The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities

Katie Day, Elise M. Edwards, Katie Day, Elise M. Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000289268
• Subtopic: Religious Architecture
• Index: Social Sciences

Like an ecosystem, cities develop, change, thrive, adapt, expand, and contract through the interaction of myriad components. Religion is one of those living parts, shaping and being shaped by urban contexts. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities is an outstanding interdisciplinary reference source to the key topics, problems, and methodologies of this cutting-edge subject. Representing a diverse array of cities and religions, the common analytical approach is ecological and spatial. It is the first collection of its kind and reflects state-of-the-art research focusing on the interaction of religions and their urban contexts. Comprising 29 chapters, by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into three parts:

• Research methodologies
• Religious frameworks and ideologies in urban contexts
• Contemporary issues in religion and cities

Within these sections, emerging research and analysis of current dynamics of urban religions are examined, including: housing, economics, and gentrification; sacred ritual and public space; immigration and the refugee crisis; political conflicts and social change; ethnic and religious diversity; urban policy and religion; racial justice; architecture and the built environment; religious art and symbology; religion and urban violence; technology and smart cities; the challenge of climate change for global cities; and religious meaning-making of the city.

The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and urban studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, history, architecture, urban planning, theology, social work, and cultural studies.

1

Introduction

Katie Day and Elise M. Edwards

When considering religion, context matters—and always has. Organized rituals and beliefs reflecting transcendent reality have never been decontextualized in their origins and development. Despite so much research on religion that focuses on individual faith, looking at religion in such individualistic terms has been a relatively recent development. Even studies of trends in the broader patterns of believing and belonging have been blinkered, for the most part, in incorporating the social and spatial contexts into their analyses. Religions develop not in isolated siloes, but in social interactions and in real time and real space. More specifically, the practices and identities of religious faiths have been social phenomena within urban contexts: religion and cities have been inextricably related throughout human history, interactive in their development. Religion and cities have quite literally grown up together. Both are complex social arrangements—dynamic in and of themselves, but even more so when considered in their relationship. Urban contexts include intersecting cultures, economies, political structures, built environments, and histories, and have profound impact on the shape of religions within them. Reciprocally, religions shape cities as well in all the same dimensions.

Religion has not been able to ignore its urban space: it is the literal context in which faith communities have flourished (or declined) and in which their primal understandings of good and evil—their very moral imaginations—have been formed. Religion is inherently spatial in its construction of meaning and message, as well as its institutional establishment. Reciprocally, cities have been shaped by religion spatially, culturally, economically, and politically. Cities are spatially mapped by religious settlers and infused as secular moral communities with their presence and symbology. This reciprocity is at the heart of the research represented in this volume. From a diversity of urban contexts from five continents, and representing a variety of faith traditions, the scholars and religious practitioners within these covers explore and analyze the nuanced dynamics of religion and cities. The rigid delineation of sacred and profane, of religion over and against the city, no longer has intellectual integrity. While maintaining distinctions, to various degrees, religion is both in and of the city. As obvious as this interaction seems, both theoretically and in lived experience, there are curious blind spots among those who engage the city, including scholars, policy makers, and even religious practitioners.¹ Those who study, design, develop, and govern cities are often blinkered from “seeing” religion and understanding its dynamic relationship to the urban context.² And those who study religion similarly overlook the impact of space on their subjects.

This volume was envisaged as a compilation of contemporary scholarship that would capture, refracted through a diversity of angles, how religions and cities are mutually engaging each other in the twenty-first century. The subject itself—the interaction of religion and cities—defies any sort of one-dimensional analysis. Its complexity is amplified by the particularities of geographic and religious contexts, reflected in the rich diversity of the chapters in this volume. From Mumbai to Stockholm, New York to Indonesia, Hong Kong to Chicago, the research represented here looks at how peoples of many religions are living out their faith in cities in myriad ways. The contributors include a wide range of academic disciplines and experience: anthropologists, sociologists, historians, theologians, journalists, practitioners, theologians, and architects, all employing their particular lenses and methodologies in their in-depth analyses.

They pull out threads of religious-urban dynamics, including economic policies, political power struggles, land use, the dramatic movement of peoples, environmental crisis, and the development of meaning and identity in it all.

