A Journey through NYC religions: Sixteen Years Seeing New York’s Religious Life

July 2010 came into Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, like a snarling bully, part of a record heat wave, according to The New York Times. Tempers were on edge. Uneasiness followed the shooting of a gangster nicknamed “Ghost” at a local barbershop.

There was a heated debate over the building of a new mosque on Voorhies Avenue, a parallel conflict to the heated one in Manhattan over a proposed mosque near the Ground Zero site. Membership at older mainline churches was descending. Advent Gravesend Church was a consolidation of a Lutheran church founded in 1908 and Gravesend Reformed Church, the oldest church in Brooklyn, founded in 1655. From a low of twenty members, the congregation had gradually recovered to about one hundred through the heroic efforts of its pastor.

A clue to the changing demography was the church’s young pianist, a recent arrival from Moscow. Not far away, Cheryl Wang had a different problem at Brooklyn Chinese Christian Church on 1502 Gravesend Neck Road. Half Japanese and half Chinese American, she was worried about the burgeoning number of ministries needed for the varieties of people in a church that had grown to about five hundred. When we visited, a wooden cross was covered with prayers written on small sheets of paper intended for a burning ceremony.

A clue to the changing authority structure introduced to the city by religions can also be inferred from the decline of the older historic churches in Sheepshead Bay as they became more progressive in theology and politics.

The Homecrest Presbyterian church became a center of social progressiveness and modernist theology under its long-term and famous pastor David M. Cory. As a candidate for the State Assembly in 1931, he ran as a socialist, saying, “The social salvation of America depends upon the centralization of industry.” He retired in 1990 at age 87 as the oldest active Presbyterian pastor in America. The church dwindled to around twenty attenders. The new Chinese immigrants preferred more strict, conservative politics and theology.

Amidst it all, two staff members and two volunteers from A Journey through NYC religions made their way down the streets to visit the more than 250 religious sites in Sheepshead Bay and Gravesend. The volunteers were a missionary from Africa and an art student from Texas A&M University.

We visited every site from Advent Gravesend Church to Zion Temple Church of God in Christ, later succeeded by Evergreen COGIC. There were Torah centers and yeshivas, Protestant preschools and churches, historic Catholic churches and schools, and an Orthodox church and school. The Messianic Jews had a center, and a Christian dance troop lightly toed pathways. There were New Age meeting spaces, psychic readers aplenty, a Tibetan Buddhist restaurant, and Shalom Day Care stood near the Christian Bambi Academy. All were there to tend to the 64,518 souls in Community District 15.

That summer walk through Sheepshead Bay helped build the model for what Journey would do over the next sixteen years: walk the streets, meet the people, notice what seemed odd or new, and follow the story wherever the evidence led.

Walking Into Controversy

Right away, our approach had the unintended consequence of thrusting us into a citywide discussion about religion. As we passed the mosque under construction and protest, we couldn’t help reflecting that the debate over the proposed mosque near the World Trade Center site did not comprehend how deeply Muslims were already part of New York’s history—or how rapidly Muslim religious life was growing. Most public discussions cited a figure of about ninety-nine mosques in the city. By August, we had visited 175, with several more, like the one in Sheepshead Bay, under construction. Pretty soon, discussions of Muslim life in New York began to rely on our long series of articles and census of the city’s mosques.

Journey developed the methodology of sympathetic objectivity that is useful in opening doors across religions by emphasizing understanding the mind and feelings of others and what practical, innovative contributions they are making to the social welfare of the city and to each other.

Right after that came our series on how the growing presence of evangelicals—and other religions—was moving New York out of a secularist era of self-understanding and into a postsecular one. The twelve-part series won the national award for best in-depth reporting on religion. Our goal had been simpler: to see what was happening down the street, not to make headlines or win awards.

The City Had Changed Faster than the Mindset of the Experts

In fact, New York City had become one of the world’s great religious capitals. Thousands of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, shrines, and religious organizations shape the life of its neighborhoods every day. They answer existential questions of purpose, meaning, and morality, particularly during the experiences of social disruption.

Religious actors do not appear simply as contributors to discourse. They appear in institutions, networks, and communities that organize everyday life—coordinating childcare, employment, food distribution, and moral formation. Their authority is not only argumentative but also infrastructural.
To treat religion as input rather than structure is to miss how it actually operates.

Visible on the city streets, they are welcome centers to new immigrants, comfort stations for families during tragedy, preservers of traditions, civic centers for politics, school halls for kids, and innovators of new forms of worship, ideas, and art across the five boroughs. Yet much of this religious life passes unnoticed.

