Urban Christianities: place-making in late modernity

What do the words ‘urban Christianity’ conjure for you? Perhaps a fiery street-corner preacher exhorting passers-by to repent, voice near a scream, funereal Bible fixed in a white-knuckled clinch? Perhaps stately steeples piercing a blue sky, with towering bells tolling? Perhaps Orthodox street processions, hallowed through color, artifact, and song? Perhaps safe houses for the urban poor where a meal, a warm bed, a change of clothes, and a blessing are reliably available? Perhaps less generic, more historically specific images: Azusa street Pentecostal origins or Mexico City Virgin apparitions?

Easy as these mental images may come, this collection seeks to outpace our most readily accessible, facile, and ultimately singular notions that belie a complex, global phenomenon. In our modern imaginary, ‘the city’ connotes nothing if not cultural diversity. Cities notoriously mix religions, ethnicities, classes, sexualities, histories, desires, economies, tastes, leisures, and migrants. Mixing itself is notorious for its unpredictability, capable of producing new forms, heteroglossic partnerships, or, of course, violent clashes. I highlight diversity as a point of departure because it sets us up to consider divergent urban experiences. How do cities harbor multiple, lived relationships to urban life?

The orienting question for this collection is whether there are distinctly Christian modes of urban experience. In prioritizing this question, we take a cue from Robert Orsi (1999), who questioned if urban religiosity was somehow markedly different from religion-as-practiced in other locales. He argued an unequivocal ‘yes,’ emphasizing the formative influence of cities on religious life: ‘“Urban religion” does not refer simply to religious beliefs and practices that happen to take place in cities … [it is] what comes from the dynamic engagement of religious traditions [with] specific features of the industrial and post-industrial cityscapes and with the social conditions of city life’ (43). There is something about the structural conditions of urbanism and the phenomenological experience of urban living that sets cities apart as hosts for culture-making. This collection follows suit, affirming that there are distinctly Christian modes of engaging city life. In taking this stance we are not presuming a trans-historical Christianity that is somehow inevitably urban or innately well suited for urban adaptation. Rather, we presume that various Christianities utilize their Christian cultural resources in order to differently and distinctly inhabit their particular urban contexts. Put differently, borrowing Jon Bialecki's (2012) Deleuzian-inspired conceptualization of Christian multiplicity, we presume that urban Christianities are ‘actualized in differing manners at different moments’ (312) by drawing from the virtual ‘field of generative potential’ (307) that defines Christianity.

The six papers that follow this introduction provide a comparative basis for exploring what late-modern possibilities exist in an object like ‘urban Christianity.’ We begin in Knoxville, Tennessee, a mid-size southern U.S. city, with Omri Elisha's ethnography of suburban megachurch evangelicals. Anna Strhan then takes us to London, an iconic global city, and a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation filled mostly with middle-class corporate capitalists. Simon Coleman and Katrin Maier move us back and forth between London and Lagos, Nigeria, a developed but struggling metropolis, as they follow transnational neo-Pentecostal migrants. The global motions of Nigerian Pentecostalism are felt again in Catherine Wanner's study of post-Soviet Kyiv, in which a Nigerian pastor controversially leads an exceptionally large megachurch packed with white Ukrainians. We then travel with William Girard to three urban locales in Central America where neo-Pentecostalism flourishes, two smaller cities in western Honduras, and Guatemala's capital city. Stephen Selka concludes the collection with a case of religious pluralism, in which Catholics, neo-Pentecostals, and Candomblé practitioners compete to define the small city of Cachoeira in Bahia, Brazil.

In each locale, Christian communities confront various conditions of late-modern urbanism: Elisha's Knoxville is characterized by residential segregation and race–class inequity; Strhan's London is definitively neoliberal, with its lives embedded in multinational corporations; Coleman and Maier's London-Lagos is both transnational and diasporic; Wanner's Kyiv combines post-Soviet capitalism with widening class inequity and global migration; Girard's Honduran cities are the product of contested and uneven neoliberal development; and Selka's Cachoeira relies heavily on a form of heritage tourism that places African-American travelers in close contact with multi-ethnic Brazilians.

