A Flash for the ACLU: Cities Are Rooted in Religion

Los Angeles County’s recent decision to remove a tiny cross from its seal has inspired an enormous protest from the region’s evangelical community and its conservative allies.

The issue seems likely to embroil the county in a storm of lawsuits and lead perhaps to a divisive ballot measure during the next few months. Yet the whole battle smacks of a kind of amnesia about the roots of urban places.

Contemporary discussions of urban issues revolve around many things, from high-technology development to racial and sexual politics, but rarely mention the role of religion -- churches, synagogues and mosques, and indeed, moral order -- in city life. That’s the postmodern, secular American approach, but it surely would have seemed odd to our urban predecessors for whom the linkage between the city and worship was utterly obvious.

The earliest cities of Mesopotamia, for example, were themselves largely directed by priests, who established coherent rules for the community. The temple, erected at the center of the town, was almost invariably the largest and most inspiring building.

This pattern can be seen virtually everywhere, from the cities of Mesoamerica and Peru to China and India. Babylon, the greatest metropolis of Mesopotamia, derived its name from Babi-ilani, or “the gate of the gods,” the place from which the divinities were believed to have descended to Earth. Inca urban society rested on the belief that their rulers were gods and that their capital, Cuzco, constituted “the navel of the world.”

The religious role in urban history goes well beyond architecture. City life, in contrast to nomadic or rural village life, has always depended on a community’s ability to establish a common moral order among strangers from outside the family or clan.

In the earliest cities, priests, or kings who derived their authority from the gods, were the ones who devised the codes that kept increasingly complex societies operating in what we might call a civilized manner.

Even the classical city -- the model to which almost all Western cities still aspire -- possessed a powerful religious orientation. Greek and Roman communities generally shared a powerful sense of “sacred space” in their central core, deriving from a religious past and common ancestors. The Roman forum, with its ties to both ancestors and the gods, once was such a sacred place and always was rebuilt after fires and occupations. No one today would dream of denying Rome its religious roots.

Christianity and Islam, although often at odds, have played similar critical roles in the development of cities. After the fall of Rome, the Catholic Church preserved the last vestiges of the classical cities, administering them and providing the legal system. In many of the last surviving towns, the bishops, whether in Paris or Rome or elsewhere in Italy, most often offered the only recognized form of authority.

Islam, even more than Christianity, was born an urban religion. Muhammed was an urban merchant, and the practice of the faith required cities as “places where men pray together.” Islam therefore fostered the creation of some of the medieval world’s greatest cities -- Cairo, Baghdad and Shiraz -- by imposing a rule of law that applied to personal and commercial transactions.

It should not be so surprising, therefore, that here in California, as well, the role of religion in founding cities was absolutely central. The missions, such as those at San Fernando or San Gabriel, whose cross so offended ACLU attorneys in the county seal dispute, represented the earliest examples of European urban civilization in this part of the world.

More recently, it was largely religious-inspired reformers of the Victorian era -- notably in Britain and the United States -- who first raised critical issues about the importance of decent housing, clean streets and open space.

In Los Angeles, a Methodist minister, Dana Bartlett, helped lead the drive to turn this city into a “better city” with healthful neighborhoods and good environments for working-class families.

Later in the 20th century, when business and government seemed to desert the poorest communities, it was the churches, more than any other institution, that labored to provide solace and assistance to distressed families and neighborhoods.

In this sense, to remove the cross from the seal dishonors the religious motivations of all these critical shapers of the urban experience. Virtually every city -- whether in California, Mexico, Iraq or China -- retains at some very basic level an intimate tie to religion. To eliminate this symbol represents not so much a threat to religion, which will live anyway in people’s hearts, but to the urban past.

Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow with the New America Foundation and Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University, is the author of “The City: A Global History,” to be published next year by Modern Library.