LITMIR.BIZ

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sermons inside whitewashed walls. Lonely backcountry Methodist circuit riders lead boisterous camp meetings and raise rough-hewn chapels. Black Baptists fervently pray as they boycott local businesses in a push for civil rights. A savvy evangelist preaches comfort in the spacious auditorium of a modern suburban megachurch.

      None of these settings are necessarily urban. Yet each of these visions connects to metropolitan religious figures in one guise or another: village ministers read sermons from Puritan divines in Boston and London; circuit riders bought books from Methodist publishers in London and New York; civil rights activists drew influence from theology professors in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia; and megachurch pastors in Scottsdale might model their congregational mission plans on those of pastors in Chicago or Seattle.¹

      Yet the assumption lingers that cities and religion do not mix. Farsighted leaders of vital religious movements in America have viewed cities as places where religion dies. When Billy Graham held a revival in Manhattan in 1957, he prepared for spiritual war. Deeming his target “Sodom on the Subway,” Graham rallied large crowds of faithful evangelicals to invade the secular city.² Graham’s sentiments on the spiritual state of New York City were not new. The father of American Methodism, Francis Asbury, traveled nearly continuously throughout the United States and Canada from the 1770s to his death in 1815, observing and supervising Methodist churches. When he entered the Republic’s cities, however, Asbury encountered worldliness and sin. Upon preaching to an unresponsive New York congregation, he bewailed: “[New] York, in all the congregations, is the valley of dry bones. Oh Lord, I will lament the deplorable state of religion in all our towns and cities!”³ Asbury echoed the concerns of many observers who believed that religious faith best incubated in villages and the countryside.

      This book begins to explain why Francis Asbury feared the growth of the city, and explores the effect the city had on religion. Historians of early Republic New York have examined how the city’s growth affected where people lived, how they worked, what they ate, and even with whom they had sex.⁴ Urban expansion also influenced religious experience. I wanted to determine how the city’s churches responded to these changes: how their respective religious traditions shaped the way they reacted to the city, and how changes in the city affected the way they perceived and received religion in these years.

      To answer these questions, I examined the creation and growth of four Protestant congregations in early Republic New York: Trinity Episcopal, John Street Methodist, African Methodist Episcopal Zion (“Mother Zion”), and the black congregation of St. Philip’s Episcopal. These congregations varied in their wealth and racial makeup. But despite these differences in identity, all four shared a common theological tradition and institutional beginnings in the Anglican Church.

      A study of religious experience in New York could pursue any number of religious traditions. The Dutch Reformed Church was central to Manhattan’s development from the beginning, and its Calvinist theology and ethnic minority status intersected with American historical themes in unique ways. Moravians and Quakers shared dissenting theological trajectories and had important interactions with multiple races and ethnicities in the polyglot city, including its black population. Presbyterians in the early Republic perhaps best articulated the connections between evangelical religion and reform movements. These groups, and others, provide important illustrations of specific developments in religion, ethnicity, race, and reform in New York.⁵ But all, including the Dutch, were outsiders and minorities in New York City in the late colonial and early Republic eras. None remained central throughout the entire sweep of time that the city grew from several thousand to a half million inhabitants.

      In this study, I have focused on churches within the Anglican/Episcopalian tradition, including its Methodist offshoots. Anglican and Methodist churches were not the first, and were rarely the most successful, religious groups in New York City, but their histories bring the reader close to the main stories of New York’s development in the early Republic. The colonial-era British government promoted the Church of England as a model of cultural authority, so from its origins the Anglican Church in New York attempted to draw together different ethnic groups under its oversight. Methodists similarly welcomed different ethnicities, not to support the establishment but rather to create a new holy family in Christ. Both Anglicans and Methodists aspired to be geographically expansive and universally influential. Anglicans and Methodists were therefore well attuned to reflecting and recording the relationship between social and religious change, perhaps better than groups that were more marginal in the early Republic.

      Further, both Anglicans and Methodists (at least, the vast majority of them) were Arminian in theology. In the early Republic, increasing numbers of Americans rejected the Calvinism that dominated the early colonial period. This stance placed Anglicans and Methodists in the theological mainstream of American religion for the time, in contrast with either the Calvinist traditionalism of the Dutch Reformed, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists (themselves soon to be modified from within) or the prophetic but decidedly minority status of Quakers and Moravians.⁶

      The similarities between Methodism and Anglicanism help establish a common center of religious affiliation, but their differences ensure breadth to avoid a too-specialized, too-specific reading of any individual group. Methodists and Anglicans generally differed in their support for revivals; prorevival Methodists often gravitated toward evangelical groups, while antirevival Anglicans preferred communion with liturgical groups. They therefore straddled both sides of the most important theological divide in the American early Republic. Finally, the Anglicans and Methodists in these four congregations provide a study of varied social and ethnic populations. These churches contained rich and poor, native and immigrant, white and black, exalted and lowly. Thus the choice of Anglican and Methodist religious traditions allows this study to evaluate big themes in American religious and social history, even as the topic studied is small in scale.⁷

      The study of congregations reveals dynamics that larger and more general studies might miss. Because congregations occupy specific geographic locations in the city, and are comprised of an easily identified set of individuals, their connections to the urban environment are clear and direct. As communal meeting places, congregations occupy public space; as places where individuals regularly experience the sacred, they touch upon private life. As such, a study of congregations allows the historian to bridge the dichotomy of public and private, of sacred and secular. They reconnect religion with social context, to provide a full analysis of individual experience and change.⁸

      New Yorkers know these four congregations well. Trinity Episcopal Church was the oldest, formed in 1697, a mother of sorts to the later three groups. At its birth, British monarchs blessed Trinity with vast tracts of land that indicated its privilege and provided it wealth. Throughout the eighteenth century, and into the nineteenth, Trinity represented stability and social significance. It even dominated the physical landscape: not until the dawn of the twentieth century did any New York building rise above Trinity’s steeple. Some of the city’s most prominent families sat in its pews.

      Methodism began as a movement within the Church of England. In 1768, John Street Methodist Chapel formed from members nominally affiliated with Trinity Church. Important English Methodist leaders visited John Street, which was the first permanent Methodist meetinghouse in America. In 1784, American Methodists broke from both Anglicanism and English Methodism, and by that decade’s end, John Street was no longer a fledgling chapel, but a church in its own right. Although Methodism often attracted the working poor to its services, John Street housed some of the town’s wealthiest Methodists.

      The final two churches in this study established their identities on racial difference. Both Episcopal and Methodist churches welcomed blacks to worship, but widespread racism in America made biracial worship difficult. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, or Mother Zion, started much like John Street as an informal chapel, where blacks held separate worship services. Over the following two decades, members grew estranged from the white church and established an independent denomination. Mother Zion remains a symbol of the birth of black Methodism, central to African American history. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church also had beginnings in informal catechism study groups. In 1819, it erected its first building, but, unlike the African Methodists, its members remained under the white-run Episcopal hierarchy, and for decades

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