reveal how humans have lived in particular places at particular times and help people ponder the meanings of place. The sciences can teach the natural components of our places and instruct us how to steward them. Theology can help us comprehend the connections between God, people, and our places. Attending well to place may mean relocating, but it will mean redistributing, reconciling, reducing, rooting, and restraining. If Christian institutions account for their own places, bring students into the study of the places where they sojourn for four years, and help students care for their temporary homes, we can help all our constituencies ask the big questions at the core of the Christian liberal arts, such as: what is the good life and how do we live it?

Our answer to that question, which must include loving God and neighbor, cannot be complete without accounting for place. Ignoring place has mangled the Christian imagination and prevented us from living in the deep communion with one another that God offers us. If we lead students to care well for their places and make where we live and how we live there as central parts of our understanding of vocation, we can help ourselves and our students live into the union Jesus won for us on the cross.

1. Quoted in Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens, and Dwight J. Friesen, The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community (InterVarsity, 2014), 75. For the growing literature on vocation taking place seriously, see Joshua R. Sweeden, “Vocation and the Stewardship of Place,” Christian Scholar’s Review 52, no. 4 (July 2023): 119–26; Brent Waters, Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues: Christian Ethics for Everyday Life (Baker Academic, 2022); Gordon T. Smith, Your Calling Here and Now: Making Sense of Vocation (InterVarsity, 2022); Susan Maros, Calling in Context: Social Location and Vocational Formation (InterVarsity, 2022).
2. I am drawing here from Willie Jennings’s work on race and Christian imagination, which makes a theological-­historical argument about how Christian thought and practice led to segregation and hierarchy as racialized notions of the other developed. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010). Literature on the American context is abundant, but for example, see Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2000); Ryan Cobb, “Still Divided By Faith? Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America,” in Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion After Divided by Faith, ed. J. Russell Hawkins and Phillip Luke Sinitiere (Oxford, 2013), 128–40.
3. Scott Waalkes, “Rethinking Work as Vocation: From Protestant Advice to Gospel Corrective,” Christian Scholar’s Review 44, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 137.
4. While the lives of students, faculty, and staff may testify most clearly to that work, some of the published fruit includes David S. Cunningham, ed., At This Time and In This Place: Vocation and Higher Education, 1st ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015); David S. Cunningham, Vocation across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (Oxford University Press, 2017); David S. Cunningham, ed., Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-­Faith Academy (Oxford, 2019); Tim Clydesdale, The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 2015). I began this paper as a part of one such cohort at CCCU member Wheaton College, thinking theologically and from within our disciplines about vocation.
5. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024).
6. Craig Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today (Baker Academic, 2011), 2–3; 243–48.
7. Jennings, The Christian Imagination. See also Willie Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020).
8. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Centennial ed.; 2003 Modern Library ed. (Modern Library, 2003). There are many excellent works on DuBois. See, for instance, Edward J. Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
9. Writing on vocation, theologian Paul Wadell argues that we must help our students see that a worthwhile life is not simply “something that each of us is free to determine for ourselves; often it means little more than having what we want whenever we want it.” Paul Wadell, “An Itinerary of Hope: Called to a Magnanimous Way of Life,” in At This Time and In This Place, ed. David Cunningham (Oxford, 2015), 194.
10. Oliver O’Donovan, “The Loss of a Sense of Place,” The Irish Theological Quarterly 55, no. 1 (1989): 39–58.
11. See, for instance, Joel Martin, The Land Looks After Us (Oxford, 2001); John N. Low, Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago (Michigan State University Press, 2016).
12. Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George E. Tinker, A Native American Theology (Orbis Books, 2001), 126–48; Vine Deloria, Jr., “Thinking in Time and Space,” in God Is Red, 4th ed. (Fulcrum Publishing, 2023). For the continuing presence of Native peoples in the Chicago region after the Treaty of 1833, which ceded much of the land to the United States, see Rosalyn R. LaPier and David Beck, City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893–1934 (University of Nebraska Press, 2015); James LaGrand, Indian Metropolis: Indians in Chicago 1945–1975 (University of Illinois Press, 2002); Terry Straus, ed., Native Chicago (Albatross Press, 2002).
13. Patty Loew, Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2013).
14. Ann Durkin Keating, Rising Up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
15. Jennings, The Christian Imagination.
16. O’Donovan, “The Loss of a Sense of Place,” 49–50.
17. See Paola Scommegna, “Least Segregated U.S. Metros Concentrated in Fast-­Growing South and West,” Population Reference Bureau, September 2011, http://www.prb.​org/Publications/Articles/2011/us-­residential-­segregation.aspx.
18. Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1967), 15.
19. For the Great Migration, see James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration (University of Chicago Press, 1991); Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Random House, 2010).
