After reading Jon Butler's richly documented history of religion in Manhattan, I thought again of one of my favorite images: a 1939 watercolor by Ben Shahn called Self-Portrait among the Churchgoers, in which a photographer stands near a church on Sunday but points his camera toward the street and seems to ignore the gathering worshippers.Footnote 11 Some U.S. historians might be relieved they do not need to learn more about those pious pedestrians, or what happens inside, but specialists in religious history might think the photographer has missed all the action. Has he? Well, in one sense, sure. Historians of religion must attend to churches and adherents, as Butler does, but, like Shahn's photographer, Butler also looks out to the wider cityscape. And that approach pays off as he asks how religion confronted “the challenge of modernity” in Manhattan, “the capital of American secularism.”Footnote 12 More specifically, he hopes to explain why religion “didn't collapse in modernity's grasp,” as religion theorists like Max Weber and William James predicted.Footnote 13
God in Gotham shows that religion persisted, even thrived, and Butler makes that argument in five roughly chronological chapters. The introduction sets out the problem of religion and modernity and describes what the book will and will not do. It is not a survey of all religious practice in metropolitan New York, he cautions the reader, but rather a history of “the European-derived mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism that dominated Manhattan's religious development from the 1880s to the 1960s.”Footnote 14 In the initial chapter, Butler draws on European examples as well as the longer history of religion since the colonial period to show how immigrant diversity and inter-group strife presented challenges for faith. Yet, setting up the rest of the book, Butler hints that the “spiritual exhaustion seemingly intrinsic to cities” did not stop New Yorkers from responding “to the looming crises facing urban faith in intriguing, unexpected, and vibrant ways.”Footnote 15 Chapter 2, “Organizing God,” shows how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish institutions mediated adherents’ experience and helped them adapt to modernity between the 1880s and the 1920s. Chapter 3 looks beyond institutions to show how architecture, technology, media, advertising, and school prayer “sacralized” the multisensorial experience of the urban landscape by the 1940s, when religion presented itself in New York “more vigorously, with greater innovation and comprehensiveness, than in any European city and at least as thoroughly and creatively as in any other American city.”Footnote 16 Because discrimination created a “de facto Jim Crow,” chapter 4 considers Harlem's diverse African American religious institutions, arguing that the neighborhood's massive mainstream churches, diverse new movements, and agile storefront churches prospered amidst racism by embracing modern professional organization and consumer culture (149). The final chapter, “God's Urban Hothouse,” argues that despite the “allegedly inhospitable spiritual environment,” between the 1920s and the 1960s Manhattan saw an “outpouring of individual and institutional religious creativity unsurpassed in any other twentieth-century American locale, urban or rural.”Footnote 17 Focusing on nine well-chosen innovators, including Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Heschel, and Norman Vincent Peale, Butler suggests each aimed to acknowledge tradition while modernizing faith.Footnote 18
The conclusion looks back from 1960, when John F. Kennedy won and suburbanization spiked. Butler argues that Billy Graham's famous Yankee Stadium crusade in 1957, which used modern institutions and media, proved “that the modernity so feared by turn-of-the-century defenders of religion had become religion's engine.”Footnote 19 Then, returning to the theoretical questions that frame his narrative, the author suggests Weber and James failed to see institutions’ modernizing function. Weber thought religious institutions were clunky, but in twentieth-century Gotham they were “pliant,” helping worshippers adapt to modernity. James thought church institutions were secondhand, “parasitic” to individual religious experience, and he failed to see they were “instruments through which twentieth-century New Yorkers, urban and then suburban, engaged belief, wonder, and the enchanted.”Footnote 20
There is much to praise in this wonderful book by a distinguished historian, and not only because it will stand for a long time as the best religious history of Manhattan. It advances the study of urban religious history by reminding scholars to situate local analysis in a wider and longer context. Butler adds texture by gesturing to colonial and early national history and by noting the transatlantic context. That transatlantic gaze generates historical insights, as when he explains why Protestants struggled to respond to the religious pluralism they confronted in New York: it was because “the London models they emulated had been developed for a city where foreign-born residents barely numbered 2 percent of the population.”Footnote 21
In its approach and focus, the book also offers suggestions for those who want to narrate U.S. religious history. By choosing a city in the mid-Atlantic, an area that had been spiritually and ethnically diverse since the colonial period, we are reminded to acknowledge regional variation. Butler also attends to churches while moving beyond a narrowly ecclesiastical focus. He highlights “institutional authority,” a theme he announced as early as his 1991 essay “Historiographical Heresy,” but also reaches beyond organizations and sanctuaries to consider cultural expressions.Footnote 22 Since Awash in a Sea of Faith, he has attended to religious architecture, and that is a major strength of this book.Footnote 23 God in Gotham offers an even richer analysis of how multisensorial religion is mediated by transportation and communication technology, as subways “whisked worshippers to distant churches and synagogues” and phonographs “conveyed recordings by African American gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.”Footnote 24 As in that example, Butler describes a wide range of African American religious practice and is especially illuminating on the role of urban storefront churches.
