Sects and the City

WHEN FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA, businessman Howard Dahl boards a plane for the East Coast or flies to Europe and beyond, he is often struck by the views of the people he encounters, especially their preconceptions about his part of the country. "There's a lot of condescension. You'd think no one here ever read a book," Dahl says, "or ever had a thought about anything. They think we're religious fanatics."

To Dahl, a successful international exporter of agricultural technology, this contempt is sometimes hard to understand. A devout Christian who spent three years at a Lutheran seminary, he comes from an increasingly sophisticated urban community of nearly 200,000--where religion's role in daily life, public and private, is accepted almost without question.

"In Fargo, businessmen easily see themselves as people of faith," he notes. "Religion plays a huge role, but, because of our Nordic heritage, it is very quiet. It sets people's ethics and how they work and relate with each other."

Oddly enough, places like Fargo, a booming high-tech city on the Great Plains, are more in sync with ancient urban tradition than are supposed paragons of American city life like New York, Boston, and San Francisco, much less the classical centers of Rome, London, and Paris. In these cities, for the most part, religion--with the notable exception of Islam--is on the decline, as churches and religious schools close and attendance dwindles often to minuscule levels.

This retreat from religion is one of the least understood and discussed aspects of the relative decline of the great cities of the West. To be sure, there are many other, more tangible causes--the rise of the Internet, the generations-long flight of the middle class to the suburbs, fear of terrorism. But the decline of religious community may reflect a deeper malaise that could weaken the very spirit of urban culture.