The Surburbification of Us All
Subway tile, Station Wagons, and an Evangelical Woman Aesthetic
I am not above following beautiful and helpful accounts on social platforms to bring a dash of whimsy and design inspiration. Recently I’ve begun following a lovely designer account on Instagram that tries to help viewers move away from the white subway tile-green plant-dark wood aesthetic and tap into something a bit more frivolous and personal. He asks good questions. He points out how design trends have changed. He puts design back into context.
Around the world, our coffee shops are sparse, mid-century, and high on subway tile (with an over-priced pour over to boot)1. We walk into this aesthetic and feel comfortable, whether we’re in Los Angeles or London. While sameness promotes ease, it flattens out a place to be any place.
Since we’re being algorithmically sorted on social media we find that the more accounts of white subway tile coffee shops we follow or reels we watch, the more we’re served. Sameness serves up more of the same.
“Suburbification”
Let’s talk about this in terms of suburbification. When I lived in an affluent master-planned community I was always surprised to see how increasingly everyone’s kitchen remodel looked the same, the color scheme looked the same, and how we were told we would have to update our flooring and kitchen if we wanted to sell our house for a profit. Houses no longer reflected the history and individual stories of a place or people. Bodies, too, began to all look the same — with the same workouts, tanning, false eyelashes, and botox. (I wrote Finding Holy in the Suburbs to try to find a way through this aesthetic).
The suburbs present to us a flattened ideal that promises ease and prosperity. They do so by giving us an aesthetic.
While the suburbs grew post-WWII, they also created an aesthetic — a package deal of prosperity based on brands, goods, and leisure time. You can see the 1950s postcards with the cute white family and their picket fence, mom with a trim waist wearing a skirt, Johnny and Suzy playing nearby without a skinned knee, father just pulled into the driveway in his wood-paneled station wagon and brown suit. Not only did houses look the same, but the idea of success and selfhood looked the same too.
Much of suburbification is based on larger mythic stories of what it means to be an ‘ideal’ American — which has always connoted moving (either moving away, moving Westward, or moving up a ladder). Much of it is based, too, on the car as the vehicle for exploration, freedom, and with ultimate ties to economic prosperity. In an 2014 article in the Atlantic on the station wagon, the author reports in the 1950s:
Car companies began making larger wagons—full-sized wagons—with six and nine-passenger seating to accommodate larger families and America’s newfound freedom of mass material consumption in the golden age of tourism.2
Consumption typifies the golden age. Suburbification is always tied to consumption.
Ultimately, if we are used to consuming things, we will consume people as well. That’s how our social media profits these days. If our attention is money, our rage and our envy are our coins and dollars we pay out.
Why an Aesthetic?
How do we change? How do we make choices? While we tend to think that what we do is more rational than not, psychologists and marketers know that we change, we think, and we consume based upon our desires. If they can hook our desires, they have our wallets. Jamie Smith’s You Are What You Love, and his Cultural Liturgies series, works this out in terms of Christian faith and practice. We are what we love. If marketers can make me love subway tile, I’ll eventually find a way to buy it, install it, and feel that I’ve somehow ‘made’ it if my bathroom or backsplash looks like everyone else’s.
Design choices create a feeling. The easiest way of saying this is that you feel differently when you walk into Holiday Inn than you do walking into the carefully curated family-picture-focused living room of your grandmother.
An aesthetic short-circuits our thinking brain and goes right to our desires. The word ‘aesthetic’ has to do with what we find as pleasing or beautiful. In Edmund Burke’s A Philosopical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) he contrasts the beautiful as that which is soothing and pleasing with the sublime, as that which promotes awe and terror. We feel our smallness (and at least a twinge of terror) in relation to a vast wilderness; we feel pleasurable feelings in a curated English garden.
But the point for now, is this for us in the 21st century: the beautiful aesthetic (that which is soothing and pleasing) is the way suburbification works. And when we’re “suburbified” we flatten people, places, and things, thereby robbing them of their transformational, sacramental power as signposts of the Kingdom of God. We’ll settle for our subway tile and pretty Instagram squares instead.3
Case in Point: The Evangelical Woman Aesthetic
A few years ago, evangelical women seemed to be everywhere with long flowy waves of hair, scripty fonts on the signs in their homes, and naming how much of a “hot mess” they were. And the felt hats. So many hats.
