Sacramental Action in Response to “Urban Crisis”: An Incarnational Critique of the General Convention Special Program

Abstract

In 1967, the General Convention Special Program (GCSP), led by Presiding Bishop Hines, emphasized unconditional funding and operational autonomy for black and minority-led organizations in response to the “urban crisis” of the 1960s. However, the program struggled to engage white Episcopalians in its sacramental vision and disregarded black Episcopalian voices, revealing its limitations and white establishment bias. While the GCSP showcased the potential for sacramental social action, it fell short due to constraints and failure to address the “urban crisis” as divine judgment on the very foundation of the church’s white establishment power. Instead, the program served as an incomplete penance, acknowledging the sacramental nature of the world and God’s reconciling grace, but ultimately inadequate as a sacramental response to colonial racial capitalism. Lacking the solidarity and critique required for efficacious sacramental action, the GCSP revealed the constraints of the white Episcopal Church to act sacramentally in a sacramental world.

Introduction

“But I would heavily underline a word of caution: no matter what this Church at the national level may decide we can do, both in human and financial terms, it will be only a token, a symbol, if, perhaps happily, a sacrament. What we do here can never be more than an ‘earnest,’ pointing to the necessity for, and the effectiveness of, a sensitive and sacrificial response on the part of the people of the Church.” ¹

These closing words from Presiding Bishop John Hines’s 1967 sermon to the General Convention—the sermon in which he introduced the General Convention Special Program (GCSP) to award $9 million to grassroots community organizations—indicates, as I will argue and develop in this paper, a sacramental worldview undergirding the Episcopal Church’s six-year foray into addressing what was then understood as the “urban crisis.” Significantly, Bishop Hines frames the GCSP as a type of sacramental and sacrificial social action on the part of the Episcopal Church. In this paper, the sacramentality of the GCSP will be evaluated by a method I refer to as incarnational criticism. This criticism, outlined in the following section, employs the Incarnation as a grounding framework for discerning and responding to God’s Judgment with efficacious sacramental action. After establishing a method for incarnational criticism, this paper establishes the GCSP in a sacramental ontology and, in conclusion, evaluates the sacramentality of the GCSP.

The GCSP fell short of Presiding Bishop Hines’s sacramental intentions. Acting from a standpoint within a sacramental universe in which God’s grace is being communicated through political and social action, the GCSP was not an adequate social sacrifice to constitute a genuinely kenotic and sacramental action on the part of the Episcopal Church. Instead, due to the constraints of Presiding Bishop Hines acting within the idolatrous framework of a settler colonial crisis narrative and subsequent failure to articulate a comprehensive response to God’s judgment that included both a reckoning with internal racism in the Church and a commensurate material response to the realities of colonial racial capitalism, the GCSP amounted to an act of penance in a sacramental world in which God’s saving grace is continuing to reconcile all of Creation to Himself.

Principles for incarnational criticism

This paper employs an incarnational critique developed with categories established by Anglican Christian socialists in the 20th century. As an incarnational critique, this criticism of the GCSP begins with the reality of the Incarnation as the ground for theology. Then it proceeds to a method of understanding social action as potentially sacramental. This method proceeds in the following order: understanding the Incarnation as the potential for the continued sanctification of the World as revealed by Christ’s kenotic action, the subsequent critique of idols and principalities that deny the possibilities of sanctification in the Incarnation, the discernment of God’s judgment in history, and the possibilities for sacramental response and action toward reconciliation with God.

William Temple’s concept of the sacramental universe, which holds that all created matter is sacramental, is employed as the central lens in sacramental critique. This is because, for Temple, “if the Personal God thus indwells the world, and the world is thus rooted in Him, this involves that the process of the world is itself the medium of His person action.” ² By this understanding of the materialist implications of Incarnation, Temple constructs a sacramental logic in which spirit comes before matter, but matter is an “effectual expression or symbolic instrument of spirit.” ³ In this way, Temple holds that the Incarnation and Christ’s kenotic ministry is, according to Ramsey, “an episode revealing and symbolic of God as He eternally is, showing to us what God is, ever and always in the glory of His self-giving love.” ⁴ Therefore, the sacramental universe:

Asserts the supremacy and absolute freedom of God; the reality of the physical world and its process as His creation; the vital significance of the material and temporal world to the eternal Spirit; and the spiritual issue of the process in a fellowship of the finite and time-enduring spirits in the infinite and eternal Spirit. Matter exists in full reality but at a secondary level. It is created by spirit—the Divine Spirit—to be the vehicle of spirit and the sphere of spirit’s self-realization in and through the activity of controlling it. ⁵

Thus, as the first principle in incarnational criticism, the sacramental universe affirms the sacramental character of the material world and history as the location where salvation comes to fruition. Moreover, as will be established in our second principle for incarnational criticism, it provides the basis to discern that God’s grace is communicated through, and that is sinful and life-denying.

