Walking in the City of God
Urban life exposes the essence of human nature, both its fallenness and its glory.
Review by Anna Heetderks
As a child, I dreamed of the life of a city kid and the freedom of movement that came with it. Growing up on the quasi-rural outskirts of a small city, I marveled at my downtown friends’ nonchalance about walking to the bagel shop on a Saturday morning, wandering to the library, or even just venturing up the street to play with the neighbors. To be free was to be in the city, and to be in the city was to be able to go wherever I wanted. Now a newly minted resident of Washington, D.C., I’ve fulfilled my childhood fantasies as I savor the urban lexicon of cross streets and Metro stops, markers that now define the contours of my life. Above all, I have loved to walk—the tree-lined streets of rowhouses in my neighborhood, the gravel paths along the National Mall, the local parks on street corners—so much that it has become a (somewhat banal) personality trait. There are many things I love about walking in the city, but one in particular is the comfortable obscurity into which it plunges me. I find myself freed from others’ preconceived notions or prior knowledge about me, respectfully ignored (most of the time), my identity obscured by their disinterest.
Like me, author and professor Garnette Cadogan seeks freedom in the autonomy and anonymity of walking city streets. Unlike me, he finds it frustratingly unattainable. In his 2015 Freeman’s essay “Walking While Black,” Cadogan explores the joys and perils of being seen in the city. A native of Kingston, Jamaica, he recalls with fondness his childhood wanderings around the city, finding both solace and adventure in its streets and in his encounters with its inhabitants. Cadogan describes walking in Kingston as a sort of inverted pilgrimage, moving toward the world, not away from it. “Walking became so regular and familiar that the way home became home,” he writes. Sadly, this experience did not prove to be universal. After leaving Kingston for New Orleans and then New York, Cadogan realized he involuntarily traded glorious obscurity for dangerous visibility. As a Black man transported to the context of a 21st-century American city, Cadogan found himself the subject of an imposed identity: that of a threat. He describes becoming the object of others’ fear and suspicion: waving to a cop resulting in being handcuffed against a patrol car, running to dinner in being assaulted by a stranger. Walking devolved from a liberating exploration of self and city to, in his words, “a complex and often oppressive negotiation.” “Walking While Black” is both ode and lament, an exploration of the ways in which existence in and movement through a city shapes our knowledge and sense of self and others.
Existence in the city forces us to consider ourselves in relation to other people and the human-built environment, as Cadogan observes in an interview following the publication of “Walking While Black”: “Walking became… a way of becoming more aware of the self, walking as a way to become aware of other selves, walking as a whole world that’s hidden from me when I am making my way from point A to point B via public transportation.” In the city, we are simultaneously constrained by and released from the expectations of others: we are just one of many faces, indistinct yet constantly seen. As Cadogan learns, this seeing can be one of superficial judgment, projecting onto others our own prejudices and fears. It can also be one that seeks others out and welcomes them as fellow sojourners on the way. If we let it, it brings us to terms with what it means to be human and to see others more fully.
Cities force us to grapple honestly with who we are as humans, including our fallen state.
There is a tendency in American evangelicalism to endorse a view both of Christian community and the good life more broadly that is implicitly anti-urban. Conveyed via Christian proponents of localism and agrarianism such as Wendell Berry and Rod Dreher, and activities like remote church retreats, this view implies that the purest form of human flourishing and communion with God is to be found in places separate from large groups of people and the systems they construct. Christians also display at times a perception of the city as a “den of iniquity,” a place of impurity, worldliness, and Babel-esque hubris that seeks to displace God and His creation with human-centered structures and systems. This view has long-standing roots in American Christianity. In a 1955 address to Calvin College, professor Donald Bouma said, “In rural areas one looks about him and sees God, or at least something beyond man; in cities one looks about him and sees man.” In addition to viewing cities as human-centered and thus inherently idolatrous, Christians have also characterized them as centers of moral decay and degradation, full of crime, corruption, and other perversions. Some, like French philosopher and Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul, see the very concept of the city as inherently evil: “The city is a cursed place—by its origin, its structure, its selfish withdrawal, and its search for other gods,” he writes. “As it develops, every city must receive and bear the curse on its own account; it is one of its basic elements.” Cadogan likewise experienced the depravity of the city, in the form of others who see him as the threat, as the source of the depravity. It is hard to deny that cities do concentrate the worst of humanity. They focus the fallenness of the world in one place, manifested visibly as racism, homelessness, addiction, crime, and poverty. However, these exist whether we are there or not—moving away from others does not eliminate sin and brokenness, it just distances us from it.
