Unlike rural and urban areas, suburbia is predicated on something unnatural and slightly diabolical: it is determined to suppress being in relationship with other people and reality itself. Such a determined effort to erase friction with everything outside your head requires the propagation of terrifyingly bureaucratic (and totalitarian) systems of power.
Is it any wonder that faith in God tends not to thrive in the suburban ethos, with its disavowal of the organic and spontaneous, of complexity and nuance, of roots and culture? It shouldn’t be a shock that suburbanites—who are painfully out of touch with the real—are the first to take up outlandish ideological causes, to have depression or other forms of psychological maladjustment, to claim some bizarre identity label, and to be drawn toward pure secularism, extremely heretical forms of progressive religiosity, or reactionary forms of religious fanaticism?
In his groundbreaking new book, Crabgrass Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Stephen Koeth, a Congregation of the Holy Cross priest who teaches at Notre Dame, sets out to explore how the move en masse to the suburbs has impacted the way Catholics practice their faith. Building on Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson’s seminal history of American suburbanization, Crabgrass Catholicism attempts to fill the scholarly void of research about religious practice in suburbia, which Koeth argues is key to understanding the United States’s trajectory in the twentieth century. Specifically, he considers the claim that the U.S. Catholic Church “lost the suburbs” due to naively “transplanting an urban model of the parish into the new suburban context.”
In order to do this, Koeth uses as his case study the archetypal example of the white ethnic Catholics who moved from New York City to Long Island’s suburbs in the post-war era. He digs into the historical records to map out the numerous factors that played a role in the big move of Catholics from urban ethnic enclaves to the suburbs. Among Catholics’ motivations was the collapse of the back-to-the-land movement, whose first iteration emerged in the 1930s. The movement, which encouraged city-dwellers to move to the country and experiment with farming and homesteading, was in part an attempt to “escape” the chaos of urban life, but also to revive the historic symbiotic relationship between the urban and rural which had decayed during the Great Depression. Dorothy Day’s mission to found Houses of Hospitality in the cities and farms in the country comes to mind as one such attempt.
But many Catholics shifted their energy away from the back-to-the-land movement toward the suburbs, which they naively thought could be a best-of-both-worlds kind of setup. Other reasons Catholics moved to the suburbs included the boogeymen of urban overcrowding, immorality, and delinquency; the worsening of racial tension; the desire to own property; fear of the encroachment of big government and of rising property taxes; the lack of funding for parochial schools; and the emergence of the culture war—namely over abortion and religion in the public square.
While Crabgrass Catholicism is formally a work of historical research, it is much more than this. Koeth offers his readers an in-depth phenomenology of suburban life, exploring its metaphysical and anthropological dimensions and their broader ramifications on the economy, society, and spirituality.
“Space shapes religious practice,” Koeth writes. “The physical—everything from water, bread, and wine to the light of a candle, the smell of incense, and the sound of music, is understood as capable of being imbued with spiritual meaning.” In urban parishes, “ritual objects and actions spiritually transformed the faithful who experienced them. But as the faithful spilled out of these churches in processions, festivals, and the rhythms of daily life, the parish lent sacred meaning to the entire ethnic neighborhood and the two became one and the same.”
This all changed during the move to the suburbs. “The concept of the neighborhood was radically altered and sometimes lost entirely. With it the Catholic conception of the parish was stretched to the breaking point and was increasingly rejected as a viable means of structuring Catholic life.” Koeth then argues that the suburban parish became “divorced from the ethnic neighborhood, and Catholic religious practice became less the expression of an ethnic and religious community and more a familial and individual observance.”
Koeth’s research demonstrates how the “bourgeois” suburban ideal is both anti-human and anti-reality and leads to dysfunction, and ultimately despair. The idea that you are supposed to live merely a comfortable, quiet life—devoid of financial worries, never having to be actively involved in building up your neighborhood and local civic institutions, not having to deal with conflict, with no commitments to relationships with other human beings, untethered by ethnic, cultural, or local roots and traditions, untroubled by struggles that may force you to your knees, dependent on a deity who is more powerful than yourself—is a dead end. This frictionless, rootless life may be cozy and convenient, but it closes the door to the sense that life is oriented toward a mystery beyond this realm.
Suburbia is determined to suppress being in relationship with other people and reality itself.
