God loves gentrification

“God loves cities.” This has been a mantra that has guided a new generation of evangelicals who have sought to take their Christian faith into the inner cities and urban centers of the United States. There are more people to evangelize there, the rationale goes. A previous generation of Christians mistakenly sheltered themselves from the diverse and “sinful” cities. Why cut churches off from the centers of art, commerce, and culture? Moreover, the bible calls Christians to seek the welfare of their cities (Jeremiah 29:4-7). Yet, the questions I want to raise are these: what does it mean that the popularity of predominately white church plants in inner cities has grown precisely as gentrification has spiked? What does it mean that many have been inspired to seek the welfare of cities precisely as a growing number of people have been economically displaced from these cities? The theologies that romanticize this shift into the city need to be seriously scrutinized alongside the material realities.

In the 1990s and 2000s, while many evangelicals changed their minds about cities and moved in, cities and suburbs also changed. According to the Confronting Suburban Poverty in America study, by 2012 there were more people living below the poverty line in U.S. suburbs (16.5 million) than in cities (13.5 million). These changes are reflected in virtually all of the major metropolitan areas around the country. Fully 88 percent of Atlanta’s poor live in the suburbs…and between 2000 and 2011, Atlanta’s suburban poor population grew by 159 percent while the city’s poor population remained essentially flat. In Chicago’s suburbs, the number of those living in poverty increased over 99% in the same time span, roughly 7 times more than the city’s rate. New York’s suburban poverty grew approximately 14 times more than the city’s poverty between 2000 and 2011.