Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures

by Frances FitzGerald

Book Overview

"We must consider that we shall be A City Upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us," John Winthrop told his Pilgrim community crossing the Atlantic to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Four centuries later, Americans are still building Cities Upon a Hill. In Cities on a Hill Pulitzer Prize-winner Frances FitzGerald explores this often eccentric, sometimes prophetic inclination in America. With characteristic wit and insight she examines four...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671645617
• ISBN13: 9780671645618
• Release Date: November 1987
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 414 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Strange Communities

It is history. Two of the four communities portrayed have changed. One has become extinct, and one, San Francisco, has changed radically. Jerry Falwell's has survived, but it now seems less significant these days. Age-restricted communities have grown in numbers and scope. Frances FitzGerald is right to see the development of all four as peculiar. She stresses the role of life-style and religion. All of the communities are totalizing, meaning all-encompassing, experiences. All of them represent changes from former lives and so are explicable in terms of liminal states and rites of passage research. All require extreme commitment on the part of the participants. All are sheltered from the world in certain respects, or could be said to represent new versions of reality. Perhaps only the homeschooling movement of today requires similar exertions of will.Reviewing history, it is noted that the Castro in San Francisco in the 1970's became part of a vast redevelopment project. Harvey Milk, though, and others were powerless to overcome the forces of gentrification. On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were shot and killed. This was eight days after the mass suicide at Jonestown. AIDS hit the Castro hard by 1984. The next section bears the title, "Liberty Baptist--1981." Television evangelists came at the time of a change in American religious life in the 1970's. Conservative evangelists were attracted to television as a medium. The patriotism was no surprise, but the launch into electoral politics was surprising, even to their audiences. By 1980 Bakker and Robinson retreated. The risks of political involvement involvement were too great. Only two superstars, Robison and Falwell, remained. Robison was a Southern Baptist. Falwell was a pastor of an independent Baptist church. Falwell was head of the Moral Majority. Falwell was most characteristically an organizer and a promoter. Fundamentalist pastors had been identified as part of a new coalition, the New Right. Falwell was leading a radical movement.Lynchburg is a small city of sixty-seven thousand. The city stands between Appalachia and Washington D.C. In the 1950's it was still a mill town, but it was being transformed into one of the cities of the New South. Lynchburg is really a collection of suburbs. Developers are still at work at the edge of town. It is not a graceful city. There are over a hundred churches. Falwell's church on Thomas road is block away from Lynchburg College. The Thomas Road Church is a vast and mightly institution. It includes Liberty Baptist College. It is a church advocating separation from the world. It tries to be comprehensive. Success and how to get it are main themes in Thomas Road preaching. Jerry Falwell was an ambitious school boy. He attended Lynchburg College for two years and then made a career decision and transferred to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri. In 1956 he decided to start his own chur