God in Gotham issues a challenge: if religion can survive, nay thrive, in Sodom by the Sea, then maybe we need to revise our theory of secularization of the modern world. The book's subtitle articulates its subversive claims: “The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan.” Its alliterative argument suggests a measure of wonder, one of those features of pre-modern life supposedly banished by secularization and the disenchantment of the world.

Jon Butler takes on the theorists as a historian of religion. He is persuasive. He marshals an extraordinary array of evidence from architecture to theology, all of it grounded in New York City's lived realities from the 1880s through the 1950s. Understanding those religious realities requires a prodigious grasp of processes of social change because New York City was undergoing rapid growth and modernization. During these years, it expanded from a large city of over three million to a huge city of almost eight million. (Manhattan's population hovered around two million.) In those years, New York secured its reputation as a world city. Its Manhattan skyline of towering skyscrapers overshadowed the city's many church steeples. At the same time, New York became a city without a majority population, a city divided unequally among three major religious groups—Catholics, Jews, and Protestants—fissured by ethnicity, class, and race.

How to make the case for religious creativity? Butler answers that question largely by looking more at innovation than at continuities. However, continuities endure that point to religion's ongoing importance as a formative feature of modernization.

Butler argues for New York's distinctiveness in his introduction. In justifying his choice of the city, he points first to its sheer scale and diversity, then to its “urban belligerence.”Footnote ³ There is no mistaking Manhattan for some dreamy, aspirational suburb. No one ever applied Brooklyn's moniker—“A City of Churches and Homes”—to Manhattan. Butler follows that acknowledgement with several important pragmatic observations: the overwhelming predominance of Jews and Catholics as Manhattan's majority population along with the unique dominance of Dutch Reformed and Episcopalians among Protestants, outranking the normally more numerous Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, at least up to 1920, before large-scale migrations of African Americans from the South and Caribbean islands. And he concludes with New York's “iconic cultural status.”Footnote ⁴ All these characteristics amplify the need to understand why religion did not collapse in Gotham but rather flourished.

God in Gotham chooses its cases selectively. Its five chapters highlight key questions: why does New York inspire sacred awe, and how is divinity experienced in the capital of American secularism? How do religious leaders organize religion in new ways to adapt to urban life? What kind of a physical presence did religion imprint on the cityscape? How did religion serve African Americans in a segregated city? What new theologies emerged to explain the problems of urban and modern life, including its politics and capitalist exploitation? Throughout, Butler toggles seamlessly from one religious group to another, amassing evidence that builds his case. Not only does he move effortlessly across religious boundaries but he also shifts gracefully from microhistorical vignettes that illuminate crucial issues to macrohistorical accounts that explain complex processes. And he never shies away from religious conflict, whether the antisemitism of leading Protestants seeking to convert Jews or the racism of Jews, Catholics, and white Protestants toward African Americans.

I want to focus first on several of the microhistories that open his chapters. Chapter 3 begins with the provocative statement: “I know a synagogue that was once a saloon.”Footnote ⁵ Talk about sacralizing the urban landscape! But Butler's account of the impact on the cityscape of Prohibition—a religiously promoted political accomplishment—emphasizes the fluidity of its spaces. Sacredness did not necessarily adhere only to prescribed buildings set aside as churches or synagogues but could be found in many varied spaces. This vignette sets the stage for a lively tour of Manhattan island's streets, pausing at diverse types of religious buildings, many of them extraordinarily innovative, like the Calvary Baptist Church's skyscraper church and residential hotel in midtown across from Carnegie Hall. Even as he notes the creative structures that respond to pressures of Manhattan real estate, Butler does not lose sight of the constant exchanges of sacred spaces: synagogues sell their buildings to African American churches, and churches sell their buildings to synagogues. Nor does he forget the aptly named “religious rental market.”Footnote ⁶ Everyone rented in Manhattan, except the very wealthy, so it made good sense for religious groups to rent rooms as well. Butler goes on to look at media as a kind of metaspace. He recognizes the power of technology to allow religious sentiment to permeate public and private spaces. Listening to recordings of gospel music, radio sermons, or cantorial chants brought religion into the lives of many who might not have bothered with organized worship. His view is expansive.

Another fantastic microhistory introduces chapter 5, “God's Urban Hothouse.” This chapter commences with a powerful account of the excommunication of Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan in June 1945 at the Hotel McAlpin in midtown. Butler uses this distressing example of religious narrowmindedness to illuminate the radical theology that the excommunication was designed to eradicate. Kaplan had written a book proposing to reconstruct Judaism in America as a civilization. He then went on to implement his ideas by rewriting the Passover Haggadah and modifying the traditional Sabbath prayerbook by removing a key concept, namely, the idea of Jews as a chosen people. These liturgical innovations particularly infuriated the ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who took the radical step of excommunication. Butler then moves back from this closeup of a key event to a sweeping overview of the responses of religiously committed men and women to the city's realities. Life in New York encouraged intellectuals to think religion. It offered them appointments at prominent seminaries, fruitful contacts across religious boundaries with other thinkers, varied audiences for their ideas, and access to diverse religious publishers. Butler chooses to focus on the most well-known and influential figures, from Kaplan to Joseph Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel among Jews, from Paul Tillich to Reinhold Niebuhr among Protestants, and from Jacques Maritain to Dorothy Day among Catholics.

Butler is particularly attentive to Americanizing influences, at least as translated through New York. He provides a provocative reading of several of these figures, writing, for example, of Soloveitchik that his concept of “double confrontation” mirrored W. E. B. Du Bois's idea of “double consciousness.”Footnote ⁷ He also notes how Soloveitchik, despite his enormous respect in the Orthodox world, received threats of a herem (excommunication) when he held the first Talmudic study session for women at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University. Butler's sensitivity to such decisive examples that reveal theological transformation effectively demonstrates how life in New York exerted a compelling challenge. Feminist demands by women particularly would exert pressure on all religions in the city after World War II.

Let me shift now to an aspect of God in Gotham that I found particularly rewarding. Butler's approach to religion, his recognition of its multiple dimensions and modes of expression, prompts a reader to rethink widespread assumptions. One of those assumptions regarding New York Jews is their general lack of religious concern, their secularization. Jewish immigrants seemed to have jettisoned much of their religious baggage crossing the ocean, most especially Sabbath observance, a vital feature of Jewish personal and public life. Butler's approach, however, while not directly challenging this fact, suggests that we would do well to look elsewhere for religion not just in continuities with the Old World. For example, his first chapter begins with the painter Joseph Stella. Here, Butler describes how Stella “embraced an unapologetic transcendental urbanism.”Footnote ⁸ This vision of Stella's paintings spurred me to think of the painter Florine Stettheimer and her magnificent series of four “cathedral” paintings that transform Broadway, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, and art into vibrant images. Usually these are described as secular shrines, but they might also be reinterpreted as expressions of “transcendental urbanism.” Like Stella, Stettheimer demonstrated, in Butler's words, “the numinous potentialities of modern American urbanism.”Footnote ⁹ Similarly, I was struck with the potential for religious readings of the poet Charles Reznikoff's By the Waters of Manhattan (1930), whose title evokes the biblical imagery of the waters of Babylon, or Alfred Kazin's often numinous reflections in his memoir, A Walker in the City (1951). Marvin Bileck's line drawings illustrate the latter, taking the reader through a tour much like Butler's evocative account of the sacralized cityscape of Manhattan. God in Gotham inspires rethinking previous interpretations of New York Jewish culture.

Butler expands our understanding of religion not through theorizing but through the power of lived religion. Although God in Gotham does not claim to be comprehensive, its compelling choices invite readers to bring their own examples into the mix. Stettheimer, for example, introduces issues of sexuality. She lived with her mother and sisters in an Upper West Side Manhattan apartment and in the interwar decades held a regular salon that openly welcomed lesbians, gay, and bisexual men and women, despite legal strictures against open homosexuality in New York. I am tempted to contemplate a reconsideration of her salon, recognizing its power of social acceptance as possessing an element of religious validation of personhood.

But if Butler understandably does not discuss religion and sexuality, he does skewer religion and race. His chapter “Modernizing God in Jim Crow Manhattan” begins appropriately with James Baldwin. Butler reproduces the original cover for Baldwin's first novel Go Tell It On The Mountain (1951) that mistakenly titles the novel's storefront church, “Temple of the Fire Baptized.” The chapter juxtaposes the many Harlem storefront churches with a handful of large established congregations in monumental sanctuaries. Both forms of religious organization, along with such radical alternatives as Father Divine, address the struggles of African Americans for dignity in the face of persistent discrimination and persecution. By paying attention to storefront churches, Butler also introduces a number of influential female preachers. The flexibility of black religion in Manhattan gave women entrepreneurial religious opportunities. He includes a wonderful portrait by the African American photographer James Van Der Zee of one of these women, Josephine Becton, that presents her as a model of middle-class female respectability. Yet Butler also recognizes similarities that existed across racial lines despite the segregation of white and black Protestants, such as ministers’ concerns with Christian doctrine, salvation, and morality. How religious leaders juggled these enduring issues with the “relentless caste of color that pursued blacks everywhere in the city”Footnote ¹⁰ brings Butler to a discussion of politics. Religion and politics were necessarily interwoven. One of the chapter's strengths comes from the way its attention to religion among African Americans addresses their demands for justice.

God in Gotham invites readers to ponder not just religion's staying power but also the creativity it engenders. As the purview of what scholars understand as “religious” expands to embrace many features of daily living—from purchasing food on Thursday afternoon for the Friday night meal and Saturday sabbath to donning special clothes for holidays, even when they are not spent in church—so do possibilities of comprehending religion's ongoing relevance in the modern world. Butler's attention to nuances of expression and practice, alongside more typical articulations of belief and belonging, introduces a rich vocabulary of religion. Sacralizing the cityscape involved not just all those examples of architecture or even the media versions of religious expression but also lively debates over public schools and released time for religious instruction. Butler manages, in short, to bring together features of modernity that are usually separated. Who considers recorded sermons or religious music together with legal struggles over released time? This breadth, along with his attention to intersecting vectors of human behavior, reminds one of Butler's earlier book, Awash in a Sea of Faith. The “Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan” successfully introduces that sense of wonder that undergirds religious postures in the world and reminds readers of its pervasive presence in belligerently urban New York City.