From the sacramental ontological perspective that the material world is an effectual expression of spirit comes the ability to distinguish between effectual and ineffectual expressions of spirit toward the end of salvation and reconciliation. A central distinction between what is effectual and ineffectual is embracing or rejecting “the world” as sacramental. That which rejects the sacramentality of the world magnifies the power of death. ⁶ From a perspective of world-as-sacrament, all which rejects the sacramental efficacy of matter—ideologies, institutions, principalities, and nation-states—supplements and elects death as the moral reality which rules over Creation. Death refers not only to the biological moment of death but also to all variations of cultural and ideological responses, preparations, and engagements with death. In this perspective, electing death’s moral reality wields death’s power in the social and cultural spheres to define, dictate, and limit the possibilities of matter and life. To deny death’s moral reality is to affirm the sacramental character of matter, history, and everyday life as lived in the present. According to Stringfellow, the affirmation of the world as sacramental constitutes a “sacramental participation in history as it happens, transfiguring the common existence of persons and principalities in this world into the only history of salvation which there is for humanity and all other creatures.” ⁷

Judgment follows the comprehension of the world and its history as sacrament. That is, the sacramentality of the world reveals the distance between God and a sinful humanity. The third principle of incarnational critique is the capacity to discern God’s judgment in history so that we might be reconciled to God. Following the charge of Vida Scudder, the focus on discerning God’s judgment is more of a reorientation toward the Incarnation. Scudder writes that “Nazareth must be clearer to the Christian than the Day of Judgement.” ⁸ Christ’s incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection are the abiding principles of discerning God’s judgment. However, because both the world and history are sacramental, Christians, according to Scudder, “welcome with no surprise, even with awe-struck joy, those historic upheavals which are the normal Sign of His approach.” ⁹

With confidence in the triumph of Christ over death, the Christian is grounded in the reality of the Incarnation, which brings about judgment and atonement. The third principle of incarnational critique is the capacity to discern and welcome judgment as the Christ-Child is welcomed at Christmastide. For Scudder, this is the training of “millennial morals” or a prefigurative politics of the Kingdom of God in which the practice of “syndicalism, soviets, or guild socialism if you will, prepare us for citizenship in the Heavenly City.” ¹⁰ Judgment is anticipated and responded to by sacramental acts of the Kingdom of God as expressed in historical social turmoil and upheaval.

The fourth and final principle, then, is the quality and efficacy of the sacramental action. In general, to qualify as sacramental action, the action itself “traces a transition from one sort of reality to another.” ¹¹ The movement from a pre-sacramental reality to a sacramental reality is marked by first understanding that one’s habitual reality is a place of loss or need. ¹² Sacramental movement from loss or a broken identity is accomplished by dispossessing oneself of that broken identity and becoming possessed by a new belonging. Williams writes, “When this transition takes place, the presence and power of the sacred is believed to be present.” ¹³ In this way, the efficacy of sacramental action is measured by belonging in grace to God’s work in and through the world through acts of dispossession.

Varying formations of democratic socialism-as-prefigurative-politics-of-the-Kingdom as proclaimed by Scudder aside, the efficacy of sacramental action is determined by its proximity to the kenotic act of Incarnation. In the words of Rowan Williams:

Action in the Church must be regulated not by abstract rule but by the goal of reinforcing and affirming the other believer in such a way that the community overall is affirmed and strengthened and moved on towards the Kingdom. In other words, my act must be a gift for the deepening and strengthening of another’s faith (and I must be open to receiving such a gift likewise): it cannot ever be a manifestation of my status or “liberty” or “maturity” as a thing in itself. ¹⁴

Therefore, sacramental action for Williams is an action that allows for beings other than oneself to both become and apprehend the invisible Kingdom of God—to participate in sacramental action is to partake in the reciprocal inertia of God’s creative renunciation in Creation and presence in the Incarnation. Applied to the GCSP in the following sections, these principles for incarnational critique will be utilized to evaluate its quality and efficacy as a sacramental action. First, the GCSP is situated in a sacramental universe by construing the program as a gift and sacramental affirmation of the world outside of the church. Second, so that the GCSP might be understood as a sacramental response to God’s judgment, I then determine how the Episcopal Church understood the urban crisis as God’s judgment and whether or not it fully grasped the life-denying principalities revealed by God’s action in the world. Finally, in conclusion, I determine the sacramental efficacy of the GCSP.

GCSP in a sacramental universe

Notably, Bishop Hines’s early theological formation drew upon the sacramental worldview of Temple. In 1933, Hines’s senior thesis at Virginia Theological Seminary was on the theological and social viewpoints of Temple. ¹⁵ More importantly, however, it is generally acknowledged that the Social Gospel influenced Hines. As a young priest in the Diocese of Missouri, Hines was mentored by the unyielding social justice advocacy of Bishop William Scarlett. ¹⁶ The influence of Scarlett and the Social Gospel of the 1920s and 1930s remained an unshakeable core of Hines’s theology and faith throughout his service to the church. Shattuck notes that undergirding the GCSP was a profound theological hopefulness grounded in the Anglican tradition in which the Episcopal Church needed to embrace and act in the moment of grace offered to the Church to share in the pain and agony of the dispossessed. ¹⁷ According to Kesselus, Hines “maintained a majestic ambition for an expansive vision of what the Episcopal Church could do to change the world.” ¹⁸ This vision was “biblically based and encompassing a fresh interpretation of ancient truths of the church and its God-revealed tradition.” ¹⁹ At the center of this vision was the Christian responsibility to unconditionally give through Christ-like sacrificial love that communicates God’s grace. ²⁰

