A while back I was speaking with a man new to New York from Ethiopia. Describing his Harlem neighborhood, with an expression of amazement, he observed, “There are churches everywhere!” He saw what few seem able to see—a religious life intricately woven into the urban fabric. Helping us all to see something of the vibrant and diverse world of Christian faith in America’s cities is Camilo José Vergara’s How the Other Half Worships. A work of both documentary photography and sociological reflection on inner-city churches, How the Other Half Worships is a major study of urban religion and Christianity in America. With more than 300 photographs, Vergara helps visualize a determined and vibrant life of Christian faith. He is informing us about an ecclesiastical world few outside the churches themselves know much about.
For more than thirty years, Vergara, originally from Chile, has with great originality documented the progressive destruction of some of America’s greatest cities. Most often he has focused on the inner city, what he calls the “ghetto,” invoking the strong term to match the hardened exclusion of so many black and Latino neighborhoods. His method is to photograph buildings and neighborhoods in cities such as Baltimore, Camden, Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia often over a period of decades, charting their history of decline, change, ruin, and, on occasion, restoration. Vergara’s sequencing of pictures generates a distinctive way of following what has happened to the city’s physical and social form.
Two of his most important published works in this area are The New American Ghetto (1995) and American Ruins (1999). Responding to the dignity of the city, his photographs provoke a vital question: Can there not be a better way? If today some cities have become “in,” Vergara’s work is a reminder of how abandoned so many of America’s cities have become, how vulnerable their infrastructure remains, and how challenging their future. Clustered luxury developments and a Starbucks, as we know, do not create either just or sustainable cities in a globalized world. Moreover, they are fleeting commodities when the economic tide turns.
It was by being physically present in urban neighborhoods that Vergara found his interest in African American, Latino, and new immigrant churches. America’s inner cities are filled with houses of worship with names like Thank God for Jesus Church, Fire Baptized Holiness Church, Mount Zion Spiritual Temple, House of Blessings C.O.G.I.C. Greater Expectations Deliverance Center, Saints of God House of Prayer, and Iglesia de Dios. He added such churches to his documentary project.
Not surprisingly, given his concern for the physical form of the city, Vergara began his study with the architecture of houses of worship, documenting everything from reclaimed storefronts to the occasional inner city megachurch, but he soon moved to the interior life of congregations. In his introduction to How the Other Half Worships, Vergara writes, “I wanted to know, for example, why Christian churches were so pervasive in destitute neighborhoods, and how the local residents thought about fellowshipping, living virtuously, the afterlife, and ways of communicating with the divine—that is, their answers to basic questions about human existence.” In fact, Vergara’s questions, from how a church received its name to the meaning of religious words and the benefits of using a tent in a revival, lead to fascinating insights into ecclesiology. Because Vergara’s project, by his account, spans twenty-one cities and “thousands of churches,” he attends to broad patterns rather than providing close ethnographic readings or in-depth historical narratives. Working inductively, he creates his own typologies and connections rather than following the lead of others.
There is nothing grainy about Vergara’s aesthetic. His photographs of people and visual culture—buildings, interior spaces, signage, and art—combine a tight focus with lush colors that render his subjects with dignity and power. The photograph gracing the cover, the red-painted brick True Vine Temple of Christ Church in Detroit, comes across as iconic. At the same time, Vergara’s photographs are in the city, and this larger context frames the book that he has produced. Art and architecture are creatively woven into the urban fabric, saying this is home.
Devoting a chapter to pastors, Vergara foregrounds the women and men who lead churches in overlooked neighborhoods. He presents church leaders using their own words on calling, vision, and understanding of their titles such as Deacon, Mother, or Bishop. To cite one response, when asked why he became a pastor, William Yancy of Leadership Missionary Baptist Church in Milwaukee offered, “My uncle was a pastor. I was called to preach; the call came from God. Most people don’t really want to pastor, to be responsible for other people. Sometimes [God] has to work with you.”
Vergara is not a professional theologian, but he cares deeply about theological matters. His observations on religious practices, devotional life, material culture, and beliefs have a fresh feel, not condescending or critical. He finds that God is central in the life of churches, and he reports on God as the Lord, the blood of Jesus, and the Holy Ghost or Spirit. He covers such topics as prayer, the devil, the afterlife, the Bible, deliverance, salvation, anointing, tongues, evangelizing (“saving souls”), and revival. Deeply rooted in the evangel, the churches he studies nevertheless elude ownership by the “evangelical” establishment. Theology is taking place from below, creative and responsive to God and life.
Constantly pushing to understand the material dimensions of religion, Vergara documents everything from Bibles and hymns to decorations and answering machine messages, especially as he seeks to frame the relationship of the churches to the outside world. Here the “world” is that which is immediate and local, not the world of national and international politics. The churches that Vergara writes about are on the margins of society and human power.
The title alludes to the work of Jacob Riis over a century ago, which drew attention to the conditions in the tenements of New York. When Vergara asks if the churches view themselves as poor, few directly agree, some even take offense, and still others suggest that affluent people appear to be ignoring God’s priorities. For Vergara as social observer, questions of race, class, and the geographical divide between rich and poor churches in America are front and center.
The broad sweep of the project leaves much unexplored and can produce interpretations that could have been clarified or revised with more context. For example, in Vergara’s view, independence marks most of the Pentecostal, Spiritual, and Holiness churches; they have “controlled their own fates,” as Vergara describes them. But it is likely that larger and denser ecclesiastical ties very often exist, some local but often global. And due to global migration and new expressions of transnational religion, there is also even more diversity of church life in the city than Vergara is able to include.
Yet How the Other Half Worships is a remarkable, one-of-a-kind study that bears close and repeated attention. In light of his body of work, Vergara must certainly be considered one of America’s most important urban observers and social commentators. What he gives us is very much a story of searching. Along the way, he shares what people asked and said of him and his work. He reports that he was asked to join churches, give his life to Christ, and was treated as a friend, yet in his postscript, Vergara characterizes himself as the “ultimate outsider” and “one immune to Christianity.” While he does not leave out criticisms of what he sees and hears, clearly he is engaged by his experience:
How could I hear promises from an “awesome God” with the power to give eternal life and to eliminate suffering and remain unaffected? In these houses of worship I found an oasis from a world obsessed with celebrity, youth, possessions, and status. If I had felt it in me, I would have repented, become a believer, and perhaps I would have walked with God.
How the Other Half Worships brings to mind theologian John Howard Yoder’s conviction that the witness of the church is found in the way it embodies the gospel in everyday experience. In the lives, rituals, and words of inner-city churches, we encounter a church walking with Jesus, lives based on a God of hope. Wrapped in vulnerability and openness to God, the church on the margins is offering a faithful witness. This is spiritual power, the wisdom of the Cross. It is what the photographs are all about.
Mark R. Gornik is the director of City Seminary of New York. He is the author most recently of Word Made Global: Stories of African Christianity in New York City, just published by Eerdmans.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
