Twenty years ago, in his landmark article “Jack-in-the-Box Faith,” Jon Butler argued that scholarship on the pre-Civil War United States “has long featured religion at almost every critical interpretive point” but that “religion has not fared well in the historiography of modern America.” Despite the good work of religious historians, Butler found that their scholarship stood “outside the interpretative mainstream.” There, like a jack-in-the-box, religion appeared as a peculiar surprise and receded without receiving substantive analysis.Footnote ¹

“Jack-in-the-Box Faith” did not discuss how urban historians had or had not treated religion. The article did, however, highlight three issues for scholars to address in order to clarify and solve the absence of religion in modern American history, and each of these issues had deep resonance with the study of cities and suburbs.

First and foremost, Butler noted that the religion problem in twentieth century historiography rested on the assumption that religion has receded from public life. Among the developments said to have spawned secularism are the rise of science, industry, technology, corporatism, and “the eruption of urban megalopolises” which “displaced rural, face-to-face society” and “obscured religion as traditionally understood and practiced.” And yet, Butler argued, the durability of “robust religious affiliation rates” challenged the notion that the United States had secularized as it urbanized.Footnote ²

In turn, Butler argued that historians had “only occasionally emphasized religion’s impact on modern American” public life and politics. Religion’s role in the presidential elections of 1928 and 1960, the civil rights movement, and the rise of the Religious Right were the exceptions that proved the rule. Otherwise, the dismissal or downplaying of matters of faith were standard practice despite numerous instances proving “religion’s resilience and power to shape political movements and electoral politics.” In this vein Butler highlighted studies that found that religion was “the second most important cleavage separating American voters after race.”Footnote ³

Finally, Butler argued that historians too easily viewed religion as “a fixed embodiment of premodern culture” and thus missed how religious actors in the twentieth century embraced the globalism, ecumenism, and therapeutic impulse of modernity. In particular, Butler argued, “religion found more compatibility than threat” in modern material and consumer culture. The consumerist suburbs thus “proved a boon to organized religion” and help account for the postwar religious boom.Footnote ⁴

In one sense, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith” seemed to capture a moment. It was published in 2004 amid an uptick in well-received monographs on twentieth-century American religion, many of which were centered on the city despite not being written by urban historians. Among many others, these include works by John T. McGreevy, Thomas Tweed, Robert Orsi, and James T. Fisher exploring American Catholicism;Footnote ⁵ Susan A. Glenn, Ruth Gay, and Etan Diamond writing on Jewish urbanism;Footnote ⁶ and Milton C. Sernett, Omar M. McRoberts, and Wallace Best studying Black religion.Footnote ⁷ These scholars were interested in, among other themes, exploring the intersection of migration, urbanization, industrialization, and religion. They showed how religious rituals gave shape to urban spaces and contributed to the formation of community and the maintenance of tradition amid the upheavals of urban and suburban migration. At the same time, they detailed how migration and urbanization spawned evolutions in religious practice and institutions and even the formation of new religious traditions. And they highlighted the central role that religion played in inspiring labor activism during different periods of change in the urban industrial economy.

Within five years of Butler’s article, a survey by the American Historical Association found that more historians labeled themselves religious historians than any other single subfield.Footnote ⁸ Unsurprisingly, therefore, by the tenth anniversary of “Jack-in-the-Box Faith,” and in the years since, there has been an undeniable expansion of scholarship on urban religion, including works on American Jews by Deborah Dash Moore and Lila Corwin Berman;Footnote ⁹ Black Americans by Jacob S. Dorman and Judith Weisenfeld;Footnote ¹⁰ white Protestants by Eileen Luhr, Gretchen Buggeln, Kyle B. Roberts, Mark Wild, and Sean Dempsey;Footnote ¹¹ and Latino Catholics by Roberto R. Trevino and Deborah E. Kanter.Footnote ¹² Scholars of this generation continued to be interested in the role that religion, especially combined with race and ethnicity, has played in the formation of identity for urban migrants and minorities and how religion inspired quests for civil rights. They also began to explore how, in the wake of white flight and suburbanization, religious groups formed community, embraced modernism and consumerism, and contributed to the rise of political conservatism. However, they have also shown how religion in the postwar period gave rise to a spirit of metropolitanism that flowered in various progressive projects of urban renewal and social justice.

