Souls of the city: religion and the search for community in postwar America

TL;DR

Etan Diamond argues that postwar metropolitan growth in Indianapolis reshaped the religious landscape, but that religious congregations remained vital sites of community even as they became geographically dispersed. He contends that "community" in the metropolis has never been singular or purely inclusive—congregations both gather and exclude, and members increasingly commute across the region to worship.

Key findings

• Suburbanization produced a boom in new congregations, but conservative Protestant, Pentecostal, and Holiness groups—not mainline denominations—dominated it: of 191 new suburban congregations formed in Marion County between 1941 and 1970, 58 percent were conservative Protestant/Pentecostal/Holiness and only 29 percent mainline Protestant.
• Inner-city racial turnover was dramatic and connected to congregational relocation: Center Township went from 30 percent African American in 1940 to 70 percent by 1970, and the 35 congregations that relocated out of Center Township between 1941 and 1970 sat in tracts that went from an average of 22 percent to almost 60 percent African American, while destination tracts were only 10 percent African American in 1970.
• Physical redevelopment displaced congregations as much as race did: of 195 congregations standing within a quarter mile of a proposed highway or exit ramp in 1960, almost half had moved or closed ten years later.
• Congregants were religious commuters, not neighborhood worshippers: a 1957 study of 23 Indianapolis congregations found almost half of members lived more than two miles away and almost one-fifth more than five miles; 1990s Polis Center analyses found members averaged five miles from church, about half of 170 surveyed churches reported a majority of members came from outside the neighborhood, and only a quarter of residents in four inner-city neighborhoods attended church in their own neighborhood.

Methods

• Historical monograph on religion and metropolitan change in Indianapolis and Marion County, focused mainly on 1940–1970 with an epilogue extending to the 1990s; the author frames Indianapolis as representative of mid-sized Midwestern cities rather than of Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles.
• Draws on archival congregational records and church histories, denominational and church-federation planning reports (e.g., Shippey 1946/1947, Leiffer 1959, Douglass's Comity Report), U.S. Census data, local newspapers (Indianapolis Star, News, Times, Recorder), oral history interviews, and GIS mapping of congregations.
• Analysis is qualitative and descriptive, organized around three geographic strands—suburbanizers, the suburbanized rural periphery, and the "unsuburban" inner city—plus a chapter on Unigov-era consolidation.

Limitations

• The book states no formal limitations section; the author does note that his primary audience began as Polis Center colleagues and that the project was funded by the Lilly Endowment, and he explicitly positions Indianapolis as representative of smaller/mid-sized cities rather than large metropolises (an acknowledged scope choice rather than a stated limitation).
• Evident from the text: the study is a single-metro case study, so generalizations to other regions rest on the author's representativeness argument rather than comparative data; several findings rely on congregational self-reports, church histories, and newspaper accounts, which may smooth over conflict or bias coverage toward congregations that kept records; and the provided text is truncated in Chapter V, so the Unigov analysis cannot be fully assessed here.