Why did religion not collapse in modernity's grasp? This is the question that opens God in Gotham, Jon Butler's study of religion in Manhattan from the Gilded Age to the 1960s (p. 10). Butler's resolute answer is that religion was flexible, innovative and technologically savvy. Religion was not consumed by the city, but moulded to the pace, tenor and contingency of urban life. While the study of urban religion has centred the everyday lives of devotees and practitioners and located their religious practices in parks, backyards, botánicas, shrines and apartments, Butler's focus is far more traditional: institutions.

Butler's imagined interlocutors are Max Weber and William James, and he frames this book as a refutation of Weber's argument about disenchantment and James's argument about religious institutions being secondary to the real core of religious life. For Weber the miraculous, the mystical and the wondrous had a precipitously declining place in modernity, as rationalisation, bureaucracy, science and technology were fuelling the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (p. 33). For James, institutions were an ‘unnecessary burden on the experience of the divine, a burden that would only grow in the age of modern organization’ (p. 34). Contrary to these thinkers, Butler argues that ‘New York's religious institutions offered mechanisms through which religious people grappled with anonymity, mobility, density, and indifference’ (p. 34). With this contrast in mind, Butler justifies his focus on institutions as the central sites where New Yorkers formed their religious lives. God in Gotham sets out to show readers that these institutions, far from being ‘unsexy and boring’, were dynamic, adaptable and ‘supple enough’ to be vital and thriving on the island of Manhattan (p. 35). What follows is an account of the architectural, technological, financial, organisational and theological innovations and adaptations of religious organisations, clergy and thinkers.

Catholics, Protestants and Jews, the main actors in God in Gotham, created capacious institutions that offered more than worship, providing key social services, and they did so with a keen eye towards marketing. In the chapter ‘Organizing god’, Butler centres denominations and organisations like the New York City Federation of Churches and Christian Workers that used the modern techniques of surveys and sociological analysis and employed polltakers to reach city dwellers and learn about their living conditions, with the hope of shaping programmes to their needs and getting them into the city's churches (p. 45). Butler argues that ‘advertising epitomized modernity’, and religious leaders advocated its use to attract churchgoers (p. 49). The Presbyterian Charles Stelzle penned the 1908 book Principles of successful Church advertising, encouraging congregations to use the forms of commercial advertising like newspaper ads and billboards. During this same period Catholics were expanding social services, through charity work and institution-building, creating a wide network of Catholic schools, orphanages and hospitals that melded modern medicine, professionalisation and efficient administration with religious mission. The urban institutions of Judaism were shifting post-1910s, as congregations built large synagogues that offered family programming, pools, athletic facilities and gathering spaces. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan helped create the ‘synagogue centre’ model as a ‘spiritual laboratory’, opening the eight-story Jewish Center on the Upper West Side (p. 73). In its focus on how institution building was a response to urban anxieties and religious agendas, this book works in sync with Paula Lupkin's Manhood factories: YMCA architecture and the making of modern urban culture (Minneapolis 2010).

Butler's chapter ‘Sacralizing the urban landscape’ centres the built environment and problems of space and density in the city. He explores the building of grand structures like St Patrick's Cathedral and the modern fund-raising methods that churches employed to fund new structures. Sanctuaries and synagogues had to ‘fit into unexpected corners and [blend] into the urban surround’, and some even adopted the verticality of city architecture. ‘Skyscraper churches’ took on the forms of office buildings and hotels (p. 88). Churches ‘embraced New York's freewheeling real estate market’ to depart from purpose-built spaces and take on renovations (p. 88). Buildings often changed hands, denominations and religions – for example, ‘by 1930 most Harlem synagogues had become black churches’ (p. 91). The real estate market was limited by restrictive covenants that barred black congregations from buying, building and renovating properties. There was also a rich religious rental market. Readers briefly learn that from the 1880s to the 1920s, Jewish lay groups rented spaces above markets and shops on the Lower East Side. Technologies like radio, electric lights, mass transit and electronic amplification changed the visual and aural environment of religion. New York's print and radio media industries broadcast religious sounds and sermons far and wide, and Manhattan had become a centre for ‘nationally distributed religious broadcasts’ by 1930 (p. 106).

In ‘Modernizing God in Jim Crow Manhattan’ Butler argues that the religious landscape of Manhattan was also contoured and constrained by racism. As insurers and financiers refused to cover black-owned churches and businesses, black communities undertook their own systematic modern fund-raising campaigns, like that at Abyssinian Baptist led by the Revd Adam Clayton Powell. Harlem's religious landscape was rich and varied. By 1931 there were 160 religious congregations in Harlem. They worshipped in grand sanctuaries, storefront churches and some lived communally in apartment buildings (p. 137). In Harlem churches focused on ‘fulfilling the whole Christian person’, creating churches that were dynamic neighbourhood outreach centres that provided social services, education and recreation. Butler turns readers’ attention to the gentrification of the Tenderloin, and how its black community and their homes, businesses and churches were replaced by office buildings, department stores and hotels. This gentrification ‘forced their worshippers into Harlem after 1900’ (p. 130). As the Tenderloin was transformed into the business and shopping district of Midtown, it also became ‘almost entirely white’ (p. 130).

This book complements more ethnographic work on religious communities in New York City, such as Richard P. Cimino, Nadia A. Mian and Weishan Huang's Ecologies of faith in New York City: the evolution of religious institutions (Bloomington, In 2013) and Kenneth Guest's God in Chinatown: religion and survival in New York's evolving immigrant community (New York 2003). Latino Christian congregations are noticeably absent from the book's religious cityscape. As Gastón Espinosa has explored in his book Latino Pentecostals in America (Boston 2014), by 1931 ‘175,000 people of Hispanic ancestry’ lived in New York City and thousands of Puerto Ricans lived and worshipped in East Harlem (p. 465 n.1, 258). New York City was home to Latino Catholic, mainline, Evangelical and Pentecostal congregations but these New Yorkers are not part of the story of God in Gotham, eliding some of Manhattan's ethnic diversity. Manhattan as an island of neighbourhoods often disappears in the text and there is opportunity for further studies of the history, feel and flavour of religion in neighborhoods beyond the poles of Harlem and the Lower East Side.

Butler's focus here on the traditional spaces of religion often casts sacralisation as an official process most often undertaken largely by clergymen, architects and those with financial and institutional authority. Religion's vitality here is measured by its institutional vigour, the minds of its intellectuals and the power of its predominantly male leaders. But it is important to think beyond these traditional figures, locations and measures of religious life. For example, Rachel Gross's Beyond the synagogue: Jewish nostalgia as religious practice (New York 2021) prompts scholars to consider urban sites like museums and delis as spaces of religious practice and memory.

God in Gotham proves that ‘tools of modernity’ were also the tools of religion. Scholars of urban history, American religion, urban religion and modernity and secularism will find much to think with in God in Gotham's compelling history of how congregations responded to the technologies, pace and cityscape of Manhattan to engage with ‘the enchanted’, not turn away from it (p. 230).