The Quietly Dangerous Suburban Church

“You Belong in PARK FOREST!” claims a 1952 advertisement for a brand new suburb 30 miles south of Chicago. “The moment you come to our town you know: You’re welcome. You’re part of a big group. You can live in a friendly small town instead of a lonely big city.” Park Forest was one of the first extensively planned post-war suburbs in America. Built for an increasingly mobile and growing middle class, by the late 1950s it housed 28,000 people, most of them families. As Gretchen Buggeln writes in her new book The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America, Park Forest’s developers made sure to set aside areas for churches in their new town, betting that “moral stability” would be a selling point.