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Shades of White Flight: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure
Since World War II, historians have analyzed a phenomenon of “white flight” plaguing the urban areas of the northern United States. One of the most interesting cases of “white flight” occurred in the Chicago neighborhoods of Englewood and Roseland, where seven entire church congregations from one denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, left the city in the 1960s and 1970s and relocated their churches to nearby suburbs. In Shades of White Flight , sociologist Mark T. Mulder investigates the migration of these Chicago church members, revealing how these churches not only failed to inhibit white flight, but actually facilitated the congregations’ departure.
Using a wealth of both archival and interview data, Mulder sheds light on the forces that shaped these midwestern neighborhoods and shows that, surprisingly, evangelical religion fostered both segregation as well as the decline of urban stability. Indeed, the Roseland and Englewood stories show how religion—often used to foster community and social connectedness—can sometimes help to disintegrate neighborhoods. Mulder describes how the Dutch CRC formed an insular social circle that focused on the local church and Christian school—instead of the local park or square or market—as the center point of the community. Rather than embrace the larger community, the CRC subculture sheltered themselves and their families within these two places. Thus it became relatively easy—when black families moved into the neighborhood—to sell the church and school and relocate in the suburbs. This is especially true because, in these congregations, authority rested at the local church level and in fact they owned the buildings themselves.
Revealing how a dominant form of evangelical church polity—congregationalism—functioned within the larger phenomenon of white flight, Shades of White Flight lends new insights into the role of religion and how it can affect social change, not always for the better.
Using a wealth of both archival and interview data, Mulder sheds light on the forces that shaped these midwestern neighborhoods and shows that, surprisingly, evangelical religion fostered both segregation as well as the decline of urban stability. Indeed, the Roseland and Englewood stories show how religion—often used to foster community and social connectedness—can sometimes help to disintegrate neighborhoods. Mulder describes how the Dutch CRC formed an insular social circle that focused on the local church and Christian school—instead of the local park or square or market—as the center point of the community. Rather than embrace the larger community, the CRC subculture sheltered themselves and their families within these two places. Thus it became relatively easy—when black families moved into the neighborhood—to sell the church and school and relocate in the suburbs. This is especially true because, in these congregations, authority rested at the local church level and in fact they owned the buildings themselves.
Revealing how a dominant form of evangelical church polity—congregationalism—functioned within the larger phenomenon of white flight, Shades of White Flight lends new insights into the role of religion and how it can affect social change, not always for the better.
198 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 23, 2016
Mark Mulder makes a compelling sociological case for why the Dutch Christian Reformed of Chicago (my people) failed to invest in racially integrated neighborhoods as they moved ever outward from Englewood to Roseland to inner-ring suburbs to outer suburbs (the precise path my family took over several generations).
He argues, first off, that the individualistic nature of American Protestantism makes it uniquely un-suited to understand and address structural injustice, particularly racism. Second, the Dutch Calvinist history of schism and mobility (they left the Netherlands, after all), gave it a template for pulling up stakes and moving somewhere new. Third, the closed-off nature of a religious-ethnic subculture that kept its own social circle, churches, schools, even businesses, left it with weak civic ties to broader neighborhoods. Finally, the church power structure left individual congregations free to choose their own future even as the denomination urged them to stay in the inner city. Mulder situates his study in the broader scholarship about "white flight" by arguing that role of religion is an under-explored factor.
Mulder's argument is quite harsh toward Dutch CRC Chicago, even though he doesn't set out to be judgmental. Rather than focusing on individual heroes or villains, he tells a structural story of organizations, drawing on church consistory records from the 60s and 70s. In the same way that racism manifests not just as personal sin but through structures like exclusive housing covenants, predatory loans, highway construction, and on, the behavior of organizations matters as much as the behavior of individuals.
He's not wrong. Yet, 2,000 miles away, I found myself feeling defensive for "my people." The Chicago Dutch were one small group eking out a living in the stormy, husky, brawling city. Surely my predecessors had to adapt for their own livelihoods. They lived within the context of broader racism toward African Americans. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warm of Other Suns, in particular, convinced me that Cicero's nickname of the "Selma of the North" was no joke. (Mulder tells the story of Timothy Christian School's failure to integrate in Cicero.)
This sort of personal justification misses the point. "Looking after our own" will never help us move beyond petty tribal squabbles until we can expand our notion of "our own" to include all of God's children. We need systemic explanations to help us understand structural forces shaping our world. Yet we also need particular stories about particular people. I've written in Image journal about Peter De Vries, the Dutch Calvinist humorist who left Chicago for a long literary career at the New Yorker, and how his atheism shook me as a teenager and later left me grateful for the intellectual freedom it demonstrated. I wouldn't understand "my people" without his novels and the stories my family tells, or without Mulder's account. His book makes me want to hear a lot more from my aunts and uncles about their experiences growing up in these neighborhoods. We need both novelists and sociologists, I suppose.
