Urban is just another word for

Scary, huh? When words have a definition that is totally different from the euphemism that they’ve become, what happens to the original definition?

It’s another case of current use does not equal original intent. Urban means city from the latin word urb. Now it’s pretty much the nice way of saying "ghetto". Which in America means “black” which in white America means “scary”.

I live in Oakland. Not too long ago I lived right off Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd here is a satellite picture of the block I lived on. Just north of the “roarin’ twenties” in the “ghost town” neighborhood. I knew all my neighbors by sight, and most of them by name. The worst problem we had wasn’t the entrepreneurs who hung out on the corner by the lliquor store. It was the church next to us.

The clockers were just making a living of sorts, and didn’t bother anyone who wasn’t a customer. The Church, a little Baptist affair was alright in and of itself. But there was one thing wrong. They sublet their spaced to a small Pentecostal group who met there about four nights a week. They felt they could make up in volume what they lacked in membership. The nine members would turn the volume way up, and they would chant their halleluja’s usually untill 9 - 10 o’clock in the evenings. It’s struck me as odd that people who speak spanish speak in tongues differently than people who speak english and speak in tongues.

I’m not religious. I blame the need to have a higher power on our big toe. More on that later. I do believe, however, that as an American, you have the right to delude yourself with whatever spiritual crutch you feel you need. I call it the “Right to be Wrong” and as much as I criuticize the Christians especially and to a lesser extent the muslim communities, I respect their right to have those beliefs and will fight to the death for that right.

But

As my neighbor, you have the responsibility to get along with the rest of the community. The Pentecostals would have the occasional revival, going until 4-5 o’clock in the morning. Without warning and on no particular day. If it was Easter, or St. Swithin’s day or Walpurgisnacht, I could understand, and adjust my plans accordingly. If they would post some knid of announcement that this was going to happen, I could also adjust my plans and be out of town that weekend.

But no, they hadn’t the decency.

The last encounter I had with them, I called the Oakland police, to complain about the noise. Yes, I was serious, I’d tell them, after I’d say my address. By 4:30. I’d snapped. I told the dispatcher if they didn’t send a car over in the next five minutes, just send the county coroner’s, and to bring plenty of bags.

A patrol car was there by the time I left the house. My wife talked to the pastor, I talked to the police, and in an hour or so, nothing was accomplished. The five times I called my landlord that night got more done, because he was going to lose the tenants in all four of his units in that house because of that group. He called the Baptist pastor, the owner of the church building, and they talked to the Pentecostals, quieting them down for a little while. They’re still there, I moved on.

I’m still in Oakland, just farther away from a church. In most urban areas, you will see tons of little churches, seemingly on every corner, right next to the liquor stores.

There’s an evangelical megachurch in Colorado Springs, Colorado, by the Air Force Academy that is attracting people from all over. this article and this one from Harper’s sums them up as:

They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blueprint for what everybody wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a grid of wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings, only a handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if you put Colorado Springs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it would make Omaha look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians looking for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain towns. What Colorado Springs offers, ultimately, is a story.

The story they found in Colorado is about newness: new houses, new roads, new stores. And about oldness, imagined: what is thought to be the traditional way of life, families as they were before the culture wars, after the World Wars, which is to say, during the brief, Cold War moment when America was a nation of single-breadwinner nuclear families.

Crime, of course, looms over this story. Not the actual facts of it—the burglary rate in and around Colorado Springs exceeds that in New York City and Los Angeles—but the idea of crime: a faith in the absence of it. And of politics, too: Colorado Springs’ evangelicals believe they live without it, in a carved-out space for civility and for like-minded dedication to common-sense principles. Even pollution plays a part: Christian conservatives there believe that they breathe cleaner air, live on ground untainted by the satanic fires of nineteenth-century industry—despite the smog that collects against the foothills of the Rockies and the cyanide, from a century of mining, that is leaching into the aquifers and mountain streams.

But those are facts, and Colorado Springs is a city of faith. A shining city at the foot of a hill. No one there believes it is perfect. And no one is so self-centered as to claim the perfection of Colorado Springs as his or her ambition. The shared vision is more modest, and more grandiose. It is a city of people who have fled the cities, people who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likeness of a dream. They call the dream “Christian,” but in its particulars it is “American.” Not literally but as in a story, one populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.

It’s a frightening feature. The church itself is huge, Wal MArt huge. Walt Disney coldn’t have imagined anything like this, but Heinlein did. In a series of his stories he describes the “American Ayatollahs”, religious nuts who run our country until a counter-revolution depsoses them.
this megachurch, called New Life Church, is close enough to the Air Force Academy that it has influence there, recently, a chaplain who reported the abuses the evangelical chaplains and cadets was reassigned. There’s articles from the Washington Post, CNN online, truthout.org and, for fairness, The bitches over at the Free Republic.

