Here’s a little idle exercise: Open up Google Maps, and put this word in the search window: “churches.”
Wait for it to do its thing, and you will see the map fill up with little red dots, like the worst case of chicken pox you ever saw.
Look at the lower right of the map for the scale, and zoom on your town to where the “one mile” is about an inch long. Zoom out to where that same scale says “five miles.” You’ll see that the entire countryside is … infected.
Zoom out a bit more, to where each inch represents “20 miles,” and think of each red dot as a parasite, feeding on some sort of prey. You’ll notice how they congregate thickly around cities and towns, but there’s never a part of the countryside that is completely without one nearby.
Now leave the map where it is, but change the search word to “schools.” The red dots diminish in number — not a lot, fortunately, but there are definitely fewer — and spread out more evenly across the map.
A few years back, I went into the Schenectady County tax assessor’s office and looked up churches and church-owned properties within a 2-mile radius of my house. In a town of about 60,000 people, there are CLOSE TO 80 of them. They cluster thickly in the city core, on some of the most valuable property around. Farther out, they occupy large tracts of land, like millionaire estates, with buildings that range from the industrial chic of recent years to soaring castlelike structures built with artisanal opulence rarely seen today.
Just sayin’.
I hope one day there will be at least ONE Beta Culture Nexus in each town, a friendly, empowering alternative to these parasitic temples of worship.
And here’s Schenectady’s pox:
