City of Dignity begins at the high-water mark of urban liberalism in the US, following how Christian leaders engaged with the civil rights movement between World War II and the Great Society of the 1960s. The first chapter follows Father George Dunne, a Jesuit who assailed racial injustice from the pulpit and from his position at Loyola University (now Loyola Marymount University, where Dempsey teaches). A pioneering voice for “social Christianity,” Dunne denounced segregation as a sin in the pages of Commonweal magazine in 1945. Three years later, he helped overturn California’s ban on interracial marriage.
Yet other events unfolding outside the walls of the church made clear that when it came to changing hearts and minds, Christian leaders were sometimes out of step with their own congregations. In 1964, when Californians voted to overturn the state’s fair housing law against the protests of liberal Christian leaders, it exposed the limits of the latter’s political power amid the growth of the evangelical New Right.
After 1970, demographic shifts and the rise of multicultural politics combined to reorient social Christianity. City of Dignity’s later chapters consider how churches responded to migration from Latin America, the war on drugs, the AIDS epidemic, and the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Christian Angelenos met this period with a “capacious vision of social justice,” linking long-standing concerns over poverty and hunger with protests against homophobia, deportation, and police violence. For Christian activists, these issues were opportunities to prove “that vigorous civic engagement, advocacy, and social ‘witness’ could transform” a deeply unjust city into a beacon of dignity, tolerance, and respect.
While mass migration altered the composition of LA’s churches, Christian leaders also acted upon the emerging global city. Dempsey argues that the church in this period became a “crossroads” for various liberation struggles, including the movements for Black Power, gay rights, and democracy around the world. Most notable is Father Luis Olivares, whose Downtown church offered sanctuary to the poor and the persecuted and solidarity to the revolutions in Central America. In this “transnational crusade against violence, war, and injustice,” Dempsey sees a blueprint for a different kind of Los Angeles.
In a city as unequal as Los Angeles, religious and interfaith organizing has helped to ensure at least a minimum level of dignity and sufficiency for many of those who have been abandoned by the state. City of Dignity shines a light on the Christian leaders who sought to realize a truly just city.