Please make plans to join us next Thursday, March 1st, 12-1:15 p.m. in the Marty Center Seminar Room (Swift Hall, Second Floor), for our final workshop meeting of the quarter.
Presenter: Greg Chatterley, Ph.D. Candidate, Religions in America
Title: “Where Your Treasure Is, There Will Be Your Heart Also” (first half of the first chapter of Mr. Chatterley’s tentatively titled dissertation, “Salt & Light: Suburban Evangelicals and the Transformation of White Supremacy”)
Author’s Notes: The chapter in full traces pre- and postwar transformations of evangelical peoples and institutions by way of migrations, first from European nations to the United States and then from the city to the suburbs. Prominently featured is the story of Carl Gundersen, a suburban Chicago construction company manager and real estate developer whose biography helps trace a path from the religious traditions of early Chicago’s ethnic enclaves to the National Association of Evangelical’s first fully-owned headquarters in suburban Wheaton, IL. Ultimately, the chapter argues (or hopefully so) that individual evangelicals and evangelical institutions long cultivated strong ethnic social identities that resonated and converged with racial developments in America’s housing market through overlapping business and religious social networks mutually keen on expansion.
For the purposes of the seminar and civility, I have essentially cut the chapter in half and given you the first bit, which covers three sections: 1) an “introduction” of sorts that introduces Gundersen and works out the stakes of his story and its implications for the transformations of evangelicalism in postwar America; 2) a deeper dive into the Norwegian-American world of Carl Gundersen with view for its ethnic and religious implications through the 1940s; and, 3) an historical stage setter for evangelical church and institutional migration from the ethnic city to the white suburb, mostly a primer on housing and racism in suburban history.
Later sections turn to rapid church expansion in the postwar suburbs, suburban church planning initiatives among the NCC and NAE, municipal and development planning and marketing of religion, and the NAE’s own suburban migration and consolidation with the help of business managers like Gundersen.
Emily Crews, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Religions, will respond. Lunch will be served.
The paper can be accessed and downloaded via the “Papers” tab (password protected) on the RAME Workshop website.
Please contact Joel (joelabrown@uchicago.edu) if you have any questions or trouble accessing the paper.