Research On Religion » New York City

Kyle Roberts on Evangelical Gotham

tonygill — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 09:00:32 +0000

Gotham. The Big Apple. The City that Never Sleeps. New York City. We have many images of New York City, but how many of us as thinking of that worldly city having a vibrant evangelical community in the 19th century? Kyle Roberts, an assistant professor of history at Loyola University (Chicago), takes us on a journey back to Manhattan Island from on a journey dating to the end of the Revolutionary War and to the eve of the Civil War to show how evangelical Christianity was shaped by this growing urban metropolis and how evangelicals, in turn, shaped the city. The interview is peppered with vivid characters who illustrate the distinct phases of evangelicalism during this seven decade period. Prof. Roberts defines what he means by evangelical Christianity, a religious movement that emphasized conversion, literalism, atoning for the death of Christ, individualism, and social activism/revivalism. He further lays out the interesting tension between the individualistic impulse of evangelicalism and its episodic concern for social activism. We then start the historical journey in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War and up to the War of 1812, meeting a businessman-turned-preacher, Charles Lahatt who was tapped to give a sermon on his voyage across the Atlantic as the Anglican pastor was too drunk to do so. New York, a port city of roughly 20,000 people, was beginning a major population and many individuals from Britain journeyed by boat to this new land. That voyage shaped the evangelical Christianity of this period with a focus on “crossing” (a conversion experience) and “dwelling” (creating a new life). We discover that evangelicals create and embrace the image of a “common church,” often built into storefronts, a tendency that defines much of New York religiosity to this day (see the podcasts by Tony Carnes below). He also emphasizes the role that women played in the expansion of evangelical Christianity as they were often the champions of benevolence societies. The second major period of Kyle’s study moves us from the War of 1812 to the Panic of 1837. New York is experiencing more growth, both demographically and economically. This becomes the “golden age of evangelical benevolence” as evangelicals move deeper into social activism, seeking to change the sinning ways of new arrivals and sailors. It is also a time when religious publishing booms as many pastors and religious groups disseminate spiritual tracts as a proselytism strategy to increasingly literate citizens. This highlights the interesting comfort that evangelicals have with modernity in this period, being willing to adapt to and adopt the new technologies at the time, often pushing them to new economic heights. The Panic of 1837 and long recovery shook the economic landscape of the city and issues a new era of urban evangelical Christianity that sees the limits of reform and social activism. Evangelicals turn inward and emphasize personal sanctification, with leaders such as Phoebe Worral Palmer creating the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society. Prof. Roberts finishes off with some of his thoughts regarding what he learned over the course of his studies, including how evangelicalism, and particularly the urban environment, is more complex than he had thought initially, and how the urban environment intersects in multiple ways with spiritual faith. He also leaves us on an optimistic note for the future noting how Protestants and Catholics found ways to mend their differences over time, which he looks forward to happening with the increased religious pluralism our nation is experiencing. Recorded: December 30, 2016.

Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City 1783-1860, by Kyle Roberts.

Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience 1814-2014, edited by Kyle Roberts and Stephen Schloesser.

Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities.

Jesuit Libraries Project.

Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project.

Tony Carnes on Jesus’s Auto Body (and Soul) Shop & Blessed Pizza.

William Reimer on Religion and Violence in Toronto.

Maureen Fitzgerald on Irish Nuns and Welfare.

John Fea on the American Bible Society.

Timothy Neary on Race, Sports, and Catholics.

Jonathan den Hartog on Patriotism and Piety.

Leigh Eric Schmidt on Village Atheists.

Bill Clark on an Academic’s Spiritual Journey

tonygill — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 08:00:04 +0000

In a personal interview that has a different flavor than many of our other episodes, we follow the spiritual journey of Prof. William Clark, a professor of political science at the Univeristy of Michigan, from his childhood years up until the present. While we have featured the personal stories of other guests on our show — such as cowboy preacher Dan Stiles and street preacher Jeff Rose — this discussion takes on a unique twist in that we ask Bill to use his own familiarity with the sociology of religion to reflect upon how his life informs us about the changing religious landscape more generally. Bill specializes in the study of international and comparative political economy, writing on such things as financial institutions, yet he nonetheless retains a close familiarity with what scholars who focus on religion are writing about.

We begin the journey with Bill growing up in New Jersey in a Catholic household. His close interaction with the Church has him considering the priesthood for a short time, though this is never realized. Instead, his interests in architecture and music take him along a different path in college. It is early in his college career, though, when he experiences a falling out with religion following the death of his father. This incident issues in a spiritual dry spell in his life and we follow the academic and professional trajectory of Bill through this period, which extends through his graduate training at Rutgers and first job down in Georgia. Despite his turn to a more secular life, he does marry a woman who remains more-or-less connected to her non-denominational religious roots and they begin a family together. The birth of their children draws Bill’s wife into weekly services with a desire to raise them with a moral foundation, while Bill admits to staying at home reading the New York Times on Sunday. Nonetheless, Bill does attend services on occasion and he admits to being rather argumentative with the pastors and their messages being that as an academic he was trained to disagree with somebody after a 40 minute sermon, irrespective what was being said. This academic personality trait becomes important later in his life as we see with his next move, which is northward to Princeton for a post-doc fellowship.

