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“Religion's Engine”: Theorizing Religion and Modernity in Jon Butler's God in Gotham
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2021
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After reading Jon Butler's richly documented history of religion in Manhattan, I thought again of one of my favorite images: a 1939 watercolor by Ben Shahn called Self-Portrait among the Churchgoers, in which a photographer stands near a church on Sunday but points his camera toward the street and seems to ignore the gathering worshippers. Some U.S. historians might be relieved they do not need to learn more about those pious pedestrians, or what happens inside, but specialists in religious history might think the photographer has missed all the action. Has he? Well, in one sense, sure. Historians of religion must attend to churches and adherents, as Butler does, but, like Shahn's photographer, Butler also looks out to the wider cityscape. And that approach pays off as he asks how religion confronted “the challenge of modernity” in Manhattan, “the capital of American secularism.” More specifically, he hopes to explain why religion “didn't collapse in modernity's grasp,” as religion theorists like Max Weber and William James predicted.
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References
11 As Deborah Dash Moore kindly pointed out, Shahn's painting is more complicated than it first appears. It is possible that the artist portrayed in the painting actually is focused on the churchgoers after all, since Shahan was fond of using a Leica camera with a right-angle viewfinder. See John Edwin Mason, “Ben Shahn, with Leica and Right-Angle Viewfinder,” March 10, 2010, available at https://johnedwinmason.typepad.com/john_edwin_mason_photogra/2010/03/shahn-leica-right-angle-viewfinder.html.
12 Butler, God in Gotham, 9, 11.
13 Butler, God in Gotham, 10.
14 Butler, God in Gotham, 9.
15 Butler, God in Gotham, 31.
16 Butler, God in Gotham, 111–112.
17 Butler, God in Gotham, 154–155.
18 Butler, God in Gotham, 199.
19 Butler, God in Gotham, 229.
20 Butler, God in Gotham, 230.
21 Butler, God in Gotham, 27.
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