I contend in this section that Hines’s call to imitate Christ through sacrificial love as a communication of Grace is comparable to and benefits from the spiritually directed material world of Temple’s sacramental universe. This is apparent both with Hines’s emphasis on collaborating with poor and dispossessed groups outside of the church and the sacrificial character of the GCSP. Put differently, the GCSP sought to celebrate the world as sacramental through a kenotic, self-dispossessing social action. This section demonstrates this by outlining the formation, performance, and criticism of the GCSP as a social action in a sacramental universe.

Bishop John E. Hines initially proposed the GCSP as an immediate response to the urban crisis of the mid-to-late 1960s that he refers to in his 1967 General Convention sermon in Seattle, Washington, as the “crisis in American life.” The GCSP started forming earlier in the year. Concerned with the state of the American social fabric and convinced that the Episcopal Church had a continued role to play, Hines enlisted the help of layperson Leon Modeste and two unofficial advisory groups to help shape his course of action. From this process, Hines garnered two principles that would shape the program: (1) a hermeneutical privilege of the experience of the poor and dispossessed and (2) a subsequent emphasis on their autonomy and authority. In Hines’s narrative, these principles were primarily derived from Hines accompanying Modeste to an impoverished community in Brooklyn, NY, and the feedback from an advisory group chaired by William Booth and composed entirely of African Americans with little affiliation with the Episcopal Church. According to Shattuck, the former experience impressed upon Hines that “the African Americans he met in the ghetto had a better sense of the reality of God than those, like himself, who had been raised in relatively privileged environments.” ²¹ Moreover, the “angry and blunt” comments from the group chaired by Booth presented Hines with more concrete principles for just action: (1) Programs developed by white people to help black people had failed; (2) the Episcopal Church needed to reform itself and purge racism that infected its members; (3) black power had to be supported by committing substantial money “without strings” to African Americans and providing funds for economic development in ghetto areas. ²²

Hines’s relatively private and informal discernment about the role of the Church in social action was crystallized in his 1967 sermon delivered at the General Convention in Seattle. In the sermon, Bishop Hines postures the GCSP as the Episcopal Church’s response to the “crisis in American life.” ²³ Referring to what was then popularly understood as “the urban crisis” in American cities which had ensued since the Watts Uprising in 1965, Hines surmised that the appropriate response to the urban crisis was the “acquisition of, or seizure of, sufficient power on their part to enable them [rioters] to shape their own destiny, taking their place equally alongside other men.” ²⁴ Hines goes on to further outline the priorities of the special program to include (1) how the Church can “intelligently and humbly” enlist the human and financial resources of the Episcopal Church to serve urban communities and (2) partnership with “indigenous community-groups in impoverished slum-areas which residents themselves have organized, are run by them and are seeking to alleviate the conditions which are destroying them.” ²⁵ Toward these goals, Bishop Hines and the Executive Council created the GCSP. They pledged $9 million, one-quarter of the Church’s annual budget, from the National Church budget over three years to be used in the direct funding of grassroots community organizations to develop the capacities of self-determination among poor and dispossessed people and communities.

Overseen by layperson Leon Modeste and a staff of mostly non-Episcopalians, the GCSP awarded funds to community groups through an application process based on the criteria of whether or not they were pursuing one or more of the following goals:

1. Community organization on a national, metropolitan, or neighborhood level (can be urban, suburban, or rural), the basic purpose of which is to gain social, political, or economic power.

2. Service to the poor based on programs designed and controlled by the poor. These include training in the skills necessary to ensure the effective conduct of such programs.

3. Community leadership training and experience in specific areas of need identified by the applying organization. ²⁶

Applications for GCP funds would then be “carefully scrutinized by a fourteen-member Screening and Review Committee, whose membership is broadly representative of the hard-core poor, including American Indians and residents of Appalachia.” ²⁷ After approval from the Screening and Review Committee, applicants would then finally be endorsed by the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church. ²⁸ In its first year of operation, the GCSP “funded 120 projects in twenty-seven states, the District of Columbia, and four foreign countries” with a total of $1,600,000. ²⁹ According to Kesselus:

This seed money benefited a variety of organizations, including American Indians in Nevada and Oklahoma, Hispanics in Texas and Central America, militant blacks in California, African American farmers in Alabama, migrant workers in Washington, a black theater group in Harlem, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., a cooperative of housemaids in Georgia, rural whites in Kentucky, and a tenants’ council in Boston. ³⁰