He argues, first off, that the individualistic nature of American Protestantism makes it uniquely un-suited to understand and address structural injustice, particularly racism. Second, the Dutch Calvinist history of schism and mobility (they left the Netherlands, after all), gave it a template for pulling up stakes and moving somewhere new. Third, the closed-off nature of a religious-ethnic subculture that kept its own social circle, churches, schools, even businesses, left it with weak civic ties to broader neighborhoods. Finally, the church power structure left individual congregations free to choose their own future even as the denomination urged them to stay in the inner city. Mulder situates his study in the broader scholarship about "white flight" by arguing that role of religion is an under-explored factor.
Mulder's argument is quite harsh toward Dutch CRC Chicago, even though he doesn't set out to be judgmental. Rather than focusing on individual heroes or villains, he tells a structural story of organizations, drawing on church consistory records from the 60s and 70s. In the same way that racism manifests not just as personal sin but through structures like exclusive housing covenants, predatory loans, highway construction, and on, the behavior of organizations matters as much as the behavior of individuals.
He's not wrong. Yet, 2,000 miles away, I found myself feeling defensive for "my people." The Chicago Dutch were one small group eking out a living in the stormy, husky, brawling city. Surely my predecessors had to adapt for their own livelihoods. They lived within the context of broader racism toward African Americans. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warm of Other Suns, in particular, convinced me that Cicero's nickname of the "Selma of the North" was no joke. (Mulder tells the story of Timothy Christian School's failure to integrate in Cicero.)
This sort of personal justification misses the point. "Looking after our own" will never help us move beyond petty tribal squabbles until we can expand our notion of "our own" to include all of God's children. We need systemic explanations to help us understand structural forces shaping our world. Yet we also need particular stories about particular people. I've written in Image journal about Peter De Vries, the Dutch Calvinist humorist who left Chicago for a long literary career at the New Yorker, and how his atheism shook me as a teenager and later left me grateful for the intellectual freedom it demonstrated. I wouldn't understand "my people" without his novels and the stories my family tells, or without Mulder's account. His book makes me want to hear a lot more from my aunts and uncles about their experiences growing up in these neighborhoods. We need both novelists and sociologists, I suppose.
March 21, 2016
This book has sparked so many thoughts and questions. In one sense it is just an academic sociological history of a small community, but in another sense it records the kind of disconnect between actions and intentions that so many of us white American Christians have participated in knowingly or unknowingly and contributed to racial injustice in our cities. The results of these failures and sins stay with all of us.
The account of the failure of Timothy Christian School to integrate is both hard and important to read.
Automatic four stars for a clear and easy to follow one-chapter history of the CRC, which I married into more than a decade ago but understand much better after that one chapter. And another star for causing painful soul searching and self-examination during Lent.
The account of the failure of Timothy Christian School to integrate is both hard and important to read.
Automatic four stars for a clear and easy to follow one-chapter history of the CRC, which I married into more than a decade ago but understand much better after that one chapter. And another star for causing painful soul searching and self-examination during Lent.
September 3, 2021
This book brings the big picture issues of systemic racism close to home for me, geographically and personally. It’s a hard history to grapple with and I think Mulder is even handed in his discussion. I’m glad I had the chance to read it within an institution with links to this story so we have a better chance at moving from lament to repentance and change.
November 17, 2016
I will be writing a review, hopefully for the Journal of Urban Mission. It is disheartening to read about how 7 CRC churches systematically contributed to the white flight phenomenon in Chicago in the 1960-70s. There are certainly lessons to be learned from Mulder's research; may we think carefully through those lessons even as the tide reverses and now whites continue moving *into* cities with the growing phenomenon of gentrification.
August 22, 2015
Listen to my interview with the author at: http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org...
September 9, 2017
Shades of White Flight examines how the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) in Chicago participated and encouraged their members migration from Chicago proper to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s.
I grew up in the CRC and have not attended in a number of years primarily because of the stances it has taken against the LGBTQ community. I also have had Mark Mulder as a professor when I attended Calvin College which may affect my reading of this book.
