5 Questions on Catholics and Suburanization with Stephen Koeth

Shane Ulbrich

Stephen Koeth, C.S.C.

[This month's Cushwa post features an interview by Shane Ulbrich with Research Travel Grant recipient Stephen Koeth, C.S.C., about his work on the postwar suburbanization of American Catholics. Stephen, a Holy Cross priest, is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Church and State and U.S. Catholic Historian.]

SU: Tell us about how your project developed. 

 SK: My dissertation explores the postwar suburbanization of American Catholicism by examining the creation and expansion of the Diocese of Rockville Centre in suburban Long Island, which throughout the 1960s was one of the fastest growing Catholic communities in the country. It describes how Catholic pastoral leaders grappled with the rapid exodus of the faithful from urban ethnic neighborhoods to newly built suburbs, and how Catholic sociologists and intellectuals assessed the effects of suburbanization in reshaping definitions of family, parish, and community. I also hope to trace how changing experiences of family and community, the economics of suburban life, and efforts to build and maintain suburban Catholic schools altered lay Catholics’ view of the state and their voting habits, thus transforming Catholicism’s role in American politics from the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution. This topic first began to take shape when I read Tom Sugrue’s contribution to Catholics in the American Century, one of the most recent volumes in the Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America series. Sugrue pointed out that “the history of Catholic suburbanization … and its implications for Catholic politics remain mostly unexamined.” And yet, Sugrue argued, suburban Catholics contributed to a “growing grassroots rebellion against taxation,” to “the erosion of support for the state,” and to “the challenge to liberalism” that reconfigured American politics through the 1960s and 70s. [1] I read Sugrue’s observation as a challenge and opportunity to bring together my long-standing interest in how Catholics have shaped their American identity with coursework in urban history I undertook as a doctoral student at Columbia University with the great historian of suburbanization, Kenneth Jackson.




 SU:  What did you come to the Notre Dame Archives to find? Did you end up making any valuable discoveries you didn’t anticipate? 

Map from Philip Murnion, et al., The Archdiocese of New York: Prospects and Recommendations for the Future (New York, March 1968)

SK: I specifically came to Notre Dame to search the archives of the Christian Family Movement. From the 1940s through the 1970s, the CFM aimed to assist married couples in properly understanding family, community, and parish life, and deepen member couples’ commitment to involvement in their parish and community. In the archives I was able to find numerous CFM handbooks used for group discussion, lectures from CFM annual conventions, and articles from the CFM newsletter, Act. Additionally, thanks to wonderful assistance from the archivists at Notre Dame, I will be able to listen to digitized recordings of oral interviews that were conducted with CFM members in the 1980s. These materials make clear the evolving ways in which Catholics understood the parish, especially in light of the liturgical movement and demographic change. I was also pleased to uncover more valuable material than I had originally expected in the papers of Fr. Philip Murnion, a priest-sociologist who founded the National Pastoral Life Center. His studies of parish life and priesthood, including for the Archdiocese of New York, contain interesting reflections on how suburbanization was re-shaping pastoral planning on the diocesan level.

SU: You said that a lot about Catholic suburbanization remains unexamined by historians. Is your research uncovering surprising trends or challenging standard narratives about the period? 

SK: One of the most popular tropes about postwar suburban Catholics is that they so valued Catholic education, and were having so many children, that newly established parishes usually built a parochial school first, and celebrated Sunday Mass in the gymnasium or cafeteria until the parish could afford to build a church. Of course, this pattern did in fact play itself out in many suburban parishes, but it was far from universally true, and the narrative may actually obscure as much about suburban Catholicism as it illuminates. St. Bernard’s Parish in Long Island’s famed Levittown development, for example, helps provide a necessary corrective. After the parish was founded in 1948 a church was built and sisters were recruited to teach religious education classes in parishioners’ homes. Not until 1961, however, was a parish school opened, and only after the parish had a contentious debate about the necessity and value of Catholic education. Parishioners questioned the advisability of spending so much money on building a school when it could only accommodate a small percentage of the parish’s children, when parishioners’ heavy tax burden was simultaneously funding new public schools, and when the ecumenical spirit of Cold War religiosity – and, in time, the Second Vatican Council – engendered suspicion of Catholic separatism.