Daily journalism often reports religion when there is conflict, scandal, an election, or a major holiday. Academic research frequently examines a particular denomination, congregation, or neighborhood in careful detail. Both perform essential public services. Yet neither is designed to observe in depth the religious landscape of an entire city as it changes over decades. Also, journalism and scholarship is still shaking off its outdated secularism. Journey looks at the public authority that is streaming into the public discourse by the jigsaw puzzle of religions in our 59 Community Districts.

Much of New York’s religious history unfolds almost invisibly. A storefront church opens above a restaurant. A synagogue meets in a storefront mosque in the Bronx—hardly anyone knows about this friendly odd coupling. An immigrant community transforms an industrial building into a temple. A congregation that once served one ethnic group gradually welcomes another. More than one congregation had leaders warning against letting the devil’s language of English through the doorways. Of course, usually unnoticed, the languages get added up, sometimes into UN proportions. A mural appears on a neighborhood wall and disappears a few years later beneath fresh paint. These changes rarely become headlines, yet together they reshape the city’s religious geography.

Harlem, July15, 2011. 2530 Adam Clayton Powell. Jr. Boulevard

Since our official founding on July 9, 2010, A Journey through NYC religions has documented the changing religious life of New York City through journalism, field research, photography, historical preservation, and public education.

Into the Streets First, Theorizing Later

Journey was built by reporting first and theorizing later. Our early question was a journalistic one: what would happen if reporters systematically walked the streets of New York and looked closely at religious life before deciding what the story was? The street journeys produced stories about Muslims, evangelicals, immigrant congregations, religious art, neighborhood change, disasters, new ministries, and old institutions finding unexpected second lives. Sometimes a single observation became an article. Sometimes it led to months or years of reporting. Our ambition was to experiment with a deeper and longer form of journalism that could discover changes before they became conventional news.

From the beginning, we adopted a simple premise: understanding religion in New York requires going into the neighborhoods themselves. Rather than relying primarily on institutional reports or secondary sources, Journey built its work from observation in the field. Volunteers, journalists, photographers, and researchers walked streets, visited congregations, interviewed clergy and laypeople, photographed changing neighborhoods, analyzed demographic trends, mapped religious institutions, and preserved documents that might otherwise have been lost.

The notebooks became longform journalism and databases. Street observations became census methods. Thousands of interviews became longitudinal research. We developed census methods for documenting religious institutions, built databases for analyzing religious change, trained journalists and researchers, and created geographic mapping systems that made it possible to observe patterns across neighborhoods. But in those first years our attention was mostly fixed on producing the next story. The archive was accumulating almost behind our backs.

The mission remained remarkably consistent. Journey exists to increase public understanding of New York City’s religious life through independent journalism, original research, historical preservation, and public education. It is nonsectarian and nonpartisan. Its purpose is not to advocate for particular religious communities nor to criticize them, but to document their presence accurately, proportionately, and sympathetically so that the public can better understand one of the city’s most influential—and often least understood—dimensions.

Mapping Changes in the City’s Authority Structure

Shifts of theological and political authorities bring problems and possibilities. Perhaps, Homecrest Presbyterian’s famous pastor’s socialism contributed to the decliine of his church. On the other hand, his ministry was full of insights and innovations. Around another Presbyterian church closer to Red Hook, he noticed that Mohawk Indian ironworkers were settling and some were attending the Presbyterian church. Probably, most New Yorkers didn’t know that most New York American Indians had become Christians. The minister started teaching himself Mohawk, compile a Mohawk language hymnbook, and started the first American Indian congregation in moder New York City.

Perhaps by the time of the arrival of the Chinese, Cory was too stretched to learn Chinese, compile a Chinese hymnbook, and start a Chinese language congregation. Two decades after the pastor’s retirement. Reverand Samson C. Tso arrived from Taiwanese American Fellowship Presbyterian Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The church has also sheltered the Brooklyn Chinese Alliance Church (founded in 1999) and the Brooklyn Christian Church (Chinese Americans who united to found their church in 1979).

Journey has been there every step of the way since 2010. We have now seen the changes and noticed the authoritative interpretations of the 250^th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Some lean to liberal social commitment, and one proclaims MAGA, Make America Godly Again.

That commitment to go where no one else goes shaped every aspect of the work. Journalism was the foundation, but the reporting expanded into photography, historical research, demographic analysis, educational television, walking tours, lectures, documentary filmmaking, and the preservation of interviews and archival materials. Each reached a somewhat different audience, yet all pursued the same objective: helping New Yorkers see the religious life of their city more clearly.

