City of Gods is a history and ethnography of Flushing, Queens, in New York City. An important site in colonial America for its place in the history of religious freedom, Flushing is now perhaps the most striking case of religious and ethnic pluralism in the world—and an ideal place to explore how America's long experiment with religious freedom, immigration, and religious pluralism began and continues. While other studies of tend to look at the big picture of religious pluralism in the U.S., City of Gods is grounded in a community study that maps out the range of responses to diversity over ti ... More

City of Gods is a history and ethnography of Flushing, Queens, in New York City. An important site in colonial America for its place in the history of religious freedom, Flushing is now perhaps the most striking case of religious and ethnic pluralism in the world—and an ideal place to explore how America's long experiment with religious freedom, immigration, and religious pluralism began and continues. While other studies of tend to look at the big picture of religious pluralism in the U.S., City of Gods is grounded in a community study that maps out the range of responses to diversity over time. Flushing’s extremely dense and diverse concentration of different religious institutions in an urban neighborhood (over 200 places of worship in 2.5 square miles) may seem like a unique case, but cities, towns, and neighborhoods all across the country are becoming more diverse, too—and each will have to learn to live with pluralism. Indeed, we may be able to glimpse the future of American religion in Flushing not only because the striking exaggeration of its diversity sharply defines the issues, but also because the story of Flushing mirrors that of the nation in microcosm.