How mainline Protestants got involved in urban renewal

One of the major story lines in the history of 20th-century Ameri­can Chris­tianity is the flight of white Protestants from cities. The modern metropolis had always made them uneasy. Between its saloons and brothels, its sprawling working-class immigrant neighborhoods, and its offer of something approaching anonymity, the city seemed to many, from the very beginning, like a torpedo headed straight for godly order.

A change of heart appeared possible in the early 20th century, as surging grassroots movements helped middle-class Social Gospelers gain a wider audience for their vision of the redeemed city. But the fires of reform cooled in the wake of World War I and, as the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern and western cities proceeded apace, white Protestants hightailed it to the suburbs, catalyzing a devastating withdrawal of human and financial resources from city centers. Or so the story goes.

Mark Wild’s new book complicates this vein of conventional wisdom by underscoring that, even in the heyday of suburbanization, a number of mainline Protestants continued to pour their hearts and souls into urban neighborhoods. For these renewalists, as Wild calls them, the stakes of city ministry could not have been higher: the future of both church and nation seemed to hang in the balance.