Getting beyond the standard narrative of the postwar building boom and recovering these debates provides crucial insight into broader uncertainties in American Catholicism occasioned by the collapse of the Catholic ghetto. These include issues of assimilation to mainstream American culture, inculcating the faith in the next generation, the quality of Catholic schools, and the relationship between church and state. These are all issues I hope to explore more deeply in the dissertation.

SU:  You mentioned Tom Sugrue’s argument that suburban Catholics contributed to a “growing grassroots rebellion against taxation.” Could you say more about the role you’re finding taxation played in Catholic suburbanization and its politics?

SK: As I mentioned, suburban Catholics found themselves under the weight of home mortgages, the increasing taxes levied by suburban municipalities that were massively expanding public services, and, in some cases, the tuition bills for sending their children to the parish school. In response, Catholic lobbying groups in New York and around the nation intensified their efforts to obtain state aid for parochial schools, hoping that such financial relief would lower tuitions, increase enrollments, and thus ensure the survival of Catholic schools. Political candidates from both parties also appealed to Catholic voters by supporting state aid for parochial schools. In 1967, delegates to the New York State constitutional convention proposed repealing the state’s 1894 “Blaine Amendment” which had prohibited state aid to church-related schools. This was a considerable victory for Catholic lobbying efforts in Albany. However, when the proposed constitution was put before the state’s electorate, it was voted down even in heavily Catholic areas of suburban Nassau County. At the time, political commentators concluded that Catholic voters must have feared that the new constitution would lead to increased financial obligations for the state and thus to higher taxes.

I am still sorting out precisely what this result, when combined with other data such as enrollment figures in suburban parish schools, has to tell us about Catholic assimilation, the laity’s support for parochial schools, and Catholic voters’ understanding of church-state relations. But the 1967 referendum strongly suggests that suburban Catholic voters placed a higher priority on minimizing their tax burden than on preserving a Catholic subculture through the support of Catholic schools. I think that this episode, and the larger story of Catholic suburbanization, can help us fill out the historiography of postwar conservatism and adjudicate historiographical debates about white backlash and the disintegration of New Deal liberalism. Catholics are often oddly omitted from the story of postwar conservatism. Historians who do try to explain the political realignment of American Catholicism, and the Catholic contribution to the Reagan Revolution, usually focus on the politics of race relations, law-and-order, and especially abortion. I hope to show that postwar political realignment can’t be fully understood without reference to the cultural, economic, and political changes wrought by the suburbanization of Catholic voters throughout the 1950s and 60s.

SU: What other archives will you be visiting? 

SK: In addition to my research in the archives at Notre Dame, I have already spent several months researching in the archives of the Diocese of Rockville Centre. I had the opportunity to examine numerous diocesan and parish collections as well as twenty years of the diocesan newspaper, The Long Island Catholic. In the coming months, I will be working in the archives of the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Archdiocese of New York, in the U.S. Bishops’ Conference papers at The Catholic University of America, and in select collections of women’s religious orders which were active in the suburbs I am studying. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I hope to visit several suburban parishes to explore their collections of bulletins, newspapers, and other documents.

 [1] R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings, ed. Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narrative of U.S. History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012): 70–72, 79.

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"Evangelical Gotham" Roundtable: An Audience Comment

Jonathan Den Hartog

I very much appreciated the just-concluded roundtable on Kyle Roberts' Evangelical Gotham.

I found myself taking in the roundtable just as I was finishing reading the book. 

So, in the spirit of an "audience comment," let me add one additional point that particularly struck me.

I was much impressed by the way Roberts' focus on religion in New York City opened up consideration of the meaning of New York City on other levels--the national and the international. The book works as a fine-grained study of one particular place (Manhattan), expressed with even more particular details of congregations and individuals. Yet, by choosing New York, the book has situated its local story in a city where developments in local religious life could produce effects beyond its borders.

One direction the City faced was westward, to the American continent. New York grew in economic and cultural significance throughout the nineteenth century, and its impact was energized by the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. New York print culture came to shape, if not the nation, at least a much larger region of the North. Thus, it mattered what was printed and that much of the printed materials were Bibles or Christian tracts or religious magazines. 

Further, New York City became the headquarters for national organizations such as the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society. These organizations had a national reach and a national impact, but their activities were coordinated by individuals living and working in New York. So, the religious life of Gotham shaped the practice of faith throughout the nation. This linking of the local and the national was evident in the annual celebrations that these national organizations put on simultaneously in New York's public spaces, with events such as addresses and parades.

