Urban Religion’s 20th-Century Renaissance

In 1887, at an Evangelical Alliance Conference on “National Perils and Opportunities,” Methodist bishop Edward Andrews put an exclamation point on the perils. Andrews warned his fellow Protestants about “the city disproportionately enlarging; immigration increasing beyond our powers of assimilation; . . . a foreign church hostile to American principles, fortifying itself among us; . . . [and] alienation of great masses of the people from the Church . . . facts portentous of disaster and, if unchecked, of ruin” (p. 13). Reverend Samuel Lane Loomis, a Congregationalist, agreed. Acknowledging that great cities offered opportunities for philanthropy, music, art, libraries, lectures, and even Christian fellowship, Loomis maintained that at a time of social and political upheaval, when “the nation’s civilization depends upon the purity of its faith,” cities had failed, in no small measure, because “Protestant churches, as a rule, have no following among the working men” (p. 23).

Citing bigotry and, ironically, the promise and practice of religious freedom, long-settled Catholics and Jews, Jon Butler indicates, also expressed concern about the continuation of religion in America. So did many “new immigrants,” who worried that America’s openness and prosperity posed a threat to their customs and their faith. In God and Gotham, Butler—an emeritus professor of history at Yale, and the author, among other books, of Becoming America (2000) and Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990)—argues that New Yorkers in the first half of the twentieth century responded to the looming crisis facing organized religion “in intriguing, unexpected, and vibrant ways” (p. 31). Manhattan’s Protestants, Catholics and Jews, Butler claims, “deepened their traditional ritual, theological, and spiritual identities by committing to institutional orders and employing modernity” to address pluralism, anonymity, mobility, density, and indifference (p. 34).

Provocative and contrarian, God in Gotham is based on the (now self-evident) premise that those who predicted the imminent demise of religion in America at the turn of the twentieth century got it wrong. The book will— and should—force historians to reassess the relationship between modernity, urbanization, and religion in the United States.¹

By the turn of the century, Protestantism was no longer the majority faith in New York City. A study by the Census Bureau in 1922 found that their share of the city’s worshipers had fallen to 35% (with Catholics accounting for 35% and Jews 30%). Conversion initiatives did not succeed. Attempts by Presbyterian minister Charles Stelzle to attract workers to his Labor Temple led ultimately to censure and his resignation. Nonetheless, Butler claims, urban mainline Protestants found the marketing techniques he used, including advertising and the cultivation of newspaper reporters and editors, “a comfortable fit with ideals and goals that were themselves adaptations to a new age” (p. 49).

Although Catholicism was organized around a hierarchical authority, Butler points out that in the United States it did not establish a centralized ecclesiastical system. Beginning in the nineteenth century—and accelerating with successive waves of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants—bishops allowed parishes organized by nationality to exist alongside traditional territorial parishes. In the twentieth century, New York City hosted a range of Catholic orders found nowhere else outside of Rome. Nuns were responsible for expanding—and modernizing—schools, hospitals, and Catholic charities (for orphans, homeless, and indigent people. Their efforts, Butler writes, “pulled Catholics into church-related activities, and ultimately worship” (p. 58).

Far more than Protestantism and Catholicism, Judaism in the United States was shaped from the bottom up, with the laity organizing congregations and hiring rabbis. In Manhattan, Butler demonstrates, decentralization allowed for the development of institutions suited both to traditionalists and modernizers. The most transformative of them was the United Synagogue of America, founded in 1913 by Rabbi Solomon Schechter. Seeking a faith that married Orthodoxy’s intensity with Reform’s organization and method, training in the Talmud and Hebrew literature with scientific research and social service, United Synagogue continued to thrive after Schechter’s untimely death in 1915, and, along with its Rabbinical Assembly, became...