COMMENTARY: Christian Revival Shakes the Big Apple, With More to Come

c. 2004 Religion News Service NEW YORK _ They are patriotic, hard-working, mostly Democratic and mainly from immigrant families. They are also born-again Christians. Their faith is increasingly typical of this 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 […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ They are patriotic, hard-working, mostly Democratic and mainly from immigrant families. They are also born-again Christians. Their faith is increasingly typical of this 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.

I was more than a little surprised that a poll of 1,006 New York City evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal church leaders revealed that 55 percent planned to vote for Bush in the recent election. Only a small proportion of the pew has begun to follow their leaders’ political rethinking.

The poll was conducted by an independent research institute that I head. My staff rechecked our data. I feverishly did two focus groups with local church leaders to see if the figures added up. The reaction even among the Democratically inclined was, “Why are you surprised?”

One young Puerto Rican pastor from the South Bronx recounted how his father came into his office like he was checking on a sick man. “Son,” he whispered. “I don’t want to offend you, but I am beginning to feel you are a Republican!” The pastor says that he isn’t really a Republican but more of a “disenfranchised Democrat.”


Kenny, a son of Chinese immigrants, sarcastically reacted to my surprise: “I didn’t realize how Commie pinko you media guys are until this election. After 9/11, the media turned around awhile but that’s gone.”

Kenny is a federal officer who worked on one of the World Trade Center recovery teams. He voted for Bush, though he, too, was originally a Democrat and comes from a family of Democrats.

The new New Yorkers now say they have discovered that the secularized liberal Democrats weren’t really their friends. The secularists were soft on the criminals that terrorized their communities; they ran the public schools that church kids attended into the ground with social experiments while sending their own kids to private schools. And the secular liberals trashed faith, morals and family.

One pastor in the post-election focus group said, “You can’t divide heaven and earth. We have to come together in NYC and be a force to be reckoned with.”

Pastors again have called Billy Graham to come to their city. His crusade begins in June 2005 with expectations that it will unleash another wave in an ongoing Christian revival.

MO/PH END RNS

(Tony Carnes is senior news writer for Christianity Today and wrote the December cover story “From Gotham to Glory: How Street-Smart Churches Are Changing the Fabric of New York City.”)


Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!