Racial Housing Integration, Suburbanization, and Debates over America’s Judeo-Christian Heritage

After World War II, many white Americans moved from cities to suburbs. The move was largely restricted to white Americans, based on banks’ and developers’ policies, as well as white resistance to black suburban neighbors. While the phrase “white flight” does not capture the reluctant, complicated decisions of white people to leave, often entire religious communities would eventually relocate from an urban neighborhood to a suburban one. They built communities in the suburbs that were inward-focused, prioritizing nuclear families. Although churches emphasized missions abroad, they were largely indifferent to the plight of their fellow Christians in the de-industrializing city. In Chicago and its suburbs, many mainline Protestant, Catholic and Jewish civil rights activists, committed to integration and working to combat discrimination on personal and systemic levels worked to integrate the suburbs, arguing that open housing laws, for instance, fulfilled the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage. A large contingent of white evangelical ministers, however, took a different stance, insisting that open housing infringed on their religious liberty. Set against this backdrop, this paper explores the ways white and black Christians engaged the debates over integrated housing in the post-World War II period, and how that was reflected in their implicit and explicit theologies and praxes.