At the same time, the City continued to face the Atlantic. Roberts begins with the Atlantic orientation, as travelers of all kinds came to relocate in the city. But it's worth remembering that New York remained a significant port throughout the period covered in the book. It was a node in the web of exchange that was the Atlantic World. Local events and figures influenced the people and ideas which circulated throughout the Atlantic.

I suspect that international ideal motivated the evangelism to sailors that Roberts documents. Not only were sailors resident in New York, but their journeys would take them to many other ports, making them potential evangelists themselves. At the same time, as a port, New York was ideally situated as an embarkation point for American missionaries heading abroad.

As a receiving port, New York could also hear of new developments in the broader, transatlantic evangelical culture. So, the American Bible Society grew under the inspiration of the British and Foreign Bible Society, just as missionary endeavors were motivated by the example of the London Missionary Society.

Thus the story of Evangelical Gotham was not just about itself, but its influence was felt nationally and internationally. I'm appreciative for Roberts' illustration of how historical particularity, when studied deeply, can open up into broader stories and significances. So, in agreement with the roundtable contributors, let me encourage people to give the book some careful consideration.

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Walking the City

We conclude our roundtable review on Kyle Roberts' Evangelical Gotham with a reflection from the author himself. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the conversation, and please do chime in below to continue the dialogue.

by Kyle Roberts

What a genuine pleasure it has been this week to have four thoughtful scholars of American religion share their journeys through Evangelical Gotham. I can’t think of better traveling companions. I have admired their scholarship and benefited from their conversation over the past decade. As with the best walks through a city, they have allowed me to point out the sites that most interest and excite me and, in return, have shared my enthusiasm, asked for clarification, and drawn my attention to things that I have missed.

This book began as an excuse to get off the Amtrak at Penn Station during my regular commute in graduate school between Boston and Philadelphia. The books that intrigued me the most at that time (and which helped me while away the six-hour train ride) were the new histories of evangelicalism that sought to understand not only what evangelicals did, but why they did it. What would make an enslaved woman join the Moravian Church? How did a slaveholder reconcile his need for independence with the conversion of his wife and slaves? How could a “crazy” itinerant melt hearts?  With notable exceptions, these new histories were often stories of camp meetings in the rural hinterland, of circuit preachers riding to an early grave. What happened to evangelicals when they went to the city? 

Nassaus St. Then.

There were, of course, wonderful books on religion in cities, whether it be Italian Catholic mothers in Harlem or Salvation Army lasses downtown, but these were stories about what the religious did to make their own place in cities that other people had made. What about those who had built the city in the first place? New York certainly did not emerge fully formed. Between 1780 and 1860 settlement raced up Manhattan Island from (what is now) City Hall Park to the base of Central Park. Someone had to do all that building. Certainly, the religious, maybe even evangelicals, played a part? As it turns out, they had quite an influential role. My contention in Evangelical Gotham is that evangelical investment in the spiritual marketplace, church building, cultural production, and moral reform, to give just a few examples, shaped the development of the modernizing city and the experience of life within it. In the process, evangelicalism came to be decidedly shaped by the experience of urban life.

Nassau St. Now

Evangelical ability to turn space into place was key to that strategy, as Lincoln Mullen points out. Reading the work of Henry Glassie, Dell Upton, Bernard Herman, and Robert Blair St. George, I knew that I had to get off the train and take in the urban built environment. How different New York looked from all the maps and illustrations that I had uncovered in the archive! But I couldn’t just look at buildings for their own sake. My reading of the vast trove of surviving evangelical diaries, autobiographies, newspapers, and tracts reminded me of the generative and constitutive role that space plays in nearly every facet of evangelical life. At a crucial moment in my thinking, Tom Tweed’s Crossings and Dwellings helped me to understand the centrality of placemaking to the urban religious.  The places evangelicals inhabited could be real or imaginary. They saw New York through many lens – some sacred, some secular - and, in turn, sought to transform it, often just temporarily, to their own ends. No stable, storefront, or ship’s deck was safe.