20. Arnold Hirsch, “Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953–1966,” The Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (September 1995): 522–50; Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (The University of Chicago Press, 1998). Whites’ reasons for resisting Black neighbors were complicated and included religion. See John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
21. One of the earliest works on redlining is Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1987). More recent ones include Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017).
22. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 215.
23. For one of the few development companies that built interracial housing see Nicole Frisone, “Checkerboard Neighborhood: Morris Milgram and Privately Developed Interracial Housing, Princeton, NJ,” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 3 (2013): 536–54. For liberal attempts to integrate the suburbs, see Tracy K’Meyer, “‘Well, I’m Not Moving’: Open Housing and White Activism in the Long Civil Rights Movement,” The Sixties 2, no. 1 (2009): 1–24; James Wolfinger, “The American Dream—For All Americans: Race, Politics, and the Campaign to Desegregate Levittown,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 3 (2012): 430–51.
24. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 199–218. For more on the mechanisms of racial segregation, see Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton Studies in American Politics (Princeton University Press, 1996); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Harvard University Press, 1993). Some African Americans moved to the suburbs in the post-­war period, but usually to communities with segregated neighborhoods. See James Dorsey, Up South: Blacks in Chicago’s Suburbs (1719–1983) (Wyndham Hall Press, 1986); Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2004); William Cooley, “Moving on Out: Black Pioneering in Chicago,” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 4 (2010): 485–506; Andrew Wiese, “‘The House I Live In’: Race, Class and African American Suburban Dreams in the Postwar United States,” in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 99–119; David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (University of Chicago Press, 2007); Sarah Potter, “Family Ideals: The Diverse Meanings of Residential Space in Chicago during Post WWII Baby Boom,” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 1 (January 2013): 59–78.
25. Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books, 2009).
26. Satter, Family Properties.
27. For how white evangelicalism’s theological toolkit hinders seeing systemic racism, see Emerson and Smith, Divided by Faith. Much of the research connecting geographic racial change explores Catholics, Jews, and white ethnic Protestants. See McGreevy, Parish Boundaries; G. H. Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Harvard, 1999). For mainline Protestants and evangelicals, see Etan Diamond, Souls of the City: Religion and the Search for Community in Postwar America (Indiana University Press, 2003).
28. Mark Mulder, “Evangelical Church Polity and the Nuances of White Flight,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 16 (2012): 16–38.
29. Mark Mulder, “Evangelical Church Polity and the Nuances of White Flight,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 16 (2012): 16–38.
30. Diamond, Souls of the City.
31. Open housing was a key issue in the 1966 Chicago Campaign that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) conducted with local activists, despite a fair housing ordinance in Chicago from 1963. See Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering, Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (University of Georgia Press, 1986); James Ralph, Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard University Press, 1993). White evangelical Christians were, for the most part, absent from civil rights movement activism or opposed to it. See Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, 2008); Curtis Evans, “White Evangelical Protestant Responses to the Civil Rights Movement,” Harvard Theological Review 102, no. 2 (April 2009): 245–73; Carolyn Renee Dupont, Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement (New York University Press, 2013); J. Russell Hawkins, Because the Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy (Oxford, 2021).
32. See House Bill No. 755, 1963, in Folder 6, Housing June 1962-­June 1963, Box 20, Cantwell Papers.
33. Rabbi Irving Rosenbaum, CCRR Minutes, first meeting (of members), May 16, 1963, Folder 1, Box 14, Daniel Cantwell Papers, Chicago History Museum.
34. News Release, 25 May 1965, in Folder 9, Box 14, Daniel Cantwell Papers, Chicago History Museum.
35. Chicagoland’s Real Estate Advertiser, April 23, 1965, Folder 9, CCRR—Referendum on Open Occupancy, Box 14, Daniel Cantwell Papers, Chicago History Museum.
37. For segregationist theology see Marsh, God’s Long Summer; Dupont, Mississippi Praying; Jane Dailey, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (June 2004): 119–44; J. Russell Hawkins, Because the Bible Told Them So; Ansley Lillian Quiros, God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942–1976 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).[/efn-note] These ministers agreed that racial prejudice was a problem, but argued the solution was individual conversion alone, not legislation.³⁶Their frame on open housing is similar to white evangelical Christians’ views on civil rights more generally. See, for instance, Randall J. Stephens, “‘It Has to Come from the Hearts of the People’: Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Race, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 3 (2016): 559–85.
38. Chicagoland’s Real Estate Advertiser, April 23, 1965, Folder 9, CCRR—Referendum on Open Occupancy, Box 14, Daniel Cantwell Papers, Chicago History Museum.
39. For the Chicago origins of this narrative, see Satter, Family Properties.
40. William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, 1st Vintage Books (Vintage Books, 1997).
41. Ren Farley, “Review of Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification,” Population & Development Review 44, no. 3 (September 1, 2018): 639–42.
