God in Gotham

At the close of the nineteenth century, many New Yorkers concluded that the modern city was inimical to religion. But, as Jon Butler demonstrates in this masterly history, they were wrong. Far from killing spiritual commitments, modernity provided critical tools for religious institutions to thrive. Thus, Butler argues, Gotham “can help us unravel the remarkable power of religion in modern America through two-thirds of the twentieth century” (pp. 2–3). Butler has produced a singular study in its combination of breadth with detail. Other works, such as Matthew Bowman's The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism (2014), have brought important nuance to the history of religion in the modern metropolis. Butler builds on these studies with an expansive assessment of “the ways that millions of Gothamites understood religion and practiced it from the Gilded Age to the Kennedy election” (p. 7). Their paths to religiosity included not only established churches and synagogues but also storefront churches, syncretic communities, and spiritually influenced organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Butler is keenly attentive to elements of distinctiveness that characterized groups he examines. In the especially rich chapter on African American religion in New York City, he chronicles how persistent discrimination forced “the black struggle with urban modernity” to take a path different from those traveled by European immigrants who, regardless of religious affiliation, found assimilation more easily achievable (p. 115

Archaeology · Consecration · Expansive · Gilded Age · History of religions · Immigration · Miracle · Modernity · Political science · Power (physics · Pulpit · Sociology · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies · Religious Tourism and Spaces · Religious Studies