The following is a stream of consciousness reflecting my thoughts of living in America as an Evangelical from Europe, but not getting it and trying to work out why?

I’m in the process of going through the Units on Be The Bridge, a Facebook group for people trying to understand racial injustice in the US, and how entrenched it is American history. If you’ve not looked at that group – it’s amazing!

One of the video units explains how white evangelical Christians, maybe unknowingly, influenced the development of a White American narrative regarding cities.  This set off a chain of thoughts that helped me understand what I see happening today.

A brief history of time or – The Promised Land

Evangelicals arrived in America fleeing persecution in Europe.  They initially saw the country along the lines of “A New Heaven, A New Earth, the City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem”. Essentially, this was Heaven on Earth. Anything which detracted from that vision was labeled evil, Satanic, or at the least, morally wrong.

These folks initially arrived in the cities. These cities were the “New Jerusalem”, any “threats” in those cities were obviously demonic!

The second wave of immigration came from non-Evangelicals, from Southern and Eastern Europe. These people came from Catholic or Orthodox backgrounds, they essentially came with nothing, and established their new lives in the cities, where the opportunities were.  As more and more “of those people” moved into the city, with their “different” religion, the nice Evangelicals moved out, creating the suburbs.

This was compounded when slavery was abolished and a wave of newly freed, but still subjugated Black people also moved into the cities from the South, which accelerated the exodus of Evangelicals.  The message was clear, cities were no longer the safe – “Heaven on Earth” that they were designed to be. They were now the centers of all kinds of evil on Earth, and best avoided at all costs, alongside “those people” destroying the kind of “Heaven” we want. (Us and Them is always a measure to determine who is right and who is wrong – in this case, the predominantly white evangelicals were those who determined right from wrong).

The Suburbs = the new Kingdom of Heaven

The suburbs took off after World War 1, the US government decided to actively lower the bar to homeownership by allowing loans at extremely affordable prices – as long as you were white.  This was a period of active discrimination, based on the color of your skin. The country was zoned into colors.  Red areas were barred from any sort of investment by the Government, but anyone “undesirable” would bring down the investment potential for the other areas, so “those people” were not allowed to participate in this process of equity growth.  People of color were left in the cities, where there was little inflation of house prices, multi-family dwellings or rent only apartments.  White people grew richer through owning their own house, helped by the Government, and being able to pass that equity onto their children, Black people didn’t.

Now the suburbs became the New Jerusalem, the new Heaven, the new promised land. Large churches grew in these suburbs, old churches transferred all their members into these new buildings (and saw tremendous church growth – but it was transfer growth).  The cities were left to rot and given up on as a lost cause.

The call to gentrificaiton

Around the mid-80s, early 90s, there was a movement (with Evangelical circles) to revisit the problem of the cities. Soong Chan Rah describes this perfectly using a series of book titles, but can be summarized by titles like The Secular City, The Unheavenly City, Babylon by Choice, but moving to titles like Loving the Dirty Streets, to Taking our Cities for God.  We now see the emphasis in songs like “Greater things have yet to come, Greater things have yet to be done, in this City”.

The calling was clear, we can’t be happy leaving these cities to their “godless” whims, we need to retake them.  All the while, without thinking about the people who still lived in those cities!

Today, we have seen this play out in the city I live in, Rockford Illinois.  Over the last ten years or so, active work has been done to bring “life” back into the old no go areas of downtown.  We started “City Market”, an expensive food truck and designer vegetables experience, Fridays from May to October each year. We’ve had large corporations buy up empty industrial buildings and rehabbing them as small designer apartments with a high price tag for single, wealthy young professionals to move into, to enjoy the new “downtown” experience, that we don’t quite have yet.

The effect on those existing people of color is they can now, no longer afford to stay in the areas of town they have historically lived in, but there is nowhere else to go.  One problem, the minimum wage, which effectively dictates what “low skilled” people earn, was set in the 60s/70s to be what someone would need to support a family with one wage earner, has been stagnant since 1970. That wage is no longer able to support anyone.  It takes two or three full-time jobs to support a family today on that amount.

What is Heaven?

But I digress, the issue I see today is the inability to differentiate, between being a Citizen of Heaven, and having our hope in our future, and the belief that the US is Heaven on Earth now, and anything that stands in the way is ungodly. I have often heard about this “Great Country”, the only place “where we have Freedom!” This is strange, as I’m pretty sure I experienced a great deal of freedom while living in both the UK and Italy.

Any criticism of America is normally filtered through a view where whatever criticism leveled is interpreted as criticizing God.    There is an overwhelming feeling of loss amongst white, suburban evangelicals, where we appear to have lost something (and this part you can choose from: our faith; our moral compass; our manors; our desire to follow God; our willingness to obey authority, our rights to discipline out kids, etc).  There is a yearning for better times in the past, where people had these things.

However, that great past never truly existed. At least not for non-white, suburban evangelicals. Everyone else was subjugated or discriminated against.  We truly do not want to return to this era in American history!

This sense of loss is being amplified by today’s political rhetoric, of which, “Make America Great Again”, is the loudest.  Unless you’re white, American was never great!  Yet, to exclaim that creates a backlash from the very people who need to hear those complaints the most.  This doubling down on Nationalism has turned symbols of our nation into idols which we uphold to a level higher than scripture. For instance, things like flag worship, the pledge of allegiance, and the constitution are held to a level of Holiness which no other country understands.  We are now at the point where someone protesting system racism and police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem (a gesture recommended by a Navy Seal) is viewed as disrespecting the flag.  We negate the protest by dismissing it wholeheartedly while denigrating the protestor for hating America. That is so much easier than dealing with the issue he’s protesting!

Jesus pointed out in Mathew 25:31-46, that those who didn’t entertain the stranger, clothe and feed the poor, heal the sick would be thrown into eternal punishment.  This was a direct warning to those calling themselves God followers of his time.  Let’s spend time exploring someone else’s worldview, rather than reacting because they criticize the country we can’t distinguish from Heaven.