Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy by Robert Wuthnow

Author:Robert Wuthnow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Reston Interfaith

How a large regional coalition like VOICE functions in practice can be seen more clearly through the activities of its constituent organizations. An organization that illustrated these activities at the local community level was called Reston Interfaith. Reston, Virginia, was founded as a planned community in the early 1960s by wealthy New York real estate developer Robert E. Simon, who named it using his initials. It was an unlikely place for an interfaith center devoted to religious, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity. By the early twenty-first century, household incomes, education levels, and housing prices in Reston were among the highest in the region. Most of its growth, mushrooming from 5,700 in 1970 to 36,000 in 1980, was driven by the rapid expansion of high technology and government contracting firms—and happened before the large influx of immigrants from Asia and Central America.36 But Simon was a visionary and when he purchased the seven thousand acres for the community with proceeds from the sale of Carnegie Hall, he wanted it to be different from the homogeneous suburbs he was familiar with on Long Island. He specifically wanted it to be a community of diversity, a goal reflected in its mission statement of building “a community where barriers created by race, income, geography, education, and age are removed” and including language about “housing for different needs and incomes.”37

That was a tall order in the early 1960s when the state of Virginia was doing everything it could to deter and delay school integration and when de facto residential segregation was the prevailing pattern. Sociologist Herbert Gans, who was writing a book about the huge Levittown planned community in New Jersey, visited the development as it was under construction and predicted that residents would socialize among their friends and family and at their houses of worship but were unlikely to forge a wider sense of being an inclusive community.38 In 1967 the hope for diversity suffered a serious blow when Simon, facing financial difficulties, sold the development to the Gulf Oil Corporation. Gulf’s interest was to maximize its profits by selling houses to upscale buyers at the highest possible prices.

Having been attracted to the community by its promise of diversity, residents formed the Reston Citizens Association (RCA), which its founding officers described as a “union” or “voice” organized to combat the big money that was threatening to undermine the kind of community they wanted.39 In 1972, RCA’s president, John Dockery, drafted a document to guide the association’s tactics. A nuclear physicist who worked at the Pentagon and who would go on to write influential papers about artificial intelligence and chaos theory, Dockery was fluent in four languages and read widely. The document he wrote for the RCA was titled “Tactical Considerations for ‘New Town’ Citizens Groups: An Urban Guerrilla Warfare Manual.” It was based on Brazilian leader Carlos Marighella’s recently translated Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla. Although it rejected Marighella’s engagement in violence, it adopted the manual’s advice in other respects. Terming the community’s

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