A notable early example of the type of projects that the GCSP funded is the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), which received a total of $200,000 to create an ecumenical grassroots effort to aid in the self-determination of the dispossessed. Although GCSP funding failed to help launch a broad ecumenical movement due to a lack of cooperation from other religious groups, IFCO would go on to become the first and largest national foundation controlled by people of color. ³¹ Outside early setbacks, Kesselus notes that “nearly all GCSP grants proved productive and received favorable review; however, the average layperson heard more about the few controversial ones.” ³²

The program was divisive and controversial for the entirety of its duration, beginning in 1967 and ending in 1973. Leon Modeste, a black social worker and layperson, was appointed to head the program. Alongside a failure to consult prominent black churchmen in the formation of the GCSP, the appointment of Modeste was perceived as a snubbing and disregard for the black Episcopal Church. ³³ This created immediate tensions with black Episcopalians who had long grappled with internal Church racism and marginalization. White conservatives voiced alarm and criticism of the “radicalism allegedly embodied in the GCSP.” ³⁴ Echoing conservative critiques of large government spending and centralized power, conservative Episcopalians maligned the GCSP for its perceived subversion of the episcopal governing structure and reversion to rule from a “distant ecclesiastical bureaucracy.” ³⁵ Ultimately, it was a combination of the latter grievances that led to the program’s demise—the purported radicalism of the program and the bypassing of the Episcopal principle were too outside the realm of tolerance for the white establishment core of the Church to continue allocating National Church funds. ³⁶ Early feedback from the program’s origins that the Episcopal Church needed to confront racism internally came back to haunt Hines and the GCSP. In his theological hopefulness, commitment to the social gospel, and desire for the Episcopal Church to lead what he hoped would become an ecumenical movement, Hines and GCSP were held back by their isolation from more significant cultural movements disrupting the nation and the various constituencies within the Episcopal Church. ³⁷

Criticism from conservatives within the Church reveals a basic assumed sacramentality to the GCSP and that this disturbed notions of sacrament, altar, and the Church as the Body of Christ. A minority report at the 1967 General Convention contended that:

our offerings, made on our altars to God, should not be diverted to achieve economic or political power for any group, White or Black. This is a most divisive proposal and most dangerous. It will alienate thousands of members of our Church, and, we fear, seriously endanger our program. ³⁸

Fearing disunity and misuse of funds given as offerings of thanksgiving for the Church ministry, conservative Episcopalians objected outright to an incarnationalist or sacramental materialist approach to the Church’s mission by excluding the realms of politics and economics as capable of imparting grace. In their view, building economic and political power was not conceivable as an extension of the grace given and received at the altar.

Conversely, for Hines, the GCSP was a form of action that conformed with the realities of a sacramental universe that included the Church but was much larger than it.

In sharp contrast to the Minority Report in 1967, Hines, at the 1973 General Convention, upheld the GCSP by contending that “we must recover a Christianity in which the sacrament of the altar is never separated from the sacrament of our brother. The need is for a witnessing community which will not be distracted from the pain of the world but will share in it.” ³⁹ This kenotic and sacramental involvement with the world is expressed in incarnational terms by Hines’s contemporary William Stringfellow. He writes, “The Incarnation means that God’s passion for the world’s actual life—including its politics, along with all else—is such that He enters and acts in this world for himself.” ⁴⁰ Convinced wholly of the sacramentality of the world outside of the Church, the preferential option for the poor and dispossessed, and the demand of the Incarnation to act within the world, Hines believed that the offering of the church’s financial and human resources to social justice organizations and grassroots community groups was the path to participating in God’s saving grace toward atonement and reconciliation. In this way, the GCSP affirmed the world as a material means through which salvation is effected. The extent to which this affirmation of God’s life in the world and history produced efficacious sacramental action relies, as I argue in the next section, on the apprehension of God’s judgment in the world.

Urban crisis and divine judgment

To a significant extent, the GCSP and its urgency were generated as a response to the urban crisis that was in full force in 1967. Rima Vesely-Flad writes:

As riots unfolded in Watts in 1965 and in Detroit and Newark—among one hundred other cities—in the “long hot summer” of 1967, fear in white America swelled. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, nearly one hundred fifty cities across the U.S. erupted in racial confrontations and riots, resulting in numerous deaths and arrests. ⁴¹

By the summer of 1968, the initiative of Presiding Bishop Hines had trickled down to urgency at the diocesan level. Episcopal churches in major urban areas were preparing and strategizing for how to respond to social unrest and violence. For instance, in the Diocese of New York, Bishop Horace W. B. Donegan created an Urban Crisis Fund to allocate funds to New York community groups, encouraged parish programming to address racism within white churches, and began consulting with lawyers about what establishing churches as sanctuaries for protestors could look like. ⁴² On the diocesan and parish level, the Episcopal Church in major cities like New York positioned itself as a reactive, stabilizing, and potentially reconciling presence. On a national level, the GCSP remained the primary method for addressing the urban crisis. The entirety of the Episcopal Church was responding to crises rippling across American social life as a form of divine judgment. The following section outlines the genesis of the “urban crisis” concept in mid-century America. It establishes it as a form of divine judgment that the Church and the nation must atone for.