Cities force us to grapple honestly with who we are as humans, including our fallen state. Cadogan’s essay is a searing indictment of the ways in which human sin—specifically, race-based prejudice—restricts the freedom of and mars the joy to be found in the most fundamental of human movements. “The sidewalk was a minefield,” he writes of New Orleans. “And every hesitation and self-censored compensation reduced my dignity.” “Walking While Black” demands a reckoning with the pervasiveness and perversity of sin. “Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of human nature [and] all our capacities for kindness, but also our capacities for cruelty,” Cadogan notes in his interview. “Human beings are irreducibly complex, so we ought to capture them in their glory, grandeur, and grossness.” This insistence on confronting the “grossness” of human nature comports with the demand of the Christian life to engage with the brokenness of the world. Cadogan warns against the temptation to romanticize urban existence and movement (“There’s a danger to think of walking in a Pollyannaish way—that walking is only a way of anchoring me to the beautiful things in the world”), but in denigrating it and isolating ourselves from it we commit a similar error. In Being Christian, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams describes the sacrament of baptism as calling its recipients not just to new life in Christ, but also to descent with him into the darkness of the world. “Baptism… is to accept that to be a Christian is to be affected—you might even say contaminated—by the mess of humanity,” he writes. “The New Testament tells us uncompromisingly: to be with Jesus is to be where human suffering and pain are found and it is also to be with other human beings who are invited to be with Jesus.”
The city extends to us the offer of an inverted pilgrimage: to see God, others, and ourselves more fully by moving toward the world.
When we walk through cities, they also bring us into contact with the beauty of humanity and the excitement of discovering others. Writing of his native Kingston, Cadogan describes the joy to be found in encounters with others while walking. “I made friends with strangers and went from being a very shy and awkward kid to being an extroverted, awkward one. The beggar, the vendor, the poor laborer—those were experienced wanderers, and they became my nighttime instructors; they knew the streets and delivered lessons on how to navigate and enjoy them.” He likewise extolls the beauty and diversity of New York’s crowds of people: the sights and foods and languages that comprise the mosaic of the city. The city is a place built on relationships with other human beings. And we cannot understand God without understanding human beings. We often expect to meet God in the natural world, but perhaps we should expect it even more in a city populated by His living, breathing, walking images and likenesses. In the city, more than in any other place, we encounter over and over the crowning glory of God’s creation. Even in the preponderance of manmade structures so shunned by Bouma, Ellul, and others, we can still encounter God. Early Christianity was rooted in cities, in contrast with surrounding pagan religions that assigned higher spiritual significance to nature. “The foundational metaphors of Christianity and paganism differed and conflicted with one another,” writes medieval historian Martha Rampton. “The importance of place emerged for Christians as they crafted a new identity and a way to express it through ritual. Pagans looked to the natural world for meaning. Christian identity, on the other hand, was manifest in human-made consecrated structures such as churches and shrines.” Historically, churches have served as the orienting point of urban life, anchoring blocks and neighborhoods and mirroring the Incarnation: God planting Himself amidst the people He created.
The city extends to us the offer of an inverted pilgrimage: to see God, others, and ourselves more fully by moving toward the world. In contrasting his experience of walking in Jamaica with that of New Orleans and New York, Cadogan speaks of the “new set of possibilities” that walking creates in a place where he is free from the fearful, hostile perceptions of others. “Serendipity, a mentor once told me, is a secular way of speaking of grace; it’s unearned favor,” he writes. “Seen theologically, then, walking is an act of faith. Walking is, after all, interrupted falling. We see, we listen, we speak, and we trust that each step we take won’t be our last, but will lead us into a richer understanding of the self and the world.”
Anna Heetderks lives in Washington, D.C., and works in government oversight. She is a native of Charlottesville, VA, and a 2024 graduate of the University of Virginia, where she studied Public Policy and Foreign Affairs.