It is at Princeton where Bill’s spiritual journey takes an important turn. They connect to a Christian Missionary Alliance church and Bill, through a series of seemingly small but important events, begins engaging a small Bible study group and, after getting a job at NYU and making the long train commute, has a regular dinner discussion with the pastor of his church. These small group discussions and personal contact with the pastor play a much more important role in bringing Bill back to the faith than the large Sunday service experience, an interesting sociological observation that reveals a great deal about how people interact with faith and helps us to understand where Bill is today. He then discusses his conversion experience, which has both its small steps and its “brick wall” moment. Bill, at this point, makes a very intersting observation — it is the sociological factors that matter for the direction of one’s conversion, but there is still more to the process than just that.

We then move up to New York City. An exhaustive commute and the opportunity to get into NYU housing allows the Clark family to move to the Big Apple. It is here we discuss his involvement with the creation of a start-up church associated with the McManus bothers’ Mosaic Church in California. We delve into the experience of creating this church and what was unique about what he was doing. This portion of our conversation also recalls some of the insights provided in an earlier podcast with Tony Carnes about New York religion, namely that spirituality in New York is not always the typical Sunday service experience, but rather finds ways to work itself into some unusual cracks and corners of the city. This discussion leads us to reflect upon what the nature of our religious landscape looks like — not necessarily declining religiosity, but rather changing forms of religiosity that appears to many (incorrectly) to be a loss of faith.

The podcast closes with Bill’s most recent academic move to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Tony is given some academic advice on how to be more attractive to other schools (namely rely upon divine providence) and then we discuss how Bill’s spiritual life is again reshaped. Bill once again gets connected with what might be considered a more traditional-style of church, plugs into a small group format, and then eventually takes an interesting missional step outside of the church building, which is where he finds himself today. We conclude with Bill’s thoughts on the recent hubbub about the rise of “religious nones” in America and what he has learned on his academic and spiritual journey. Recorded: May 21, 2013.

RELATED LINKS

Bill Clark’s bio at the University of Michigan.

The Political Economy of Monetary Institutions, edited by William Bernhard, Lawrence Broz, and William Clark.

Capitalism, Not Globalism: Capital Mobility, Central Bank Independence, and the Political Control of the Economy, by William Clark.

Principles of Comparative Politics, by William Clark, Matt Golder, and Sona Golder.

RELATED PODCASTS

Tony Carnes on a Journey Through NYC Religions

Tony Carnes onJesus’s Auto Body Shop and New York City Religions, Part II

Margarita Mooney on Her Monastic Vacation

Kimberly Conger on Being Christian in Secular Academia

W. Bradford Wilcox on Marriage

Tony Carnes on Jesus’s Auto Body (and Soul) Shop, Blessed Pizza, and NYC Religions Part II

tonygill — Sun, 19 May 2013 08:00:49 +0000

Get ready to go on a journey — a fascinating, inspiring, and sometimes unusual journey — through the spiritual life of New York City. Following up on a previous podcast interview with Tony Carnes, who created and runs a research/journalism project known as A Journey Through NYC Religions, we walk through the various boroughs of Gotham to discover a circle of Korean limo drivers holding Bible study, a famous Harlem hat maker who helps troubled souls via a small chapel in her store, and an award-winning hair salon that favors spiritual healing over gossip. We also find out how (East Coast) Tony discovered a prayer group meeting on a Friday night in one of the seediest parts of the Bronx and located in Jesus’s Auto Body Shop, named after a certain envangelist who did his preaching two millenium ago. Our conversation begins with how Mr. Carnes started his journalistic investigation some three years ago and almost immediately stumbled upon an odd little church with a Spanish-speaking minister who came from a Russian Orthodoxy tradition. And in another part of town, he was also amazed to find an Afghan-Hispanic Muslim cooperating with a Chinese-American Jew to teach African-American kids strong morals. Our conversation not only covers these specific manifestations of New York religiosity, but also covers broader trends. We hold a fascinating conversation about how many studies of religion underestimate spiritual activity byfocusing only on churches or similar houses of worship that we tend to be familiar with. Add to this that many of these surveys and censuses are affected by under-reporting by African-American and immigrant churches that stay below the sociological radar for a variety of reasons. We also discuss how and why 1978 was a pivotal year for church growth in NYC and how religious life further changed in the 1990s under Mayor Giuliani. We then highlight some of the recent stories that Tony Carnes’s website has featured recently, including a look at Jackie Robinson’s religious background, an aspect of his life that was not covered in the recent movie, “42.” This prompts (West Coast) Tony to ask about the hubbub surrounding Tim Tebow and the New York Jets over the past year. A fascinating conversation ensues drawing in the likes of former Knicks guard Jeremy Lin and the pastoral route that former Jets’ lineman Michael Faulkner took with his life. This is when our conversation then turns to how religiosity has manifested itself in the world of small business in NYC, with our focus turning to Harlem’s Heaven (hat shop), Divine Connection Hair Salon, Blessed Pizza, Jesus’s Auto Body Shop, and a group of Korean limo drivers who hold Bible study sessions at 4 a.m. Tony Carnes makes several important observations at this point, namely that it is not often elites that change our social culture, but rather grassroots outsiders like all the folks we just mentioned. Moreover, we note that the recent discussion of the rise of “religious nones” in society is not picking up much of this unconventional religious behavior that goes on in the city. If you are only looking in the established pews of church buildings, synagogues, or mosques, you are likely to miss a great portion of the story. Tony discusses how his team of journalists will stop and investigate any store that has a Quran in the window or any business with a spiritual sounding name to see what is happening behind those doors. As this entire interview reveals, there is a great deal of religion that is occuring on a daily basis. Tony finishes the interview describing what his organization is up to, including plans underway to expand this model of investigative, data-driven journalism and the various workshops he offers to high school and college students as well as anyone else who is interested in what he is doing. Recorded: May 15, 2013.

