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Sacred Circles and Public Squares:
Religion De- and Re-Centered in Indianapolis and the NationA book proposal by Arthur E. Farnsley II, N.J. Demerath III.
Etan Diamond, Mary Mapes and Elfriede Wedam
with a Foreword by David Bodenhamer and an Afterword by Jan Shipps
A society�s sense of itself rests partly on fact and partly on myth.� Public religion in the United States is a case in point. Once celebrated as �a nation with the soul of a church,� America owes much to the �civil religion� that has expressed and enacted our sense of a uniquely blessed and providential polity.� The self-congratulatory thesis of� �American exceptionalism� depends heavily on the public religion evident on Memorial Day, July Fourth, and Thanksgiving, not to mention the sacred inscriptions on our currency, and prayers at Presidential Inaugurations and the beginning of daily business in the U.S. Congress and most state legislatures.� But if America�s reputation as the West�s most religious society is a long-standing source of pride for many citizens, it is a continuing conundrum for many scholars.
Virtually every argument on behalf of America�s exalted religious status has been challenged.� Our high rates of self-professed believers decline when one asks what is believed; our high rates of claimed church attendance drop sharply when full pews are actually counted. Questions concerning public religion are no less important. Just what part of America�s diverse religious life is public and with what effects?� Just what part of America�s public sphere is religious and with what consequences?� Is there a widening or narrowing gap between religious form and religious function? Are public and private religion becoming more or less of a piece? Are there significant trends that illuminate the present in light of the past? And perhaps most important of all, where does one look for the answers to such questions in a country so sprawling and complex?
In 21st century America, it makes sense to look first in the cities, for they not only best reflect the changes in American life, but they also magnify the relationship among myriad religious traditions.� Urban restructuring�massive suburbanization, the shift from an industrial base to a service economy, and the global effect of transnational movements of people and money over the course of the last hundred years�radically reshaped the way Americans live.� Perhaps most importantly, since most Americans now live in cities or the suburbs that surround them, those changes undermined the bucolic, Jeffersonian ideal that has been central to the nation�s conception of itself.
As cities became larger and more dispersed, their citizens grew more concerned than ever about their quality of local life: personal safety, public schools, and property values.� Cities contain a clear tension between viewing the metropolis as one community with a single, central identity and seeing a metropolis as space filled by hundreds of smaller, particular neighborhoods.�� Religion has shaped and has been shaped by these urbanizing changes.� To tell the story of religion�s relationship to public life is, in one important sense, to tell the story of religion�s changing relationship to the metropolis.�
Following in the tradition of� �Yankee City� and �Middletown,� we have used Indianapolis to tell this story of social and religious change.� But Indianapolis differs from both Newburyport, Massachusetts and Muncie, Indiana.� Never a divinely emergent �city on a hill� reminiscent of John Winthrop�s 17th century Puritan colony on Massachusetts Bay, Indianapolis was deliberately planted in the 19th century at the exact center of the Indiana plains.� What started out as a small state capital has become the country�s 13th largest city. It is an industrial and financial magnet whose growth and development over the past century reflects that of the nation as a whole.
Urban historians and sociologists of religion have intensively studied a handful of very large American cities.� Yet huge mega-cities represent only a small fraction of the cities and large towns where most people live.� The size and demographic distribution of Indianapolis better approximates the social arrangements and institutional structures of most American cities than do megalopolises like Chicago or New York.
This book, which is based on the largest collection of data ever amassed on urban religion in one city, surveys the changing role of religion in the public life of this mid-sized city. The research has been supported by grants from Indianapolis�s own Lilly Endowment--one of the nation�s largest foundations--to The Polis Center of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). The objective was a detailed examination of what has happened to religion in the city, both as a large community with one common identity and as a vast collection of neighborhoods radiating outwards in every direction. The result is a massive compendium of information--historical, demographic, and ethnographic--with extensive surveys and intensive interviews.
Until forty years ago, Indianapolis was known as �Naptown� for the sleepy quality of an annual calendar interrupted mainly by a 500-mile auto race and a state fair that attracted farm families from around the state. But the same changes that drew people into cities across the nation and linked those cities into a national and transnational culture shook Indianapolis awake.� This book is the story of how this restructuring has affected religion�s reach, scope, and impact in Indianapolis.� At the same time, it examines how religion pushed back against the decentralizing, secularizing, and modernizing effects of restructuring that in many (though not all) forms appear hostile to traditional structures of church life.
Indianapolis was never a seamless garment. Still, from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, civil and religious authority were linked to political and economic power through the Protestant institutions of the white middle and upper classes. That establishment was the core around which the rest revolved, both literally and figuratively. The Circle at the city�s center contained both the prospective governor�s mansion and the churches of the Protestant establishment.� This center, this establishment core, had a presumed legitimacy; its values defined the public sense of the sacred.
