Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches

Chapter 7: Taking the (Inner) City for God

chapter 7 Taking the (Inner) City for God 183 Listening to churchgoers at Eternal Vine and Marble Valley Presbyterian talk about Knoxville’s impoverished inner city, it often seemed as though the inner city was something of a missionary preoccupation . For those less involved in social outreach it is uncharted territory, an alluring but harsh and unsettling element of the urban landscape. For socially engaged pastors and churchgoers it represents “pockets of despair” calling out for intervention, so close to home. It is seen as a place where black children, dependent single parents, gang leaders, and drug addicts await the goodwill and generosity of those who live just a short drive away with their resources and messages of hope. The megachurches I studied showed a particular fascination with the inner city that was far more prominent than their interest in serving poor rural white communities in the nearby Appalachian Mountains (although churches throughout the region have active Appalachian ministries).1 Unlike Appalachia, the black inner city represents a mission field that is at once proximate in location—the nearest “backyard” to the affluent suburbs—and culturally foreign for the majority of white suburban churchgoers. As an image of localized otherness and disorder, the inner city was the focus of constant emphasis and idealization on the part of socially engaged evangelicals in Knoxville who needed to reaffirm their bona fides as champions of a missionary cause. In this chapter I explore the religious and cultural significance of the inner city for white suburban and socially engaged evangelicals, linking 184 | Taking the (Inner) City for God it to coterminous evangelical concerns regarding the status of “the city” as an outpost of the Kingdom of God on Earth, and the importance (and difficulty) of achieving racial reconciliation, social harmony, and urban community development as markers of the kingdom. I begin with a discussion of the essential yet polysemic concept of the Kingdom of God, and the ways that evangelicals imagine its social implications while trying to work with and around its ambiguous temporal connotations . I then discuss the sense of exilic consciousness expressed among suburban evangelicals in relation to the city—that is, their complicated sense of being exiles from the urban center, with its moral and social dysfunction—and how this informs their belief that they are all the more spiritually obliged, and qualified, to advance the welfare of the inner city. In that section and the following one I also provide examples of the engagements and institutional relationships that stem from a preoccupation with the black inner city. The latter section is an in-depth case study focusing on Marble Valley Presbyterian’s partnership with a small black church in an inner-city neighborhood undergoing a process of community development. Although the partnership was predicated on notions of racial reconciliation, relations between the two congregations were strained by preconceptions and prejudices on both sides, disagreements about issues of accountability and social justice, and the inevitable tensions that come about when the circumstances of an institutional partnership actually produce something more in the way of a system of patronage. These strains did not completely overdetermine the nature of the partnership or minimize the positive outcomes, but they were indicative of deep cultural rifts, some of which carry salient political implications. I conclude the chapter with thoughts on what such case studies reveal about the increasingly influential and authoritative role that affluent evangelical megachurches play in certain segments of civil society, especially regarding community service and the reorganization of local nonprofit sectors in the postwelfare era. the city and the kingdom The city has historically been something of a moral conundrum for conservative Protestants. Nineteenth-century preachers and reformers believed that urban industrialization accelerated the breakdown of moral character and community in modern society. Twentieth-century fundamentalists inveighed against modern cultural trends such as liber- Taking the (Inner) City for God | 185 alism, secularism, and relativism, which they believed were propagated by savvy urban elites intent on undermining traditional Christian values and authority structures. Urban centers were disparaged as places of vice, social decay, commercialism, rampant ethnic and religious diversity , and racial conflict. In the 1950s–1960s, white churches reacted to demographic and economic changes in U.S. cities by moving to the suburbs, justifying “white flight” on theological and separationist grounds (Dochuk 2003). Despite this aversion, modern-day evangelicalism would never...