The cover story in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine goes directly to something that's been troubling me ever since I made a cross-country road trip in August, 2001. But for the glorious exception of Jonesborough, Tennessee, the America I saw seemed to have lost its towns. It was all malls and Sam's Clubs and Krispy Kremes and vast parking lots out on the highways that snake around barren town centers. "How do you weave community out of big-cart visits to WalMart?" I wondered every day of that long, hot drive.
Out along the Trail of Tears, where the only stations up and down the radio dial are either conservative talk or low-level Christian stuff, I had this follow-up question: If all available airwaves are filled with rants about all those others who do wrong, where do the no-town folks hang to discover otherwise? Rotary Club?
Sadly, Theda Skocpol's Diminished Democracy casts doubt on the Rotary option:
"...we've gone from a nation with a genius for organizing membership associations that people could join at the local, national and State level, to a nation of professionally run civic organizations that do things and speak for people... (There) were groups that brought people together from all walks of life. From the 1960s onwards, the membership of such groups in the US fell significantly." (underline added for emphasis)
The Times article describes an American trend -
"In a sense, the new breed of megachurches has more in common with the frontier churches of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which served as gathering places for pioneers who had gone West in search of opportunity. In sprawling, decentralized exurbs...where housing developments rarely include porches, parks, stoops or any of the other features that have historically brought neighbors together, megachurches provide a locus for community. In many places, they operate almost like surrogate governments, offering residents day care, athletic facilities, counseling, even schools. Taking the comparison one step further, there's even a tax, albeit a voluntary one: members are encouraged to tithe, or donate 10 percent of their income to the church."
Radiant, the specific focus of the Times, is a mega-church run by a mail-order preacher who never finished his correspondence course, but did master the build-a-church marketing seminars.
(T)he city didn't have the infrastructure to support an influx of young families. (The pastor) sensed opportunity... ''Just helping the community opened a lot of doors, made people feel like we weren't just a church.''
The newly arriving parents told him (schools) were terrible. So (the pastor) rented a trailer, strung up a banner and began signing up children for an as-yet-unbuilt charter school..It was a measure of just how desperate parents were for an alternative to the public schools that the parents of 225 children turned up, vaccination records in hand, and registered them. Today the school... directly across the street from...(the) massive worship center, is thriving. It has more than 1,000 children, and a waiting list close to 200.
Because the school relies on public funds, teachers are required to follow state-approved curriculum guides, but (the school) nevertheless provides free advertising for Radiant. ''To this day parents will come by here and go, 'We just moved (here) and my kids go to school here, so tell me about this church,' ''
''We usually say it's a real positive church, real upbeat, kind of a community feel. A great place to get to know people. And they go, 'Great, I'll check it out.' That story has happened hundreds of times.''
If one were not particularly deep, one might think, "Well, that's mighty nice of the church to fill in where the community falls short,"... until this: At a youth service, the pastor admonished the teenagers,
''If I asked how many of you have close friends who are unbelievers, a lot of you would probably raise your hands. I'll tell you right now, if one of you is a believer and the other is not, your relationship is doomed.''
DING!DING!DING!DING! That, dear citizens, is the sound of the democracy alarm deep in your patriotic soul.
At this rate, we can just disband the states and become a federation of denominations. Federation has such a nice ring to it - so corporate, so us. At last, we can ditch that whole "United" thing. Instead of towns, we'll have individual church groups, which will provide schools and parks and coffee shops and something that looks like AA but without its unfortunate inclusive attitude toward all faiths. We'll hole up in little ghettos of belief where we can more easily shun those others.
This is a very bad thing for democracy. As John Danforth stated in his own recent alarm about the conflating of politics and religion,
"...the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country."
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the "art of combination" is central to democracy. But when towns lose their centers and schools are worth fleeing and parks are replaced by plastic play zones at fast food joints and developers fail to provide architecture for social engagement... when so many essential structures of genuine civic vitality fall away...
How do we put it all back together again?
ADDENDUM, 4 June 2005
Atrios recommends The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler.
Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our economic predicament, but in large part a cause. It is the everyday environment where most Americans live and work, and it represents a gathering calamity whose effects we have hardly begun to measure. In The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where everyplace is like noplace in particular, where the city is a dead zone and the countryside a wasteland of cars and blacktop. Now that the great suburban build-out is over, Kunstler argues, we are stuck with the consequences: a national living arrangement that destroys civic life while imposing enormous social costs and economic burdens. Kunstler explains how our present zoning laws impoverish the life of our communities, and how all our efforts to make automobiles happy have resulted in making human beings miserable. He shows how common building regulations have led to a crisis in affordable housing, and why street crime is directly related to our traditional disregard for the public realm. Kunstler takes the reader on a historical journey to understand how Americans came to view their landscape as a commodity for exploitation rather than a social resource. He explains why our towns and cities came to be wounded by the abstract dogmas of Modernism, and reveals the paradox of a people who yearn for places worthy of their affection, yet bend their efforts in an economic enterprise of destruction that degrades and defaces what they most deeply desire. Kunstler proposes sensible remedies for this American crisis of landscape and townscape: a return to sound principles of planning and the lost art of good place-making, an end to the tyranny of compulsive commuting...
This is a huge deal. When - and how - will we repair these losses?