During the second half of the twentieth century, that establishment center has not held. Mainline Protestantism is still a potent force in its negotiations with other forms of institutional religion, but it is no longer the de facto center.� Having built separate, parallel institutions of education and social services during the early half of the 20th century, Catholics and Jews have gradually merged into the mainstream establishment. The Black Church and white evangelicals lack the same overarching, coordinating, institutions, yet even from the periphery they now engage the establishment from positions of greater strength.� The city�s common identity, its sense of community, is increasingly defined by shared commitments to patriotism and to sports. The sporting venues and war memorials that now represent shared interests are founded on much more general values that can in principle be shared by Catholics and Protestants, blacks and whites, Christians and Jews.
The de-centering and re-centering processes at work in the city are neither strictly chronological nor linear.� At any particular point, there are centripetal and centrifugal forces which find various and simultaneous expression. For example, the same forces that led Catholics to build separate schools and social service agencies helped to center their community�s strength even as it led gradually toward the de-centering of the Protestant establishment.� The social forces that have segregated the city racially have, in other ways, galvanized the Black Church into an institutional resource for the African-American community.� The loss of an establishment core may seem de-centering and even destabilizing at first blush, but the future stability of the city appears to depend on the interwoven strength of multiple centers.��
We use the language of �de-centering� and �re-centering� because we have found this concept a useful tool for understanding the secular and religious transformations inherent in the urbanizing of America.� During the first half of the 20th century, both the city and its religion were highly centered enterprises, with each playing a key role in centering the other. But during the second half of the century, this established center was gradually de-centered. The city�s geography, culture, economy, and political power all became more dispersed; its mainline religious hegemony became increasingly riven.� Other religious communities became more autonomously prominent, including the evangelical traditions of working-class Southern whites, African-Americans, and other ethnic minorities.�
The city�s shift from centered to de-centered may appear to be a complete story of its own, especially since both processes take many forms in matters ranging from the ecological to the political, the institutional, and the psychological.� Yet recent developments suggest a third phase of a still larger saga; namely, a process of re-centering through which parts of both the city and its religious panoply have found new centers, albeit not the same kind of centers that characterized Indianapolis a half-century ago.� We can see in Indianapolis the gradual waning of a white, liberal Protestant establishment and the waxing of a complex balance of cultures in which religion plays a leading role. This is neither the romantic story of multicultural harmony nor the drama of hard-edged balkanization.� In Indianapolis we can see in full color and rich texture the complicated changes we all sense, but can only abstractly comprehend, across American society as a whole.��
Following an Introduction that will elaborate many of the points above, the book comprises five chapters. The first introduces Indianapolis itself and describes the city�s overall changes through the 20th century. The second assesses religion as a factor in the public square and the civic culture, noting its early centrality and later marginality. The third describes what has happened to the institutional side of religion, focusing on the changing mix and missions of the city�s denominations and congregations. The fourth focuses on religion in the city�s neighborhoods where it sometimes seems to create strong local centers, but other times to galvanize separation.� Finally, the fifth chapter offers a summary interpretation of Indianapolis, cautiously employing the city as a lens through which other cities, and indeed American society, might be viewed.� The following fleshes out each of these chapters in a bit more detail.
Chapter 1: The Circle City on the Plains
Until recently, research on religion rarely took place seriously, and research on cities only occasionally included religion.� This chapter embarks on the story of religion in Indianapolis by introducing the question of cities as spaces and places.� Over the past century, cities have undergone considerable transformation, expanding physically, socially, and culturally to embrace the majority of American citizens.� Ideas such as �neighborhood� and �community� mean different things today than they did to earlier generations.� Changes in transportation and communication technology have changed the way we experience local space.
Keeping these analytical themes in mind, this chapter explores the twentieth century history of Indianapolis in terms of the tensions between the metropolis as a centered whole and its hundreds of smaller, de-centered, components.� This tension is not only physical and spatial, but is experienced in people�s political, economic, and cultural lives.� By opening with a general discussion of Indianapolis�s broad social, economic, and political trends over the twentieth century and then moving to a more focused exploration of religion�s role, the first chapter makes it clear that the city is not a mere backdrop to the story of religious change.� It is indeed the interplay of economic, political, cultural, and religious change that demonstrates how religion functioned both as social cause and effect.��
Chapter 2: Religion, Civic Culture and the Polis�Here the focus is primarily on religion's changing role in shaping public life and secondarily, on the impact that changes in public life have had on religion.� Four areas receive special attention: the uses of public space for religious expression; the ties between religion and citizenship; religion and the delivery of social services; and finally, the influence of religion on public policy and social movements.� By moving beyond the topics typically associated with religion and public life--for example, school prayers and posting the Ten Commandments--the chapter will expand our understanding of exactly what religion�s involvement in civic life entails.
