In this book we are trying to confess that the goals of the contemporary Church - that is to say, the church of St. John's by the Gas Station, the Christian college, the denominational and interdenominational seminary - the 'goals' of these Christian communities are blasphemous. The reconciliation the Church is seeking to accomplish today by these subterfuges has already been wrought. The brotherhood - the one blood of Acts 17, 26 - that the Church makes its goal today is already a 'fact'. And because this is so, that very fact judges our goals and our efforts to achieve brotherhood by social action as blasphemous, as trying to 'be' God. Instead of witnessing to Christ, the social action of the Church lends support to the totalitarianism of wars and political systems of the 20th century. By its social action, the Church permits and encourages the State and culture to define all issues and rules and fields of battle. The Church then tries to do what the State, without the Church's support, had already decided to do to solve all human problems by politics. And this is specifically the political messianism of contemporary totalitarianism and of Revelation 13. Politics by definition can only adjust and rearrange. It cannot - as politics - solve anything. But the Church's social action encourages the very movements in the contemporary political processes which are moving us straightaway into 20th-century totalitarianism. from the Foreword

In the fifty years after the Constitution was signed in 1787, New York City grew from a port town of 30,000 to a metropolis of over half a million residents. This rapid development transformed a once tightknit community and its religious experience. These effects were felt by Trinity Episcopal Church, which had presented itself as a uniting influence in New York, that connected all believers in social unity in the late colonial era. As the city grew larger, more impersonal, and socially divided, churches reformed around race and class-based neighborhoods. Trinity’s original vision of uniting the community was no longer possible. In Four Steeples over the City Streets, Kyle T. Bulthuis examines the histories of four famous church congregations in early Republic New York City—Trinity Episcopal, John Street Methodist, Mother Zion African Methodist, and St. Philip’s (African) Episcopal—to uncover the lived experience of these historical subjects, and just how religious experience and social change connected in the dynamic setting of early Republic New York. Drawing on a range of primary sources, Four Steeples over the City Streets reveals how these city churches responded to these transformations from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century. Bulthuis also adds new dynamics to the stories of well-known New Yorkers such as John Jay, James Harper, and Sojourner Truth. More importantly, Four Steeples over the City Streets connects issues of race, class, and gender, urban studies, and religious experience, revealing how the city shaped these churches, and how their respective religious traditions shaped the way they reacted to the city. (Publisher).