A Religious Outpouring
Such beliefs have, in fact, proven hard to shake. Over the course of the 20th century the image of the godforsaken city never went entirely out of fashion. In the wake of this summer’s urban protests it is, in some circles, back in vogue. As a result, while historian Jon Butler’s latest book, God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan, focuses on a bygone era (the 1880s–1960s), it could not feel timelier.
Butler offers overwhelming evidence that even New Yorkers could not flee from God’s presence. Most did not try. Instead, some decorated Manhattan’s streets with ornate churches and synagogues, while others turned homes and rented rooms into worship spaces. Attorney Street on the Lower East Side was a noteworthy case in point: “Though only four blocks long, by 1930 it was home to more than fifty Jewish congregations only two of which met in synagogues,” Butler writes. Religious content crowded the city’s newspaper columns and saturated its airwaves too. Nearly everywhere one looked, the Big Apple was shot through with the sacred. “Religion resonated throughout the world’s most populous place,” Butler observes, “sacralizing every kind of space and linking faith to the press of modern life.”
The durability of faith defied the expectations of more than just the city’s sanctimonious detractors. A sprawling scholarly literature on secularization long insisted that modernity spelled certain doom for religion. This theory eventually ran aground on a stubborn fact: In many of even the most urbane places, the predicted disenchantment never came. For Butler, Manhattan is in part a case study underscoring this larger point. “The likes of Max Weber and William James misjudged the resilience of modern religion and mistook what its emerging textures and energies could mean,” he argues.
But it is not merely a case study. A vein of what one might call Manhattan exceptionalism runs through the book. Chicagoans may be inclined to jump out of their seats at Butler’s assertion that the Windy City “approached Manhattan’s complexity but did not achieve it.” But if they can manage to keep reading, they may, by the end, concede that he has a point when he writes that “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.”