First, following the sacramental principle of idolatry-criticism, it should be noted that moral urgency and crisis rhetoric around the deterioration of the American social fabric has a long history rooted in settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the American jeremiad tradition. As a rhetorical pattern in social, moral, and political life, according to Bercovitch, “the American jeremiad was a ritual designed to join social criticism to spiritual renewal, public to private, identify the shifting ‘signs of the times’ to certain traditional metaphors, themes, and symbols.” ⁴³ Unlike the European jeremiad “which constantly unleashed a torrent of guilt upon its audience,” the American jeremiad balances narratives of guilt and fear with an added “dimension of progress and hope that public life could improve.” ⁴⁴ Famously exemplified in Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” the American jeremiad celebrates a sense of national mission amid moral decay. ⁴⁵ This model would become a favorite tool for Puritan leaders who “used it as a means of social control that directed parishioners’ actions towards particular ends” and “interpret calamities and colonial hardships by tying them to the alleged moral flaws within the communities.” ⁴⁶ Moreover, as a narrative of covenantal renewal, the American jeremiad became a means to reify the racially stratified colonial society through corrective and atoning violence against enslaved black people. ⁴⁷ Vesely-Flad writes that “when slaves resisted forced labor, they challenged biblical ideas of divinely ordained character and social order.” ⁴⁸ In this way, uprisings and slave rebellions became another form of divine judgment that demanded urgent social cohesion, law and order, and violence. ⁴⁹ Hope for renewal amid moral decay, hardship, and crisis is not limited to the seventeenth century. Instead, the American jeremiad persists in American political life. According to Neüff:

The genre evolved over time; adapting to new circumstances, it became more secular and encompassed a variety of media. Nonetheless, it continued to fulfill a nation-affirming and nation-binding function, crucial for the multicultural and multiethnic “imagined community” of Americans. ⁵⁰

While this paper does not engage the mid-century urban crisis fully with the tradition of the American jeremiad, it understands the potentially life-denying rhetoric of the crisis as grounded in a settler colonial narrative of worldly decay, divine judgment, moral renewal, and ongoing crystallization of a racist and colonizing nation-state. Because of this potentially problematic narrative of settler colonial renewal, I approach crisis rhetoric and the genealogy of urban crisis with a hermeneutics of suspicion.

In the broad, idolatrous tradition of crisis rhetoric in American moral and political life, urban crisis has its distinguishing factors in mid-century American life. Generally, “urban crisis” refers to the wide range of events and phenomena that occurred in American cities, mainly in the Northeast and Midwest, during the process of rapid deindustrialization, including the breaking of the Ford-Keynesian compromise, “white flight” to the suburbs, the subsequent racially skewed growth in poverty, dispossession, violence, and social unrest in urban centers. The causes and proposed solutions to the urban crises of mid-century America varied in their description depending on the social location and political goals of the observer.

The white and capitalist narrative of urban crisis began forming in the mid-1950s. Timothy Weaver notes that the first notable use of the concept of urban crisis occurred in 1955 by Frederick K. Vigman who “saw the ‘crisis’ as rooted in structural forces: slum housing conditions, inadequate city services, and suburbanization that undercut each city’s tax revenue base.” ⁵¹ Advocates and analysts in the late 50s, such as Vigman, held the conviction that the crisis was solvable with government investment indicative of the paradigm of pro-growth liberalism. ⁵² Following the apparent failures of urban renewal, the urban crisis in the jargon of policy analysts in the 1960s took on a more explicitly racist outlook in the 1960s as uprisings unfolded across major American cities.

Amid the disasters of deindustrialization and failed urban renewal, the concept of the urban crisis became “construed in social and psychological terms rather than economic and material ones” as tensions in racially segregated cities boiled over into riots and uprisings. ⁵³ Referred to as the “Negro (and Puerto Rican and Mexican) problem” by James Q. Wilson, language confronting the so-called urban crisis became outwardly racist and borderline eugenic when addressing the underlying causes. A narrative of the “culture of poverty” and “heritable characteristics ‘passed down from generation to generation’ and reflected in traits and behaviors such as ‘confusion of sexual orientation’ and ‘high tolerance for psychological pathology’” buttressed the racist explanations of poverty and violence in cities. ⁵⁴ Solutions to this urban crisis ranged from psychiatric treatment and increased social services to increased demands for law and order. ⁵⁵ Conservative and rightwing social forces operated primarily in this realm of political and moral rhetoric. Vesley-Flad writes that, “Law and order became the vehicle by which whites transmitted their antipathy to integration and fear of racial violence.” ⁵⁶