And yes, they are bitches, of the punk-assed variety.


The Harper’s piece describes further the demographic of these megachurches.

Part of their antipathy is literally biblical: the Hebrew Bible is the scripture of a provincial desert people, suspicious of the cosmopolitan powers that threatened to destroy them, and fundamentalists read the New Testament as a catalogue of urban ills—sophistication, cynicism, lust—so deadly that one would be better off putting out one’s own eye than partaking in their alleged pleasures. But the anti-urban sentiments of modern fundamentalists are also more specific to the moment in which they find themselves.

Three years ago, in the 2002 elections, Christian conservatives swept Georgia, the last Democratic bastion in the South. They toppled an incumbent Democratic governor, a war-hero Democratic senator, the state House speaker, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, and his son, the Democratic candidate for Congress in a majority black district that state Democrats had drawn up especially for him. The new Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss, and the new governor, Sonny Perdue, both conservatives and Christian, won not on “moral values” but on an exurban platform. The mastermind behind the coup was Ralph Reed, once of the Christian Coalition, who had been reborn as Georgia’s Republican chairman. Reed remains a fundamentalist, the same man who once tested employees’ commitment to “Christian values” by asking them if they supported the death penalty for adultery, but he was too canny to talk like that in public. The term “Christian,” he’d learned, is a “divider,” not a “unifier,” so he had left overt faith behind. He backed candidates who ran under the mantra of the exurbs: “Shorter commutes. More time with family. Lower mortgages.”

This troika of exurban ambition worked on multiple levels. Just as Nixon used marijuana and heroin in the 1960s as code for hippies and blacks, Reed devised a platform that conflated ordinary personal goals with fundamentalist values. “Shorter commutes” is a ploy that any old-time ward heeler would recognize. It means: let’s move the good jobs out of the city. Atlanta, like Colorado Springs, has an urban core that Christian conservatives would just as soon see wither. “More time with family,” of course, extends that promise of exurban jobs but also speaks in code to the fundamentalist preoccupation with “family”—that is, with defining it, with excluding not just gay couples but any combination not organized around “biblical” principles of “male headship.”

As for “lower mortgages,” they are lower in exurbs because cities subsidize them. The city pays the taxes that build the sewers and the roads for the exurbs. The city provides the organization that makes it possible. Exurbs are parasites. And what else does “lower mortgages” mean? More land. More space between you and your neighbors. And this, too, is necessary for Christian conservatism, which depends on the absence of conflict as one of its main selling points. For all its talk of community, it is wary of community’s main asset: the conflict, and the resulting cultural innovation, born of proximity. But such cultural innovation is death to today’s Christian conservatism, which tosses a gauzy veil of tradition over the big-box consumerism of its megachurches.

As contemporary fundamentalism has become an exurban movement, it has reframed the question of theodicy—if God is good, then why does He allow suffering?—as a matter of geography. Some places are simply more blessed than others. Cities equal more fallen souls equal more demons equal more temptation, which, of course, leads to more fallen souls. The threats that suffuse urban centers have forced Christian conservatives to flee—to Cobb County, Georgia, to Colorado Springs. Hounded by the sins they see as rampant in the cities (homosexuality, atheistic schoolteaching, ungodly imagery), they imagine themselves to be outcasts in their own land. They are the “persecuted church”—just as Jesus promised, and just as their cell-group leaders teach them.

This exurban exile is not an escape to easy living, to barbecue and lawn care. “We [Christians] have lost every major city in North America,” Pastor Ted writes in his 1995 book Primary Purpose, but he believes they can be reclaimed through prayer—“violent, confrontive prayer.”[4] He encourages believers to obtain maps of cities and to identify “power points” that “strengthen the demonic activities.” He suggests especially popular bars, as well as “cult-type” churches. “Sometimes,” he writes, “particular government buildings . . . are power points.” The exurban position is one of strategic retreat, where believers are to “plant” their churches as strategic outposts encircling the enemy.

Theirs is an embattled religion, always persecuted and with enemies everywhere. First it was Satanic subliminal messages in music, now it’s gays, and the urban nightmare.


If they want war, fine. Let them see a war. A cold war. Like the one America just won. We beat the Communist systems because of our system's checks and balances, our openness to newness and change. The Founding Fathers instituted these because they didn’t trust human nature and it’s proclivity towards tyranny.

Go to the Hinterlands and set up your homogenous grids and Mega everythings. I want my city, next to The City, and I want all the weirdoes, even the one’s that I don’t like, because htye are still part of the environment that fosters creativity, and chaos, and from those elements come opportunity. The Urban Village model needs to be explored further, and wacky things like sustainability and diversity and equal opportunity and quality secular education. The only way the Darkness of these Forces of Ignorance can be turned back is with the light of reason.

And turn down that damn amplifier.