Urban evangelicals: Popular religious belief in New York City, 1783--1845

This dissertation examines the relationship between evangelicalism and the city in the lives of New Yorkers in the sixty years following the American Revolution. As New York City experienced unprecedented demographic, geographic, and commercial growth, evangelicalism emerged as the nation\u27s most rapidly spreading religious movement. New York\u27s secular reputation has long overshadowed the role religion played in its development, while historians of evangelicalism have long believed evangelicalism\u27s success lay in its rural, not urban, manifestation. Yet for a diverse range of men and women, evangelicalism provided a vibrant popular religion that shaped their experience of the city. ^ Drawing on print, manuscript, and material evidence, this dissertation traces how two core principles of evangelicalism, conversion and the missionary spirit, combined at the turn of the nineteenth century to provide New Yorkers with a powerful justification for engaging the city. Arriving in New York from around the Atlantic World, evangelicals rebuilt desecrated meetinghouses, gathered scattered congregations, participated in revivals, and published several short-lived magazines. The hardships of the War of 1812 awakened evangelicals to the need to alleviate the temporal and spiritual wants of their neighbors. With the return of peace came an unprecedented period of expansion. Evangelicals focused on the conversion of new audiences, locally through geographic strategies for sorting the city, and nationally through a print culture emanating from city presses. Embrace of reform ultimately revealed the limits of what New Yorkers, evangelical and otherwise, would accept.^ Rather than shunning the secular city, evangelical New Yorkers embraced the opportunities and wrestled with the challenges it offered. Evangelicals founded scores of voluntary associations, built hundreds of churches, and turned New York into a national center for the production and distribution of evangelical culture. Over time, however, evangelicals found a majority of their neighbors responded to their efforts variously with indifference, violence, and, less frequently than they would have liked, conversion. Yet in the process of reaching out to the city around them, evangelical New Yorkers created an enduring urban religion, a distinct form of religious practice, understanding, and experience that came out of their dynamic engagement with the city.