Another view for Dec. 23, 2004
By Tony Carnes
They are patriotic, hard-working, mostly Democratic and mainly from immigrant families. They are also born-again Christians. Their faith is increasingly typical of New York City. On Sunday mornings about 1.5 million out of 8 million New Yorkers now attend an evangelical, charismatic or Pentecostal church, according to a recent religious census.
Relatively unnoticed is how the “born agains” have been remaking the city's soul. If not quite a New Jerusalem, the city is a religiously transformed place. There are also signs that a political transformation is coming. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani says, “The evangelical and Pentecostal churches will play an increasingly important role in city politics.”
Even now, we are only beginning to understand that the beginnings of New York City's revival were as much rooted in its religious revival as in its law enforcement and economic revivals.
In 1955 the New York Council of Protestant Churches put out a five-alarm call to Billy Graham to come help a dying church. According to their records, there were 2,300 Protestant churches in the city then, and they were fading fast. Graham said he found among city ministers “a sense of desperation.” So he came and held his famous 1957 Madison Square Garden evangelistic crusade. You still run across church leaders and lay people who became Christians at that time. Still, religious organizations continued downhill for another 20 years.
Then, in the 1970s at NYC's lowest point, the churches began to turn around, partly through immigration, partly through conversions. But the process was almost invisible to the local press and scholars. For a while in the late 1990s there was a new church founded every six weeks in the South Bronx, a Hispanic area that the U.S. Census labeled the poorest in the country. Before anyone knew it, by 2004, there were 7,100 evangelical churches in the city, according to a recent church census conducted by Columbia University for the Christian Cultural Center, a local charismatic church.
The new New Yorker is one of those “moral values” voters. In thousands of evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal churches a new social and political awareness is percolating. Although most are still Democrats, their leaders have begun a political switch. In the presidential election George W. Bush doubled his support among Protestant New Yorkers polled by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International in comparison to the last election.
Pastors again have called Billy Graham to come to their city. His crusade begins in June 2005 amid expectations that it will unleash another wave in an ongoing Christian revival.
Religion News Service
Tony Carnes writes for Christianity Today.