As if this complexity were not enough to hold in one volume, during the final stage of this project, the coronavirus pandemic swept across the globe. In a matter of weeks, even days, much of what had defined both cities and religions—both dependent on physical gatherings of people—came to a dramatic halt. Everything from commerce to worship needed to be reimagined and retooled to remote forms of engagement for public safety. Streets were empty, workers were unemployed, borders blocked travel and immigration, and houses of worship shuttered until further notice. The coronavirus pandemic has been a cruel reminder of how interdependent we are on this planet, for better or worse. As the death toll rose in the spring of 2020 in the global city of New York—her hospitals overwhelmed, her theaters, businesses, and sacred places gone dark—it became apparent how very vulnerable cities were. Further, the pandemic ravaged those communities within cities who were most vulnerable to begin with: people of color, those in lower-paying service jobs, in dense housing, those with less access to health care, the elderly, and the incarcerated. Social inequalities were grimly laid bare and exacerbated. Those with access to internet technology were more likely to work and study at home … and to survive. The digital divide was exposed even as it widened the social distance between the haves and the have-nots, or the hooked-in and the unplugged.

In this context, religious groups have worked diligently to adapt. As “shelter in place” policies were enacted throughout the world, the familiar rituals of gathering have been jarringly interrupted. Yet the longing for meaning, support, worship, and especially comfort during this period of suffering and dying has intensified. It should come as no surprise that many of the challenges to public orders have come from religious groups, defying bans in order to hold corporate worship and funerals. Violators—such as the Hasidic community holding a funeral for their rabbi in New York, or Christians in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, gathering for worship—elicited police responses, which no doubt felt as religious persecution by the pandemic-weary believers. Most faith communities have had to become technologically savvy and have learned to creatively continue ministries. Anecdotally, many report higher numbers of people accessing worship through technology than had previously attended. However, what the long-term impact of the pandemic will be on cities and religions is a manner of speculation. Will there be a thinning of attachment to the materiality of worship in built sacred spaces, with tangible symbols, and in the physical presence of others? Will “social distancing” erode social capital and social trust? Is what might feel apocalyptic in fact becoming “the new normal” in the future, and how will societies and religions look different? These questions and many others are not addressed here, although Richard Cimino and Hans Tokke, who write about their research on the religious super-diversity in Queens, New York, provided an epilogue in their chapter about the impact of the pandemic on the religious groups they studied.

Then, later in the spring of 2020, as people of color were bearing disproportionate amounts of suffering due to COVID, a series of Black people were fatally shot by police in the US. These sparked mass demonstrations, not only in American cities large and small, but globally as well. The empty streets were now filled with thousands of people in largely peaceful demonstrations calling for the dismantling of systemic racism, especially in police departments. As people of all races and religions marched together, it was clear that the need to assert that “Black Lives Matter” was an issue worth risking one’s health and life for. At once, the intersecting dramas of the pandemic and cries for social change were performed in city spaces. Chapters that address racial injustice, like Teresa Smallwood’s research on police violence and community response in Nashville, have even more relevance and urgency in this moment. The question of what to do with Baltimore’s “ghosts,” Confederate monuments and art from the Uprising following the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, is raised by Marcos Bisticas-Cocoves and Harold Morales.

No doubt there will be a proliferation of additional research on these critical historic phenomena. But in moving into the post-pandemic and post-social unrest realities of this moment—if indeed there is a “post”—it will be important to look at how cities and the religions within them are changed. But first it is crucial to understand the dynamics of cities and religions as they have interacted up to this point. The contributors here bring a rich diversity of research, drilling down in their analyses of how particular urban contexts and the peoples of faith within them are in mutual engagement. Understanding the nuances of these interactions will enable clearer insights going forward.

The history of religion and cities

Early human civilization moved from agrarian settlements to more densely populated centers where commercial trade of crafts and services created communities of exchange. Since the first cities emerged in 3200 bce in Southern Mesopotamia,³ these more densely populated spaces with markets and residences were usually organized around a centralized temple. Having a central cultic institution served a number of purposes, including generating shared meaning and social coherence among the population, creating social control through norms and laws, and facilitating the development of language. As these early cities developed, societies organized hierarchically, and political power also became centralized and sacralized. Sociologist of religion Robert Bellah has described the relationship between God and king, arguing that power was mythologized so that it might be maintained.⁴ From these early roots, religion, power, and the places of power were intricately interconnected in symbiotic relationships—in cities.

