any New York building rise above Trinity’s steeple. Some of the city’s most prominent families sat in its pews.
Methodism began as a movement within the Church of England. In 1768, John Street Methodist Chapel formed from members nominally affiliated with Trinity Church. Important English Methodist leaders visited John Street, which was the first permanent Methodist meetinghouse in America. In 1784, American Methodists broke from both Anglicanism and English Methodism, and by that decade’s end, John Street was no longer a fledgling chapel, but a church in its own right. Although Methodism often attracted the working poor to its services, John Street housed some of the town’s wealthiest Methodists.
The final two churches in this study established their identities on racial difference. Both Episcopal and Methodist churches welcomed blacks to worship, but widespread racism in America made biracial worship difficult. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, or Mother Zion, started much like John Street as an informal chapel, where blacks held separate worship services. Over the following two decades, members grew estranged from the white church and established an independent denomination. Mother Zion remains a symbol of the birth of black Methodism, central to African American history. St. Philip’s Episcopal Church also had beginnings in informal catechism study groups. In 1819, it erected its first building, but, unlike the African Methodists, its members remained under the white-run Episcopal hierarchy, and for decades remained without a voice or vote in the denomination. St. Philip’s long path to recognition within the New York diocese is a dramatic story in its own right.9 Mother Zion and St. Philip’s were pathbreaking black congregations in New York; elite blacks attended these two churches alongside poorer coreligionists.
These four congregations shared common bonds through their institutional origins and in some of their theological assumptions, but each had a unique geographic location, social makeup, and forward trajectory. The development of these four churches provides a laboratory of sorts to closely observe and test the claims of urban religious transformation. Through them one can measure what role revivals played in an urban setting; when, why, and how black churches split from white bodies; or how urban and economic growth (and decay) affected religious identities.
In the early Republic, New York City underwent a massive transformation, growing from a provincial port town to a major commercial center. In 1790, New York’s population stood at just over 30,000 inhabitants; the number doubled to 60,000 in 1800 and doubled again in 1820 to 123,000 inhabitants. This exponential growth accelerated in the following decades, exploding to a half million residents in 1850. New York overtook Philadelphia as the nation’s most populous city at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By 1860, New York had become a world city in its influence.10
Amid all this growth, New York earned a secular reputation as a place where one could advance commercially.11New York was the financial and cultural center of the expanding nation, and important members of society, including John Jay, James Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth, attended the city’s churches.12 The presence and interaction of these leading figures in a place where religious influence seemed to be dwindling made New York congregations central to developments that did not occur elsewhere until much later.
This study draws together several genres of historical inquiry. As a social history, it studies the interactions and relationships between different groups of New Yorkers in the early Republic. As a religious history, it recognizes that those groups claimed institutional affiliation with specific religious bodies. And as a record of lived experience, it works to combine the social reality and the religious choice of these New Yorkers, to see the city through the eyes of its inhabitants. While geographically precise, it is expansive to the degree that human perceptions are expansive, even messy.
Church history provides a base and a foil for the work. Traditionally, church histories narrated the institutional development of the church. Practicing adherents of the religion—often professional clergy—typically wrote them. Church histories usually privileged the actions of clergy over those of the laity, and theological issues over social and cultural contexts. While such studies can appear antiquarian or esoteric to those outside the religious tradition, church histories provide an important starting point for this study. For one, church historians often focused on individual congregations. And their emphasis on theology provides a missing ingredient in determining the identity of religious actors. Finally, because church histories provided the earliest narrative of a religious group, they supply clues to the social identities of the historical actors, specifying people and places within a larger religious setting that later scholars have overlooked.13
Theologically and institutionally driven church histories have not been in vogue for nearly a century; the second major field used in this study, social history, largely supplanted church history in interpreting religion. Social histories place the religious actors of church history in their local environments, linking them to shared identities involving class, gender, race, and space. The classic models of social history often connected economic development and class identity to religion. A dominant strain of this historiography has suggested that evangelical reformers used a religious vocabulary of conversion to draw together troubled elites and a rising middle class, both of whom embraced religion as a form of social control over unruly laboring orders.14 Historians of gender have built from, and challenged, this economic base by considering the place of women in evangelical conversion attempts; such studies have pointed out that elite and bourgeois attempts to convert the lower orders often focused on working women, and the transformation of those women into genteel partners in domesticity.15 Scholars of race and slavery have also connected religion and social experience. Historians have recognized the importance of religion to the slave experience, and of the black church to the formation and defense of the black community throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.16
In recent years, other historians of religion have rejected church history as too narrowly defined, but stepped away from the occasionally reductionist claims of social history, to promote the concept of lived religion. Borrowing a page from anthropology, lived religion attempts thick description to uncover the web of symbols and meanings that historical participants experience as their culture.17 This approach focuses on laity over clergy, and common perceptions over elite; it consequently blurs traditional religious categories such as sacred and secular that high theological studies establish as rigid and distinct.18 But this approach considers religion as religion, and does not attempt to attribute other, social or historical, factors as primary in considering religious experience. Rather, religion is a highly individualized concept, molded and shaped for common consumption.
A number of historical works have navigated among these schools. In general, the fault lines have lain between scholars who place religion at the forefront, and those who put greater weight on social factors as causing or determining religious questions. Scholars of Methodism, for example, have either identified the movement as a popular religious expression birthed alongside the American Revolution, or have highlighted the social forces shaping Methodism, thus rendering its religious aspects secondary to tensions of class, race, or gender.19 Historians of American Episcopalianism have similarly either considered the theological heritage and trajectories of the denomination, or probed the race and gender tensions arising within the church.20 Historians of black religion have more closely blended the two categories, but bemoan the lack of truly biracial studies of religious experience.21
My focus on the congregation as a social unit cuts across these historiographical categories. Congregational studies must return, in part, to church history, because the individuals who attended the churches debated, defended, and fought over who led them, and their theologies. But congregations’ small scale also allows historians to look closely at the class, gender, and racial identities individuals retained in their churches. A congregation bridges the dichotomy of public and private, or sacred and secular—as a communal meeting place (public) where individuals regularly experience the sacred (private). A congregation’s specific geographic location allows the historian to connect religion with social