Today, perhaps, they’re more into boho flowy dresses from Anthropologie, middle parts, getting their ‘colors done’, Stanley water cups, and almond-shaped nails.
While most of us can’t afford these luxury goods, we find the dupes; many of us still want the aesthetic, because if we have it, then we somehow think we will obtain what “the beautiful” promises: ease, safety, and being pleasing to the eye.
Suburbification promises ease without suffering, beauty without price or pain, comfort and safety without risk. Suburbification says change happens because of your socio-economic status not because of Jesus.
When it’s all wrapped up in some subway tile, a felt hat, or an oversized blazer in neutral earth tones (“Dark Autumn”) it seems achievable.
Having recently scrolled through photos from an evangelical women’s conference on Instagram I suppose I was surprised (but I probably shouldn’t be) about how many of the women looked the same. They all had on chic and modest dresses. Or oversized blazers. They all had ethically made leather products that helped women artisans. They all had switched from large dangly earrings (from ten years ago) to the small gold understated studs and layered necklaces. They were all young (or looked it); they were all white.
When I watch “Christian influencer” types on social media, I have to wonder if why we love them or love to hate them is less about content and more about the aesthetic of it all. It’s all the same. It’s contextless. It’s flat. And it works.
When women don’t have institutional belonging, they use the market.4 (There’s a whole lot in that sentence and books have been written about it, but I won’t go into it now. The market is not evil in and of itself, but it is a force). And part of the market is a look. I don’t begrudge a maxi dress or leather bag, but what I would want for women and for Christian women in particular, is less of an aesthetic of sameness and less of an aesthetic of simply being pleasing to the eye.
I want more for Christian women (and men).
I want to see Christian women of all sizes and shapes, in all colors, in quirky fashion choices because this shows both the creativity of a God who delights in the pleasing tones of a monarch butterfly and the quirky symmetry of a hammerhead shark, a God who created both the sublime Grand Canyon and the beautiful wildflower meadow. Shouldn’t we reflect that boldness, that specificity?
If our aesthetics shape our desires, if we are what we love, then it’s imperative that we think just as much about form as we do about content. We’re woefully behind on intentionally shaping a Christian imagination.
We’ve let ourselves be suburbified and called it good.
And for Fun…
And in my scrolling, I also came by this reel by Wisdm styling different fonts and oh boy, this is my love language. Here’s an example of fun, whimsy, and individual style. Nothing about this is boring, flat, or staid. (The reel has 44million views, which means lots of people like fashion and fonts apparently).
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For more of my work, check out The Willowbrae Institute, my books (Finding Holy in the Suburbs and A Spacious Life) and The Cartographers Podcast (where we’re talking about formation, technology, suffering and hope).
I shared this on Instagram last week but now I can’t find it, but the idea about the subway tile is not unique to me.
Charles Moss, “The Last Great Gasp of the American Station Wagon, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-last-great-gasp-of-the-american-station-wagon/373776/
In case anyone is wondering the “beauty” in “Beauty Leads the Way” (this Substack) is disimilar from Burkean beautiful; I mean ‘beauty’ in the sense of the transcendentals of beauty, truth and goodness, all of which find their culmination in the Godhead.
Lots of good books explore this topic; I don’t agree with everything they say but there are some good starting points with Kate Bowler’s The Preacher’s Wife, Katelyn Beaty’s A Woman’s Place and Celebrities for Jesus, Karen Swallow Prior’s The Evangelical Imagination and some recent work on influencers in CT.
I love this. And I hate the mid-century bright aesthetic in coffee shops! - bring back the grungy overstuffed couches and questionable art and dimly lit corners :)
Ever since having my son who has a disability 11 years ago, I've grown to value the ways in which we just don't fit the mold. I also grew up Catholic and with a staid midwestern family, and often feel out of step with the evangelical culture, even though I've been part of it for 15 years now. But as I got into my 40s it all just started mattering less.
I love Gerard Manley Hopkins on this topic:
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Same. Same. Same.