42. Jeannine Bell, Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-­in Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing (New York University Press, 2013), 2. See also Junia Howell and Michael O. Emerson, “Preserving Racial Hierarchy Amidst Changing Racial Demographics: How Neighbourhood Racial Preferences Are Changing While Maintaining Segregation,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 15 (December 8, 2018): 2770–89.
43. Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder, Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification (Russell Sage Foundation, 2017).
44. In 2010, the “typical” white American lived in a neighborhood that was seventy-­five percent white, while the “typical” Black American lived in a community that was only thirty-­five percent white. One study found that white evangelicals are mostly suburban residents, with 51.8 percent living in suburbs or exurbs, 18.4 percent living in urban areas, and 29.8 percent living in rural areas. By contrast, about 70 percent of Black evangelicals and Hispanic evangelicals live in urban areas, compared to 18.5 percent of Black evangelicals and 14 percent of Hispanic evangelicals living in urban or exurban neighborhoods. John Green and Ann Greenberg, “America’s Evangelicals,” referenced in Mark T. Mulder and James K. A. Smith, “Subdivided by Faith? An Historical Account of Evangelicals and the City,” Christian Scholar’s Review 38, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 430–31. Evangelicals are also divided along class lines.
45. Soong-­Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (InterVarsity, 2009).
46. Rah, The Next Evangelicalism, chapters 1–3. For recent analysis of evangelicals and race, see Emerson and Smith, Divided by Faith; J. Russell Hawkins and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, eds., Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith (Oxford University Press, 2013); Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism (UNC Press, 2021); Jesse Curtis, The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era (New York University Press, 2021). Individualism is a long tradition in white evangelicalism; for evangelicals’ individualism as they shifted from Democrats to Republicans between the 1930s and 1960s, see Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton, 2010). For social gospelers’ failure to resist consumerism, see Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). For Christian critiques of consumerism, see John F. Cavanaugh, Following Christ in a Consumer Society, 25th Anniversary (Orbis, 2006); Ronald J. Sider, Just Generosity: A New Vision for Overcoming Poverty in America (Baker Books, 1999).
47. Our church was Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church, which is connected to Circle Urban Ministries. To learn more about the church’s foundational philosophy, see Raleigh Washington and Glen Kehrein, Breaking Down Walls: A Model for Reconciliation in an Age of Racial Strife (Moody Press, 1994), and Karen J. Johnson, Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice: A History of Christians in Action (IVP Academic, 2025).
48. Rah, The Next Evangelicalism, 149–52.
49. Some sociologists have broken multiracial churches down into two main categories. In racially transcendent churches, people emphasize an identity beyond race. See Gerardo Marti, A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church (Indiana University Press, 2005). In assimilationist churches, the white members dictate the worship norms, etc., and minorities must cede their cultural preferences to keep the white members. See Korie Edwards, The Elusive Dream: The Power of Race in Interracial Churches (Oxford, 2008). In my experience at Rock of Our Salvation Church, there were elements of racial transcendence, but with very successful efforts to counter white hegemony, in contrast to Edwards’s arguments.
50. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005).
51. Micheal O. Emerson, “Residential Segregation Rewards Whites While Punishing People of Color | Kinder Institute for Urban Research,” Kinder Institute for Urban Research | Rice University, accessed January 15, 2025, https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/residential-­segregation-­rewards-­whites-­while-­punishing-­people-­color.
52. S. Macartney, A. Bishaw, and K. Fontenot, “Poverty Rates for Selected Detailed Race and Hispanic Groups by State and Place: 2007–2011,” in U.S. Census Bureau, 2013.
53. The neoconservative movement makes the personal responsibility argument strongly. For mainstream evangelicalism and neoconservative arguments about personal responsibility’s relationship to continued racial inequality, see Antony Alumkal, “American Evangelicalism in the Post-­Civil Rights Era: A Racial Formation Theory Analysis,” Sociology of Religion 65, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 195–213.
54. Stephen Charles Mott, Biblical Ethics and Social Change (Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 4; Millard Fuller, The Theology of the Hammer (Smyth & Helwys, 1994).
55. Steve Garber, Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good (InterVarsity, 2014), 18.
56. The CCDA represents a return toward a more complete orthodoxy, after the fracturing of the fundamentalist/modernist divide. See David Moberg, The Great Reversal: Reconciling Evangelism and Social Concern (Wipf & Stock, 2007). For more on Perkins and the CCDA, see Peter Slade, Charles Marsh, and Peter Heltzel, Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins (University Press of Mississippi, 2013); Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (Basic Books, 2007); Timothy Essenburg, “Urban Community Development: An Examination of the Perkins Model,” Review of Social Economy 58, no. 2 (June 2000): 197–223; Stephen E. Berk, A Time to Heal: John Perkins, Community Development, and Racial Reconciliation (Baker Books, 1997).
