The Gentrification of the Presbyterian Mind

 

The most challenging and interesting thing I've heard in the last week has been a piece on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show. It was an interview with Sarah Schulman, distinguished professor of Humanities at CUNY, Staten Island and author of The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination.  Schulman's book looks back on the AIDS crisis and its effect on her life and the arts and politics of her Lower East Side neighborhood. It's highly New York-centric, so the subject matter may not have universal appeal, but it sure as hell made me think. Here's the interview:

Schulman argues that broad cultural, economic, and behavioral changes have moved urban society toward residential homogeneity and also residential segregation. This homogeneity in our lived environments, Schulman argues, squelches genuine creativity, social mixing, and democratic flourishing.

Schulman's thesis clarifies later in the interview (around 15:35), when she emphasizes that gentrification is not simply a function of individual preferences. We don't just choose to be with like-minded people, but there have been all kinds of structural incentives urging us in this direction. In New York, it was a set of tax breaks to encourage luxury development and a lack of government emphasis on sustaining low-income housing. She asserts, against the host, that while these structural incentives were created to draw wealth back to the city and "shore up the tax base," there was never any meaningful effort by the city government to integrate new wealth and foster mixed-income communities. The result is whole neighborhoods of the city that are exclusive enclaves, where cultural and economic homogeneity prevail. In the words of a caller, New York has become "boring."

The same caller identifies the nationalization of culture through the expansion of mass media (sources like MTV) as a parallel force that muted creativity by standardizing our notions of what is acceptable or cool. Schulman reinforces the concept by saying that the whole culture of suburbanization that emerged in the 50s created a different kind of person: a person used to racial and class stratification, a person, Schulman says, "who was willing to trade freedom for security." Schulman calls this mindset "a supremacy ideology," a standardized vision of taste and culture reinforced by the economic means to enforce one's tastes on others.

You may have never been to the Lower East Side, but don't you see the truth here in your own life? In your own neighborhood? How about your church? Is the PCUSA a cultural form of church that has become something like the Lower East Side? Did we fall victim to suburbanization and the homogeneity that was urged by those patterns of residential segregation? Were we insulated from the negative effects of the lack of creativity in our midst by our own relative wealth--wealth that allowed us to continue unaware for decades on our self-destructive path of cultural uniformity? Did the Presbyterian mind become gentrified?

If this sounds like a novel thesis, it's not. Gibson Winter wrote an essay in the Christian Century in 1955 called "The Church in Suburban Captivity." 57 years... and ain't much changed.

Can this trend change? I'm doubtful. The lives of churches are enmeshed in larger cultural trends and rarely function outside of them. The homogeneity of the PCUSA will not be arrested until there is a larger move by individual Presbyterians to move into intentionally diverse residential settings. Contemporary church plants tend to be cultural boutiques--capturing a small segment of an increasingly segmented population that self-identifies according to purchasing habits. They're different, but not diverse.

The gentrification of the Presbyterian mind is enmeshed with the trend toward residential and class fragmentation and stratification in our wider society. The former is in thrall to the latter. Can the fragmentation and stratification change? Can you see yourself moving "downward?" Can you see yourself moving into a neighborhood with worse public schools? Can you see yourself moving into places with higher crime and worse government services? Are you willing to swim upstream, to trade your security for freedom?

As much as I believe in the idea--and the gospel roots of this idea of "downward mobility"--I haven't been able to do it personally. And if I can't do it myself, it seems a bit preposterous to presume that our denomination can do it as a whole.