New York City is not usually a place where God walks. It has, as Kyle Roberts acknowledges in his compelling study of urban evangelical religion in the early American republic, “a greater reputation for sin than piety” (251). In the twenty-first century, when New York is a hub of global finance, our histories are more attuned to the development of Commercial Gotham, but Roberts tells a different tale, one in which evangelical Protestants were at the center, not the margins, of the city's radical growth and transformation. Roberts does not claim that Evangelical Gotham is the only Gotham, nor even that evangelicals were ever more than a minority of the city (about 15 percent by 1850). But their churches abounded in its built environment, they set their moral causes at the center of its civic life, and they turned the city's commercial resources to godly ends. “Evangelicals did not just live in New York,” he writes; “they lived through it” (7).

Evangelical Gotham challenges the notion that evangelical religion was a primarily rural phenomenon opposed to an emerging urban modernity. Through personal journals and autobiographical narratives, religious magazines and newspapers, and church records and published histories, Roberts finds that evangelicalism thrived in a modernizing world because of its individualistic appeal (through conversion) and because it offered spiritual stability while, especially in the urban milieu, “allow[ing] people to respond and adapt to change” (18). Evangelical adaptability arose from its portability: engaging David Bebbington's well-known work, Roberts interprets evangelicalism as a series of intersecting principles, rather than rigid doctrines or practices, that could be layered onto different denominational commitments. The city in turn encouraged, even fostered, the developments that fueled evangelicalism's rise.

The book is divided into three chronological parts. The first period, 1783–1815, was characterized by infant evangelical communities, liberated by New York State's embrace of religious freedom, striving to sink roots in urban soil. Revivals led to rapid growth in conversions and drew in migrants from the Atlantic world. But the social dislocation of the city created distinctive problems of gathering and ministering to souls, exemplified by Connecticut-born Ezra Stiles Ely's ministry in New York's almshouse and hospital. After the War of 1812, which begins the book's second period, churches were growing but were unevenly distributed, leaving thousands of New Yorkers under- or unserved. Evangelicals navigated the fluid environment with voluntary missionary and reform societies, an expansive print culture which cemented New York as a “national and international center for evangelical cultural production” (113), and “free” evangelical missionary churches which sought to reach New Yorkers who could not afford pews in existing churches. The Panic of 1837 and sometimes violent disputes over the place of antislavery in the churches marked the transition to the third period. A new generation arose which had been born into evangelical homes and fostered a new cultural dynamic that focused on sanctification or life after conversion. This dynamic was led by women, particularly Phoebe Worrall Palmer, who became a sought-after revivalist and reasserted female holiness in an increasingly bourgeois evangelical culture that, by the 1830s and 1840s, was bound to gendered notions of women's dependence. At the same time, evangelicals faced a crisis of class and religious geography as upwardly mobile New Yorkers moved uptown. Most downtown churches relocated to follow them, but some had to reinvent their mission in place, as the John Street Methodist Church did when an 1856 riot prevented its sale. The city, to paraphrase Roberts, transformed evangelicalism as much as evangelicals had transformed the city (220).

As befits a tale set in America's commercial powerhouse, marketplace metaphors abound in Roberts's descriptions: evangelical religion is itself a “marketplace,” converts are sometimes “consumers,” denominations “brands,” and preachers “vendors.” And no wonder, as evangelicals turned New York's markets to good use, for example, through the commercial and technological infrastructure that made evangelical print a giant. Religion and the urban landscape fit well together here because the interrogation of religious space is a particular strength of Roberts's narrative. Using city directories and church records, Roberts traces the construction and movement of meetinghouses (especially helpful are seven well-designed maps showing their locations between 1790 and 1856). But religion is not just in the churches, and churches are not only dedicated spaces with pulpits or steeples. Shipboard meetings reached out to sailors. Lewis Tappan's free churches often began in rented commercial space. Phoebe Worrall Palmer turned gender conventions to spiritual advantage in the mixed-sex Tuesday gatherings through the creative redeployment of space. By holding them in a parlor rather than a church, Palmer circumvented cultural prohibitions on women's public speaking: the Tuesday Meetings could be cast as private social gatherings rather than public formal assemblies, permitting “urban evangelicals to reconcile contemporary social demands of respectability with the rigors of individual piety” (197).

Evangelical Gotham reinforces the judgment that religion has been wrongly underappreciated in its urban milieu. Future work might move beyond the rural-urban dichotomy or interrogate a prevailing narrative that today stresses evangelical commonalities so much as to downplay not just intra-evangelical disputes but the oppositions with which evangelicals framed themselves against non-evangelical Protestants. (For evidence of this, one need only look to New England, from where many of the shapers of Evangelical Gotham originally hailed, as Roberts readily admits.) None of this negates Roberts's commendable work. Indeed, Evangelical Gotham deserves a leading place in the growing conversation on religion, mobility, and urbanity in the early United States. Such works include Kyle Bulthuis's focused study of New York City congregations (Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York's Early Republic Congregations [New York University Press, 2014]), though Roberts is somewhat more optimistic about the enduring impact of religion on the city. Roberts's attention to religious geography, both physical and metaphorical, recalls Shelby Balik's work on largely rural Vermont and New Hampshire (Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England's Religious Geography [Indiana University Press, 2014]). Roberts's valuable contributions to this conversation help us frame our understanding of religion in the early United States for the better.