Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editor's Introduction
- SECTION I RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA
- SECTION II RELIGIONS IN THE NEW NATION, 1790–1865
- SECTION III CHANGING RELIGIOUS REALITIES
- SECTION IV RELIGIOUS RESPONSES TO MODERN LIFE AND THOUGHT
- 21 Religion and Immigration, 1865–1945
- 22 Religion and the Modern City, 1865–1945
- 23 Religious Responses to Industrialization, 1865–1945
- 24 Religious Responses to Modern Science, 1865–1945
- 25 Religious Responses to Philosophy in America, 1865–1945
- 26 Fundamentalism
- 27 Religiously Informed Social Reform and Reaction in the Era of the Great Depression
- 28 Nativism from the New Republic to the Cold War
- 29 Between God and Caesar: World War I and America's Religious Communities
- 30 World War II and America's Religious Communities
- SECTION V COMPARATIVE ESSAYS
- SECTION VI RELIGION AND DIVERSE AREAS
- Index
- References
22 - Religion and the Modern City, 1865–1945
from SECTION IV - RELIGIOUS RESPONSES TO MODERN LIFE AND THOUGHT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editor's Introduction
- SECTION I RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA
- SECTION II RELIGIONS IN THE NEW NATION, 1790–1865
- SECTION III CHANGING RELIGIOUS REALITIES
- SECTION IV RELIGIOUS RESPONSES TO MODERN LIFE AND THOUGHT
- 21 Religion and Immigration, 1865–1945
- 22 Religion and the Modern City, 1865–1945
- 23 Religious Responses to Industrialization, 1865–1945
- 24 Religious Responses to Modern Science, 1865–1945
- 25 Religious Responses to Philosophy in America, 1865–1945
- 26 Fundamentalism
- 27 Religiously Informed Social Reform and Reaction in the Era of the Great Depression
- 28 Nativism from the New Republic to the Cold War
- 29 Between God and Caesar: World War I and America's Religious Communities
- 30 World War II and America's Religious Communities
- SECTION V COMPARATIVE ESSAYS
- SECTION VI RELIGION AND DIVERSE AREAS
- Index
- References
Summary
Moral philosophers, theologians, scholars of religion, and historians until recently have traced the trajectory of modern urban religious history as a tragic story of decline and loss. To cite a prominent and influential example of this way of thinking, conservative Christian moralist Alasdair MacIntyre writes,
When the working class were gathered from the countryside into the industrial cities, they were finally torn from a form of community in which it could be intelligibly and credibly claimed that the norms which govern social life had universal and cosmic significance, and were God-given. They were planted [botanical metaphors are common in discussions of religion and immigration] instead in a form of community in which the officially endorsed norms so clearly are of utility only to certain partial and partisan human interests that it is impossible to clothe them with universal and cosmic significance.
Viewed from the perspective of antiurban moralists, modern cities are great engines of secularization. They give us urban religious history as sacred noir, with God's body outlined in yellow police chalk on a city sidewalk.
The great historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, likewise thought that all that remained of humankind's great religious traditions in modern cities were degraded and decadent survivals. Life in the city is about speed, efficiency, function, and novelty, Eliade and others following his lead believed; caught up in this frenzy of over-stimulation, city people are disconnected from the ontological grounds of human experience, alienated from being itself, as being is revealed in nature, in the rhythms of the moon, the cycles of the seasons, and the pulse of the oceans.
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- The Cambridge History of Religions in America , pp. 479 - 498Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000