You don't have to tell me that downtowns are eroded. In my suburb, downtown stores regularly struggle for their lives. Not a year passes without another stalwart draining and dwindling out of business. The old courthouse is vacated, its vital public activities transferred to a new building on the outskirts of town. Our new courthouse stands just down the road from a local version of the new public square: a shopping mall.

Shopping malls have quite consciously been built and presented as public squares, commons, or downtowns. Many reflect this intention in their names, such as (to cite a few I have known) Yorktown, Crossroads Mall, Stratford Square, and Town Square. Mall architecture incorporates-albeit in an artificial, thermostatically regulated fashion-many of the fixtures of older downtown areas. Walkways are laid out in squares and rectangles, urging circuitous wandering. Fountains shoot. Trees and lesser greenery soften and enliven the scene. Benches invite rest, lingering, and the possibility of conversation. Amphitheaters await performances and audiences.

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In addition, malls no longer simply sell products in myriad stores. They have expanded to include chapels, dentists, optometrists, medical clinics, counseling centers, ice rinks, miniature golf courses, food courts, childcare, banking services, postal services, and branch offices of local, state, and federal governments. Some (such as the famous Mall of America, which sports its own zip code) include full-scale amusement parks. Others (such as Canada's West Edmonton Mall) contain zoos.

In short, you can now pass an evening or a Saturday afternoon in a shopping mall just as such times were once passed downtown on the square. You can meet friends for a meal, windowshop, take in a movie, toss pennies in the fountain, listen to a few songs from a local band. Just as you might once have done downtown, you can arrive early and, before meeting friends, visit the dentist and mail a birthday package. All the while you will pass knots of teenagers gathered here as their ancestral counterparts once congregated outside downtown soda shops. And you might anticipate returning to the mall the next morning, for prayer, worship, and the singing of hymns.

Some folk in Silver Spring, Maryland, want to build a megamall in their Washington suburb. Said a member of the task force charged with promoting the venture, "The central forces used to be schools or the church. That is not the case anymore. A mall, if properly managed and structured in terms of its services, can meet those needs from another perspective." So the mall is the new public square. But what is this other "perspective" it operates from? And how does this new public square compare to the old?

In truth, the shopping mall is a rather ambivalent public square. Once again, its architecture is telling. The older downtown and public square was thoroughly accessible. It might be reached from any direction and by several means of transportation-car, bus, train, or foot. It was open to the sky, unbounded by walls. It was centrally located, so citizens often passed through it even on their way to other business or concerns.

The shopping mall, on the other hand, is more like a medieval feudal village. You are welcomed, but reticently and with the implication that the aims and ways of the lords who own the property must be honored during your stay. Thus malls are found in the outskirts of suburbs, removed from train and bus stations, impossible to access by foot for all except those who enjoy strolling on the shoulders of Interstates or six-lane freeways. Malls are surrounded, moat-like, by huge parking lots that distance them from any nearby establishments or neighborhoods. They are flanked on every side by the imposing guard towers of Penney's, Sears, Montgomery Ward's, Von Maur's, Marshall Field, and other merchandizing giants. The overall effect is one of the public square not so much as "commons" or crossroads as fortress.

Once you are inside the mall, the "public" spirit is not just circumspect, but circumscribed. As much as mall owners and operators want people to frequent their space, and to consider malls as warm and open as town squares, they are quick to remember when necessary that malls are private property. Only the states of California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Washington have recognized some limited right of expression in "private" shopping malls. Many malls, entirely within their constitutional rights as now interpreted by the courts, forbid regular religious services.

The technically private status of the new public square also allows its arbiters to control access. If a newsworthy event happens in a downtown park, journalists and photographers can simply walk into the park and go to work. If the same event transpires in a shopping mall, the same journalists and photographers must seek permission to enter and do their work-and they may or may not get it. Similarly, last August the Mall of America instituted a Friday and Saturday night ban on all teenagers under age sixteen entering the mall without an adult chaperone.

The legally private nature of shopping malls also gives mall police latitude for "enforcement" not at all enjoyed by city or county police. It is not widely known or appreciated that malls are monitored, via remote camera, quite closely and sometimes invasively. Parking lot cameras, for instance, have reportedly been used to window-peep on teenaged couples making out in their cars. And mall gendarmes can be forthrightly arbitrary about who they will keep off the premises. Mall cops at a St. Louis mall informed one group of kids that they were not allowed to wear baseball caps backwards. At a Washington, D.C. mall in 1992, a club of computer hackers was interrupted and frisked in the food court. When one hacker objected that the searches violated due process, the mall police replied that they were within their rights because the mall was private property, allowing them to do "whatever we want-and you'll play by the rules or we'll arrest you."

