On his book God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan
Cover Interview of March 17, 2021
Lastly
God in
Gotham wasn’t
written to celebrate religion. But it was written to help readers
understand what might have been accomplished by religious people in seemingly
strained settings. In this regard, it is implicitly and explicitly critical of
two strands in writing about religion in twenty-first-century America.
First, God
in Gotham is critical of histories that implicitly and explicitly celebrate
the religious commitment of previous rather than recent times. Historians and
scholars of religion have spent too much time insisting that before 1500
religion in the West was essentially “axiomatic,” or a given. But after 1500
(yes, it’s not an accident that the Protestant Reformation dates from 1517) it
is said that Westerners faced choices that ultimately led to secularization and
its steady effacement of religion. Such accounts dismiss the complexity of the
past. Religious commitment and adherence were problematic in all ages and all
settings, if hardly in the same ways. It was not without reason that before
1500 every European nation attached horrific penalties to those who rejected
religion broadly or spurned its specific government- or church-sanctioned forms,
including maiming and death.
Second, God
in Gotham is critical of histories that treat twentieth-century American
life as all but bereft of religion, especially from the 1920s into the 1970s. They
often bypass the deep religious dimensions of the post-1945 civil rights
crusade, despite the religious affiliations of so many civil rights leaders. Then
such histories breathlessly scramble to describe the rise of conservative
evangelical politics, deftly avoiding any account of how the movement could
have emerged from the seemingly silent religious stage of the previous
half-century.
God in
Gotham is hardly
without criticism of the figures and movements it describes and discusses. Nor
does it suggest that success in grappling with urban modernity after 1880
precluded new difficulties such as those that have emerged powerfully since the
1980s—from the sexual abuse scandals in Catholicism and Protestantism to the stark
decline in the mainstream denominations and the rise of the religious “nones”,
especially among the young, who are indifferent to traditional organized
religion. For better or worse, God in Gotham is a distinctly historical
book about the fate of organized religion in a specific place during specific
decades. It is not a breezy prognostication about religion’s future in
twenty-first century America or the world. However potentially interesting,
that is a task blessedly beyond the skills of a historian, and certainly beyond
the skills of this one.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
God in Gotham wasn’t written to celebrate religion. But it was written to help readers understand what might have been accomplished by religious people in seemingly strained settings. In this regard, it is implicitly and explicitly critical of two strands in writing about religion in twenty-first-century America.
First, God in Gotham is critical of histories that implicitly and explicitly celebrate the religious commitment of previous rather than recent times. Historians and scholars of religion have spent too much time insisting that before 1500 religion in the West was essentially “axiomatic,” or a given. But after 1500 (yes, it’s not an accident that the Protestant Reformation dates from 1517) it is said that Westerners faced choices that ultimately led to secularization and its steady effacement of religion. Such accounts dismiss the complexity of the past. Religious commitment and adherence were problematic in all ages and all settings, if hardly in the same ways. It was not without reason that before 1500 every European nation attached horrific penalties to those who rejected religion broadly or spurned its specific government- or church-sanctioned forms, including maiming and death.
Second, God in Gotham is critical of histories that treat twentieth-century American life as all but bereft of religion, especially from the 1920s into the 1970s. They often bypass the deep religious dimensions of the post-1945 civil rights crusade, despite the religious affiliations of so many civil rights leaders. Then such histories breathlessly scramble to describe the rise of conservative evangelical politics, deftly avoiding any account of how the movement could have emerged from the seemingly silent religious stage of the previous half-century.
God in Gotham is hardly without criticism of the figures and movements it describes and discusses. Nor does it suggest that success in grappling with urban modernity after 1880 precluded new difficulties such as those that have emerged powerfully since the 1980s—from the sexual abuse scandals in Catholicism and Protestantism to the stark decline in the mainstream denominations and the rise of the religious “nones”, especially among the young, who are indifferent to traditional organized religion. For better or worse, God in Gotham is a distinctly historical book about the fate of organized religion in a specific place during specific decades. It is not a breezy prognostication about religion’s future in twenty-first century America or the world. However potentially interesting, that is a task blessedly beyond the skills of a historian, and certainly beyond the skills of this one.