Unsettling “Inner City”: Liberal Protestantism and the Postwar Origins of a Keyword in Urban Studies Bench Ansfield Department of American Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA; bench.ansfield@yale.edu Abstract: The term inner city first achieved consistent usage through the writings of liberal Protestants in the USA after World War II. Its genesis was the product of an era when a largely suburban mainline Protestantism was negotiating its relationship to American cities. Liberal Protestants’ missionary brand of urban renewal refocused atten- tion away from the blight and structural obsolescence thought to be responsible for urban decay, and instead brought into focus the cultural pathologies they mapped onto black neighbourhoods. The term inner city arose in this context, providing a rhetorical and ideological tool for articulating the role of the church in the nationwide project of urban renewal. I argue that even as it arose in contexts aiming to entice mainline Protestantism back into the cities it had fled, the term accrued its meaning by generat- ing symbolic and geographic distance between white liberal churches and the black communities they sought to help. Keywords: urban renewal, racial discourse, containment, racial liberalism, city churches, liberal Protestantism In the fall of 1956, Reverend David W. Barry, executive director of the New York City Mission Society, announced to a Boston audience that the “inner city” was the “most crucial evangelical frontier” for American Protestantism. Proclaiming that “the battle for the soul of America is being fought and will be won or lost in the inner parts of our great cities”, Barry (1957:3–6) lamented that Protestants “are losing this battle ... at an accelerating rate”. As the former director of research for the National Council of Churches (NCC), the representative body of mainline Protestantism, he was well positioned to convey such a warning, which had, by then, become a favourite refrain for liberal Protestants. 1 Continuing on with his address, Barry made use of a curious term that had yet to enter the pop- ular lexicon, yet was already appearing with frequency in the pages of the NCC’s publication The City Church (where his address was reprinted): Where is Protestantism in full retreat? In the inner city, and no proud statistics on sub- urban church growth can hide that fact ... Where do most of the schizophrenics in our mental hospitals come from? The inner city ... Antipode Vol. 0 No. 0 2018 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 1–20 doi: 10.1111/anti.12394 ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. A Radical Journal of Geography