WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW: THE SUBURBAN PROPHET
Our Lady of the Expressway, by Lowell Boileau.
“Why have so many Protestant congregations forsaken the dispossessed in the cities by literally closing their doors, packing up their possessions, and moving to the suburbs?” (1)
The American suburb was born, not just out of overcrowding and industrialization, but also racism and classism. The white church now lives, moves, and has its being in the suburb. This is where I wish to start this conversation with William Stringfellow (1928-1985), an important and underappreciated voice whose witness to the American landscape pierces at the heart of the church, especially white churchgoers in the United States. Yet he also speaks to all of white America for all of white America are the spiritual inheritors of the demonic work of slavery and white supremacy that their ancestors pressed upon others and upon themselves (and continue to do so today). The white church is continually formed by the suburban landscape that segregates and separates. I am not saying suburbanites don’t have spiritual lives. I’m sure many of my fellow suburbanites are very spiritually filled and have their private and public devotions. With the legacies and structures of racism and materialism, we have to face the fact that America is not the New Jerusalem or even the fallen Rome. It is Babylon, as Stringfellow argues, and therefore “represent[s] a pagan mentality, which is alien and inappropriate to the Bible.” (2) Christianity within America has been further bastardized in the suburb. We have allowed ourselves to put our faith in our automobile (the suburb’s sine qua non), our suburban sprawl, the hope for the “better school district,” an extra lane to be built on the freeway, and the continued need to hoard our wealth and gatekeep it. Like Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, we have been seized by our own hypocrisy and face a spiritual death.
William Stringfellow’s works (especially in Dissenter in a Great Society, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, and Free in Obedience) lay out a grand indictment of the spiritual reality of American life today, which is heavily influenced by racism and technocracy. A lawyer by training and native son to the east coast, WASP elite, his work among the Harlem poor in the mid-20th century helped him recognize the inherent racist and classist policies affecting not only black Americans but all Americans. He speaks directly to the urban masses of the city and her surrounding suburbs. This spiritual reality, Stringfellow argues, effected by the ideology of the industrial revolution, has infused itself into the faith of the American Christian. (3) Freedom and individualism have become pagan mentalities for Christians because they have been distorted by American thinking. The result is a never-ending search for freedom in life which individuals, by their own merit, can obtain if they work hard enough. The American way of life is wrapped up in this thinking. American life searches for freedom and salvation in the material reality and needs of life in order to better oneself - forgetting the ultimate freedom found in Christ Jesus. Materially speaking, we see this realized first in the fact of the automobile.
Stringfellow writes, “While the poor are confined to their ghettos, more and more space is being diverted in the city to luxury housing. In part the exodus of the middle classes contributes to this…[f]or principalities such as these [utility companies, builders, insurance companies, banks, unions, universities, and other real estate investors] it is more advantageous to redevelop the city for the rich than…for the poor. [T]he chasm between the rich and the poor grows wider and wider, and the hostility between the rich and the poor, associated as it usually is with racism of one sort or another, becomes more intense and embittered.” (4) That class and community go hand-in-hand in much of suburban life is no small accident but the model on which the suburb is built. It begins with the automobile. If we cannot afford the automobile we are obliged to stay in the city or suffer the suburban reality of the auto-centric environment, hostile to movement of persons without cars. Though if we can afford to have a car in the city, we allow ourselves to have a car in the city. We move into buildings and neighborhoods where other people have cars. The luxury housing mentioned by Stringfellow makes this possible with underground parking structures and valet services. The death dealing powers of American suburbia are found prominently in our attitudes toward the poor and marginalized.
Indeed, this Americanist thought plays into the role manifest destiny had in this nation. The ideology of manifest destiny asserts that Americans are allowed to move and live and keep moving to our heart’s desire for it was our God-ordained right to seek for us ever-expanding horizons. Through the expansion of these horizons, Native culture and life was decimated and destroyed. In a similar manner, the suburbs have further eroded the conscience of white America as well as consciousness of how to live interdependently and think critically on the issues facing, who we made to be, the other. We no longer have to see the reality we have built for ourselves in the suburb and can turn a blind eye. Our Christian faith, which binds us to our neighbor, has been corrupted by the pagan lifestyle of suburbia, itself rooted in the individualism and materialism of American life. We have been “blessed” with land and wealth, meaning we can do whatever we want with it and guard it for ourselves. This is a backbone of the prosperity gospel movement whose legacy has cheapened faith in America, as it makes it a means to an end, that being material wealth, and exonerated the suburbanite from thinking critically about their lifestyle.
Stringfellow was acutely aware of how the American way of life was causing grave danger to the very soul of America which has been broken and bloodied from the institution that helped build this nation: slavery. One side of the mouth was proclaiming freedom, the other side was whipping it. He writes, “Moral poverty is more virulent among whites than among blacks or Indians or Chicanos because the lives and livelihoods of most American whites have been subsidized by racial privilege...and white Americans are not about to allow that to be upset.” (5) Suburban life was propagated by a white government, for the expansion of its domination through the wealth and power of the nascent bourgeoisie and capitalist classes, expanded the city into a new landscape that was dominated not by people but by the automobile, the key to one’s ability to live in the suburbs. Segregation was heightened in the suburbs just as it was across the cities. However, here, too, did segregation – now based along racial and class lines - flourish.
The American suburban life has exacerbated the racial and economic issues and has formed for us a reality shaped by separation and consumption. Where then is our hope? For Stringfellow, hope is found in “living constantly, patiently, expectantly, resiliently, joyously in the efficacy of the Word of God.” (6) Moreover, Christians living in the suburb need to discern, with Bible in hand, this suburban life carefully. He states further, “[B]iblical ethics asks how to live humanly in the midst of death’s reign. And biblical politics…as it manifests resistance to the power of death, is, at once, [a] celebration of human life in society.” (7) The work and conversations that need to happen in order for a reconciling dialectic, (8) one that is life giving to a lifestyle that for far too long has only produced death. But the white church will need, like the early Christians, to be a community in which lives are molded in a way that renounces, repents of, and then transcends the ways of the world (in this case, the separation, materialism, and bigotry of American suburbia) and opens lives up to be generous and trusting toward our neighbor and our God. (9)
Stringfellow, Dissenter in a Great Society, 68.
Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, 47.
Stringfellow, Free in Obedience, 22-23.
Stringfellow, Free, 24.
Stringfellow, An Ethic, 28.
Stringfellow, An Ethic, 138.
Stringfellow, An Ethic, 151.
Understanding that our shared American story is one of contradictions and for those of us who are Christians, knowing that we must be reconciled to each other as Jesus Christ is to us through what he did on the Cross.
Informing the spirit of this sentence is Willie James Jennings’ commentary on Acts 4 from his work, Acts.
