Evangelical Gotham

"With deep and wide-ranging research, Roberts has provided a path-breaking interpretation of religious dynamics in the development of New York City as the nation's leading urban center. The book is simply jammed with insights--especially on the city's expanding but also conflicted evangelical churches (Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist), but also on race, religious and ethnic minorities, missionary initiatives, market-place instincts, gender, revival, philanthropic voluntarism, and more. Evangelical Gotham is a splendid book."

-- "Mark A. Noll, author of America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln"
"Evangelical Gotham persuasively demonstrates that American evangelicals shaped the development of New York City, even as New York City shaped the development of American evangelicalism. . . Roberts convinces that without Gotham, evangelicalism in America would not have developed into the powerhouse it became over the course of the nineteenth century."-- "Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life"
"Evangelical Gotham's evocative portrait of born-again Protestantism in early nineteenth-century New York City offers a startling new history of religious fervor in a city too quickly tagged with secularism and a vivid account of America's first evangelical nerve center. Vividly written and ingeniously researched, Evangelical Gotham recasts much of what we thought we knew about American urbanism, religion, and the dynamics of American evangelical germination."-- "Jon Butler, Yale University"
"Until recently historians have viewed the landscape of religion chiefly from the perspective of social history, treating the realm of faith as a subjective response to uncertainty and change and spiritual movements as instruments for imposing order. Sometimes the secular approach goes farther and sees in revivals and awakenings the ambitions of elites to impose social control over the subordinate classes. Roberts will have none of this. In Evangelical Gotham, religion operates as a domain of meaning in its own right, anchoring individual lives, building institutions, and inspiring aid to the needy in body and spirit. Roberts shows that evangelicals embraced the city and appropriated its characteristic institutions to religious ends. In a stratified society, rent by divisions of class, race, and ethnicity, these dedicated souls were inclusive and expansive, seeking to bring every possible soul within their embrace. Such a faith proved a social force of immense importance and in charting its impact Roberts provides us with a powerful lens through which to view the world of the early republic."-- "Robert Gross, University of Connecticut"