All six essays are thoroughly ethnographic, and we benefit from the authors' sharp observations, extended presence, vivid descriptions, and rich historicizing. As each contribution engages the orienting question of distinctly Christian urban experience, there are two organizing interests that provide some analytical bearing. First, each author considers how their particular Christians ‘dwell’ (Feld and Basso 1996); that is, how they cultivate an urban sense of place that both reflects and recreates integral elements of their cultural Christianity. Second, each author examines how their particular Christians interact with specific structural conditions of late-modern urbanism (Sassen 2001). As a result, each essay integrates the broad, macro conditions that Christians confront as they engage urban life with the localized, micro strategies used to invest urban contexts with religious meaning. In turn, cities are treated as both material and imagined, structural, and ideological environs.

The significance of this collection partly derives from the increasing urban-ness of contemporary life. AlSayyad (2011), in introducing a co-edited volume on urban expressions of religious fundamentalism, observes that ‘more than half of all human beings live in cities’ (25). In another recent volume that explores the affinities between urbanism and religiosity, Pinxten and Dikomitis (2009) document the massive historical shift in global urban populations, from three percent in 1800 to a projected 70 percent in 2030. Cities throughout the world are also the focus of both social critique and cultural innovation. The United Nations' State of the World's Cities 2010/2011 reports numerous patterns relevant to this collection: class-based fantasies have made urban sprawl a global problem; at least seven million displaced people occupied urban areas in 2008, burdening local institutions like education and health care; dense urbanization increasingly fosters economic development in cluster and mega-cities; global cities are experiencing widening inequity in income, hunger, and access to public services; and urban populations by aggregate are both younger and poorer than ever. Along with these numerical, demographic, and structural issues, urbanism holds a special place in our understanding of the making of modernity.

Simmel (1903) is, of course, integral to ‘the city’ becoming a mainstay of social scientific thought. It is striking to me how well his outline of distinguishing urban characteristics has held up over the last 100+ years, that urbanism is defined by humans' relation to: the built environment; the economic efficiency and psycho-social consequences of short functional interaction; the overload of the senses and resulting screening of sensory attention; the anonymity that leads so often to indifference and alienation; the cosmopolitanism of diversity; and the city as epicenter for cultural production (cf. Strhan this volume). The expansion of cities in the wake of the industrial revolution has also prompted many to implicate urbanism in Weberian schemes, suggesting that ‘urbanization and secularization were thought to be a part of modernization’ (Williams 2011: 87). For popular and scholarly commentators alike, more people in cities meant more exposure to diverse lifeways and greater reliance on rationalization due to urbanism's materialism and market fundamentalism. But, as with the fate of most other secularization predictions, any strict association between rising urbanism and rising secularism has failed to materialize (Casanova 1994). As Eade (2011) wrote in his study of Muslim and Catholic migrants to London: ‘Western cities dramatically illustrate the stubborn refusal of religion to disappear from the public stage’ (284). The urban Christianities documented here are no exception.

This collection seeks to demonstrate ethnographically the complex and varied relationships that form between Christians and cities. Of course, as long as there have been cities Christians have been in them. Elisha observes in his essay that ‘the city’ as symbol figured heavily in scripture and in the early Church (St. Augustine's City of God being the statement that has endured most strongly). If we consider only the example of the U.S., we have seen a variety of urban Christianities: from the Salvation Army as a distinctly urban religious expression (Winston 1999) to Pentecostalism's Azusa Street revival and its storefront heritage (Crumbley 2012); the tradition of urban revivalism that connects Charles Finney, Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and Benny Hinn; liberal Protestantism's Social Gospel (Williams 2011); and the strong urban tradition of African-American churches (Fauset 1944; McRoberts 2003).

Anthropologists of Christianity (Cannell 2006; Robbins 2003), however, have yet to make Christian experiences of urbanism central to their comparative theorizing. In their excellent review of this burgeoning field, Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins (2008) highlight five areas of study that have achieved some analytical coherence: conversion; linguistic practice; gendered and racial politics; economic modalities; and the divergent cultural-historical formations in which Christian identity is claimed. This collection promises an advance toward cementing urbanism as another coherent, comparative arena for the anthropology of Christianity. Interestingly, two subsequent reviews of the field make no reference whatsoever to ‘urban’ or ‘city’ (Lampe 2010; McDougall 2009). Fortunately, several ethnographies have dealt seriously with the relationship between Christianity and urbanism, namely: Burdick (1993) on the dynamics of religious pluralism among Catholics and evangelicals in Rio; Wiegele (2004) on the explosive popularity of prosperity Catholicism in Manila; Smilde (2007) on the intersections of Venezuelan masculinity, urban unrest, and evangelical conversion; and O'Neill (2010) on the development of Christian citizenship among neo-Pentecostals in the urban dystopia of Guatemala City. Alongside the ethnographic and theoretical work found in this collection's essays, my hope is that outlining the two organizing interests below will provide some scaffolding for the comparative study of urban Christianities.

