There are two images of Peter Williams in Kyle T. Bulthius's book. The first, a late eighteenth century engraving, shows us the Old John Street Chapel, a small, Methodist-leaning appendage to the much larger Trinity Church, which was Anglican before the American Revolution and Episcopal after. Williams was a slave sold to the Chapel when his Loyalist master found it convenient to escape the new United States, and the engraving shows him standing steadfastly at the church's door, for Williams served as sexton of the church until he gained his freedom in 1796. The second image dates to some two or three decades later. It is a formal portrait, and shows us not the servant but Williams the sober Methodist gentleman. He is neatly but plainly dressed, with a solemn expression. This is Williams the church founder, member of a large and growing free black population in New York City, who would eventually help to found the Zion Chapel, an African American branch of the Methodist church, in 1801. The Chapel eventually gave birth to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

It is a credit to Kyle Bulthius's creativity with sources that his interpretations of these two images encapsulate much of his argument in his book. Four Steeples is not conventional church history; nor is it purely cultural or social history. Rather, Bulthius has blended the three. He has narrowed his focus to four New York congregations: Trinity and St. Philip's, both Episcopal congregations, and John Street and Mother Zion, both Methodist. The first of each pair was predominantly a white congregation, the second, African American. Bulthius has dug into the commonplace sources of everyday church life in these congregations, the seemingly tendentious histories of congregations toiled over by forgotten ministers, painstaking and neatly (or not) handwritten membership and baptismal records, and other such ephemera. These details allow Bulthius to substantiate claims that historians often have to generalize from anecdote. For instance, he demonstrates that African Americans only reluctantly and slowly left the congregations that gradually imposed increasing stricture upon them. He can compare the gender ratios of those who rented pews and those who were communicants in his churches. From these dry details he has spun a social history of New York in the early American republic through a congregational lens, showing how religious ideals adapted to a rapidly pluralizing, commercializing, and urbanizing city.

The argument of Four Steeples runs like this. Before the Revolution, New York's dominant Anglican faith presented an ideal of social, religious, and political unity, bolstered by legal establishment and doctrinal latitudinarianism, and actuated in attempts to proselyte African Americans and a firm commitment to interracial congregations. But from the beginning, this effort faced challenges. Many Anglicans supported the Methodist movement because it seemed to bring the unruly lower classes to church—but gradually Methodism antagonized many Anglicans' genteel sensibilities and after the Revolution it became a new denomination entirely. Indeed, the Revolution dealt a blow to the ideal of unity. While the Revolution led to the end of slavery in New York, it also sparked a gradual and painful hardening of relationships between white and black New Yorkers. Bulthius gives a particular example: “Methodists segregated blacks from whites, but grouped free blacks with slaves. Thus they denied free black makes the separate identity that free white Methodist men enjoyed” (66). Meanwhile, Trinity Church pursued its old ideal of unity by embracing Federalism, the politics of morality, and social gentility, strategies which maximized the church's influence but marginalized its African American members, who were limited to humble professions and sat uneasily among their wealthy co-parishoners.

Race is the preeminent source of the social tension Bulthius investigates, but he pays attention to class and gender issues as well. Over and over again, the same story unfolds: African Americans, or women, or those of middling economic status, find themselves ostracized in a church which places power in the hands of white people, or men, or the wealthy. They seek other avenues to recognition and influence: women like Elizabeth Seton or Sojourner Truth pursue benevolent societies or an intense private spirituality. African Americans like Peter Williams organize the “African Society,” an independent organization for African Christians that eventually spawns actual congregations. The churning social currents of New York City in the early republic tore apart old social institutions, and perhaps the greatest strength of Bulthius's study is the nuance his enormously tight focus brings to such a sweeping argument. His African Americans indeed eventually separate, but Bulthius shows how deliberate and painful that process was. Women in all denominations entered benevolent societies, but Bulthius shows how seating arrangements during worship shaped how members of various denominations thought about gender differently.

If Bulthius were a juggler, we would marvel at how many balls he is keeping in the air. He occasionally drops one. At times his attention to detail submerges his argument, and his analysis, skipping as it does from race to gender to class and back again, can blur as much as clarify. The task of determining which factor was the most important in any given case sometimes threaten his ability to make any generalization whatsoever, and thus the book's narrative force sometimes drags, particularly in the early going. More, his tight focus paradoxically obscures one of his central claims: Bulthius emphasizes the rapid growth and increasing diversity of the city, and so it is odd that there is virtually no sign of people who were not Episcopalians or Methodists in his story. Indeed his churches seem to exist in a vacuum, the world outside them alluded to but rarely seen. This may be a case of Bulthius's great strength also being his weakness, and it should not obscure the impressive richness of the story he does have to tell.