This is not to romanticize urban or rural life, which is full of friction with reality—with other humans in the city, with nature in the country. These are stressful forms of life, but it is a stress that is pregnant with meaning. It is not the anxious, meaningless type of stress that leads to despair. This type of stress forces you not only to look for meaning, but to learn how to function—to get a particular job done. Suburban stress, however, doesn’t orient you outside of yourself into reality or relationship with others, but instead makes you collapse in on yourself. And of course, one can easily argue that cities are no longer spaces conducive to faith, community, and the fostering of roots, given the expansion of waves of gentrification. As much as this might be true, the fact is that—ontologically speaking—cities retain the potential to inculcate roots, at least more so than the suburbs.
Koeth demonstrates how this existential drama impacted the development of suburban Catholicism. The landscape of suburbia and the lifestyle it engendered was devoid of the factors found in urban settings that made it easier to live a vibrant faith. For example, it was harder to foster a communal ethos, to see one’s neighbors on a regular basis, to get to know them and be forced to solve problems together. One was also less likely to pass by the parish on a daily basis, to stop in to light a candle on the way to work, or to celebrate festivities regularly at the parish. Surely, plenty of suburban residents were actively involved in their parishes—but their relationship with the parish has substantially changed.
Crabgrass Catholicism shows that religiosity, to truly transform a person’s life, must be attached to (or parasitic upon) some other concrete phenomenon: for example, communal and civic institutions, neighborhood life, and one’s ethnic and cultural heritage. Koeth marks the point when ethnic white Catholics stopped identifying as Italian Catholics, Irish Catholics, Polish Catholics, etc., and opted instead for “just Catholic” (or worse, as “white” Catholics!). As soon as faith became detached from culture and neighborhood life, it changed from an integral factor in one’s daily life to being reduced to either a nice but ultimately irrelevant historical artifact, an ideological football of sorts, co-opted by one side of the culture wars of another, or completely faded into the background.
Koeth insinuates that Catholicism floundered in suburbia because of the short-sighted and naive pastoral approaches that clergy took. Had pastors considered the massive paradigm shift brought about by the move to the burbs, and modified their approaches accordingly, perhaps the faith would have flourished—and if not, at least survived—in suburbia. Yet I’m inclined to argue that the explanation is much more grave: suburban life is ontologically opposed to Catholicism, and to other forms of Christianity that place a strong emphasis on the sacraments.
Andrew Greeley, whom Koeth repeatedly lauds as the most trustworthy authority on all things suburban Catholic, would seem to agree. Greeley, the late sociologist and priest, feared the challenge that the “material prosperity” brought about by “the suburban way of life”—with its “unbelievable array of gadgets”—would pose to religious leaders, who preached the need for salvation from the chaos of “this world,” as they chastised selfishness and materialism. Indeed, it’s hard to love one’s neighbor and care for the poor if one rarely even sees poor people, let alone next-door neighbors.
Suburban life is ontologically opposed to Catholicism.
Indeed, suburban life seems intent on abolishing the experience of reality as given, as an unforeseen gift (and sometimes curse) rather than of human calculations, and of life’s being contingent upon the support of God (and other humans). Suburbia centers artifice over nature, the manufactured over the organic. It is predicated on the ceasing of all tensions, and thus the erasure of life’s metaphysical charge.
This is not to say that one cannot live a devout life in the suburbs. Of course, one can find plenty of sincerely religious people and communities in the burbs. The evils of suburbia are not powerful enough to banish God should he decide to make an appearance there. But this is the exception to the rule. In suburbia, a vibrant faith is a bug, not a feature; the air is pervaded by a hollow, drab, nihilistic form of religiosity.
While the book maps out the trajectory of most ethnic white Catholic immigrant groups, it is yet to be seen whether new immigrant groups will follow suit. Among my recently-immigrated Latino friends, I’ve observed some who have opted to stay in the city, hold onto their cultural heritage, actively live out their faith and live a very communally-oriented lifestyle; others, by contrast, aim to make as much money as possible, move to the burbs, and live a quiet, isolated, secular lifestyle without having to be bothered by the inconveniences of urban life, extended family, the demands of tradition, or God himself. Unsurprisingly, their children have been quick to complain about depression or anxiety disorders, and to flock to various political ideologies, including MAGA, antifa, and gender abolitionism.
Koeth is to be lauded not only for his extensive research, which fills a major gap in historical scholarship on suburbia and American Catholicism, but for the integrity with which he presents it. His measured, objective tone lets the history speak for itself rather than clouding it with his own opinions. Koeth models a humility, professionalism, and apolitical neutrality that is sorely lacking—especially, and sadly, among priests—today. Crabgrass Catholicism is a must read.