Digital mapping gave me a means to try to make sense of the massive amount of data about place that I was uncovering. Without Google Earth and (later) Google Fusion Tables, it would have been hard to see the patterns in evangelical emplacement strategies that make up the maps in my book. While mapping software is good at conveying some kinds of spatial information, it doesn’t work as well with others. How might I convey Margaret Prior’s conversion experience as the Word wafted on the wings of a breeze out the window of the Methodist meeting house across the adjoining yard to her “unperceived” ear as she sat beneath a shade-tree?  My programming skills weren’t (still aren’t) that good. I hope Monica Mercado will invite me to sit in on her class one day as she and her students follow Prior through the city. I would share my own clumsy attempts at mapping Henry Chase’s journeys in 1821-22 through what is now the Lower East Side when he first became a missionary to mariners. At first, he followed the systematic landscape of the grid, calling at every house up one street and then down another. Within a matter of weeks those carefully laid plans were jettisoned by the demands of the women of the neighborhood who wanted his time and attention. Zipping back and forth from one house to another to offer spiritual and temporal support to these women certainly reminded him that the promise of the linear grid was illusory (and that urban evangelicalism was a women’s religion). As a scholar who chose the medium of a book to tell this story, I strive to demonstrate those journeys of faith through the city in other ways – through text and image. I have, however, deposited all my mapping data with the New York Public Library for those who want to recreate the past journeys of others. 

Could Catholics have been contenders for the souls of evangelicals in Gotham’s spiritual marketplace? Christine Croxall asks a great question. By utilizing a broad definition of evangelicalism, I could see a much wider array of actions and strategies in the city’s spiritual marketplace than if I had focused on a single denomination. While evangelicals dominated the city’s spiritual marketplace through mid-century, they were certainly never alone. Some of the scholarship that most interests me these days is by Croxall and Bridget Ford that take seriously the ways in which evangelicals and Catholics fed off each other’s strategies.  That became clear as I looked at how John Hughes approached parish building in the later 1840s. Did that imitation/emulation extend to their beliefs as well? Fear and hatred of Roman Catholicism was deeply engrained in Protestant DNA by this point. Perhaps what the examples of the almshouse residents that Croxall points to tell us less about a battle for doctrinal understandings than for the rich and varied modes of popular religiosity, pulling from Protestant, Catholic, and other belief systems that existed in early national and antebellum New York. Theirs is a world now largely lost to us.

To conclude, I’ve always loved Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” from The Practice of Everyday Life where he reminds us that to truly understand a city, we must go down from the height of steeple to the level of the street. It is in the daily movements and interactions of men and women, the “ordinary practitioners of the city,” that the city is constituted. I fully embraced that idea and spent much time looking closely at what I found down there. Catherine O’Donnell’s comments remind me however of my need to climb back up into the steeple, or better yet, to figure out where John Bornet secured his view of Manhattan in his panoramic birds’ eye view that adorns the cover of my book. John McGreevy, in his comments on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Parish Boundaries published in this blog a few months back, refers to this as the need to remember to come up for aid.  What can I say? Evangelical Gotham is a seductive place! But I wholeheartedly agree that pulling back to see the commonalities across time and space is essential. My journey through Evangelical Gotham has, in some ways, come to an end while it is just beginning for others. Fortunately for me, I am beginning my next journey with the rich reflections of four fellow travelers in my head and my heart.

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A Roundtable on Roberts, "Evangelical Gotham"

Cities have long haunted this history of American evangelicalism. They are sites evangelicals either fear or feel the need to control. But in Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Kyle Roberts highlights the ways in which evangelicalism was uniquely suited to urban forms of expression. Roberts, an associate professor of history and new media at Loyola University in Chicago, has long been a friend of the blog. He's written at length about his digital project on the development of America's Jesuit university libraries. So for this week, we're turning RiAH over to a roundtable reflecting upon Roberts' new book.

Our first post comes from Catherine O'Donnell, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. In her post, O'Donnell lays out what's at stake in writing an urban history of evangelicalism. Future posts throughout this week will hone in on other matters. And on Friday, Roberts himself will respond.

by Catherine O'Donnell

Lewis Tappan

 What a marvelous idea it was to explore evangelicals, a big and messy group, in New York City, a literal and bounded space. Drawing on a range of sources across a number of decades,  Kyle Roberts shows us buildings rising, filling with worshippers, and falling into disuse; pamphlets being printed, read, and set aside; and congregations forming and coming apart.  Like time-lapse photography, Gotham offers a view of historical change that feels both intimate and grand.