The chapter will explore attempts to use the power of the state to promote a particular viewpoint or practice.� But it will also discuss religion as an integral part of the larger story of the city and of urban America generally, including topics such as religion�s relation to vice reforms, Americanization, public demonstrations, education, and social welfare. The general story of religion in civic life over the course of the twentieth century follows a trajectory that moves from a more to a less centered and not always re-centered city. But when examining a particular topic more closely, these strains often struggle against each other. Grand narratives often have lesser narratives competing within them.
Chapter 3:� Institutional Religion Diversified and Domesticated�This chapter describes a major change in the thrust and structure of Indianapolis�s institutional religion as a response to more secular changes in the city itself. It will recount the decline of the city�s denominations as forces in public life while describing the persistence of its congregations as centers of private religion.� In so doing, this chapter will provide context and affirmation for an emerging research literature that remains somewhat abstract. Institutional religion, even for establishment Protestants, has become just one more venue in which identity is negotiated and a sense of communal belonging is sustained.� Not surprisingly, this is more explicit and compelling at the local level.
Chapter 4: Neighborhoods and Religious Re-Centering�Neighborhoods are local, segmented communities that are both emblematic and reflective of everyday life at its most rooted. Choices about where to live reveal aspects of both individual character and social standing. They may be at the core of a larger metropolis or marginal to it, either central to the city where their members pursue careers and social life, or peripheral alternatives to the city�s dominant activities. Neighborhoods range from homogeneous and cooperative to heterogeneous and fractured.
The nature of the neighborhood is both cause and effect as far as the nature of the religious congregations within it is concerned. Some congregations reach out to the neighborhood and provide important services as well as interpretive frames of meaning for their adherents; other congregations stand aloof or are otherwise removed from the neighborhood scene, often with members who come from elsewhere in the metropolitan area.� Congregations are sometimes painted as neighborhood �points of light.�� This is true for some but by no means for all.� Congregations may be sympathetic or hostile towards their surroundings; they may be perceived as desirable local participants or ostracized.� With the array of decisions any congregation makes, all participate for good or ill in building the web of structures upon which all neighborhoods rest.
Chapter 5: Conclusion: From the City to the Nation��This book argues that institutional religion has increasingly vacated the urban public sphere, while continuing and sometimes heightening its ties to neighborhoods, families, and personal life. The white Protestant elite maintains great influence, probably more in Indianapolis than in many other places.� But its dominance is no longer taken for granted.� In a country where there are now more Catholics and Jews combined than Protestants on the Supreme Court, the "center" is defined by competition among cultural ideas and values.� Some groups may have more naked power than others, but fully clothed authority must be constantly negotiated and legitimated. There is a continuing sense of a public sacred, but it is not unilaterally attached to institutional religion, let alone any one particular form of it.�
Much of what has happened in Indianapolis has occurred elsewhere in the nation. Many other cities have experienced the attenuation of a once-dominant cultural center.� With the blurring that has occurred between center and periphery, the meaning of public religious rituals and ceremonial events has gradually become hazy in the country at large.� Meanwhile many congregations have both been re-centered and have served to re-center in other ways.� As the importance of public religion has declined, it has thrown into relief the continuing significance of an enduring private and personal religion at the level of congregations and neighborhoods.� Even so, religion�s capacity to mold, shape, and control is hardly universal and is sometimes problematic.
As this study of Indianapolis reveals, religion truly is "re-centered" vis-�-vis public life. The point is not that the public square is now denuded.� Religion remains, but many different groups now contend for influence. Institutional religion still enacts a large role in the lives of people, but it plays a changing and less-prominent role in the public square. The Protestant establishment continues to have disproportionate power, but no longer has presumed authority. Religion�s taken-for-grantedness is the genie that cannot be put back in the bottle.
Afterward�While the book itself will be multi-authored, with no signed chapters, the Preface will be written and signed by the director of The Polis Center.� The Afterword will be written and signed by Jan Shipps, author of a companion volume, �See You in Church?�� Religion and Culture in Urban America. �This final section will review the questions posed in the Introduction of Sacred Circles and Public Squares and show that the answers provided in the book�s five chapters describe a pattern of what happened to religion in urban America in the 20th century, a pattern that permits fruitful comparison with what occurred elsewhere.� A brief overview of how Indianapolis fits into the larger context of other mid-sized cities in the U.S. will follow, with emphasis on the cities featured in her companion work.
In closing, she will refer to the availability of the huge repository of information gathered by researchers at The Polis Center for future scholars.� This will allow her to end this work with an assertion that this book and other works summarizing the project�s results will become a baseline for future studies of religion in urban America.
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