City of Dignity offers a textured history of liberal Christianity in Los Angeles. The book makes its aim and arguments clear: mainline Protestants, Catholics, and progressive Black congregations banded together under a shared “vision of social justice rooted in the defense of human dignity and a preferential option for the poor and marginalized, the sick and the refugee, the hungry, and the homeless, as well as a global perspective that frequently framed local issues in terms of a global human rights agenda” (2). Dempsey persuasively demonstrates that Christian leaders (mostly clergy) from the 1940s to the 1990s mediated between the city's most disenfranchised and its political and economic powerhouses. Dempsey carefully threads the needle in suggesting that his book is not a complete counternarrative to the host of systemic injustices that have plagued the city, but the main players in his book offered a different, dignified way forward. Stories of their successes and limitations in the arenas of civil rights, human dignity, and labor animate this book. Dempsey's book is sweeping, covering many progressive religious organizations and movements.
The book begins with Jesuit priest George Dunne, after his return from years of missionary work in China. Dunne spearheaded and lead efforts in the 1940s to end segregation and uplift the dignity of labor. Chapter 2 demonstrates Dempsey's strengths in urban history and religious currents of the 1960s, as the chapter weaves together a history of the religious forces in 1964 that defeated Proposition 14, which sought to undo the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Passed a year earlier, the Rumford Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination in the housing market. This, perhaps more than any other issue, according to Dempsey, proved to be “the single greatest catalyst to the development of interdenominational and interfaith alliances in the city” (37). Chapter 3 details the discrete and overlapping histories of Black, Latino, and gay community organizing, showing how an “insistence on the empowerment of the marginalized” shaped Christianity in the city. Chapter 4 straddles the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on the “global church” mission of the Interreligious Council of Southern California to transform discourses and practices that targeted individuals with AIDS and immigrants. In chapter 5, Dempsey traces Los Angeles’ designation as a city of refugees and sanctuary city, amidst the refugee crisis from El Salvador and Guatemala. Finally, chapter 6 begins after the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers who mercilessly beat Rodney King, a time in which riots and unrest called city leaders to a reckoning of race relations and economic imperatives. In this chapter Dempsey shows how the liberal Christian establishment in Los Angeles, in a major departure from precedent, turned to neoliberal market-based solutions to cool down tensions and create opportunities for Blacks and Latinos.
City of Dignity covers an era that has captured the attention of the twentieth century historians across various fields and subfields. Most broadly, this book brings together in seamless conversation the fields of urban history and American religious history. The basic contours of changes to the religious landscape in the post-World War II period are well known by scholars of American religion, but such generalizations have long (for decades now) begged for intimate urban histories to describe these changes. This book answers questions such as: who are the particular groups and power players in engendering change for marginalized populations in the urban centers? And this book offers a clear and decisive answer in large part due to its careful examination of key archival sources from collections including: Southern California Ecumenical Council Archives (at Fuller Theological Seminary); ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives Los Angeles; the papers of notable civil rights minister Thomas Kilgore (at the University of Southern California); John LaFarge S.J. Papers (at Georgetown University) and Catholic Human Relations Council Collection CSLA-27 (at Dempsey's home institution, Loyola Marymount University).
Recent literature has traced the conservative transformation of southern California, part of a larger trend of scholarship focused on the rise of the Religious Right. While still acknowledging this shift in historiography, Dempsey's book offers nearly six decades of countervailing liberal Protestant Christianity and the importance of these traditions even while numerically on the decline. City of Dignity contributes importantly to recent books that trace Los Angeles’ religious history: Mario T. Garcia's Father Luis Olivares, a Biography: Faith Politics and the Origins of the Sanctuary Movement in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and the volume edited by Richard Flory and Diane Winston, Religion in Los Angeles: Religious Activism, Innovation, and Diversity in the Global City (Routledge, 2021), a volume to which Dempsey contributed a chapter.
Furthermore, this book contributes to smaller (but just as vitally important to know) history of the religion and immigration. Here, Nicholas Pruitt's Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism (New York University Press, 2021) and Melissa Borja's Follow the New Way: American Hmong Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change (Harvard University Press, 2023) make for fine pairings with Dempsey's overall book but especially with chapters three through five. On the history of intersections between religion and human rights, Gene Zubovich's Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) offers a complementary study.
On a final note: the book's accessibility lends itself to a broader readership, too. It would not only work quite well in undergraduate classrooms, but it would also seem especially appropriate for organizations in Los Angeles seeking to advance the rights of immigrants, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, the LGBQT community, and other progressive religious groups. Today, Angelenos can still feel the effects of the history told in this fine book.