In another sense, however, the problem Butler cited remained. In 2010, Kevin Schultz and Paul Harvey concurred that most American historians left religion “to those who identify explicitly as religious historians” and failed to see religion as “essential for the grand narrative.” In particular, Schultz and Harvey underscored the absence of religion in suburban studies, lamenting that Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, the “foundational text” on the history of those “most avowedly religious of places,” had ignored the role of religion in their development.Footnote ¹³ Michelle Nickerson made the same critique of the so-called “new suburban history,” which also overlooked how religion organized suburban space and shaped suburban economics, politics, and family life.Footnote ¹⁴

So, in a 2016 article, “God, Gotham, and Modernity,” Butler celebrated the recent scholarship that had taken urban religion more seriously, but he once again lamented that religion appears “only fitfully in broad-scale urban histories. We know much about the ways particular religious groups confronted modern city life,” Butler wrote, “but broad-scale writings on modern urbanism tend to stress technology, urban planning, and finance, leaving religion aside.”Footnote ¹⁵ Another way of framing the problem might be to say that despite an undeniable increase in scholarship on urban religion, monographs in urban history not expressly about religion often fail to address religion at all.

Once again, Butler tried to point the way forward. In the remainder of his article, and in his 2020 monograph, God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan, he uncovered how religion thrived in Manhattan, the supposed “capital of American secularism,” from the Civil War through the 1960s. Despite Max Weber’s predictions of secularization, and pastoral leaders’ fears about urbanization’s pernicious effects on faith, religious entrepreneurs had employed new technologies and media, including electricity and radio, to spread their message. Congregations had embraced professionalization and modern management techniques, and taken advantage of New York’s real estate market to sacralize the urban landscape. Thus, the hallmarks of modernity, Butler argued, became the means by which Protestants, Catholics, and Jews overcame the “anonymity, mobility, density, and indifference” of the modern metropolis.Footnote ¹⁶

What, then, has kept urban historians from universally recognizing the importance of religion to urban and suburban history? How might urban historians better include religion in their scholarship, and to what end?

As Kathryn Lofton has observed, many historians undoubtedly have shied away from including analysis of religion in their scholarship because they are not themselves religious and they feel inadequate to the task of discerning what does and does not “count” as religion.Footnote ¹⁷ Additionally, while urban historians are comfortable thinking in structuralist terms, and thus engage with histories of capital and labor, policy and planning, race, gender, and the state, they are likely less comfortable discerning how internal faith might have motivated the people they study, and thus fail to explore forms of community, authority, and advocacy that arise from other sources, including religion.

But perhaps urban historians can safely sidestep such debates and pitfalls and, yet, still engage religion seriously by examining institutions, a form of analysis to which urban historians are accustomed. Although Weber held that institutionalization led to secularization, Butler and historians working in his vein have shown how the institutions built by religious communities have thrived and helped temper what Walter Lippmann famously called the “acids of modernity.”Footnote ¹⁸

Urban historians hesitant to engage religion might begin by plumbing the manifold ways religious institutions have helped shape cities and suburbs. Most concretely this has implications for urban and suburban space. Butler’s focus on real estate in Manhattan highlights the ways religious communities have both transformed and been changed by space.Footnote ¹⁹ Urban historians are accustomed to thinking about space and place, and so, as Timothy Gilfoyle suggests, it should only be natural for them to explore religious groups’ “territorial claims on shrines, churches, streets, and neighborhoods” and how they have reshaped cities and suburbs, and to “reconceptualize space and place” accordingly.Footnote ²⁰

