Onward, Christian Gentry
an open letter to city-dwelling followers of Christ
I grew up an evangelical Christian, and my earliest experiences of mindful living and healthy relationships took place in my suburban faith community of south Kansas City. After college, my wife and I decided to settle in midtown Kansas City. Here for the last decade we’ve established a life together and have begun raising a family. This has become our community.
In the ten years I’ve lived here, I’ve seen many others who, just like me, have moved away from unsustainable and isolated suburbs to be a part of revitalizing our city’s urban neighborhoods. But recently I had two conversations with neighbors of mine that have caused me to rethink my assumptions about the impact of middle-class whites returning en masse to urban areas across the country, and particularly the impact created by the sudden influx of evangelical Christians.
The first conversation took place at the playground with another father. He’s part of a small group that recently moved from the suburbs to start their own community church in the city. We were discussing the state of public education and common concerns over sending kids to failing city schools when he said, “You know, it’s just a dark place, and we need to be the light. We need to be here to shine light and drive out the darkness.”
The second conversation took place at a social gathering, this time with another man who recently bought a house in Squier Park, a neighborhood that straddles the historical racial dividing line in Kansas City — Troost Avenue. He attends one of the several churches recently “planted” in midtown by suburban megachurches or church networks, and he is one person among hundreds who have recently moved here to be part of their newly-formed church communities. This man was telling me about the neighborhood and saying how much it has improved just in the two years he has lived there. “One of my friends,” he told me, “bought a house for $40,000 last year, fixed it up a bit, and just turned around and sold it for over $100,000 last week. Isn’t that great?”
“Sure,” I said, “but won’t the quick rise in property value end up forcing out neighbors who rely on low rent?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we should do gentrification with justice.”
What struck me in both of these conversations was their perception that their presence here in the city is, by definition, a positive force. Just by moving their families to urban neighborhoods, these men carry with them the assumption that property values will increase, the “darkness” will be removed — and that these are the healthy signs of urban revitalization. But I also felt confused, especially by the second conversation. On the one hand he expressed some concern over gentrification; on the other he praised the rapid rise in property value. And then there was that phrase: gentrification with justice.
I later learned that gentrification with justice was coined by Bob Lupton, an Atlanta-based evangelical pastor. According to Lupton, urban neighborhoods are in desperate need of middle-class suburbanite Christians to “reclaim the land” and to become once again, in his words, the gentry. Lupton believes land-owning residents need to invest in the neighborhoods. If we want to address urban problems, first we need more gentry living in poor neighborhoods. Lupton says Christians must be the ones to carry out this mission because they “are the very ones equipped to infuse into our culture both values and actions that will have redemptive outcomes.”
Over the past few years Kansas City has seen a significant increase in suburban-based evangelical churches planting new congregations in the urban core. Many of these churches are arriving with a stated mission to fix, heal, save, or redeem the broken city, and many affirm this concept of gentrification with justice, either explicitly or implicitly. Their mission is to bring the kingdom of God to the city.
But what if our cities don’t need the gentry to bring God’s kingdom?
It’s common to miss what is right in front of us because of the certainty with which we hold our own beliefs, and the certainty by which we rejects all others. Far too many evangelicals still view urban renewal primarily through the lens of their white, middle-class, suburban-born capitalist worldview, oblivious to how the gentry might be received by those whom they would like to see gentrified. They mistake their idea of the world for the world itself. Here in the city, it seems many evangelicals fail to consider the perspectives of people who were already here, including those who have stayed in the city but happen to have different beliefs about God and the world, particularly those in the black community.
I recently attended a forum at a black church in Kansas City’s east side. The purpose of the forum was to discuss Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, and how his fifty-year-old dream stacks up to the realities of today. When the conversation turned to fair housing issues, one of the pastors on the panel stood up and bluntly said, “White people abandoned these neighborhoods years ago, but now they are coming back into the urban core, buying up houses and properties in our community, and they’re buying them cheap, and they are going to force us out.”
I felt like he was looking directly at me. I thought to myself, Me? No. I’m not part of the problem, am I? It’s not all white people…not me!
But the more I thought about what he said, I couldn’t help but remember my conversation with the father on the playground that day. He spoke of bringing light to drive out the darkness, which is a common Christian metaphor from the teachings of Jesus. But it is also a metaphor that, in the context of American history and culture — particularly in segregated places like Kansas City — has deep racial implications. There’s a disturbing lack of awareness in the suggestion that one should “bring light into a dark place” when that “light” just happens to be white people and the “dark place” happens to be an urban center lived in primarily by black people for the previous fifty years. The metaphor has different meaning when what is being driven out is you. How would it feel to be black and to have lived in a community for fifty years, and then to have someone arrive from the outside and declare they are here to bring light to drive out your darkness?
In the wake of the civil rights era, theologian James Cone began synthesizing the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, attempting to reconcile Christianity with the Black Power movement. But Cone’s theological perspective is also historically rooted in the days of slavery. According to another theologian, Dwight Hopkins, “Slaves in America found within the biblical narrative a thread of hope in the stories of the oppressed Hebrews, and God’s promise of liberation. [They] connected this narrative with the Jesus parables, which emphasized the healing and liberation of the outcast and of people forced into material poverty.” From this perspective, liberation of the poor is central to the life and teachings of Jesus. Jonathan Walton says that such theology empowers blacks in America to relate to the biblical narrative in a new way. He writes, “Jesus reveals himself as black in order to disrupt and dismantle white oppression.”
