When it comes to looking for vibrant faith, cities have not been high on the Anglo-Saxon search list.
More recent voices join the barrage.
With the coming of the '80s and '90s, mainliners and evangelicals turned their guns on modernity and modernization. But urbanization, though less a concern, is still seen as a messenger of modernity. Clothed in this kind of language, urbanization sounds remarkably similar to the fading rural-urban moral polarization of past days. David Wells, to cite one example, begins his 1993 assault on the detheologizing of evangelical reflection with a history of modernization's impact on Wenham, Massachusetts. In his survey of two hundred years of changes, he sees Wenham as a particular case study of the large, amorphous, but potent social changes that have swept America in that period.