Of course, institutions and space have direct implications for the study of urban economics, social services, urban planning and renewal, and the politics of local government among many other issues. American Catholicism, for example, provides ample opportunities for such economic, social, and political analysis. As Scott Appleby has noted, Catholics built “powerful political machines” in cities across the country and a “vast social infrastructure” of schools, hospitals, orphanages, and charities.Footnote ²¹ My own work explores how this Catholic infrastructural footprint expanded from city to suburb in the 1950s and 1960s as bishops and clergy collaborated with planners and developers in a religious building boom that structured suburban communities and had transformative effects on religious practice and national politics.Footnote ²²

The physical and social infrastructures the Catholic Church helped build were, of course, never exclusively ecclesial. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. Catholic bishops strongly advocated for the building of public housing and activist priests served on the boards of local housing authorities. In the ensuing decades, urban parishes formed community among and provided various services for residents of public housing and organized efforts to press housing officials for improved living conditions. And most recently, religious nonprofits have formed public-private partnerships to adaptively reuse church properties and build new affordable housing options in response to the national housing crisis. Such religious influences in housing have been underexplored, and yet, as John McGreevy has reminded us, even today the Catholic Church “remains the single largest institution in the United States beyond the federal government.”Footnote ²³ Its sizeable footprint in social services from education and healthcare to low-income housing and immigration services provides historians not only a starting point to engage religion, but also a way to examine issues like housing on a national scale, moving beyond individual housing complexes and cities, while not focusing exclusively on federal policies.

Indeed, engaging religion may help urban historians resolve another problem of scale. All too often urban historians have tended to study cities and suburbs in isolation from one another. But religious networks are fluid across municipal boundaries. Catholic institutions, for example, are organized into dioceses that encompass entire metropolitan regions, and adherents of various faiths move freely across a map of sacred spaces often unseen by outsiders. Studying religion, therefore, provides opportunities to develop a truly metropolitan approach to the city and to uncover untold stories. So, too, may urban historians’ emphasis on the municipal and the local help religious and political historians move past some of their overly simplistic analyses of modern American life. For example, scholars of modern American politics and religion have often emphasized the themes of culture war and polarization in national politics. But the contours of metropolitan politics do not always map easily onto such left-right dichotomies. Focusing on the grassroots municipal politics that shape everyday life in cities and suburbs may highlight continuities that complicate the typical narratives of twentieth century religion and politics.

Finally, the increase in immigration to the United States in recent decades and the diversification of immigration—from Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—that has occurred since the 1970s provides another possible entry point for urban historians seeking to engage religion. Latin American immigration has made American Catholicism, for example, an immigrant church once again, revivifying parishes in the urban north once abandoned by white flight and shifting the balance of ecclesial demographics from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and Southwest. Such changes overlap well with urban historians’ interest in urban crisis and renewal, as well as the growth of the Sunbelt. Altogether, the transnational dynamics of Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, and a diversity of other religious traditions can assist urban historians in exploring the effects of globalization on American cities and suburbs, in understanding immigrant communities, and in assessing how immigrants both assimilate to and transform American society. In recent years, scholars including Felipe Hinojosa, Mauricio Fernando Castro, Sally Howell, and Uzma Quraishi have, for example, shown how Latino radicals in the 1960s compelled faith communities to join their protest of urban renewal, poverty, and racism; how Cuban exiles and Cold War federal funding transformed Miami from a vacation destination into a global city and altered U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics in the process; how Detroit’s Muslim immigrants of the 1920s, and African American converts of the 1950s, crafted an Americanized Islam and debated post-1965 Muslim immigrants over religious change; and how 1950s Indian and Pakistani immigrants to Houston navigated the politics of race, class, and religion in the post-Jim Crow South.Footnote ²⁴

In summary, no dissertation or monograph on any topic in twentieth-century American urban or suburban history would be approved or published today if it failed to consider the historical implications of race, class, and gender. And rightfully so. But nothing less should be true for religion. As Jon Butler has argued for the past twenty years, and so many other historians have helped prove, to ignore religion’s influence on the modern metropolis is, ultimately, to terribly misconstrue modern America itself.