Roberts starts, as historians love to do, by telling us we’ve got something all wrong. New York City was not a godless place, he explains, nor was evangelicalism a rural phenomenon. Instead, evangelical congregations, benevolent societies, and printing enterprises flourished in New York City and helped to create its physical and cultural landscapes. Roberts may understate the extent to which historians such as Anne M. Boylan have, by exploring women’s benevolent work, already helped us to see evangelicalism in an urban context. Nonetheless, his work is invaluable. Gotham provides  a careful accounting of the growth of evangelicalism in absolute and relative terms, Roberts’ precision offering a welcome reminder of scholars’ need to count as well as read. Yet  -- mirabile dictu! -- Roberts reads brilliantly, too, both texts and architectural blueprints; he wants not only to demonstrate that evangelicalism flourished in Gotham, but to explain why it did. He attends to instrumental uses of religion – it creates community services – and its intangible ones.  “Unsure of their place in the world and no longer able to rely on the security of their place in tight-knit communities,” he argues, evangelicals needed “a faith not of adherence but of active piety” (18).  Roberts also contends that New Yorkers valued evangelicalism because of “the premium it placed on personal discovery of an individuated experience” (19). His analyses of individual evangelicals such as Elizabeth Palmer movingly demonstrate the way faith spurred anxiety and achievement, creating and unsettling relationships and institutions as it did.

St. Catherine of Siena

 Now for a slightly contrarian moment (another thing historians love to do). Exactly because Roberts writes so ambitiously about the distinctive appeal of evangelicalism to New Yorkers, I found myself  wondering just how distinctive some of what he describes really was. New York’s evangelicals undoubtedly faced uncertainty and found solace in their faith, but human beings have always faced uncertainty, and religions of all varieties – including the communal and the individuated -- have helped them withstand it. Moreover, because I study Catholics in early America, I can’t help musing that Catholicism, a religion both Roberts and his subjects contrast starkly to evangelicalism, also flourished in New York. Granted, this was partly due to the mass immigration of Catholics.  But immigrants’ arrival as Catholics did not necessitate their persistence within the faith, and the flowering of schools, community organizations, and publications suggests that more than passive inheritance was at work. The combination of social services and spiritual solace that evangelical women provided in fact seems a cousin to Catholic orders such as the French Filles de la Charité, the community of vowed women who first served the poor in ancien régime Paris.

I don’t mean to behave like a latter day English Puritan, triumphantly pointing out the lurking popery in Protestant practices. Nor do I mean to become a latter day phenomenologist insisting that all human religion is reducible to a single form.  Instead, I’d like to draw attention to what was for me an unexpected gift of Roberts’ work. By attending so carefully to evangelicals in New York City, and by doing so in a way informed by scholars such as Thomas Tweed and Robert Orsi, Roberts places his subjects in unmistakable if implicit conversation with people from other centuries and traditions. When Roberts writes that evangelicals “deployed artifacts across the landscape to ‘anchor the tropes, values, emotions, and beliefs’ of their community, marking their own social location and prescribing expectations for proper use” (27), I think of the richness of Catholic material culture and practice as well as of antebellum evangelicals.  Conversely, when I read of evangelicals’ congregation-founding practices and innovative uses of space, I want to learn whether nonevangelicals, including Catholics, began to do anything similar.

Thanks to Gotham, I’m left persuaded that evangelicalism and New York built each other, and that evangelical New Yorkers pondered questions that kept their rural cousins and transatlantic ancestors awake, too.  Should a faith community try to discern and attack social injustice, or should it look away from the world? When do objects connect humans to the divine, and when do they tether them to earth?  These are questions that are distinctively tied to issues such as racial slavery and rapid urban growth, but not exclusively so.  Thus Roberts’ work exemplifies what can be a useful creative tension in historical writing, the twin desires to explain why a thing happened when it did, and to demonstrate how that same thing possesses an importance that transcends its specifics.  The history of religion is a particularly fertile field for the latter kind of claim; a colleague once caught me looking thoughtful as I perused a Sister of Charity’s memoir and asked jokingly, “Pondering the meaning of life?”  “I think so,” I replied.  Yet when writing about religion, I also feel a need (and I think I’m not alone in this) to link my subject very tightly to American events and people, flirting with exceptionalism in order to avoid having religion seem irrelevant to What Was Really Going On: economic growth and exploitation, territorial expansion, political conflict, and the rest.  Kyle Roberts’ Gotham shows that it is possible to draw our attention to the specific while inspiring us also to ponder the enduring, another generous gift of this terrific book.

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