RELATED LINKS

Tony Carnes’s profile on A Journey through NYC Religions

A Journey through NYC Religions main website.

Values Research Institute.

New York Glory: Religions in the City, edited by Tony Carnes and Anna Karpathakis.

Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries, edited by Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang.

Harlem’s Heaven Hat Boutique and the link to the video on A Journey’s website.

Divine Connection Hair Spa on Facebook.

Some of the businesses mentioned in the show, including Jesus’s Auto Body and Blessed Pizza are too small to maintain websites, but we greatly welcome any information that you can provie about them in the comment section below or on our Facebook Fan Page. Please forgive us if your posts get caught in our spam filter.

Timothy Dalrymple on Religion, Sports, and Jeremy Lin.

Tony Carnes on A Journey through NYC Religions

tonygill — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 08:00:29 +0000

Religion in New York City? Say it ain’t so! Well, we talk with journalist Tony Carnes, who over the past three years has been working on a project to document every nook and cranny of The Big Apple in a search for that city’s spiritual lifeblood. His multi-media endeavor, known as A Journey through New York City Religions, has uncovered a remarkably vibrant spiritual lanscape that is constantly changing as the city finds itself in the throes of constant immigration and emigration. We start our interview with a look at (East Coast) Tony’s life, discussing his upbringing in small town Texas as well as his first visit to NYC wherein he was pleased to find out he could order a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at The Four Seasons restaurant. He then explains his own personal religious development from a kid more interested in hot rods than in the Bible and how this changed while he was at the University of Texas. His journey then takes us around the globe, including a pit stop to study under Frances Schaeffer at L’Abri in Switzerland, until he finally lands a job as a journalist, contributing to such notable publications as Christianity Today, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Newsday. Our discussion probes a theme that has arisen several times before on this podcast series, namely why the mass media tends to overlook the nation’s religious life or portrays it in ways that are incongruent with people’s daily experience. Mr. Carnes then gets into the details of how he set up A Journey through NYC Religions based upon the changes he saw taking place in internet media and how that could be harnessed to explore stories that were largely being ignored. Our conversation then moves to a discussion of New York City itself and how it has changed over time, from what was once considered “Sodom and Gomorrah on the Hudson” in the late 19th century to its “burned out days” in the 1960s and ’70s, to what it has become today. He provides some interesting data on how religion, which appeared to be on the decline in the ’50s and ’60s, makes a remarkable turnaround in NYC starting in 1978, particularly with the growth of evangelical churches being founded in the city. We then discuss how Tony goes about this project including his initial plan for covering the 6,400 miles of roads in the city and what questions he asks of his religious subjects that he encounters. He also reveals the journalistic philosophy that undergirds his reporting, something known as “sympathetic objectivity,” and how this differs from “accountability journalism” that most other news outlets practice. (If you listen carefully at this point in the interview you can hear RoR’s very own canine mascot, Rocky Barkington, weigh in with his opinion.) We finish our interview with a few stories of Tony’s adventures, including trodding through one of New York’s biggest snowstorms to find a pastor’s house, his discovery of a Mayan evangelical church, and Tony’s reflections on what he has learned over the years of doing this project. Contrary to secularization theorists, or those folks who think secular culture is trumping religion, Mr. Carnes sees an awakening of spiritual fervor facilitated by the mixing of new people always feeding into this great metropolis. Starving to hear more specific stories of religion in New York, (West Coast) Tony invites (East Coast) Tony back on the show, to which Mr. Carnes gracefully agrees. Stay tuned. Recorded: April 19, 2013.

RELATED LINKS

Tony Carnes’s profile on A Journey through NYC Religions

A Journey through NYC Religions main website.

Values Research Institute.

New York Glory: Religions in the City, edited by Tony Carnes and Anna Karpathakis.

Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries, edited by Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang.

ProPublica, as mentioned in the podcast.