The Gods of the City takes Strasbourg—a large municipality of commercial, cultural, and administrative importance—to explore the place of religion in the modern city. Steinhoff focuses on Strasbourg's Protestant communities, both the Lutheran and the Reformed, to examine how modernization and urbanization reshaped the mission of the city's Protestant faith communities, and how these churches responded to the evolving needs of the city's faithful. Steinhoff seeks big game here by arguing that the tight linkages between modernization and secularization do not always hold true; urban faith communities were not relegated to the background of modern city life. In Steinhoff's impressively sourced account, Protestant leaders did not simply wring their hands and declaim “oh the times, oh the mores” in responding to modern life. Rather, Steinhoff demonstrates, while challenged by the changing urban realities, these institutions sought to modernize and adapt to tend the faithful in this new urban environment. This willingness to evolve allowed the churches not only to survive, but also to play a role of continued importance.

The first several chapters serve to establish the context of Strasbourg's Protestant communities. The opening chapter details the organizational and theological developments of Alsatian Protestantism under French rule before addressing the largely botched post-1871 attempts of German officials to reform the organization of regional Protestantism. These failed efforts led to the maintenance of the status quo ante bellum for regional Protestants and furthered distrust of the German state. The ensuing chapter—a wonderful overview in English on the urban history of Strasbourg—explores the changing demographics of Strasbourg as the growth of the working class and influx of German Protestants, both as civil servants and as soldiers, altered religious life. These changes necessitated new approaches in the use of religious space, for example, accommodating garrison parishes or creating parishes in Strasbourg's newer neighborhoods. Steinhoff then outlines the nature of parish life. For most Protestants, the parish remained the locus of religious life in Strasbourg; few people eschewed formal religious affiliation and paid the alternative church tax. While detailing the challenges facing parishes, from the difficulties of selecting new pastors to shifting personnel out to the suburbs, Steinhoff notes that two trends seemed to be clear: the pastors became increasingly professionalized and better educated over time, and parish lay councils assumed a greater role in the city. Both were indicative of the evolving modern sensibilities of the churches.

The four chapters that ensue—on church-state relations, on the so-called “culture wars” (Kulturkampf), on practices of worship, and on ministering to the faithful—get at the heart of several of Steinhoff's larger arguments. Unlike in neighboring France, there was not a sustained attempt by the German state to attack the place of religion or religious institutions. Problems in Alsace sprang rather from the Kulturkampf or from local circumstances; German officials in Strasbourg, for example, used the powers from the Napoleonic Concordat to limit the influence of Francophile parishes, not to attack Protestantism more broadly. In general, Steinhoff argues, German officials saw a positive role for religion. Moreover, they hoped to push Alsatian Protestants closer to their Trans-Rhenanian counterparts. Schools also represented a point of complicated interaction between Protestant churches and the state; while arguments developed over when and how Alsatian faith communities could influence religious instruction, no one ever questioned the place of religious education within the curriculum. For Steinhoff, schools thus remained a place of continued influence for the Protestant community, one that brought most children in contact with their faith.

Indeed, Steinhoff argues in the chapter “Worshipping Community” that religion remained an important part of the lives of many in Strasbourg. Despite conflicts with both work and leisure activities, Sunday morning services remained relatively popular. And Steinhoff reads the contact of average parishioners to their faith through major life moments—baptism, first communion, death—as evidence that religion remained a constituent part of people's lives. If there is a strain in the argument, it comes here. Despite continuing ties to the religion, contemporaries, some cited by Steinhoff, did fret over the diminishing religiosity of the age. Steinhoff's point is perhaps better taken to show that religious rituals continued to shape the lives of many in Strasbourg, but not necessarily of religious fervor among Strasbourg's Protestants.

Much more telling are Steinhoff's investigations of how the practice of ministering to the urban environment changed, and how the churches sought to modernize their organizational structures. Alsatian pastors sought to reach out to parishioners, provide for the needs of parishioners in poor districts, involve lay persons more in church life, develop new programs to appeal to youth, and in general find new ways to address the needs of urban Protestants. Likewise, both the Reformed and Lutheran Churches in the decade or so before 1914 worked long and hard to give their respective institutions modern modes of governance, improved parish organization, increased lay participation, and even (in differing guises) enfranchisement for women. Such efforts ultimately failed to reach fruition when the regional administration was replaced in the wake of the Zabern Affair. Taken together, Steinhoff paints a nuanced picture of urban religious institutions striving to maintain vitality in the face of modern life, and at least from an institutional perspective, succeeding as often as not.

Steinhoff convincingly shows that Strasbourg's Protestant religious communities worked hard, if not always successfully, to address the needs of the modern urban population. Moreover, at least in the context of pre-1914 Alsace, church-state relations remained complicated, a relationship determined not by the cultural fights of the era but by local political considerations. Religion remained a constituent, if diminished part, in the lives of Strasbourg's Protestants.