Regardless of how the crisis and its solutions were framed, Weaver observes an alarming trend that would fully crystallize in the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s. The moral urgency of crisis rhetoric and material explanations, often developed by liberals and leftists, is repeatedly appropriated by conservative and rightwing politicians and public figures to enact further dispossession of the poor and racial minority communities. ⁵⁷ This was fully on display in the 1974 Fiscal Crisis in New York City, in which the emerging neoliberal consensus justified brutal municipal austerity and usurpation of municipal government by financial institutions by blaming bloated municipal budgets, corruption, and the degeneracy of racial minority communities, which had become dependent on the liberal welfare state. ⁵⁸ To impose this austerity and manage its social consequences, the racialized narratives of poverty culture, crime, and degeneracy justified police violence, displacement, and added cultural distance to the already spatially, racially segregated cityscape. ⁵⁹

In this paper, I understand the genealogy of the urban crisis rhetoric to be both the cultural outgrowth and the vanguard of the transformations of capital and power in mid-century American cities. Therefore, before I incorporate urban crisis into an incarnationalist critique, I adopt the concept of colonial racial capitalism to define the phenomenon of the urban crisis the GCSP sought to ameliorate. This perspective understands the phenomenon of urban crisis in mid-century cities as caused by a layered convergence of multiple historical, economic, and political factors. The mid-century urban crisis’s primary structural and materialist causation is the economic transition from an industrial capital to a financial capital. As William Sales, Jr observed in 1975:

Economic activity in New York City is primarily directed toward producing and processing the information necessary for the ruling class to exercise control over the productive activity of the national economy. The service oriented economy of the city represents the epitome of bureaucratic organization of labor in the United States. This bureaucracy exists solely to facilitate the realization of surplus value. ⁶⁰

For Sales, New York City emerges as the capital of international finance both because of the “quality, variety, and flexibility of its labor force” and its success in attracting corporate capital “as a natural consequence of the rate of profit realized there.” ⁶¹ Constitutive of this profit rate is a relative surplus of the low-wage labor force “thrown out of older manufacturing processing and agricultural sectors” by technological advances and deindustrialization. ⁶² Concomitantly, Sales holds, the processes of imperialism and colonial development in the Global South, which disrupted the economies of colonized peoples (particularly in the Caribbean), forced displaced populations into the economic exploitation of already racially segregated slums in cities like New York. These forces converged to create racially segregated slum neighborhoods and a racial underclass through which maximized profitability and racialized class hierarchies were maintained. As Sales explains:

In a sample of seven New York City ghettos, the percentage of individuals working fulltime and not making a living wage, discouraged job seekers, those working part-time involuntarily, and the officially unemployed, range from 39.9% to 66.6% of the ghetto labor force. ⁶³

These racially segregated areas of cities became the subject and source of confirmation for racist beliefs that were both reinforced and explained in the urban crises of the 1960s and 1970s. As Sugrue writes, “to the majority of untutored whites, visible poverty, overcrowding, and deteriorating houses were signs of individual moral deficiencies, not manifestations of structural inequalities. White perceptions of black neighborhoods provided seemingly irrefutable confirmation of African American inferiority.” ⁶⁴

Therefore, the concept of urban crisis in mid-century America employed throughout the 1960s and 1970s is better understood as a false consciousness or ideological distortion of material and social conditions. Rather than the cultural or structural explanations established earlier, this paper posits the concept of urban crisis as an ideological function of profit extraction, financialization, and racial capitalism within the confines of a colonizing nation-state. That is, urban crisis is the terminology used by colonizers to describe the anti-colonial resistance of internal colonies. Defined by their exploitative and extractive relationship with both capital and white power structures, the existence of internal colonies implies that colonization is also an intra-nation-state process through which categories of race, class, and gender stratify the subjectivities of citizenship following the extraction of surplus value. In this case, argues Adamson, “Black people are legal citizens of the United States with, for the most part, the same legal status as other citizens. Yet they stand as colonial subjects in relation to white society.” ⁶⁵

Thus, within the schema of the nation-state, urban neighborhoods of color existed in colonial relationships with white America. The neighborhoods in which the urban crisis played out were thus intentionally economically underdeveloped, their wealth and property subject to external ownership, and they were made dependent on colonial powers through predatory lending, housing segregation, and chronic underemployment and unemployment. ⁶⁶ Giving hermeneutical privilege to the theory of internal colonialism, my understanding of the crisis in American life is one in which capitalist restructuring, imperialism, and systemic racism converged to create a racialized, segregated underclass of surplus labor to maintain profit maximization and white social stability. Riots and other spontaneous or intentional social unrest are thus political resistance and uprising against internal colonial rule and capital accumulation. Known contemporarily as colonial racial capitalism, the context I situate the urban crisis is one in which:

capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups—capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, conquerors of the land made property/the dispossessed and removed. ⁶⁷

In this context, colonial racial capitalism requires the conditions that produce urban crisis both as a means to extract surplus value through the economic exploitation and dispossession of racialized bodies and as a colonial frontier representing the possibility of further development and extraction. ⁶⁸ In the words of William Stringfellow: “The American frontier is no longer a wilderness territory in the West . . . Today the frontiers are the blighted, congested, polluted urban centers, especially in the North, which have become increasingly unfit for human habitation.” ⁶⁹

