God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan by Jon Butler

Abstract

Reviewed by: God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan by Jon Butler Mark Granquist God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. By Jon Butler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020. 308 pp. It is a sign of a very good book that it delivers more than it promises, and this is a very good book. It describes the religious life of New York City, specifically the borough of Manhattan, between [End Page 113] 1880 and 1960. It is a deeply researched volume with a wealth of detail and description. But the book is really about much more than this. It is a case study about religious life in a modern American city, perhaps the modern American city, and an examination of the common assumptions and theories about religious life in the modern urban West. Despite the oft-repeated claims of secularization theorists (and many church leaders) that such modern cities are deeply secular and irreligious places, Butler convincingly demonstrates that, in the case of Manhattan, such claims are simply wrong. Butler lays out a rich narrative of the vibrancy, multiplicity, and ingenuity of religious life in Manhattan. Far from being irreligious, Manhattan was awash with both traditional and new religious organizations and was a leader in American religious life in the period when it was the leading city in the United States and one of the leading cities in the world. European secularization theorists at the beginning of the twentieth century saw the migration of people into the cities as the engine of modernism and the beginning of the end for traditional theism. In an unlikely pairing, they were joined in this assessment by conservative Protestant groups who saw cities like New York as hotbeds of irreligiosity. But as religious sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have demonstrated, this view of urban irreligion in America is really a myth, and rates of religious adherence in America have been higher in urban areas than in rural territories. Cities like New York give inhabitants far more choices of religious groups; in cities, conventional religion was in hot competition with newly developed groups. Butler vividly demonstrates this phenomenon in Manhattan, where mainline Protestants contended with all sorts of New Thought and self-empowerment groups, established Black churches vied with self-anointed store-front preachers, and a whole range of Jewish groups sought to define that community. Perhaps in that competitive market were the roots of a great degree of religious adherence. The first chapter deals with the sources of the idea of urban irreligiosity within American religion, primarily from mainline Protestant leaders who felt that growing religious pluralism threated their hegemony. In the second chapter these same groups are seen [End Page 114] aggressively organizing to bring traditional religion to Manhattan, not only by building scores of impressive churches but also by adapting themselves to the new challenges and opportunities of urban America. In this they were joined by Roman Catholics and Jews, whose ranks were swelled by millions of new immigrants who came to America before the First World War. The third chapter demonstrates how these religious leaders, besides establishing new congregations and synagogues, also set out to sacralize the fabric of Manhattan and put their stamp on urban culture. The fourth chapter examines how these same dynamics were at play in Manhattan's swelling African American communities; though they were greatly constrained by urban discrimination and segregation, they paralleled the other religious groups in energy and approach. A fifth chapter looks at Manhattan as the seedbed of theological thought in the twentieth-century United States, due to the presence of prominent religious leaders such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Joseph Dov Solveitchik, and Dorothy Day, among others. Perhaps most intriguing is the conclusion, in which Butler examines religious life and organizations in the suburbs of New York City that mushroomed after 1945. Rather than viewing suburban religious life as an antithesis to or escape from urban religion (or irreligiosity), Butler claims that these suburban religious organizations were actually an extension of the religious life of urban Manhattan. This fruitful line of inquiry begs for further investigation. No book can do...