This pattern of the co-production of religion and urban life has continued throughout history until the present time. In the Hebrew scriptures, there is an identification with the spiritual self and one’s community as the Israelites in exile are exhorted to “seek the (shalom), welfare of the city … for in its welfare you will find your welfare”—even if one is an exile in that city.⁵ Consider the later design of medieval cities in a Christocentric pattern, as reflected in the maps from this period: urban space itself both reflected and reinforced religious meanings.⁶ During the Reformation period in Europe, an urban vision informed John Calvin’s reorganization of Geneva. Although his theology affirmed the sovereignty of God, it was in the city that theological convictions were to be manifest. The centrality of cities to the organization of religion is also reflected in Islam (Mecca) and Roman Catholicism (Rome). A number of cities are shared by religions that consider them sacred, such as Jerusalem for Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and Varanasi for Buddhists and Hindus. These sacred cities provide a gravitational center for religious traditions, enabling their institutional, ideological, and political development. Religions and cities have had their identities, and indeed their fortunes, entwined.

Religions are in the meaning-making business and the cities in which they were located became a primary focus of the theological imagination. However, there was ambivalence about “the city,” which itself became a metaphor of both blessing and curse. In the Greek scriptures of the Christian tradition, the “New Jerusalem” is prophesied in the Book of Revelations as the symbolic culmination of human history and perfection of all creation. “Babylon,” on the other hand, reflects the depths of human sinfulness and self-destruction. Although it has been a great city historically, Babylon (part of what is now Baghdad) was condemned in the bible as being the place of multi-lingual confusion, idolatry, and condemnation.⁷ In the fifth century ce, St. Augustine of Hippo, in City of God, further explored these two conflicting metaphors of the city as a place of redemption or of ultimate damnation. In this influential work, the church and state both contribute to the ordering and progress of human community. Ultimately, however, his allegorical City of Heaven leads to salvation, but the City of the World leads to damnation. In the theological and intellectual history over succeeding ages, the city has persisted as a compelling metaphor for humanity itself—representing both its highest potential and lowest depravity. This ambivalence about the city is not just limited to a religious imaginary but has been reflected more broadly in culture, politics, and the academy.

In the American experiment, “the city” as Janus-faced metaphor also evolved. Religion was a central dynamic in the establishment of the new country, and the urban metaphor conveyed the utopic vision. Since the Puritan preacher John Winthrop exhorted those who would be settling the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 to see their new community as a “city on a hill,” the biblical reference entered the vocabulary of American civil religion. The “shining city on a hill,” as used by President Ronald Reagan, connoted a society which was exceptional in the global community, providing a beacon from a lofty perch. But the city as metaphor, and in reality, was not always “shining,” but has also been perceived as a place of chaos, terror, and depravity. In theory, theology, public policy, and public perception, “the city” is considered with ambivalence, as both sacred and profane, the place of redemption or alienation. While this has been the bifocal lens through which religion has seen the city and its context, it has rarely looked at itself in such terms.

As well as the recurring theme identifying the city with salvation within civic consciousness, the concurrent identification of the city with sinfulness, depravity, and condemnation has been equally, and at times predominantly, in the public imagination. Urban centers are defined by density of population, enabling the creation of anonymity and the lack of social controls. The Puritans, despite imagining the American experiment as a “shining city,” looked at actual cities less charitably, as havens that bred all manner of excesses, bringing out the worst of humanity. Religious traditions have often viewed the city in pathological terms and seen themselves—religious institutions—as standing over or against the city, holding up a mirror that it might see its sinfulness. The boundary between sacred and profane was considered absolute, impermeable. The church or temple, if it stayed in the city, considered itself as judge and source of redemption for those who escaped, or were rescued from, the stench of urban decay. Urban scholar Robert Orsi describes how the popular Christian evangelist Billy Sunday of the early twentieth century reflected a prevalent social perspective o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Research methodologies
• PART II Religious frameworks and ideologies in urban contexts
• PART III Contemporary issues in religion and cities
• Index