Catastrophe Showed the Need for Archives

Then COVID changed the tempo of Journey. We continued reporting—conducting several hundred interviews with religious leaders and documenting the deaths of religious figures in our “Moved to Heaven” series—but the long street journeys slowed. For the first time, we also had time to look backward at what we had accumulated. The notebooks filled shelves. Photographs numbered in the tens of thousands. Interviews, census sheets, maps, videos, and fragments of religious history had been gathered during years when our attention was mostly fixed on producing the next story.

We began to realize that the journalism had created an archive.

Across sixteen years, Journey has published more than 1,600 articles and features, produced over 5,400 media items, documented more than 15,000 religious sites, conducted approximately 15,000 interviews, preserved roughly 150,000 photographs, and compiled more than 20,000 pages of field notes. Congregations have merged, buildings have changed hands, neighborhoods have evolved, and generations have passed away. Materials gathered for yesterday’s journalism can now help reconstruct changes that were difficult to see when they were happening.

The archive, in turn, began producing new journalism, research, and books. Old interviews could be reread beside new ones. Photographs taken years apart revealed changes in buildings and neighborhoods. Census notes could be compared across time. Historical collections that had accumulated around individual stories began to take shape as larger narratives. Current work includes a major study of Protestant churches in Central Manhattan, research on youth, religion, and social trust in New York City, documentary films, timelines and online educational resources, and books exploring the city’s changing religious landscape.

Onward!

The street journeys continue, although at a lower tempo. Now we often carry sixteen years of history with us. A congregation visited today can be compared with a photograph taken twelve years ago, an interview with its former pastor, census notes from another journey, and demographic changes in the surrounding blocks. The archive changes what we see on the street, just as new street reporting changes how we understand the archive.

In Sheepshead Bay, for example, we later covered the remarkable adjustments to the pandemic at the Kosher Culinary Center, the rise of online synagogues, and local reactions to a nation that sometimes seemed to be losing its mind over political conflict. Rabbi Shlomo Segal, spiritual leader of Kehilat Moshe of Southern Brooklyn, reflected in a Journey article on the story of Solomon. Visited by God in a dream and offered anything, Solomon did not ask for more troops, greater wealth, or the death of his enemies. He asked for a “listening heart.”

Segal wrote that a listening heart enabled Solomon to hear the concerns of others with wisdom and compassion. The memorialization of each other’s long struggles and sufferings, he suggested, was a root of justice and peace.

That is close to the spirit of Journey’s future work. Tomorrow another congregation will open in a storefront. Another mural will appear on a wall. Another immigrant family will carry an old faith into a new neighborhood. Much of that story will pass unnoticed. Journey intends to keep walking the streets, asking questions, listening sympathetically, checking the evidence, and returning to the archive to see what we missed the first time.

(Water color and haiku by Darilyn Carnes, photos by Tony Carnes. Reporting by Tony Carnes, Chris Clayman, Melissa Kimiadi Brandon, Heather Bowshear)

Explore the rich religious heritage of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

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The ancient Babylonians destroyed the First Jewish Temple on the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av in 586 BCE. The Roman empire destroyed the Second Temple on the same date in 70 CE. Rome renamed the land Palestine to try and sever the Jewish connection to Israel and drove the survivors into exile. This year, Tisha B’Av begins at sundown on July 22, a day of fasting, prayer and remembrance. The Babylonian empire included what is today’s Iran.

Nearly two thousand years later, the Babylonian and Roman Empires are long gone – the Jewish people remain but continue to face threats from old and new enemies. Since the Temples were destroyed, Jews have prayed facing Jerusalem and closed Passover seders and Yom Kippur services with the same vow, “Next year in Jerusalem” – nearly two thousand years before the modern State of Israel existed.

Within days of Tisha B’Av, on July 18, 1290, King Edward I expelled every Jew from England – the first time a European kingdom expelled its entire Jewish population. Those who stayed risked seizure and death. The ban held for more than 350 years.

The attempts to erase the Jews did not begin with the medieval world and did not end with the Holocaust. Exactly 704 years after the English expulsion, Iran directed the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, killing 85 people. More than three decades later, no one has been brought to justice – and the regime that ordered the attack is still at work.

The Focus Project develops and distributes Opeds, news, background, and history to inform individuals and organizations about issues affecting the American Jewish community and Israel. Link here. Without endorsement, Journey opens its OpEds to a variety of religious and political viewpoints. If you have something to say, let us know!