Early on Mulder makes the claim that the CRC is a closed off from society. People in the CRC have two places of social engagement, the church and the private christian, predominately CRC, schools. The CRC has created Cadets (for boys) and Calvinettes (for girls) to “operate as religious counterparts of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts” (pg 39). Members of the church shopped at businesses owned by other members and only shopped at other locations if there was no other choice. When African Americans began to move into the community it was easy for the church and it’s members to pick up their shops, church, schools, and communities and move them to the suburbs.
In addition to a closed community the CRC’s governmental structure also played a role in the movement to the suburbs. Each church is owned by the members. They have the right to sell the church building if they chose to. In the Englewood and Rosewood neighbourhoods, the focus of the study, every CRC church relocated in the span of a decade to the suburbs. In one instance the church even directed the congregants where to move. This was not stopped by church polity as the churches had every right to do with their building what they wished.
Mulder contrasts this with the Reformed Church of America (RCA) a church indistinguishable from the CRC. The CRC split from the RCA, has the same heritage, same dutch background, same creeds and catechisms. The difference is that the RCA stayed in the Rosewood and Englewood communities 15-20 years longer than the CRC churches because their hierarchical structure encouraged the RCA to stay.
As someone who grew up in the CRC, reading this book made me understand why my upbringing was the way it was. It made me understand why my community was so closed off (even though many CRC members will take offense to this), why my parents spent thousands of dollars a year on private education, and why all of our activities were organized through the church / church community. Why when we moved our new community was also based around our new CRC congregation and christian schools. And it explains today why it irritates my partner, who grew up in a different church environment, when my family's first response for wedding vendors is to hire someone in our church.
I applaud Mark Mulder for his work in bringing the racist past of the CRC to light. With works like this I hope that churches are able to make a self critique and that change can happen. However, I fear that members of the CRC will take the problems presented in this book and say that that was a congregational issue, not a systemic issue.
At one point Mulder points out how the Synod of the CRC (it's governing body) understood the systemic issues of racism but it was not able to convey this to it's members. Members of the CRC have difficulty understanding systemic issues as they place all the responsibility on the individual in their spiritual and daily lives.
I recommend this book for those who grew up in the CRC to help explain racial tensions to their family members. I for one will be using the argument presented to try and show how the CRC is a proponent of racial segregation.
I grew up in the CRC and have not attended in a number of years primarily because of the stances it has taken against the LGBTQ community. I also have had Mark Mulder as a professor when I attended Calvin College which may affect my reading of this book.
Early on Mulder makes the claim that the CRC is a closed off from society. People in the CRC have two places of social engagement, the church and the private christian, predominately CRC, schools. The CRC has created Cadets (for boys) and Calvinettes (for girls) to “operate as religious counterparts of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts” (pg 39). Members of the church shopped at businesses owned by other members and only shopped at other locations if there was no other choice. When African Americans began to move into the community it was easy for the church and it’s members to pick up their shops, church, schools, and communities and move them to the suburbs.
In addition to a closed community the CRC’s governmental structure also played a role in the movement to the suburbs. Each church is owned by the members. They have the right to sell the church building if they chose to. In the Englewood and Rosewood neighbourhoods, the focus of the study, every CRC church relocated in the span of a decade to the suburbs. In one instance the church even directed the congregants where to move. This was not stopped by church polity as the churches had every right to do with their building what they wished.
Mulder contrasts this with the Reformed Church of America (RCA) a church indistinguishable from the CRC. The CRC split from the RCA, has the same heritage, same dutch background, same creeds and catechisms. The difference is that the RCA stayed in the Rosewood and Englewood communities 15-20 years longer than the CRC churches because their hierarchical structure encouraged the RCA to stay.
As someone who grew up in the CRC, reading this book made me understand why my upbringing was the way it was. It made me understand why my community was so closed off (even though many CRC members will take offense to this), why my parents spent thousands of dollars a year on private education, and why all of our activities were organized through the church / church community. Why when we moved our new community was also based around our new CRC congregation and christian schools. And it explains today why it irritates my partner, who grew up in a different church environment, when my family's first response for wedding vendors is to hire someone in our church.
I applaud Mark Mulder for his work in bringing the racist past of the CRC to light. With works like this I hope that churches are able to make a self critique and that change can happen. However, I fear that members of the CRC will take the problems presented in this book and say that that was a congregational issue, not a systemic issue.
At one point Mulder points out how the Synod of the CRC (it's governing body) understood the systemic issues of racism but it was not able to convey this to it's members. Members of the CRC have difficulty understanding systemic issues as they place all the responsibility on the individual in their spiritual and daily lives.
I recommend this book for those who grew up in the CRC to help explain racial tensions to their family members. I for one will be using the argument presented to try and show how the CRC is a proponent of racial segregation.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews