Jon Butler's God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan affirms what historians of religion have long known and some urban historians have begun to discover—that few things in American history have survived so well as religion. Political moments and social movements have come and gone. Fashions have fallen out of favor; fads have faded. But that thing that we call “religion”—however defined, theologically, experientially, or institutionally—has survived, even thrived, particularly in American cities and perhaps most particularly in America's largest city, New York.

Modern American society has not become so secularized as to replace religion, nor has modernity secured religion's demise. The key questions are: What accounts for the resiliency of religion in the face of modernity, and how has anyone ever thought otherwise? Using Manhattan as a representative case study, Butler answers these questions with astounding clarity and insight.

God in Gotham begins with the requisite discussion of the perceived antagonism between urban space and religious faith. As Butler discusses, cities have long been widely viewed as metropolitan dens of sin and vice, morally bankrupt, and spiritually corrupting forces in the lives of their inhabitants. Indeed, there still exists a common association between sin and the city as well as an apprehension about cities rooted in notions of ambivalence about urbanization, industrialization, and modernity in general.

This was particularly true for New York City, which by the late nineteenth century had developed a reputation as a place of immorality, crime, vice, and corruption. As Richard Zacks has argued, “New York reigned as the vice capital of the United States,” and Manhattan had become “the island of vice.”Footnote ³⁷ New York City was also the most potent example of the general sense developing among scholars and moral reformers that cities were inherently bad and had deleterious effects on people's character. Many pioneering sociologists, such as Robert Park and Lewis Mumford, wrote extensively about their “deep reservations” regarding city life in comparison to a rural, pre-industrial, and agricultural existence. They worried about the loss of “community” that corresponded with the growth of cities. Moral reformers echoed this anxiety but expressed even greater concern for what they perceived to be a decrease in morality directly connected to life in the city.Footnote ³⁸

This was also a great concern among those observing the mass exodus of black Americans out of the South to places like Chicago and in New York during the Great Migration, starting just after World War I. Many black ministers, for example, expressed alarm about the “tempting lure” of northern cities and attempted to divert the flow of southern migrants into the outskirts of cities rather than directly into them. In addition to suggesting strongly that the African American temperament was more suited to the South and that the South was the “natural home” of black people, they also strongly suggested that rural life rather than city life was best for blacks. African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Bishop Cornelius T. Shaffer, for example, recommended “avoiding for the most part, the larger cities of the country” and forming rural “colonies.” This rural life outside the city is where migrants would more likely cultivate and maintain religious and moral values.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, fleeing the city as an act of cleansing and moral regeneration has often been celebrated in song, literature, and film, from Gladys Knight following her man from L.A. back to Georgia on a midnight train; to Carl Sandburg's Chick Lorimer, a “wild girl” who left the city one day and was just “gone”; to Kevin Bacon's character in “Footloose,” who rattled the residents of Bomont, Utah, with his Chicago dance moves. The message has been clear. Cities are bad and ultimately bad for people.

No city has sustained the association between sin and the city more emphatically than New York. From the late nineteenth century throughout the twentieth, ministers and moral reformers have railed against what they believed to be the evilest city in the world, starting perhaps with Samuel Lane Loomis. In his 1887 book Modern Cities and Their Religious Problem, Loomis, an American clergyman, proclaimed, “It will not be difficult to convince those who are acquainted with the life of our cities, that the Protestant churches, as a rule, have no following among the workingmen.” By this he meant immigrants, whom he considered “city people”—poor and downtrodden—who, if religious at all, were Catholic.Footnote ⁴⁰ He simply entitled one chapter in his book “The Threat of the Cities.” Writing in the introduction of the volume, Samuel Strong, another American minister, corroborated Loomis's views. “There is special need of evangelizing the city because the city is exposed to special perils,” he wrote.Footnote ⁴¹

Loomis and Strong wrote with New York City very much in mind, and for decades other ministers would follow their example and further expand their depictions of the city. The evangelist-showman Billy Sunday often thundered about the evil that was New York, decrying in 1915, “There is little hope that the Lord ever will be able to save such a hell hole as New York.” Another evangelist named Billy stated pretty much the same thing over forty years later. The common depiction of New York City as sinful animated Billy Graham's motivations for his first evangelical crusade in the city in 1957. Writing in his personal diary just days before the launching of the crusade at Madison Square Garden, Graham proclaimed, “I know that we are going to one of the strongholds of Satan. Materialism, indifference and wickedness are apparent to even a casual Christian observer of New York.”Footnote ⁴²

With God in Gotham, Butler vividly and convincingly undermines this association between sin and the city, showing that it has never had much merit, and certainly not from 1880 to 1960. Rather, he begins with a controlling question about a very different New York City: “How did religion confront the challenge of modernity in the most prominent borough of what, by 1925, was the world's largest city?”Footnote ⁴³ It was not the city of sin Loomis and others had described. Rather, New York was, as Butler has proclaimed in his other writings, a “sacred modern city” where many of the markers of modern religion were laid down. As he states, “Far from a casualty of the modern, religion in Manhattan became quintessentially modern. It was as much institutional and bureaucratic as theological, and it was fueled by international and domestic migration well into the 1930s.”Footnote ⁴⁴ It was a sacred modern city for the many Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who “embraced modern organization, institutional structure, and modes of outreach.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Employing modern methods and the materials of modernity—radio, advertising, architecture—the churches and synagogues of New York transformed themselves and the meaning of religious practices in the city.

Butler reveals this transformation in three principal areas: institutions, sacred space, and religious activism. Perhaps the most intriguing and contributive chapter in the book is chapter 2, “Organizing God,” where Butler revives and enlivens “institutional history”; acknowledging that some scholars had come to see it as “unsexy and boring,”Footnote ⁴⁶ Butler reelevates the institutional approach to religious history to the level of importance it should never have lost. He shows that religion in New York was fundamentally institutional and that these institutions were the “instruments through which most New Yorkers—most Americans—approached God.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Although he is careful to show important differences in organizational forms and institutional priorities between the city's Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, he contends that “all of the city's principal religious groups deepened their traditional ritual, theological, and spiritual identities by committing to institutional orders and employing modernity in their service.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Butler also shows how sacred space in New York was a deliberate construction based on social needs and the shape of the built environment. Echoing the assertions of sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow, Butler understands “the sacred” as a production of human action, allowing anything and any space to be sacred space. He states, “In the modern city, just about any space—from a former barbershop to a subway car to a classified ad—could be sacred space,” as it linked “faith to the press of modern life.”Footnote ⁴⁹ As a scholar of migration, this construction of sacred space caught my attention as it resonated with my own findings about the construction of sacred space in Chicago, which was similarly wide open. The many “Chevras” (small Jewish groups) of New York reminded me of the hundreds of “storefront churches” of Chicago popping up in that city during the same time period.Footnote ⁵⁰ And similar to Chicago, “by the 1940s religion of nearly incomprehensible variety was everywhere in Manhattan—stuffed visually, aurally, and tactilely into the metropolitan landscape and the minds of those who called it home.” Butler shows that even the streets became sacred spaces, declaring that “the streets that brought worshipers to sanctuaries and storefronts offered equal opportunities for sacralization” by way of preaching, parades, and fairs.Footnote ⁵¹

The third area of transformation relates to the other two in significant ways but is just as significant on its own. Butler has filled his book with a wide array of religious actors and their religious actions in New York City. Often working within institutional contexts (but sometimes not), these actors radically transformed the religious landscape and the meaning of religious work in the city—while employing, not avoiding, the tools of modernity. And in Butler's view, this level of religious work eclipsed that which was happening in anyplace else in America. As he states, “Between the 1920s and the 1960s Manhattan stimulated an outpouring of individual and institutional religious creativity unsurpassed in any other twentieth-century American locale, urban or rural.”Footnote ⁵² Throughout the borough of Manhattan, from Harlem to the Lower East Side, people such as Adam Clay Powell, Sr. and Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacque Maritain, Norman Vincent Peale, and Dorothy Day helped to turn New York City into a veritable center of American religion. And they did it in awareness of, but not cooperation with, one another. As Butler concludes, “Together, yet without even a hint of coordination or collective intent, they fostered passionate new religious visions amid the bustle of the world's largest city. From the allegedly inhospitable spiritual environment, they changed what God and religious life meant to millions of people.”Footnote ⁵³

God in Gotham is the first book of its kind. While admittedly not a “comprehensive” account of religion in New York, it is nonetheless a sweeping history of Judeo-Christianity in the city, told as one coherent yet multifaceted story rather than merely a part of the larger story of New York. Jon Butler has achieved something astounding, and his work will likely pave the way for others, for, as he concedes, “There is so much more to say.”Footnote ⁵⁴ And those works will doubtlessly find some basis in Butler's key claims regarding the construction of modern religion and the interplay (rather than alleged antagonism) between religion, urbanization, and modernity, knowing that not all of the city's religionists were either Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. Scholars who follow Butler will also now know that for New Yorkers there was no understanding of religion outside the practice of that religion.

Butler will be charged with “New York exceptionalism,” however. Most of us who work on New York City eventually are. But what some call “New York exceptionalism” others of us simply call urban history. And New York's importance to American religious history can hardly be overstated. One does wish, however, that it were not so easy to conflate “Manhattan” with “New York.” One is a part of the other, but they are not one and the same. Also, future studies on religion in Gotham should give greater air to the existing and powerful counter-narratives to the outdated depictions of the city as especially sinful and immoral, allowing the counter-narratives to become the narrative. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. likely had that counter-narrative in mind when he said in 1970, “Christ would have walked in Selma. He would have marched on Washington, and He would have lived in Harlem.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Powell, like many others, already saw the city as moral space, as “sacred space.” For them, heaven is a city. Perhaps New York City.