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1 ∞ introduction Commerce, art, education, religion, labor, the professions, literature, the forces of war, and the forces of peace, all passed along in a long procession, illustrating in a graphic manner a century of the faith, the hope, and the progress that make a real city. —Indianapolis News, June 8, 1920, on Indianapolis’s Centennial Celebration parade The plan was straightforward, both in symbolism and in substance. When Governor Jonathan Jennings and his fellow commissioners sought a location for the Indiana state capital in 1820, they selected an area along Fall Creek in the very center of the state. This was to be, quite literally, Indiana’s city: Indianapolis. It was not a fort, a trading post, a river port, or the end of a railroad line. Indianapolis was created out of nothing to be the seat of government. The equally straightforward design for the city came from Alexander Ralston, a colleague of Pierre L’Enfant, the surveyor who designed Washington , D.C. Ralston had similar visions for this new capital: a one-milesquare city, bounded by the unsubtly named North, South, East, and West Streets. The street pattern followed a traditional grid, with sixty-foot streets alternating with thirty-foot lots. Spaces were set aside for a State House and a Court House, as well as two city markets. Breaking the grid like a big ‘‘X’’ were four diagonal streets that were primary transportation routes in and out of the city. At the center of it all was the eighty-foot-wide Circle Street, circumscrib- 2 sacred circles, public squares ing a 333-foot lot on which the governor’s house was to sit—at the center of the center, given Indianapolis’s location relative to the rest of the state. By 1840, four of the city’s most prominent churches—all part of the Protestant establishment—surrounded the Circle, with a fifth Protestant church just one block away. The vision was clear. At the heart of both the city and the state, the political and religious establishments were comfortably intertwined . A deeply symbolic symmetry balanced the church alongside the state, the sacred with the secular, the Circle within the Square. At the end of the twentieth century, the Circle still centered downtown Indianapolis, but the city’s neat, compact symmetry was long since skewed. Throughout the city’s history, the suburbs grew and expanded ever outward . Starting in the 1960s, the inner city’s population dwindled. Said Stephen Goldsmith, mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 2000, As in all of the other large cities east of the Mississippi, we suffered many of the same problems in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s . . . essentially, the flight of the middle class, the concentration of urban poverty, the typical reaction that as wealthy people moved out of the city, tax rates were increased in order to more aggressively redistribute wealth. . . . I often say that on a very bright, clear day—my office is on the 25th floor of the City/County Building—I can actually see dollar bills float across the city line and land in the suburbs where the tax rates are less, the crime is less, and the education is often better.∞ In this massive urban realignment, both the trappings of traditional religion and its formative cultural power gradually faded from the old center. All but one of the churches left the Circle, and that remaining church is dwarfed by the towering office buildings that surround it. Government and commerce claimed the mile square, and they were gradually separated, in principle at least, from the old religious establishment. There was still crossfertilization within the city’s leadership elite, who often shared both church membership and board membership, joined in subtle bonds forged by proximity . But the separate institutions grew ever less proximate due in part to an increasingly rigorous legal separation of church and state. By the end of the 1990s, Goldsmith could describe the relationship thus: [W]e pretended the government was neutral with respect to faith-based organizations. In fact, our experience was that it wasn’t neutral at all. It was hostile. And it was hostile at almost every level of government. In 1997, Mayor Goldsmith launched the Front Porch Alliance (FPA), an ambitious attempt to build partnerships among faith-based organizations , civic groups, and local government. He appointed a director and staff whose job it was to keep local religious groups—mostly churches— informed about funding opportunities for their outreach ministries. He looked...

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