Dwelling

The cultural work of place-making provides one mooring for this collection. What range of agentive strategies for forming Christian modes of dwelling do we see in the six case studies? The inspiration here comes from Feld and Basso's (1996) work on ‘senses of place,’ which they define as ‘local theories of dwelling … ways of fusing setting to situation, locality to life-world’ (8). Or, as Basso (1996) writes elsewhere: ‘Dwelling [consists] in the multiple, “lived relationships” that people maintain with places, for it is solely by virtue of these relationships that spaces acquire meaning’ (54). At stake is the fundamental difference between physical space and inhabited place, the active imposition of meaning on spatial forms. Our interest is in Christian-inflected ways of urban dwelling (cf. Bielo 2011a). How do Christian communities cultivate senses of place that directly reflect and recreate their social and religious lifeworlds?

Several contributions highlight explicit acts of place-making that figured prominently during their fieldwork. Strhan details how her London Anglicans attempt to square evangelistic desires with the realities of corporate office culture. As a social space, the office becomes a place to be religious, but not without an attendant series of dilemmas and anxieties: from a boss vigilantly against workplace proselytizing to believers' fears of offending their coworkers. Elisha profiles a mobile and fluid place-making practice, the development of city-wide prayer networks that ritually ‘pray over’ specific locales. This involves a constant recasting of urban spaces, from street corner sin to revivalist epicenter. Coleman and Maier reflect extensively on the place-making that occurs along Nigerian Pentecostal pathways through London. They remind us of the flâneur trope: ‘[Benjamin's] paradigmatic figure of modernity who walks through all avenues and alleyways of the city with impunity’ (Manalansan 2003: 87). Much like Manalansan's ethnography of Filipino transgender migrants in New York City, in which ‘queers of color strive to map out the gay city as they stake out their own spaces’ (65), Coleman and Maier's Nigerian Pentecostals strive to map out a charismatic city. They do so despite their ambivalence vis-à-vis the ‘impunity’ of the classic flâneur, their marginal status as ethnic migrants and non-citizens sitting uncomfortably with their spiritual ambitiousness.

A key contribution of this collection is an exploration of how place-making is constantly mediated. The contributors concern themselves with the semiotic channels that act as ‘middle grounds’ (Engelke 2010: 371) between lived religion and sense of place. In doing so, this collection works within what Engelke (2010) calls ‘the media turn’ in the study of religion, in which ‘religion is often understood as the set of practices, objects and ideas that manifest the relationship between the known and visible world of humans and the unknown and invisible world of spirits and the divine’ (374). Three fields of potential emerge as vital in Christian place-making: temporality; materiality; and ideologies of the city.

As an analytic frame, temporality references cultural assumptions about the nature of time and its passing. Guyer (2007), for example, argues that late-modern America has witnessed an ‘evaporation of the near future’ (410) in favor of immediate and far distant futures (cf. Bialecki 2009). Evangelical Protestants are no stranger to the power of temporality; we need look no further than the extensive impact of rapture eschatology on shaping social practice (Harding 2000: 228–246). Elisha, Girard, and Selka all observe how models of temporality weigh heavily in mediating Christian relations to place. Elisha captures this in several ways: how place-centered prayer events mark the passing of time alongside (and at times in favor of) the passing of secular time, the temporal alignment of prayer to enhance the effect on place (what he calls ‘ritual simultaneity’), and the sense of urgency derived from evaluating the places they surround with prayer. Girard argues that a neoliberal development temporality derived from national policy takes precedent over the End Times dispensationalist temporality more readily associated with Pentecostalism in the churches where he worked. This produces curious artifacts, like solo street signs sans actual streets planted in one congregation's property. The meaning assigned to ‘the past’ is at the center of Selka's analysis of how Cachoeira is occupied in conflicting ways. African American tourists flock to this Brazilian city because of its role in the transatlantic slave trade, creating the context for heritage tourism, whereas neo-Pentecostals remember the city primarily as a haven for demonic sorcery. Readers will discover a rich score for understanding how models of time mediate models of space and place.