Informed readers always have some quarrels about who is included and excluded. I wondered if it might have helped to note in passing that D. T. Suzuki began a visiting professorship at Columbia University in 1952, a stay that would expand Zen's disproportionate influence on New York painters, musicians, writers, psychologists, and theologians. But, to Butler's credit, God in Gotham delivers more than it promises by mentioning, for instance, Theosophy and Baha‘i as well as the Ethical Culture Society and the Nation of Islam. He even helps to explain the influence of Peale's “positive thinking” on President Donald Trump.Footnote 25 In fact, its documenting of spiritual diversity is one of the book's many strengths.
The author's explicit reflection on theory is another contribution and, as Butler notes, something rare among U.S. historians. If his essay “Historiographical Heresy” provided the “model” for his award-winning Awash in a Sea of Faith, Butler's 2006 article “Theory and God in Gotham” addressed the new book's central problem: religion's persistence after 1880.Footnote 26 That article invited historians to reflect on theory and aim for explanation: “Without self-consciously reimagining . . . the relationship of religion to modernity, our histories of religion . . . will become aimless chronicles . . . mere catalogues of events that never assess cause or context.”Footnote 27 Butler recognizes historians’ “vigorous resistance to theory and theorizing,” but God in Gotham challenges that resistance.Footnote 28 For that, we are in his debt.
As a modest down payment on that debt, let me end by reflecting on Butler's use of the terms religion and modernity as well as his explanation of religion's persistence. His explanation—that religion persists because devout Manhattanites embraced the “instruments” of modernity—is suggestive. However, he might have offered an even fuller explanation, and realized his stated goal for the book, if he had crafted or borrowed definitions of religion and modernity and more explicitly stated how this case study advances our understanding of each category.
In his analysis of Graham's 1957 service, Butler suggests that, by then, modernity had become “religion's engine.” Graham's use of “modern institutions and technology,” as well as “radio and television broadcasts,” drove religion's success.Footnote 29 If modernity propelled religion, I wonder if the relationship also went the other way: was religion modernity's engine? To answer that question and assess his explanation of why religion “didn't collapse,” it might have helped to have more clarity about the key terms. In the introduction, Butler offers a principled objection to defining religion, and many U.S. historians and religion scholars will welcome that move. As an alternative, he tells the reader he will offer “a historical probe into the ways that millions of Gothamites understood religion and practiced it from the Gilded Age to the Kennedy election.”Footnote 30 The book does offer rich evidence of religious “practice,” including details about neighborhood fairs and street processions, but says less about residents’ “understanding” of religion, with the exception of two pages on Paul Tillich's definition.Footnote 31 He might have added more information about Manhattanites’ changing understanding of the term religion by analyzing, for example, vernacular usage in local periodicals between the 1880s and the 1950s.
Or, if he abandoned that ambitious aim, Butler might have offered his own stipulative definition of religion at the start, as James did in The Varieties of Religious Experience, saying that for his purposes, he will take religion to mean this. Or, as Weber promised but never delivered, Butler might have offered an empirical definition at the end, disclosing what this historical study has revealed. Such a definition might more fully explain religion's persistence. Butler's claim that devotees “embraced” the instruments of modernity like marketing strategies, organizational patterns, and mass media might tell us how religious institutions were organized and how leaders communicated with members. Yet I am not sure it tells us all that historians wants to know. Why did religion flourish in this U.S. city but not in other European centers? Were not the instruments of modernity available there, too? And some will want to know more about individuals’ motives, why New Yorkers affiliated with local religious institutions, and which social forces helped those institutions flourish. In other words, did not a vibrant religion have to provide individuals with a satisfying experience, an encounter with “supernatural beings or forces,” which Butler calls a “traditional” substantive definition? And did not religion's flourishing also depend on how it functioned—for example, by providing city dwellers with a sense of belonging?
Butler might have borrowed a definition, perhaps Spiro's, which he cites: religion is “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.” Since Butler criticizes James and Weber for failing to see the significance of institutions, this definition seems well suited to his aims, and Spiro's phrase about “culturally patterned” interactions also would allow Butler to include architecture, technology, and media.Footnote 32 I have no vested interest in suggesting this definition, especially since I have proposed an alternative.Footnote 33 And I do not think historians of religion have to define that key term in every study, but Butler opens and closes the book by talking about how the term has been defined. Given that expressed interest, I wonder if a bit more attention to what religion is and how it functions might have enriched Butler's very suggestive explanation of religion's endurance.
Finally, I wonder if Butler might have settled on a definition of modernity—while distinguishing the term from modern, modernist, and modernization—and indicated how his study advances our conversation about the meaning of the term.Footnote 34 And it does make important contributions, I suggest. God in Gotham documents how Protestants, Catholics, and Jews responded to the social conditions of modernity, including transnational migration, rising urbanization, accelerated travel, and mass communication. Further, although he does not use the phrase, Butler shows that in Manhattan between 1880 and 1960 there were multiple modernities, including Jewish modernities and Catholic modernities.Footnote 35 Finally, Butler's illuminating sources and insightful interpretations provide evidence for those who have argued that the defining feature of modernity is not secularity but pluralism.Footnote 36 That, in the end, is one of the most important lessons of Butler's tale. Religion in Gotham was, above all, diverse.