All this may indicate that we should not be content with the shopping mall as the new public square. The old public square included the jostling forces of church, government, culture, and commerce. Whatever its shortcomings, it allowed each a voice, some power to challenge the dominance of any other. But the new public square is a fortress of commerce, the walls of which religion, government, and culture may enter only if and so long as they serve the ends of commerce. Faith may be expressed only so long as it does not offend shoppers. Free speech is allowable only if it does not lead to conflict that may steer customers away from a favorite mall. Journalists, teenagers, homeless people, and other potential nuisances that might spoil the atmosphere may be prohibited from the premises. Malls are also highly controlled spaces in other, less dramatic ways. They pipe in soothing music to relax inhibitions, and bask customers in unvaried artificial light that prevents the sun from ever going down and ending a shopping day.

Thus the shopping mall is the implacable symbol and embodiment of the more pervasive, abstract, and attitudinal American public square as it now actually stands. That public square, in the words of essayist Wendell Berry, "exists to protect the 'right' of profit," and will "inevitably gravitate toward protection of the 'rights' of those who profit most. Our present public economy is really a political system that safeguards the private exploitation of the public wealth and health."

Americans are, of course, notorious for the shortness of their memories. And here is one of the instances where our willful ignorance of history most painfully hurts us. This is a time of growing "conservatism," but of an odd, lopsidedly present-oriented conservatism. It is a conservatism that has little respect for institutions predating World War II and-as the reckless debt-building of the Reagan eighties demonstrated-little real concern for the burdens or treasures we may leave to posterity. We may be thankful that this conservatism has attuned the nation to the perils of big government. But true conservatives of the not-so-distant past (such as G. K. Chesterton, William Jennings Bryan, the southern agrarians, Robert Nisbet, and Christopher Lasch) were wary not just of big government but of any monolith-including big business.

Besides cutting itself off from its own tradition, today's conservatism obscures history and the realization of how much commerce owes to what Berry calls "the public wealth and health." For instance, the railroads that opened the West and provided American businessmen a massive market distribution system were built with public resources. The corporation, with its legal status as a "person" and attendant rights and privileges, is a creation of modern law and government. And the Department of Commerce, as fashioned by Herbert Hoover, offered business such invaluable tools and services as demographic surveys that were mined for abundant market information.

All this suggests that American Christians might be a good deal more critical and cautious in their dealings with the new public square than many have been up to this point. Paying ironic if unconscious homage, megachurches have already mimicked the architecture of corporate office buildings and, like the malls, put up their own food courts.

More deliberately, a Minnesota coalition of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and others have established the Mall Area Religious Council to establish a "spiritual presence" at the Mall of America. According to its webpage, the Council plans to open The Meaning Store at the mall in 1997. "It will be a store where "meaning in life" is made available in a spiritual manner." Patrons may use the store's Reflection Center for meditation and worship, glean "reliable information about local and world religious traditions," or shop for "books, music, [and] artifacts of world religions."

For all the good intentions behind it, The Meaning Store crowns mall culture's victory. It reduces Christianity, Judaism, and other faiths to name brands, objects of comparison shopping. They are simply differently packaged containers of "meaning in life," now made available for today's purchase and, should it be desired, tomorrow's disposal.

So The Meaning Store is the perfect religious symbol of the trivialization of real choices in the new public square's endless promotion of pseudo-choice. It is true that the malls, with their rows on rows of stores, apparently overflow with choice. But mall stores carry a small, least-common-denominator stock that can cater only to the taste of the masses-not to those who would genuinely be different in their clothing, jewelry, reading, or music listening. More significantly, mall culture inhibits community; it denies and destroys smaller ways of life, such as folk songs and art, or strains of apples and brews of beer peculiar to a region. As Wendell Berry puts it, mall culture will not allow us to conform to local ways and conditions, but forces on us "a rootless and placeless monoculture of commercial expectations and products."

In like manner, The Meaning Store presumes faiths are, finally, not that different from one another. By confining Christianity (among others) to "meaning in life," and commodifying it, the Store endorses an attitude of spiritual seeking as shopping and makes the "customer" sovereign. Seriously obscured, if not lost, is any sense that the seeker's desires might be misguided and in need of conversion, a transformation wrought by a Sovereign other than the self. And so buried, too, is the glorious hope that the seeker might make the really important and significant choice, the choice to petition the God "whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine" (Ephesians 3:20) and embark on an adventure bigger than any mortal individual's meager dreams and puny plans.

Such, I fear, are the deeper ramifications and trajectories of the new public square. Richard John Neuhaus worried that the old public square was naked, denuded of vital religious trappings. The new public square is not naked, but dressed in armor. We ought to start looking for the chinks.

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Reprinted with permission from Rodney Clapp and re:generation quarterly. To subscribe to re:generation quarterly, call 800-783-4903. The purpose of re:generation quarterly is to equip the emerging generation to transform their world by providing commentary, critique, and celebration of communities and contemporary culture.

Rodney Clapp is the Editorial Director of Brazos Press. Brazos Press Brazos Press is a publisher of unapologetic theology and theologically-based cultural criticism, grounded in and growing out of the Great Tradition common to Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anabaptist, confessionally oriented mainline Protestant, and Protestant evangelical Christianity.

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