"Churches may function as communities," he writes, "but what do they do for the community?" Hearings concerning the revitalization of such urban areas often do not look upon these churches as assets but as liabilities that inhibit the renovation and renewal of the neighborhood. Problems of parking, noise, and an interest in low rental costs make these urban churches part of the problem, and not the solution to inner-city ills.
This partly has to do with the fact, McRoberts argues, that these churches usually are not community-based, in the conventional sense, or defined in the sense of the old "parish," but are congregations of affinity. By this he means that most of the congregants do not reside in the neighborhood but commute to it from across the city. As "particularistic spaces of sociability," in the jargon of the trade, they are not territorial, and therefore have no particular interest in the host community. Such churches are located in urban ghettos not because that is where their people are, but because the real estate they need is cheap and available. In 1999 in the Four Corners district straddling Roxbury and Dorchester, which is the geography of McRoberts's study, he counted 29 congregations. The area "teemed with lush religious life," he wrote, thus confirming the classical sociological analysis that black urban neighborhoods were "overchurched."
Conventional wisdom would suggest that where there are so many churches the building blocks of the community must be strong, but for McRoberts the phenomenon of the urban black religious district raises the question of what he calls the "ambiguous place of the African-American church in black urban life." This ambiguity can be seen in his analysis of the relationship between black churches and the "street:" First, the street can be seen as the evil other. Second, the street can be a place from which to recruit new members. Third, it can be the scene of redemptive ministry. Fourth, it can be a combination of two and three.
The multitude of religious traditions that compose the religious district would suggest that there are as many responses to the street and the inherent problems of the neighborhood as there are churches. Thus the monolithic nature of the black church is as much an urban legend as the monolithic black community it presumably serves. The notion that black faith-based initiatives can deliver devolved governmental social services is therefore as dangerous as it is false.
Rather than focus on romantic ideas of black urban religious life, with its image of the church as the engine that drives social service and reform in the neighborhood, McRoberts challenges "both scholarship and policy to focus more on the actual behaviors and inclinations of religious institutions in depressed urban neighborhoods. Particular attention," he notes, "should be paid to the urban religious districts: the dense, diverse religious ecologies that appear as symptoms of neighborhood decline yet contain richly complex forms of community."
| Go back for seconds of "Revelations about black urban religious life," Peter J. Gomes' Boston Globe review of Omar McRoberts' "Streets of Glory"
posted in articles on August 17, 2003 6:58 PM | t (0)
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