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Rural, Urban, and Suburban

In a highly contentious presidential election year, a steady drumbeat of stories and reports will focus attention on issues that divide American voters into cultural and political camps. Such issues include critical race theory, gender identity, immigration, gun ownership, abortion, animal rights, and others. The Congregations and Polarization (CAP) project seeks to explain the ways Indiana’s religious congregations are framing their missions and ministries in communities shaped by these well-documented divisions.

We know from past research that congregations’ responses will differ considerably. Some will experience serious cultural conflict within their own ranks, but most will not, because many congregations have already sorted into culturally and politically homogeneous camps. Some will try to keep all discussion of these divisions outside their congregation’s walls, seeing politics as a distraction from their spiritual mission. Some will try to be peacemakers, often searching for some moderate, purple, center between red and blue. And some will join the fray, likely also hoping for peace, but committed to creating changes they believe are just.

The CAP project is based on two important assumptions. The first assumption is that these culturally divisive issues are grounded not simply in differences of personal opinions or values, but also in different interpretations and experiences of these issues that must be understood in specific social contexts. Because we are working across the state of Indiana, we begin with social differences among rural, urban, and suburban contexts. The discussions taking place in these different areas do not start with the same assumptions and do not share the same definitions of the problems. School boards in these different locales do not argue about the same issues. People’s daily experiences can be quite different depending on where they live and this clearly influences their shared opinions and attitudes. So rather than holding inclusive conversations at the statewide level that might lead toward mutual understanding and community wellbeing, we often have multiple conversations running on very different tracks. Put most bluntly: Discussions about problems of race, inequality, immigration and the rest are not framed the same in these different contexts. This makes productive engagement on these issues very difficult.

The second assumption is that congregations seek to build community in ways that most social organizations do not and cannot. Congregations are communities and they serve communities. And these communities are themselves deeply shaped by the social contexts in which they operate. Congregations seeking to address certain difficult issues in rural Indiana will have a very different conversation than congregations in urban or suburban areas. For instance, discussions about gun ownership and gun violence will be framed differently in a rural community where many of the residents go hunting than in an urban area where guns are most often associated with violence. Conversations about animal rights will be different in a farming community than in one where most animals that people own are pets. Even conversations about difficult issues such as the role of historical and systematic racism play out very differently in an environment where there are very few Black people. The principles may be the same, but the lived, daily, experiences shape the ways decisions are made and resources are used.

Therefore, the first step in the Congregations and Polarization project is to develop a clearer picture of differences and similarities in these three different parts of Indiana: rural, urban, and suburban. To do this, our colleagues at Polis used the best-available methodology from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to separate Indiana into urban, rural, and suburban areas. This method is especially helpful because it asks residents how they would describe the place where they live, rather than only relying on a measure such as housing density. Polis then used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2017–2021) to point out important differences and similarities among these areas. In this exercise, all urban areas are lumped into one group, all rural areas into a second group, and all suburban areas into a third.

Recognizing, however, that not all urban or rural or suburban areas are necessarily identical, we took the further step of creating eight different, smaller, study areas for deeper analysis. These are: Marion County (Indianapolis), the Indianapolis suburbs (technically the 2023 Indianapolis-Carmel-Greenwood Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) minus Marion County), The Region (five counties in northwest Indiana including the cities of Gary and Hammond), Elkhart County, Allen County (Fort Wayne), Bartholomew and Jackson Counties, Ohio and Ripley Counties, and Crawford County. These study areas represent very different parts of the state and will, in some cases, show differences within the rural or urban or suburban classifications that would not otherwise be apparent.

We encourage readers to sort through the data on their own and to think about information that confirms or challenges their prior assumptions. We have provided introductory analysis of differences and similarities we think may be important for understanding the contexts in which congregations work. This report is a first step because, in the end, this is a project about congregations and this information is meant to provide needed background for that effort, rather than public policy analysis.

Our deepest hope is that this data will spur productive, sustained conversation within religious communities about their mission goals and the context in which they operate. Beyond this, we hope to inform public officials and civic leaders who are thinking about the public role of congregations. And they should be thinking about that role: Religious congregations are on the front lines of many different socially divisive issues. They are frequently the first stop for people seeking help. They are intimate, supportive, communities of ordinary people who mean to make the world a better place. If they cannot contribute to a shared vision of our lives together, if they cannot sustain conversations about fraught topics, what organizations can?

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