![]() ![]() Religion became fundamental to identity and scarcely separable from culture and ethnicity. ![]() Populations that might not have been terribly religious in their home countries became legendarily pious in the New World. Above all, that meant churches and synagogues. ![]() How could it have been otherwise? Gotham was a city of immigrants who found support and solace not in government but in popular institutions. But as Jon Butler demonstrates in his dazzling study of faith and its practice in the city between 18, religious life of all kinds was vibrantly alive in Sodom on the Hudson. Antiurban passions were acutely expressed in the temperance and Prohibition movements. Through much of the last century, evangelicals and conservative Christians were at best suspicious of the threats to faith and morality in the burgeoning metropolis, and some preachers denounced it savagely. At first glance, the theme of religion in modern ManhatÂtan might seem discouraging. ![]()
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