Urban crisis as a modality of colonial racial capitalism begets the following questions: “What or who is this a crisis for?” and “What social and economic structures are the solutions proposed by those seeking to solve the crisis maintaining or inventing?” The concept of urban crisis utilized by Bishop Hines and the Episcopal Church bore some resemblance to the hegemonic definition developed by white pundits and policymakers espousing developmentalism and liberal civic and market values. However, it also seems to be in dialogue with the de-colonial, internationalist, and materialist understandings of the black radicals and the emergent Black Power movement. The pre-emptive dialogues with Modeste, consultations with unofficial advisory groups, and operational autonomy granted to Modeste and GCSP office significantly impacted how the National Church viewed urban crises. This is displayed in an appendix to the “Questions and Answers About the Church’s Program On the Crisis in American Life” document produced by the Episcopal Church for bishops and church partners to elaborate on frequently asked questions about Bishop Hines’s announcement of the GCSP.

Here, the Episcopal Church described the “crisis in American life” as a “sickness” that had been “demonstrated dramatically by the symptomatic outbreaks of violence in the city after city.” ⁷⁰ Concerned primarily with violence and social unrest, the document roots violence experienced as urban crisis in inequality in employment, housing, income, and education. ⁷¹ The authors outline the following dimensions of the crisis as such: The authors outline the following dimensions of the crisis as such: (1) education precarity; (2) housing disparity; (3) predatory retail; (4) income inequality; (5) lack of political power; (5) widespread political and social alienation; and (6) the failures of integration and the Civil Rights movement. ⁷²

Thus, for the National Church, the urban crisis is the enduring structural dispossession and marginalization of black life in American cities, made visible by eruptions of social unrest and violence. The report has no explicit critique or analysis of colonial racial capitalism and American imperialism. Notably, however, the power relations, namely structural inequality and racialized economic predation, upheld by the internal colony theory are described in the attributes of the crisis in American life established earlier. Regardless, the National Church persisted with uncritical confidence in the liberal dream of the democratic nation-state. The crisis is conceived in terms of a nation still forming. Black Americans and other impoverished communities are alienated from the democratic process and economic opportunity that defines the United States of America.

Toward this crisis in American life, the National Church sought to dialogue within its forays through the GCSP. Whether or not it was effective in its social and economic impact toward its stated goals of alleviating the crisis in American life is not the goal of this paper, and there is no available research measuring its quantitative impact. As suggested earlier, the “winning solution” to the mid-century urban crisis came from austerity, capital financialization, and the emergent political-cultural project of neoliberalism. The neoliberal framing and solution successfully appropriated structural and cultural diagnoses and solutions endemic to the period. Whether or not the GCSP contributed structurally or culturally to the ascendancy of neoliberalism is also outside the scope of this paper but not outside the realm of speculation or incarnational critique.

As a comprehension of and response to divine judgment, however, I contend that the GCSP is both a below-adequate and exceptional response. The GCSP is exceptional in how other predominantly white Christians responded to the urban crisis in the 1960s. Vesely-Flad writes that, in response to the urban crisis, white evangelical associations collectively “asserted a belief that America was in moral decline and spiritual chaos, alienated from God and in need of the church.” ⁷³ Evangelicals formed the “Christian Right” movement and supported politicians like Alabama governor George Wallace and Richard Nixon in his 1968 presidential campaign. ⁷⁴ Rather than viewing itself as somehow participating in the arbitration of divine judgment, the Episcopal Church viewed itself as needing to atone. Instead of responding to the urban crisis with punitive, atoning violence, Presiding Bishop Hines constructed the GCSP as a potential means of accompanying, mediating, and transforming violence into constructive steps toward social and racial reconciliation. While not endorsing violence, Hines had a nuanced and structural account of what was causing violence. Arguing that “violence is built into our normal structure,” Hines held that violence originated from the “frustration and despair on the part of the people, individuals and also corporate groups.” ⁷⁵

Instead of responding to violence as the arbitrator of divine judgment, Hines committed to transforming violence through a sacramental response to divine judgment. “God’s truth,” according to Hines, would “break out into the world of men’s needs, of men’s suffering, of men’s cries for love and justice and hope.” ⁷⁶ It was the responsibility of the Church to “offer ourselves as channels for the effective operation of God’s compassionate judgment and grace as we find it mirrored in the life and death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.” ⁷⁷

The GCSP had a strong understanding of and response to violence but lacked a thorough analysis and critique of idolatry. This was because the Church positioned itself between the emerging Black Power movement and the white establishment, which hindered its ability to fully criticize the oppressive structures of colonial racial capitalism, such as American imperialism and racial capitalism advocated by proponents of internal colonialism and William Stringfellow. Despite this flaw, the GCSP maintained its integrity by grounding its actions in the principles of the Incarnation and its implications for social action. This was evident in Hines’s commitment to viewing the world as a sacrament, prioritizing the autonomy and self-determination of the poor and oppressed, which became the central focus of the GCSP.

