The Danger of Spiritual Gentrification

When the issues of White Evangelicalism come at the expense of my immediate neighbor, I am a spiritual gentrifier.

“I don’t know how to define gentrification, but I tend to know it when I see it.” As our family has settled into ministry in a long-neglected urban neighborhood of Indianapolis, we have had countless conversations that begin with comments like this one. Many people have heard that gentrification is an issue and know it is likely a problem for urban ministry, but they have difficulty defining the word.

The challenge is understandable. After all, when a complex term like gentrification can be applied to everything from economics to housing and even food, it is no wonder that standard definitions or concepts might evade us.

At least two negative forces are at play when gentrification occurs in a neighborhood or community. First, there is the displacement of existing residents. The term gentrification first emerged in mid-twentieth-century London, when a sociologist and city planner named Ruth Glass observed the displacement of poor working-class residents as “the gentry”—middle—or upper-class residents—moved into a redeveloped community. As is often the case today, when gentrifiers move into a neighborhood, they increase property taxes and rent, pricing existing residents out of their homes.

Second, and as a result, outsiders benefit at the expense of insiders. In one famous scene from the 1991 film Boys N the Hood, Furious Styles (played by Laurence Fishburne) educates his son and several community members on these mechanics. He describes how outside forces will intentionally drive down the economic value of homes in a community to drive residents out, then subsequently buy those same homes to resell them at a much higher price. Outsiders profit at the expense of individuals and families who have lived in a community for generations.

It is not difficult to see why P.E. Moskowitz described gentrification in this way:

 “[Gentrification is] a void in a neighborhood, in a city, in a culture. In that way, gentrification is a trauma, one caused by the influx of massive amounts of capital into a city and the consequent destruction following in its wake…Gentrification cannot happen without this deeply rooted inequality; if we were all equal, there could be no gentrifier and no gentrified, no perpetrator or victim.” (How to Kill a City)

When gentrification is defined by these two concepts—displacement and outsider benefits at insider expense—we can carefully apply it to several concepts, including housing, economics, food, retail, and vocabulary (i.e., conservatives appropriating “woke” as a pejorative is verbal gentrification).

At the risk of further complicating our definitions, gentrification can be a helpful word to describe how many Christians spiritually relate to their neighbors.

I used to be someone who could easily get sucked into the latest debates, failures, and juicy gossip of White Evangelicalism. I have lost countless hours of sleep to the current issues within churches and Christian organizations that I do not even belong to. The many significant debates within my denomination (the PCA), as vital as they could be, have sucked immense spiritual energy from me for days or weeks on end.

For many years, I believed I had a responsibility and obligation to invest myself in these matters to such an extent that I would have little energy left to give anyone but my wife and children. To be a pastor, to be a Christian at all, meant investing deeply in the cares and concerns of White Evangelicalism.

It only took a few months of living in our new neighborhood for my perspective to change drastically. As my neighbors' immediate, pressing needs became known, I found myself weighed down with an exhaustion that was impossible to carry. I was depressed, tired, and unable to focus or act on what was right in front of me. That is when it hit me: I could not carry both the weight of my neighbors and White Evangelicalism. I had to choose.

The choice was an obvious one.

In that moment, it became clear to me that my neighbors care little about the latest debates and issues within my denomination or even the broader White Evangelical church. They do not care about our semantic debates around sexuality; they are concerned about the rise in gun violence over the last six months. They care little about who said what at the latest giant Evangelical something-or-other; they must worry about the impact of economic redevelopment when our eviction rate is as high as sixty percent. They haven’t heard about the latest pastor who had moral failings; their families are fractured, and they’re doing their best to hold things together. They don’t have time to listen to your debates about racism and CRT; they are trying to fight for better access to education in a neighborhood that the city has neglected for decades.

Here’s the thing: some of these conversations matter. Our churches and denominations should have (some of) these conversations. But shouldn’t they also address the gun violence, economic vulnerability, and systemic injustice facing my neighbors? When White Evangelicalism demands I care about its issues while it ignores the needs of my neighbor, it is effectively asking me to exploit my neighbor by taking my best spiritual resources away from them.

When the degree to which I care about the issues of White Evangelicalism comes at the expense of my immediate neighbor, I am a spiritual gentrifier. I am a spiritual gentrifier when I deal with my immediate neighbors as an abstraction rather than as real persons in genuine relationships. If I invest all my spiritual and emotional energy in the issues on the latest Christian blogs rather than giving my best to my immediate neighbor, I have effectively minimized and displaced my neighbor’s spiritual importance. If I make more time for debates with other Christians, the latest issues on Christian Twitter, or the infighting within my denomination than I do for the concerns of my vulnerable neighbor next door, I am allowing outsiders to benefit more from me than my neighbors do.

When more of our energy is given to the issues of White Evangelicalism in general rather than my neighbors next door, something is wrong. If you are a lion online but a mouse in your community, your priorities are off. When we take up physical space in a community but give our best spiritual resources elsewhere, we are spiritual gentrifiers.

I am a finite person, and you are, too. We only have so much spiritual and emotional energy to give away to others before we come to the end of ourselves. When Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:28-34), he at least intended for us to prioritize the needs of our vulnerable neighbors next door.

Our neighbors deserve our best: our best attention, our best prayers, our best anger, our best sorrow, our best joy. Our neighbors lose when we live as spiritual gentrifiers who give our best away to outsiders and neglect the image bearers next door. We are at our best as neighbors when we learn to prioritize their concerns and place the many demands of outsiders – whether of White Evangelicalism or anything else – in their proper place.