Faith, families and cities

There's a fascinating piece about cities and the future in the spring issue of The American Interest, but you can't read it because it's behind the subscriber firewall. Ha-ha! (he said, Muntzily). But what I want to talk about is the part in which author William McNeill discusses why the worldwide migration of populations into cities -- did you know that the US has more "frontier counties" (that is, counties with tiny populations) today than it did in 1890? -- will cause population decline and increased religious conflict.

McNeill says children are expensive to raise in cities, and difficult to nurture in large part because we have no real communal sense. "The underlying reality is that we have not found any satisfactory substitute for village communities as nurturers of the young (and sustainers of the old)," he writes. But there's a deep human need for the kind of stability that traditional village life has always provided. In cities, he says,

urban mobility permits like-thinking persons to come together and agree to enforce explicit moral standards of behavior among themselves. By far the most common and powerful basis for such vountary associations is religious commitment. Yet the costs of religious commitment are also real, especially when it sets the community of believers against the rest of the surrounding society.

Trying to shift back and forth between one set of manners for the in-group, and another for the much larger out-group, is difficult. Moreover, whereas the stability offered by inherited custom in village life is a given, in a city it's a deliberate choice -- and virtually impossible to maintain over the long haul. Thus to build and maintain bonds under such dynamic conditions, believers have to be intensely devoted. Writes McNeill: "Is it any wonder, therefore, that what is often termed 'fundamentalist' religious is overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon?"

[Along those lines, by all means read Olivier Roy's discussion of Islamic fundamentalism as a response to globalization and modernization. I'll post on it separately later.]

McNeill says the rapid urbanization of the planet will bring divergent and intensely devoted religious groups in closer contact with each other, with unpredictable results. Still, he says,

religious groups operating in urban settings still have not found a way to mimic the nurturing and supportive roles that came naturally to semi-isolated villagers. American Protestant megachurches notwithstanding, no cakes of custom within which millions of strangers can comfortable conduct their lives have yet shown up. Perhaps they never will.

If McNeill is right, this has implications for what we've been discussing as the Benedict Option -- that is, groups of families and others consciously withdrawing to a certain extent from the mainstream in order to pioneer alternative ways of living out the virtues in community. His essay suggests that it's not really possible in an urban setting. But here's the thing: it's also problematic in a village setting too. I've written with love and admiration this morning about how the village is coming together to help my family while my brother-in-law is away in the war, but it's also true that there is no longer an enforceable (by custom and consensus) and clear set of moral standards governing behavior, sexual and otherwise, in villages. My sister and I live in very different settings, but thanks to mass media, we're raising our children in much the same culture.

Another challenge, it seems to me, is labor. If I wanted to pick up and move with like-minded families from our church and relocate to a more rural setting so we could raise our kids in community, it would be virtually impossible because of the kind of work we do. As a writer, it would be easier for me to telecommute, but I'm guessing that I'm the exception. My friends and I are all engaged in forms of symbolic analysis -- the abstract manipulation of concepts, as opposed to concrete work (e.g., baking bread, building furniture). We depend on urban civilization for our livelihoods. That being the case, it seems that the only possibility open to us is to dedicate ourselves and our families to each other and our little church platoons, and hope that our children will defy McNeill's prediction.

Thoughts?