Some historians claim that the religious movements in New York City were motivated by fear of the chaos and disorder of the city. So, the responses to immigrant suffering are reinterpreted as “civilizing” the unwashed, taking social control of the non-Anglo Saxons, and relieving panic attacks in the face of strangers and new religions. Morality, not forgiveness and redemption, takes center stage in such a narrative. Historian Paul Boyer (Urban masses and moral order in America 1820-1920.1978, page vii). framed his understanding of religion in the city this way: “Fears about industrialization, immigration, family disruption, religious change, and deepening class divisions all focused on the growing cities. Social thinkers, reformers…were often linked by …a common interest in controlling the behavior of an increasingly urbanized populace.” He called this the “urban social-control effort.”
There were certainly religious and secular leaders who saw the city this way. The secularizing romanticists and City Beautiful city planners saw the city as something to control or even replace with a romanticized vision of rural life. We can see this approach working itself out in the history of Norwegian immigration to New York City.
Norwegian elite leaders wanted to protect the peasants from emigrating to the city where they would allegedly be cast into a dungeon-like existence. But what they really feared was a loss of elite control. For a long time in Norway, peasants could not even move to a city without elite permission. Nor could they establish their own churches. The peasants and rising middle classes saw the city differently. They wanted to get to the city and establish new churches that ministered to their lives.
These classes bore the evangelical message of freedom for the individual, the revival of faith, and the building of a new, better community than that experienced living down on the farm.
So too in New York City, this drama played out. The elite Norwegian ministers tended toward the social control mode to keep in line the middle and lower classes. They feared that the evangelical Norwegians would turn the world upside down (the actual name of a tune that the American revolutionaries required the British Army to play during its surrender.)
The evangelical Norwegians certainly acknowledged and lamented the evils manifested on the streets of the city. But their response was, by and large, one of community building, not running away, and compassion, not loathing and fear, and hope because the gospel promises that features of the eternal city can be partly realized here on earth. You more often read in the letters, diaries, and publications of Norwegian immigrants about the city as a blessing from God. They acknowledged that any good thing must be fought for. The evil character of the Slum must be opposed in a major battle–and that would be won. The care of souls would mean care for the city environment. You read more confidence than fear and despair.
Armed with a clear picture of the existential dejection among the downtrodden, New York City’s religious people like the Norwegian deaconess/nurse Elizabeth Fedde went forward in 1he 1880s and 1890s with an optimism that they could bring sunshine to darkness, a harvest of growth and order from out of the chaos.
Her fellow Scandinavian, journalist Jacob Riis from Denmark, was one of the many evangelical Christians like Fedde who were certain that they could uplift the downtrodden and vanquish the criminal threshers who were sorting out the poor like so many husks. Even bridges like the Brooklyn Bridge were designed by evangelicals with a fervor for uplifting a good society. They didn’t fear the immigrants (they were immigrants!), they cherished them. The working and middle-class evangelical spirit was around every corner from where misdeeds, misspent, and damaged lives gathered. Confident, hopeful, determined.