57. John Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down: John Perkins Tells His Own Story (G/L Publications, 1976), 79.
58. Wayne Gordon, “The Eight Components of Christian Community Development,” 2, accessed April 11, 2016, http://www.nsc-­church.org/CCDA%208%20Points.pdf. Note that the term relocation has problematic elements given the history of interactions between the United States government and Native peoples.
59. My own seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, is one such case in that it is located in a community that was the center of a controversy over integrated housing. See Karen J. Johnson, One in Christ: Chicago Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 7.
60. Claire Bolton, “Enacting Critical Community Development through Anti-­Gentrification Policy Advocacy,” Community Development Journal 57, no. 2 (2022): 213–33.
61. Claire Bolton; Katherine Hankins, and Andy Walter, “‘Gentrification with Justice’: An Urban Ministry Collective and the Practice of Place-­Making in Atlanta’s Inner-­City Neighbourhoods,” Urban Studies 49, no. 7 (2012): 1507–26.
62. Sara M. Perisho Eccleston, “Discourses of Incarnational Belonging: Unpacking the Motivations and Goals of White Urban Relocators,” Community Development 51, no. 4 (August 7, 2020): 323–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/15575330.2020.1774787.
63. Soong-­Chan Rah, “Rethinking Incarnational Ministry,” ed. Chris Jehle, Soong-­Chan Rah, and Brandon Wrencher, CCDA Theological Journal, 2013 Edition, 2013.
64. See Spencer Perkins and Chris Rice, More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel (InterVarsity, 1995); Spencer Perkins and Chris Rice, “Reconciliation: Loving God and Loving People,” in Restoring At-­Risk Communities: Doing It Together and Doing It Right, ed. John Perkins (InterVarsity, 1995).
65. Gordon, “The Eight Components of Christian Community Development,” 4. See also Mary Nelson, “Redistribution: Empowering the Community,” in Restoring At-­Risk Communities: Doing It Together and Doing It Right, ed. John Perkins (InterVarsity, 1995).
66. Perkins’s own experiences line up with neither political perspective. See Lauren F. Winner, “The Church as Family and the Politics of Food Distribution,” in Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins (University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 16–31.
67. One study found that teenage pregnancy rates and educational attainment decreased not at a steady rate, proportionate to the number of high-­status people in a neighborhood, but in bursts because they are the product of social interactions in the neighborhood. In black neighborhoods, as the percentage of high-­status workers fell from 20.7% to 5.6%, the change in high school dropout rate was inconsequential, and the dropout probability increased from .111 to .120. But when the percentage of high-­status workers dropped to 3.5%, the estimated dropout probability increased to .192. For males, the effect of a having fewer high-­status workers in their community is greater. When the percent of high-­status workers fell from 5.6% to 3.4%, their probability of dropping out of school rose from .146 to .345, which is highly significant. Jonathan Crane, “The Epidemic Theory of Ghettos and Neighborhood Effects on Dropping Out and Teenage Childbearing,” American Journal of Sociology 96, no. 5 (March 1991): 1226–59.
68. Raleigh Washington and Glen Kehrein, Breaking Down Walls: A Model for Reconciliation in an Age of Racial Strife (Moody Press, 1994); Slade, Marsh, and Heltzel, Mobilizing for the Common Good.
69. For other resources that take place seriously besides those cited elsewhere, see Eugene Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir (HarperOne, 2012); Eric O. Jacobsen, Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith (Brazos Press, 2003); Eric O. Jacobsen, The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment (Baker Academic, 2012). Critiques of New Urbanism (represented by Jacobsen) include that it gives too much weight to how physical spaces shape human interactions and that it is primarily for the wealthy. See, for instance, Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, 260–66.
70. Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, 245.
71. Andy Crouch, “Ten Most Significant Cultural Trends of the Last Decade | Q Ideas,” Q, accessed April 23, 2016, http://qideas.org/articles/ten-­most​-­significant​-­cultural​-­trends-­of-­the-­last-­decade.
72. Steven Bouma-­Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement (Eerdmans, 2008), 127.
73. Leonard Hjalmarson, No Home Like Place: A Christian Theology of Place, 2nd ed. (Urban Loft Publishers, 2015), 211–26; Bartholomew, Where Mortals Dwell, 268–84.
74. Prediger and Walsh, Beyond Homelessness, 142.
75. See Paul Sparks, Tim Soerens, and Dwight J. Friesen, The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community (InterVarsity, 2014), 59; Brian Brown, “The Rise of Localist Politics,” in Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America, ed. McClay Wilfred and Ted McAllister (New Atlantis Books, 2014), 171–79.