Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783–1860

Kyle Roberts's ambitious study of the growth of evangelical congregations in New York City in the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War is meticulous in its attention to detail, thought-provoking in its claims, and sensitive in its interpretations. Roberts, who is Associate Professor of Public History and New Media in the History Department at Loyola University Chicago, draws on and contributes to the fields of religious history, urban history, social history, demography, ecclesiology, and literary history. The book is divided into three chronological parts reflecting political and economic events (1783–1815, 1815–40, and 1840–60), with a substantial appendix that quantifies the congregations by denomination in five-year periods, in the categories of Evangelical Protestant (several denominations); Mixed Evangelical Protestant (Protestant Episcopal and Reformed Dutch); Non-Evangelical Protestant (several denominations); and Non-Protestant (Roman Catholic and Jewish).The New York State Constitution of 1777 guaranteed freedom of religious profession and worship (from 1784 any congregation could be incorporated as long as it had a democratically elected body of trustees); the disestablished Church of England became the Protestant Episcopal Church. The principal evangelical denominations were the Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the Baptists, with some evangelicals among the Protestant Episcopalians. (Congregationalism, essentially a New England phenomenon, scarcely caught on in New York.) According to Roberts's tables, from 1800 to 1855 the Evangelical Protestant category constituted just over half the city's total. For example, of the 142 evangelical congregations in 1855 (out of a total number of congregations of 275), 39 were Presbyterians, with 17 other Presbyterian categories; 33 were Methodist Episcopal, with 10 other Methodist categories; 33 were Baptist. The picture began to change in 1860, the end of the period covered, with increasing immigration to New York: there were now 32 Roman Catholic congregations and 17 Jewish ones. Throughout the book there are valuable images of meeting houses, preaching houses, mission houses, ‘bethels’, and chapels of different denominations, showing the architectural changes from ‘storefront churches’ in the later eighteenth century to the imposing steepled St Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church of 1857 as the city's population increased and wealthier congregations moved northward (a handful of maps pinpoints the distribution of denominations in successive periods, though the small scale regrettably makes these difficult to scrutinize).One of the attractive aspects of this book is the range of manuscript and contemporary printed sources that Roberts has used, illustrating the trajectories of evangelical New Yorkers of different denominations. These include the manuscript journal of the layman Charles Lahatt, who is presented in the first chapter as a type of literal and spiritual travel: originally a Lutheran who left Germany for London, where he heard the evangelical Rowland Hill, in 1789 he sailed to America on business, and was prevailed on by the ship's captain to preach; when he reached New York he began a prayer meeting, and later joined a Baptist church by immersion in the East River. Ezra Styles Ely, a Congregationalist and Yale graduate who was unable to get a Presbyterian pulpit in New York, became a missionary in the public almshouse and hospital, recording his detailed exchanges in his two much-reprinted Journals (1812, 1815) (also titled Visits of Mercy). Ward Stafford, educated at Andover and Yale, spelled out a programme for evangelizing in the upper part of the city, ill supplied with churches, in The New Missionary Field (1817).For the readers of Wesley and Methodist Studies Roberts's accounts of the growth of Methodism in New York and the activities of its members will prove most valuable. For example, the Sunday school teacher Michael Floy Jr kept a diary in the 1830s (published in 1941), in which he recorded reading more than 250 useful books, and in 1834 published a memoir of one of his pupils who died young. Roberts usefully sets this tract in the context of the burgeoning of evangelical publishing in the city. Henry Chase worked as a missionary on the waterfront from 1821 to 1854, a longer tenure, Roberts tells us, than that of any other urban missionary, encouraging his converts to attend the interdenominational Mariner's Church. A much better-known figure, Phoebe Worrall Palmer, to whom a whole chapter is devoted, was a prominent writer, revivalist, and developer of John Wesley's theology of perfection, whose published works in the 1830s and 1840s, notably The Way of Holiness, went through many international editions, and who took her campaign to the British Isles from 1859 to 1863. Roberts observes tartly that this allowed her ‘to sit out escalating tensions over slavery’ (218). As fascinating as these individual portraits is the history of the rebuilding of the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church (1768, 1818, 1841).There are, however, some mistakes. There were several prominent evangelical dissenters in England in the late eighteenth century (most of Whitefield's followers were not members of the Church of England). Not all evangelicals thought conversion included forgiveness through the imputation of Christ's righteousness (a doctrine abominated by Wesleyans). The Wesley brothers achieved no colonial revivals. Richard Baxter was a moderate Nonconformist, not a Calvinist Independent, and was highly valued by John Wesley; it is no surprise that Floy also admired Baxter.

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