That’s not to say that all black people in urban neighborhoods in America are familiar with or strictly adhere to a belief system informed by this theology. And not all white evangelicals now moving into urban areas are familiar with or strictly adhere to a belief system informed by gentrification with justice. Yet the subject of racial oppression, both historic and current, is one we can no longer afford to ignore because we are now witnessing a movement dominated by privileged white people moving into black neighborhoods, seemingly unaware of the history of racism in our cities.
White flight to the suburbs was not a phenomenon. It was an orchestrated effort by city planners, real estate agents, developers, and bankers, all of them run by powerful white men. Real estate agents deliberately moved black families into white neighborhoods, and then used white fear as a tactic to encourage white families to sell while they could and flee to the suburbs. Middle class black families who believed they were moving into a better neighborhood soon found out they were not welcome. They were harassed. They were alienated. They were threatened. Crosses were burned in their front yards. And finally, they were abandoned by almost all of the institutions that had supported those neighborhoods — schools, banks, grocery stores, city services. Many of them were left with mortgages for houses now worth way less than what they paid for them.
So if we, as the grandchildren of the white flight generation, suddenly re-enter the city and proclaim that we are the light that will drive out the darkness, can we expect to be welcomed with open arms? Or is the opposite true? According to the black pastor on the panel that day, we are viewed with suspicion as the latest manifestation of white oppression, the next round of perpetrators in a long history of displacement and abandonment. Even if we don’t want to believe it is true, those beliefs are only in our heads. This is how we are viewed.
Dear believer, please sit with that for a minute. You might not be the redeemer. You might be the oppressor.
It’s a tough pill to swallow. We bring with us a pre-conceived narrative that casts us as the hero, the light coming to shine in the darkness. But then there is the other side of the coin: we risk being the next generation of white oppression, unwittingly driving black families from their homes, undermining their basic dignity and rights.
Perhaps this sounds extreme. As a new urbanite and a Christian, you would never dream of forcing out your neighbors because they are black, or poor, or both. But looking at recent events in Kansas City, it’s clear that the black pastor’s statement isn’t a cynical, misplaced fear. It is precisely what is taking place.
Just last year, due in part to Kansas City’s influx of young middle-class professionals, low-income residents at the Bainbridge Apartments on Armour Boulevard nearly lost their homes. City Hall and developers actively worked on a scheme to remove the residents from midtown and relocate them elsewhere. Most of the residents are black, elderly, or disabled. All of them live on an average of $13,000 a year. As part of this scheme, some influential city leaders tried to push through the City Council a flawed study that argued such high concentration of low-income residents at the Bainbridge creates a “social blight,” and they used questionable crime statistics as the basis for their case. The study’s only proposed solution was to designate the building as “socially blighted,” which would allow the city to take it by eminent domain, displace the residents, and then offer the property to a developer to turn the building into market-rate apartments, charging rent that none of the current residents could afford.
There seems to be a lag time between the gentry’s move to the city and the awareness required to become part of a just and equitable urban community. This is understandable. But it is during this lag time that relocation will take place. In the end, I don’t think it is enough to preach and practice gentrification with justice, assuming that justice automatically follows gentrification. There must be more engagement outside of the church walls because it is in City Hall, not Fellowship Hall, where the master plans for relocating the poor take place. We don’t all need to become political activists, but perhaps membership in our communities requires more from us than we initially imagined.
If you call yourself a follower of Jesus, how does it define your role in the community? And I don’t mean your church community. I mean the community that was here before you moved here, the geographic space you share with your neighbors. If you really dig deep, do you believe that Christ’s highest calling for you is a place among the gentry? Because the problem with taking on the role of the gentry is that by doing so, you place yourself in defiance of the teachings of Jesus.
For people like Lupton, the privileges and resources of the gentry are not only acceptable, but also essential for Christians in the city. Yet to pretend that Jesus of Nazareth would proudly proclaim his position among the gentry is to ignore his life and teachings, and to choose instead a modern Americanized myth of who he was. A reading of his life and teachings shows someone who implored his followers to lay down their privileges, their possessions, their land — and if it came to it, even their own lives. Jesus didn’t tell the poor that wealth would trickle down; he told the rich that their wealth should be laid down.
Gentrification with justice as theology, both in theory and in practice, simply reinforces the long-held belief that African-Americans are not able to do anything without the help of whites, which by definition continues to strip our black brothers and sisters of their full humanity. 150 years ago, this was still on the books as the 3/5 rule — according to our own political system, blacks were less human than whites. Today, this dehumanizing discrimination manifests itself so subtly that it escapes the notice of most believers, because it can hide under the veneer of mission-driven theology. By definition, the notion of the gentry saving the poor from their plight places a higher value on the gentry. It’s one thing to say this in economic or political terms. But to place such economics and politics on the same table as our theology and practice as Christians once again turns the hands and feet of Jesus — his followers — into the cogs and wheels of empire.
The good news is still the good news. It just might be different than you think.
