Jon Butler - God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan

Judy Blumes controversial 1970 teen fiction bestseller, Are You There God? Its Me, Margaret, focused on a sixth-grade girl born and raised in Manhattan. Margaret Simon had just moved to the New Jersey suburbs and was anxious about boys, her first bra, and her eagerly anticipated first period. But Blumes title caught Margarets main worry: religion. She had none. But her suburban classmates did. Her parents mixed marriageher mother Protestant, her father Jewishturned religion upside down. Her mothers parents were so angry that they all but disowned both their daughter and granddaughter. Margarets Jewish grandmother seemed more malleable but kept calling her my Jewish girl, as though saying so could make her one. Amidst the tensions, Margarets parents punted. She could choose a religion as an adult.

Margaret quickly realized that religious belonging opened doors in her new suburb, though she wasnt sure which ones or where they led. She already saw the complications in her Manhattan grandmothers pestering.

Sylvia Simon is a lot of fun, considering her age, which I happen to know is sixty. The only problem is that shes always asking me if I have boyfriends and if theyre Jewish. Now that is ridiculous because number one I dont have boyfriends. And number two what would I care if theyre Jewish or not?

Yet Margaret cared about God. She took her frightened expectations about puberty and her new suburban life to God, and she prayed to God regularly, sometimes about mundane matters and sometimes about crises. She called it talking with God. She sought solace in a Catholic confessional after she derided her rival, the prematurely voluptuous Laura Danker. But she fled when the priest said, Yes, my child? The incident made her physically ill. That evening, her talk with God revealed how deftly a preteen could raise transcendent concerns about abandonment, shame, and responsibility.

I really hurt Lauras feelings. Why did you let me do that? Ive been looking for you God. I looked in temple. I looked in church. And today, I looked for you when I wanted to confess. But you werent there. I didnt feel you at all. Not the way I do when I talk to you at night. Why God? Why do I only feel you when Im alone?

Margarets guilt about hurting Laura Danker and anxiety over her parents determined irreligiosity seem strikingly innocent today, when religion engenders such bitter political tensions. But looking backward from Margarets adolescence, her suburban religious dilemmas offer a convenient place from which we might begin to consider the surprising history of American religion between the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s and the 1960 Kennedy election.

That Margaret still could feel the pull of religion in the 1960s when she thought about Laura Danker or her expectant period points to religions often unexpectedly powerful persistence in and around Manhattan. Eighty years earlier, religious leaders and secular observers alike worried that there would be no religion for a Margaret to turn to, as traditional faith drowned in an onslaught of urbanization, industrialism, and unstable pluralism, all of it starkly epitomized in Manhattan and New York City. What happened that encouraged religious thinking in Margaret and in other New Yorkers and suburbanites in the 1950s and 1960s? Did religion itself change as new problems and new trends emerged? And for whom did religion changereligious leaders, lay worshipers, the curious, the indifferent?

The bet here is that the history of religion in Margarets birthplace, the epicenter of one of the worlds largest cities, can help us unravel the remarkable power of religion in modern America through two-thirds of the twentieth century. True, Blumes New YorkNew Jersey settings carry the tinge of East Coast provincialism. After all, dynamics among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants might have been different in Atlanta, Minneapolis, or Seattle and their suburbs. But no place and time is typical of every place and time, especially in America, and larger themes about the American experience often thrust past particularities of place. This is as true of religion and the questions religion has prompted in America as it is of other issues. Even if the story of religion in Manhattan cannot bring clarity to every question of religion in every American place, it offers important lessons about the relationship between religion and its perceived threats from twentieth-century urban modernity.

Of course, religion is not the subject that jumps to mind when thinking about modern Manhattan. The borough has long exemplified secular worldliness for Americans and visitors alike. Religion might seem reasonably associated with Manhattans quaint seventeenth-century Dutch past, antebellum-era Protestant social reform and abolition, and the increasing numbers of German Jews and German and Irish Catholics who deepened the islands long-standing religious diversity in the early republic. Indeed, Manhattan even spawned a prophet in the 1830sMathias, otherwise Robert Mathews. And an 1857 Protestant revival demonstrated that non-Catholic Christians could still dominate the citys religious atmosphere, even if the revival also reflected Protestant worries about maintaining their sway.

But after the Civil War and especially after 1880, religion scarcely registers as a key feature of Manhattan. Instead, everything inimical to religion comes to mind. In 1914 the New York Times summarized evangelist Billy Sundays view of the city as a hell holerotting, corroding, corrupt, hell-ridden, God-defying, [and] devil-ridden. (No matter that Sunday routinely called nearly all American cities hell holes, including relatively innocent Milwaukee.) A few European rabbis saw America itself as rife with threats. Russian rabbi Jacob David Willowski called America a trefa land where even the stones are impure. Hungarian rabbi Moses Weinberger, appalled by lax ritual practice in New York City, advised Jews still in Europe to stand firm, and stay where you are. Dont wander away. Israel Zangwill, the British Zionist, argued in 1910 that Jews were falling away from their duty amidst New Yorks urban chaos and that the city was not a Jewish center at all but a dissolving panorama of old Jewish life, a snowball which can only melt. Instead Zangwill urged Jews to consider Galveston, Texas, a gateway to the great empty spaces of America. Indeed, religious casualties mounted as Jews left Eastern Europes face-to-face shtetl communities for the freedom of Lower Manhattans anonymity. Some Jews embraced irreligious socialism, some took up atheistic Marxism, and some pursued naked American materialism, a route Abraham Cahan traced in his bracing 1917 novel, The Rise of David Levinsky.