Nearly all of the contributions examine the social life of material things in cultivating a sense of place. Materiality has been an important analytic for the development of the anthropology of Christianity (Engelke 2007), and this collection builds on that strong relationship. Buildings, as material constructions that work in place-making, appear in the analyses of Coleman and Maier, Wanner, Girard, and Selka. Coleman and Maier reference the potential of sound's material dimensions, in particular those emanating from Christian ritual practice that can move into and even transform city spaces. A comparative reading here lends itself to an exploration of the materiality of sound vis-à-vis acts of religious dwelling. For example, we can make immediate parallels to Islamic examples in which Muslim calls to prayer are projected through city loudspeakers, altering the possibilities for experiencing place (Hirschkind 2006). The most elaborate analysis of place and materiality comes from Girard. Drawing on Bora's analysis of Victorian material culture (1997), Girard maps the elements (and avoidances) of texture vs. texxture in which the former downplays linkages between physical form, history, and cultural desire, and the latter calls attention to those linkages. Girard steers clear of evaluations grounded in judgments of taste (Bourdieu 1984) that laud texxture and chide texture. Instead, he provides a multi-sensory analysis of how neo-Pentecostals use a range of physical forms to tether themselves to both city spaces and regimes of modern desire. Throughout the collection, we find powerful evidence of how senses of place are integrally linked to the materialities of Christian social practice.

The forms of dwelling that animate this collection are also mediated by intricately built and morally loaded ideologies of ‘the city.’ There is significant precedent here, as Christians are well practiced in theologizing cities. Orsi (1999) notes how early 20th-century urban evangelists in the U.S. viewed cities with contempt; Billy Sunday famously and publicly advised God to ‘“wear rubber gloves” when dealing with city folk’ (31). This contrasts sharply with a wide range of urban Christians preceding and following Sunday who attributed great redemptive power to cities, from the Salvation Army (Winston 1999) to the Social Gospel movement (Williams 2011). Elisha tracks dual ideologies about the city: that it represents the greatest evangelistic opportunity for Christians and that its morally corrupting potential threatens spiritual pollution. Managing these competing imperatives becomes central to how city-wide prayer movements map their targeted places. Strhan's Anglicans by and large view the city as secular-dominated and hostile to Christianity, which leads to acts of naming and classifying urban spiritual needs. Coleman and Maier present a complex case. On the one hand, Lagos Pentecostals work with a schema that associates ‘the rural’ with indigeneity, traditional religion, and cultural-spiritual backwardness, while ‘the urban’ connotes modernity, public legitimacy, and Christian redemption. Yet, cities are also known for their temptations, making ‘the urban’ a place to desire but only with judicious trepidation. Elisha, Strhan, Coleman, and Maier demonstrate how theologically and morally loaded ideologies are also entangled with other everyday discourses and practices.

Finally, the urban senses of place featured in this collection resonate strongly with critiques of secularization and observations about religion in the public sphere. As Casanova (1994) argued about the ‘deprivatization’ of religion more broadly, the Christian communities analyzed here refuse ‘to accept the marginal and privatized role which theories of modernity as well as theories of secularization had reserved for them’ (5). In his analysis of the Bible Society of England and Wales, Engelke (2012) takes up a similar point. He argues that the confusion and refusal of ‘public,’ ‘private,’ and ‘religion’ leads Bible Society members to pursue an ‘ambient faith,’ in which sensual and material registers are prioritized over more explicit discursive semiotics. As a result, Bible Society members negotiate establishing their presence in an urban public without being ‘too public’ about their religious impulses. This collection capitalizes on Engelke's observations that ‘public’ and ‘private’ are not discrete categories, that there are multiple publics to be named, and that there are multiple ways for religions to enter public life.

