| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Etan Diamond. Souls of the City: Religion and the Search for Community in Postwar America. (Polis Center Series on Religion and Urban Culture.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 199 $35.00.
So much seemed so right about postwar America. The nation weathered an uncertain demobilization period, and patterns of mass consumption not seen since the 1920s returned. Americans sought higher education in record numbers, bought new cars and household appliances, and, with the help of a consumer-friendly federal government, managed to realize the dream of independent home ownership. Suburban development, cut short by the Great Depression, resumed with a fury as former orchards and farm lands were plowed up to make room for rows and rows of prefabricated homes. Many Americans coped with the fears of the Cold War with the help of their religious beliefs. Membership in religious denominations skyrocketed during this period. A cape-wearing Roman Catholic bishop, Fulton J. Sheen, won an Emmy award for a religious program on the new national medium of television. Biblical epics like The Robe (1953) and The Ten Commandments (1956) drew huge crowds to American movie theaters. In the 1950s, Americans inserted the later controversial words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance and replaced "E Pluribus Unum" with "In God We Trust" as the national motto.	1
But even as people were planting tulip bulbs around their new suburban homes and taking their television sets out of packing boxes, the postwar era already had its critics. Perhaps the most famous were David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950) and William H. Whyte's Organization Man (1956). Both books addressed the underside of the new American culture, critiquing it as one of isolation and rank careerism in which the bond of human solidarity had been shattered and the meaningful life seemed to elude the grasp of most. Critics of the religious revival of the era were just as trenchant. Gibson Winter, sounding much like the medieval Pope Boniface VIII, issued his now famous manifesto in the pages of the Christian Century against the "Suburban Captivity of the Churches," decrying the fact that "any remnant of corporate thinking which still existed in Christianity ... has been lost in this suburban encounter." Postwar America's suburban idyll was inhabited by lonely islands of men and women, incapable or unwilling to forge bonds of solidarity with one another. Even the depth and sincerity of their religious beliefs were suspect. Etan Diamond challenges this dour view of postwar America. On the winding streets and in the cul-de-sacs of suburban Indianapolis, he finds the ligaments of community. Moreover, he believes that religion played a significant role in creating that community.	2
Diamond urges his readers to reconsider the term "community" as it applies to suburban America. He puts aside notions of physical proximity and cultural homogeneity, aspects of urban communal life, and insists that suburban communities are best viewed as what this reviewer calls "associations of intention." Suburban community was largely a mental construct consisting of deliberate, voluntary efforts on the part of often spatially separated suburban dwellers to come together for common endeavors and mutual support. No institution in suburban Indianapolis facilitated this communal identity more than the suburban church.	3
Focusing almost exclusively on Protestant communities, he argues that churches provided an important middle ground for people to meet each other and to work together on projects that enhanced church life: building drives, church dinners, educational programs, and recreational leagues. Shared concern and preoccupation with children was another important source of suburban bonding, and congregations created parochial schools and cooperative Sunday schools; they invested heavily in youth activities designed to keep children loyal to their religious affiliation while allowing them to meet wholesome "others."	. . .

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