In the Arcade Fire’s breakthrough album, Neon Bible, they presented a dark, sustained critique of religion. In a similar fashion, their new album, The Suburbs, takes aim at the failed promises of suburban life. Both albums benefit from an avoidance of scathing, didactic claims; instead, they rely on a series of vignettes that make the point forcefully from many directions. For example, the song “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” opens this way:

 

They hear me singing and they told me to stop,

Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock.

These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose,

But late at night the feelings swim towards the surface

‘Cause on the surface the city lights shine.

They’re calling out: “Come and find your kind!”

Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small,

That we can never get away from the sprawl.

Living in the sprawl, the dead shopping malls

Rise like mountains beyond mountains,

And there’s no end in sight. I need the darkness.

Someone please cut the lights!

 

There are many ways to interpret the distinctively urban turn of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. (There are even more predictions about what the future may hold for the American landscape.) Moreover, the church has finally begun to turn its attention back to the cities – also for a myriad of reasons. But perhaps the most compelling reason for the abandonment of the suburban ideal is that the dream no longer seems very compelling. It had become an alternative gospel – a way of avoiding sin, guilt, and misery. But somehow all of those things crept back in. Arcade Fire’s vision of endless “dead shopping malls” is a metaphor for the seemingly hopeless suburban trap. By contrast, the stunning vision in Revelation 21 and 22 of the fusion of the new heavens and the new earth presents us with a hope of human flourishing – a world that is also a city, as well as a garden and a temple.[1] The death of the suburban dream – though costly to some churches who married their ambition to it – only makes the gospel seem that much more beautiful.

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