God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan

by Jon Butler

Overview

A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism.

In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community.

Yet fears of religion’s demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem’s storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan’s young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island’s booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth.

God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than foundered in it. Far from the world of “disenchantment” that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674045682
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/29/2020
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	707,258
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jon Butler is Howard R. Lamar Emeritus Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University and Research Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His books include the Los Angeles Times bestseller Becoming America and the prizewinning Awash in a Sea of Faith and The Huguenots in America. He is a past president of the Organization of American Historians.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Are You There God? 1

1 Spiritual Terror and Sacred Awe in the Capital of American Secularism 11

2 Organizing God 32

3 Sacralizing the Urban Landscape 78

4 Modernizing God in Jim Crow Manhattan 113

5 God's Urban Hothouse 152

Conclusion: Moving Out, Moving On 210

Notes 237

Acknowledgments 291

Index 295

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/15/2020

Butler (Awash in a Sea of Faith), professor of history at Yale, explores in this illuminating history why religious practice flourished in Manhattan during a period when urbanization and its associated “spiritual exhaustion” were destroying it elsewhere. Drawing on old maps, portraits, speeches, and church archives, Butler paints a vibrant cultural portrait of the streets of New York, “a city alive with religious and cultural change.” He compares this to the situation in Europe, where secularism was on the rise in the early 19th century, fueled by poverty, dysfunction of social services, and a lack of time for people to attend church services. In America, however, waves of immigration brought an array of religions to Manhattan, and the resulting religious pluralism gave rise to a lively faith community whose competing forces thrived by becoming “as much institutional and bureaucratic as theological.” This eye-opening history is sure to enlighten anyone interested in cultural histories of New York City. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

2020-07-14
A history of the practice of religion in New York City from the 1880s to the 1960s.

Historian Butler focuses on the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish populations of Manhattan during a time when the city was a vibrant, growing center for these major religions—despite fears of the minimalization of faith in the face of modernity. “New York may not have been a sacred city like Mecca or the Vatican,” writes the author, “but it was not for lack of trying. Religion resonated throughout the world’s most populous place, sacralizing every kind of space and linking faith to the press of modern life.” Butler reveals NYC as a microcosm of the nation’s religious life, teeming with energy and vitality even in the midst of cultural secularization and urban troubles. The author deftly tracks how broad social changes and demographic trends came together to shape the role of faith in NYC. For example, he notes how modern, industrial-era thought about management, efficiency, organization, and advertising made a great impact on the ethnically diverse faith communities of Manhattan. Butler also provides a welcome examination of how the Black church developed in NYC. “While European immigrants…were more or less assimilated into the white world, race prejudice against blacks in New York has endured since Africans’ first appearance in the city….Across the period of our concern, the culture of Jim Crow—if not the law—pervaded New York, forcing urban blacks to adapt and follow unique paths to salvation, civic and spiritual.” Throughout, the author acknowledges the contributions of the many thinkers, writers, teachers, and activists who shaped the religious world of the 20th century—among others, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Maritain, Norman Vincent Peale, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. In the latter sections of the narrative, Butler examines the migration of New Yorkers to the suburbs and notes the ways their faith lives survived that change.

An intriguing study of urban faith in the modern age.

Kirkus Reviews

What a pleasure it is to take a tour of Manhattan’s sacred past led by one of the nation’s preeminent religious historians…Butler offers yet one more reason why contemporary Americans might want to ask hard questions the next time they hear someone declaiming against urban places. The worlds of the city, the suburbs, and beyond are more interdependent than we sometimes think. And an unrelenting pursuit of the divine is common to them all.

Christianity Today - Heath W. Carter

Elegantly written and persuasively argued…You cannot put this book down without feeling that Sin City has gotten a bad rap from the media. The metropolis has long been characterized by deep religious feeling and expression…This is a major book on a major topic in American history. It will complicate our judgements about the nation’s biggest city.

Gotham - Kenneth T. Jackson

A lively account of religion…[and] a sharp poke in the eye to traditional theories of religion and modernity that should make scholars ask some tough questions.