GCSP as a sacramental action

Despite a contextually exceptional but politically and analytically lacking response to the urban crisis as divine judgment, Hines’s and the GCSP’s focus on “no strings attached” funding and the operational autonomy of the GCSP represent the most significant sacramental quality. Following the principle that sacramental action is a movement from having a broken identity to a dispossession of that brokenness, it is clear that Hines conceived of the GCSP as a hope for the Church’s salvation. The use of National Church funds to bolster the autonomous actions of the poor and dispossessed was, for Hines, the material act of dispossession that would bring the Church closer to God’s continued action in the world. Moreover, it allowed others to become and comprehend the Kingdom of God independently. The divine judgment apparent in the urban crisis made it clear to Hines that the moment required an “imaginative, creative, and courageous response” to God’s action in the world. ⁷⁸ For Hines, this meant re-orienting the Church’s mission around the truth as revealed in the brokenness of the American society in solidarity with the oppressed and alienated. ⁷⁹

The structure of GCSP allowed the Episcopal Church to pursue this type of non-paternalistic giving and self-dispossession programmatically. From Leon Modeste’s autonomy to the subversion of the episcopal principle to string-free funding to grassroots community groups, GCSP attempted to communicate the grace extended to the Church through the Incarnation for the world outside of the Church as a gift freely given for the dual purpose of autonomy and reconciliation. For Hines, this grace was communicated as an unconditional trust of Modeste, the GCSP staff, and the community groups and organizations that received GCSP funding. ⁸⁰

Hines intended for this sacramental action to draw the entirety of the Church into a new relationship with the world’s brokenness. To this end, the results varied. Kesselus writes that although “the program incarnating his vision of God’s imperative did not become permanent at a national level, it set a course in the minds of a significant number of Episcopalians.” ⁸¹ Yet, as indicated by the dissolution of the GCSP, the lack of ecumenical cooperation, and the coming conservative counter-revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s, Hines was not completely successful in his intentions of drawing Episcopalians and its mainline allies into his sacramental and evangelical vision.

Moreover, Hines’s focus on the world outside of the Church to the initial exclusion of black voices within the Church represents the most crucial failure of the GCSP. It challenges the efficacy of its sacramental action. Considered in a historical context and measured in a far longer term than the six years the GCSP was in operation, the failure to include black Episcopalians indicates the very brokenness of the GCSP sought to address and remedy in the Episcopal Church. In light of how narratives of divine judgment and social renewal historically operate in white Christian America, critical attention should be paid to the urgency through which Hines sought to act without the consent of black Episcopalians. In this instance, the GCSP was constrained by its function as a white establishment church, the subsequent imperative to mediate between the Black Power movement and its white establishment membership, and its inability to fully comprehend the divine judgment manifesting as urban crisis. According to Frederick Williams, president of the Union of Black Clergy and Laity (UBCL), the GCSP was actually “the most sophisticated bit of paternalism” that never meaningfully approached racial reconciliation within its membership ⁸² Instead of fully dispossessing itself in a manner which genuinely allowed itself to join the brokenness of the world, as Shattuck poignantly remarks, “the ‘servant-church’ Hines envisioned . . . was dependent upon the possession of power sufficient to the accomplishment of its sacrificial social goals.”⁸³

The question of sacramental efficacy arises when considering the sustainability of the visible church and the call to imitate Christ’s sacrifice. Efficacy in sacramental action requires a recognition of the world as sacramental and the ability to discern and respond to God’s judgment. Hines recognized the sacramentality of the world, but his position as Presiding Bishop limited his analysis of God’s judgment. The GCSP demonstrated that sacramental social action was possible in the Episcopal Church but also revealed the Church’s constraints and sinfulness. The GCSP was an act of penance in a sacramental world where God’s grace reconciles all Creation to Himself.

Conclusion

Thus, while the GCSP was a form of Christian social action that its Christian proponents understood as an action within a sacramental world, it falls short of being considered a sacramental action. Defined as a kenotic action in solidarity with the world-as-sacrament, which allows others to both individually experience grace and interdependently comprehend the Kingdom of God, the GCSP was, though exceptional regarding how other white Christians and politicians responded to the urban crisis, limited in its understanding of the urban crisis as God’s judgment. Unable to escape the confines of white settler colonial moral urgency, Presiding Bishop Hines neglected to seek black Episcopalians’ consent in forming and operating the GCSP.

Moreover, Hines could not articulate a broader and keener criticism of the urban crisis’s underlying structural and cultural causes due to his position within an established church. However, the autonomy and strings-free funding granted to and by the GCSP is laudable and constitute the closest the program got to being considered sacramental action. For the GCSP to have been considered sacramental action, it would have needed to have included more black Episcopalians from the beginning, found a way to mobilize the Church’s financial and human resources beyond merely writing a check, and more adequately critiqued the moral reality of death by its sacramental actions of solidarity—both at the altar and in the brokenness of the world. Instead, the GCSP represents, perhaps more than any Episcopalian sermon or publication of the period, the Church’s most aggregate and dialogic articulation of penance amid God’s divine judgment manifesting amid the realities of racial, colonial capitalism in mid-century America.