Guess What City Ranks among America’s Most Sinful Cities?
The recent focus of many people living in the Detroit area has been on the Detroit mayor’s text message scandal (for more information about his struggles, click here and here). The current scandal has its roots in the Whistleblower Trial of 2003.
Unfortunately, this type of scandal further tarnishes the image of Detroit. However, what is even worse than this scandal is Detroit’s perpetual infamy as the “Murder Capital” of the United States. This unfortunate reputation has surfaced again in a special report that is posted at Forbes.com, “America’s Most Sinful Cities” (HT: Al Mohler’s blog). It was stated in this article that “we have unveiled the American city that has fallen the farthest from grace in each of the seven deadly sins ( lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy and pride). For each sin we stretched our imagination to find a workable proxy–murder rates for wrath, per capita billionaires for avarice–then culled the available data sources to rank the cities. Some of the results were surprising: Salt Lake City as America’s Vainest City. Some were not: Detroit as America’s Most Murderous.” This last line is the picture that the world apparently has of Detroit. A few months earlier David M. Ewalt wrote an article on November 11, 2007 entitled “America’s Most Murderous Cities.” In this article, Detroit ranked no. 1 as compared with Baltimore as no. 2. In the words of Ewalt, “To put it in perspective: Detroit’s murder rate is more than 8% higher than the country’s second most murderous city, Baltimore, and eight times that of the least murderous metro. More people were murdered in Detroit than in San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas and San Jose combined–and each one of those cities has a bigger population than Detroit.”
Ewalt’s description of Detroit is distressing. It is bad news for Detroit to have the ignominy of being labeled as “America’s Most Murderous City.” The current text message scandal only adds to Detroit’s ongoing dubious distinction among cities in the United States. However, the Detroit area has some positive distinctions, such as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and The Henry Ford,” to name a few. In my estimation, what is more important for any godly influence in the Detroit area are those churches committed to a clear proclamation of the Gospel message that demands sinners to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. There are a a number of historic fundamentalist and conservative evangelical churches in the Detroit area. Though there are a number of good churches, let me name two larger fundamentalist churches that I am very familiar with and can positively promote: Inter-City Baptist Church and First Baptist of Troy. Though life in the Detroit area has significant problems, my prayer is that not only Inter-City Baptist and First Baptist of Troy but all the churches committed to a gospel proclamation of Christ’s lordship will serve as salt in an area that desperately needs this message coupled with the regenerating work of the Spirit.