How, then, do Christians implicate place-making practices in broader public strivings? In Wanner's case the public sphere is up for grabs. Being a post-Soviet state, Ukraine already hosts a variety of social actors vying for authority, voice, and power. Add to this a Nigerian-led, white Eastern European dominated megachurch and its material and discursive strategies for gaining public legitimacy. Coleman and Maier argue that Nigerian Pentecostals' lack of legal citizenship impacts their movement in and through London, while their Christian citizenship prompts them to make various claims about their participatory role in London's public. O'Neill's (2010) elaboration on the notion of ‘Christian citizenship’ is helpful here for understanding how Christians seek to bind together modes of dwelling, moral obligations to improve the public good, and the demands of the state. Selka's comparison of Christians and Candomblé practitioners is especially instructive because it raises the question of how different Christians in the same place are able to accomplish engaging a public. Historically and ethnographically, we know that Catholics cross-culturally have a strong tradition of asserting themselves in public contexts (Galvez 2010; Orsi 1985). Selka's Afro-Catholics appear equally comfortable proceeding through city streets, whereas the Pentecostals are far more ambivalent about the dangers of public life. Is there something, then, about the cultural differences between Catholics and conservative Protestants, or about specific urban contexts, that explains differing successes in gaining public presence?1

The comparative study of Christian place-making emerges strongly from this collection. Dwelling is a powerful cultural act: emotionally resonant; morally charged; and something that is not given but must be made. As Feld and Basso wrote so eloquently: ‘as people fashion places, so, too, do they fashion themselves’ (1996: 11). In this spirit, Christian communities do not merely exist in urban locales, they actively transform space into place and in doing so generate ties to place that are meaning-full in their religious lives. The areas of inquiry raised by these six essays focus on the range of place-making practices; the reliance on models of temporality, materiality, and ideology in mediating senses of place; and the use of dwelling as an entryway to impact the public sphere.

Dwelling in late modernity

The focus on dwelling in this collection is complemented by constant reference to the structural realities and patterns that grind out the contours of contemporary urban life. By the very nature of interacting with cities, the Christian communities in these essays interact with macro processes that link globalization, neoliberalism, and post-industrial changes. In turn, we see in this collection a range of Christian-inflected responses to the structural conditions of urbanism.

At least five global currents seem to travel with late-modern urbanism. Contemporary cities are experiencing several neoliberal shifts (Davila 2004; Hackworth 2007), namely increased privatization of public space and residential-commercial investment in formerly disinvested neighborhoods (a.k.a. ‘restructuring,’ ‘revitalization,’ or ‘gentrification’ depending on your normative stance). The relocation and decline of industrial production have resulted in a post-industrial cityscape recognizable by abandoned and repurposed factory and warehouse districts. Third, late-modern cities grow out as much as up, with ever-expanding rings of suburban and exurban zones – although the cultural reputation of these zones shifts across geo-political areas (for example: the gated communities of the U.S. upper-middle class (Low 2001) versus the poor, densely cramped outgrowths of cities like Sao Paulo (Pardue 2011)). Urbanization has always been synonymous with cultural and class diversity, but contemporary cities are increasingly defined by alarmingly stark class inequalities. Lastly, more and more late-modern cities function as, or hope to be, ‘global cities’ (Sassen 2001), defined by transnational networks of ethno-, techno-, and finance-scapes (Appadurai 1996). While these late-modern processes do not always occur together or localize uniformly, they do consistently shape how the multiple lived relationships to cities form and change.

One set of processes that recur throughout this collection ensues from restructuring in post-industrial cityscapes (cf. Bielo 2011b). Furseth (2011) notes correctly that the ‘movement of industrial production out of the city, the growth of the service sector, and the spread of the knowledge class have all had a profound effect on cities’ (33). Consumption and leisure economies, while not always explicitly referenced in these essays, are steadily present in their effects. Elisha and Strhan point us toward the patterns of class segregation that follow from widening class inequity. Strhan plays off the UN Report on global cities, which categorizes five neighborhood cultures that parallel residents' life of labor: luxury; gentrified; suburban; tenement; and abandoned neighborhoods. Not incidentally, Elisha and Strhan are also writing about predominantly middle-class, white conservative evangelicals whose evangelizing practices take them across lines of race and class and into city sectors that are not home for the evangelicals. In both cases, this crossing of lines produces tensions, dilemmas, anxieties, and self-conscious reflections, all of which evangelicals integrate into their theologies of need and responsibility. Wanner draws our attention to the housing booms and busts of Kyiv's residential restructuring. The economic access to, and the cultural value of, land has been reorganized, which turns out to be integral for understanding how the megachurch handles legal and moral allegations against their pastor. Race, for Wanner too, is a central concern; in a racially explicit city, Ukrainians assess the Nigerian pastor as either spiritual savior or social threat precisely because racial lines are being crossed. Urban restructuring sutured to neoliberal development is Girard's definitive context for understanding how Honduran neo-Pentecostals imagine the future of their cities and the relationship between city and nation. Pastors' visions of how churches ought to respond to state and local development are permeated by entrepreneurialism, a strategy equally neoliberal in its genealogy (Freeman 2007).

Time and again in these examples we see Christian logics of urban redemption differing from (and often clashing with) secular logics of change. Coleman and Maier think through the potential of Christian and secular logics reinforcing one another, a potential troubled by the transnational disjunctures separating London and Lagos. Elisha characterizes his consultants as ‘aspiring social engineers,’ which aptly captures the immanently human and collective nature of revivalist strategies. In Selka's case, significant cultural distance separates tourist-centered efforts to selectively ‘brand’ cities and religious efforts to shift the spiritual-moral grounding of cities. Wanner argues that the social fragmentation exposed by late capitalism in post-Soviet Ukraine prompts Pentecostals to articulate a moral obligation for active, visible citizenship. This returns us again to questions of Christian citizenship and religion in the public sphere. Faith-based logics and strategies for redeeming urban unrest constitute a form of public engagement that secular actors cannot breezily dismiss or denounce, making them all the more contested.

Global ethnoscapes also figure prominently as a structural condition. Coleman and Maier offer the compelling argument that cities, because of their role in fostering transnational migration routes, represent a key site of Pentecostal agency because they avoid the authoritative purview of any singular state. As with global cities in general, transnational networks often challenge the autonomy of the nation-state (Sassen 2001). In the formation of London-Lagos, multiple publics are engaged and the resources derived from transnational movement become a stable part of Pentecostals' institutional repertoires. This analysis holds up well in Wanner's case. Despite continually asserting their presence in Kyiv's public life, activist Pentecostals seek distance from state power in response to increasing frustration with state interference in their Nigerian pastor's affairs. Taking this line of inquiry to the other essays we might ask: how else do cities, because of their late-modern structural changes, create or confine the agency of religious actors?

The transnational flow of people is also present through tourism. Selka demonstrates how an industry of ethnic and heritage-based tourism helps draw out the religious pluralism that divides Cachoeira; Girard highlights the ever-present context of Mayan tourism, which is promoted heavily by the Honduran state. For Pentecostals, the region's Mayan heritage has the double edge of being a source of economic livelihood and a bearer of spiritual demonization. This clustering of urbanism, tourism, and Christian dwelling points toward a fruitful comparative opportunity with the growing literature on Protestant travel to Holy Land cities (Feldman 2007; Kaell 2012). How might structural conditions over or underdetermine the possibilities of Christian place-making at the urbanism–tourism–pilgrimage nexus?

My aim in outlining these features of late-modern urbanism is to show that Christian place-making is not a cultural free-for-all. There is a definable range of conditions that direct and contextualize acts of dwelling. In cases like those from Selka and Coleman and Maier, these conditions are unavoidable and color the analysis at every turn. For others, like Girard and Elisha, they are more subtly present, but still present and influential. Readers interested in tracking these conditions across the essays will find a great deal of material to work with and, I suspect, will find other continuities in Christians' relationships to late-modern urbanism.

Coda

I cannot think of a more necessary time to advocate for the comparative study of urban Christianities. Cities throughout the world are expanding in scope, number, and social-political-economic importance. Global flows of people – through tourism, labor migration, and displacement – increasingly bring religious cultures face to face. Christian communities, following a broader shift, are increasingly active and visible in public spheres.

My hope in this introduction has been to provide some analytical moorings for reading the six contributions to this collection. I have focused in particular on two inter-related issues: the dynamics of Christian place-making and the structuring force of late-modern urban conditions. By establishing these two organizing interests as dialectically fused, there is a loud refusal to dualize micro/macro, experience/context, practice/structure, or the city as ideologically imagined/materially constituted. Certainly, there are many expressions of urbanism and many varieties of Christian culture not captured here, but our goal is not to be exhaustive. Our goal is to help establish urban Christianities as a comparative field of study that is coherent, generative, and useful.

Notes

¹I would like to thank Eric Hoenes del Pinal for articulating an early version of this question at the 2011 Society for the Anthropology of Religion meetings in Santa Fe, New Mexico where this collection originated.