Revelations about black urban religious life

By Peter J. Gomes, Globe Correspondent, 8/17/2003

Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood, by Omar M. McRoberts. University of Chicago, 178 pp., $25

The sociology of religion and the study of the black urban church ordinarily do not make for compelling reading among non-specialists. For that reason, Omar McRoberts's study of the urban environment of black churches might easily be consigned to that literary black hole of doctoral studies turned into books for the scholarly guild. In this case, much would be lost, for McRoberts has written about Boston's urban religious environment and offered a trenchant analysis that challenges much of the conventional wisdom concerning ``faith-based communities.'' As such, ``Streets of Glory'' is as relevant as President Bush's proposal to support through federal funds the so-called faith-based initiatives.

With due deference to such intellectual ancestors as E. Franklin Frazier and St. Clair Drake, McRoberts offers what he regards as the first serious study of black urban religious life since Drake's monumental 1940 study of black churches in Chicago. Local interest aside, McRoberts stands in worthy succession.

It is a cliche of American society that the stability of the black community is defined by its church culture. Anyone who has watched Henry Hampton's epic ``Eyes on the Prize,'' viewed the PBS special ``This Far by Faith,'' or heard of Boston's Ten Point Coalition would believe that the movement for racial social justice and the building of just and stable communities of color are projects that operate out of the rich church culture of the black community.

Yet McRoberts asks difficult questions that demand a more critical analysis of the relationship between neighborhoods in decline and the multitude of black churches in their midst, and the urban phenomenon of a devastated streetscape such as Blue Hill Avenue, which is populated chiefly by chop shops, liquor stores, and churches. ``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.''

If we are truly interested in contemporary community life and civil society, we will want to know how churches actually work in depressed urban areas. There is no better study available on this volatile subject than this one, required reading for all would-be policy makers, and citizens.