S-USIH: Society for U.S. Intellectual History - Matthew Bowman

Are you there, God? It’s me, Manhattan…Butler…argues that far from being a Sodom on the Hudson, New York was a center of religious dynamism throughout the 20th century…[He] reminds us that New York was a center for Catholic religious orders too, their numbers rivaling any city’s except Rome.

Wall Street Journal - Katrina Gulliver

Enlightening and engaging, God in Gotham chronicles the collision of religion and modernity in Manhattan with incredible skill. Butler not only reveals traditional religious forms challenged and changed by their confrontation with a secular city, but also a major metropolis sacralized by the work of the faithful. A must-read for anyone in search of the soul of America.

Kevin M. Kruse

Butler’s marvelous contrarian intelligence is on full display, as is his silky smooth prose. Could any other author help us better understand James Baldwin, Abraham Heschel, Norman Vincent Peale, and Dorothy Day? Read God in Gotham as a primer on almost the whole of modern U.S. religious history and beyond.

John T. McGreevy

God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith eagerly engaged modernity, where immigrants were welcomed, not shunned. Butler argues that modern Manhattan actually gave rise to a new urban religious landscape of unparalleled breadth and popularity, rather than a crippled, old-fashioned religion of exclusion…Splendid.

Living Church - R. William Franklin

Serves as a reminder of how vital religiosity was to the old New York of 1900–1960…Butler gives readers a deeper sense of how ‘New York values’ were once a modus vivendi for religious pluralism that provided a broadly religious foundation for American culture. He believes that it could be so again.

Law & Liberty - James M. Patterson

Proves that ‘tools of modernity’ were also the tools of religion. Scholars of urban history, American religion, urban religion and modernity and secularism will find much to think with in God in Gotham’s compelling history of how congregations responded to the technologies, pace, and cityscape of Manhattan to engage with ‘the enchanted,’ not turn away from it.

Journal of Ecclesiastical History - Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

Butler paints a landscape of religious vitality in arguably the heart of burgeoning modernity—Manhattan…[He] shows that religion adapted to modernity rather than being trampled on the concrete.

Modern Reformation - Justin McGeary

If I were still teaching Introduction to Religion in American History, I would assign Jon Butler’s God in Gotham, with its excellent cameos of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, the Reverends Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Sr., and other great or notorious divines who shaped Manhattan’s religious landscape from the Gilded Age to the Sixties.

The Metropole - Bob Carey

In his enthralling God in Gotham, Butler takes us through the mighty city’s neighborhoods, traditions old and new, and bustling heterogeneous populations to illuminate the ways diverse Manhattanites have organized themselves in pursuit of community and faith. I learned something rich and surprising on every single page of this compelling book, as fascinating as Gotham itself.

Elizabeth Alexander

A masterwork by a master historian. Butler’s lively multidisciplinary, multidenominational book will serve as a model for all future work on the subject. God in Gotham should be an instant classic.

Jonathan D. Sarna

God in Gotham shows how religion in Manhattan thrived as the borough barreled along the leading edge of American modernity—defying the prophets of secularization who looked for piety to wither away. In elegant prose, Butler tours Manhattan’s evolving religious landscape, showing how the city’s crowded pluralism nurtured both ugly prejudices and brilliant theological breakthroughs that left a lasting imprint on American culture well beyond New York.

Molly Worthen

A splendid read, the most instructive feature of the work is the author’s ability to capture the resourcefulness of the city’s faith communities. With material drawn from the area’s rich collections, the work will remain a textbook model for courses on urban religion for a long time to come.

A.J. Scopino

An expansive work on a sweeping subject. Butler persuasively argues that religion flourished rather than foundered in Manhattan—not in spite of modernity but precisely because of the ways diverse communities of faith engaged with modern structures, sensibilities, challenges, and opportunities. He shows religious traditions as fluid, dynamic, and resilient.

Heather D. Curtis

With lively prose, fascinating accounts, and riveting analysis, Butler transforms our understanding of urban religion and the very meanings of modernity as he convincingly portrays a city at once notably secular and a religious ‘hothouse.’ Whether considering the uses of urban space, the impact of racial segregation, or the significance of technologies such as electricity, radio, and sound recordings, he has produced nothing less than a distinctive urban history as well. God in Gotham is history at its finest.

Michele Mitchell