Unsettling “Inner City”: Liberal Protestantism and the Postwar Origins of a Keyword in Urban Studies

The term inner city first achieved consistent usage through the writings of liberal Protestants in the USA after World War II. Its genesis was the product of an era when a largely suburban mainline Protestantism was negotiating its relationship to American cities. Liberal Protestants’ missionary brand of urban renewal refocused attention away from the blight and structural obsolescence thought to be responsible for urban decay, and instead brought into focus the cultural pathologies they mapped onto black neighbourhoods. The term inner city arose in this context, providing a rhetorical and ideological tool for articulating the role of the church in the nationwide project of urban renewal. I argue that even as it arose in contexts aiming to entice mainline Protestantism back into the cities it had fled, the term accrued its meaning by generating symbolic and geographic distance between white liberal churches and the black communities they sought to help.