Four Steeples over the City Streets
Описание книги
Tells the diverse story of four congregations in New York City as they navigated the social and political changes of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. In the fifty years after the Constitution was signed in 1787, New York City grew from a port town of 30,000 to a metropolis of over half a million residents. This rapid development transformed a once tightknit community and its religious experience. Including four churches belonging in various forms to the Church of England, that in some form still thrive today. Rapid urban and social change connected these believers in unity in the late colonial era. As the city grew larger, more impersonal, and socially divided, churches reformed around race and class-based neighborhoods. In Four Steeples over the City Streets, Kyle T. Bulthuis examines the intertwining of these four famous institutions—Trinity Episcopal, John Street Methodist, Mother Zion African Methodist, and St. Philip’s (African) Episcopal—to uncover the lived experience of these historical subjects, and just how religious experience and social change connected in the dynamic setting of early Republic New York. Drawing on a wide range of sources including congregational records and the unique histories of some of the churches leaders, Four Steeples over the City Streets reveals how these city churches responded to these transformations from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century. Bulthuis also adds new dynamics to the stories of well-known New Yorkers such as John Jay, James Harper, and Sojourner Truth. More importantly, Four Steeples over the City Streets connects issues of race, class, and gender, urban studies, and religious experience, revealing how the city shaped these churches, and how their respective religious traditions shaped the way they reacted to the city. This book is a critical addition to the study and history of African American activism and life in the ever-changing metropolis of New York City.
Отрывок из книги
Early American Places is a collaborative project of the University of Georgia Press, New York University Press, Northern Illinois University Press, and the University of Nebraska Press. The series is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.earlyamericanplaces.org.
ADVISORY BOARD
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Chapter 4 explores the place of women in the churches in the growing city. Women constituted a numerical majority in each congregation. After 1800, wealthy women quietly entered the public sphere. They organized charitable institutions that focused on widows and children. These benevolent societies preserved traditional assumptions about poverty and the organic vision of society of the colonial era. Paradoxically, however, such organizations opened the way for more radical forms of action, as they provided public spaces, however circumscribed, for society’s wealthiest women. Many more women in the churches preserved conventional gender roles by choosing private pious contemplation and steady attendance at worship services. The close connection of some of these women to their ministers heightened social tensions in the churches.
The fifth chapter explains the intersections of gender with race in church life. In the larger society, slavery, poverty, and menial status meant that black men risked being labeled feminine and without power. Thus in the black churches men, not women, took primary place, mimicking the white church’s example in an exaggerated form. Black women, however, remained numerous in the churches, and supported their leaders through the emergence of auxiliary benevolent societies and in quiet, obedient forms of piety, similar to most white women. Just as white women gained a place in the public sphere through benevolence, so did black men in public processions and benevolent societies. These black men used a universal language of unity, which mirrored colonial-era church language, but like those earlier forms masked the strongly middle-class and masculine identities of the actors.
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