Even the headline of the short essay in the New Yorker was meant to offend, and it did: “Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City.” The piece, by Dan Piepenbring, has been read, attacked, defended, and ridiculed by far more people than ordinarily read the New Yorker. If the editors’ goal was to attract online readers, they succeeded.
Piepenbring makes no effort to veil his contempt for the famously clean and friendly fast-food restaurant, of which there are now four in Manhattan. He visited the grand opening of the largest and most recently built one, on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan. “The air smelled fried,” he writes. And yet
Piepenbring leaves us to wonder many things, including why someone who doesn’t like a restaurant should be annoyed that it closes on Sundays. He goes on:
Whatever else may be said about Piepenbring, he’s not a bad writer. “Industrial but claustral” is an apt phrase, provided one takes the latter adjective to mean “suggestive of a cloister or religious house” rather than “confining or enveloping.” It’s hard to think of a less confining or enveloping place than Chick-fil-A.
What shocked many readers of the essay, other than its sheer animosity and the author’s raw detestation of Chick-fil-A’s cow ads (“in which one farm animal begs us to kill another in its place”), was his idea that the restaurant chain is somehow “infiltrating” a city of 8.5 million people that prides itself on its bewilderingly diverse array of cultures and lifestyles. The restaurant’s expansion in Manhattan, he writes, “raises questions about what we expect from our fast food, and to what extent a corporation can join a community.”
Of course, it raises no such questions. New Yorkers are very lefty in their politics; Chick-fil-A’s owners are Southerners with strong Christian convictions. But New Yorkers are mostly grownups, too, and they’re capable of coping with this slight dissonance.
Leave aside the animus, though, and Piepenbring has a point. He sounds a touch paranoid, like 16th-century English Protestants murmuring about Jesuit insurrectionists, but he’s not wrong to find something strangely incursive about evangelical Christianity. Not every one of the company’s employees is a Christian—far from it I would think—but it closes on Sundays in deference to the Fourth Commandment, and the friendliness of its servers isn’t so different from what you’d find in a Baptist church in Georgia. That Chick-fil-A radiates a kind of evangelical warmth is undeniable.
The franchise Piepenbring visited, as it happens, is on almost the very spot of a much earlier infiltration by evangelical Christianity. Just a block to the east on Fulton Street—you can walk there in a minute or two—was once the site of the North Dutch Church. Jeremiah Calvin Lanphier was sent to the church as a lay missionary in 1857. Then as now, the area was dominated by the financial industry and inhabited mainly by bankers and stock traders, very few of whom were interested in church attendance. Lanphier made the counterintuitive decision to announce a lunch-hour prayer meeting: From 12:00 to 1:00 there would be prayer. He distributed announcements and told as many people as he spoke to.
On the first day, September 23, 1857, no one came for the first half-hour; then six people trickled in, and they prayed. The following week, 20 people came and prayed. On October 7 Lanphier recorded in his journal: “Prepared for the prayer-meeting today, at noon. Called to invite a number of persons to be present. Spoke to men as I met them in the street, as my custom is, if I can get their attention. I prayed that the Lord would incline many to come to the place of prayer. Went to the meeting at noon. Present between thirty and forty.” Lanphier and his fellow supplicants decided to meet every day. A week later he recorded: “Attended the noon-day prayer meeting. Over one hundred present, many of them not professors of religion, but under conviction of sin, and seeking an interest in Christ; inquiring what they shall do to be saved.”
By the spring of 1858 there were thousands attending, so many that the North Dutch Church couldn’t contain them, and other churches were opened during the noon hour. The Fulton Street Revival, as it became known, spread to other parts of Manhattan and Jersey City and eventually to Philadelphia and parts of the Midwest. The movement wasn’t sectarian and seems to have involved nothing more than people praying aloud in the extemporaneous manner of evangelical Christianity. The meetings lasted for a year, then waned, though many Americans in the Northeast would later trace their conversions to prayer meetings attended in the year 1858. Many of the men would die on Southern battlefields a few years later.
Spontaneous prayer meetings are a very different thing from a friendly, chicken-themed fast-food franchise, I acknowledge. But both are discernibly evangelical, and I wondered if the news media and intellectuals of 1858 reacted in some way comparable to the New Yorker’s passive-aggressive denunciation. Lanphier in his journal mentions that the editors of several news dailies asked to meet with him; there must have been some reaction.
A little searching brought me to an editorial leader in the New York Times (the paper was then only a few years old) in which the editors tried fairly to assess this strange new upsurge in evangelical religiosity. They were evidently uncomfortable with dealing with the subject of religion at all: “The region of a man’s religious impulses does not usually belong to the editor’s field,” they wrote. “We fear the effect of publicity on such delicate matters, and, in dread of both hypocrisy and fanaticism, the greatest subject which can agitate the human mind is usually dropped from our columns.” But, they went on, they couldn’t help noticing what had been happening in the area of Fulton Street and associating it with religious movements elsewhere in the country. “The great wave of religious excitement which is now sweeping over the nation, is one of the most remarkable movements since the Reformation,” they reflected.
The Times’s editors eventually worked themselves into a positive assessment of the Fulton Street phenomenon. The principles adopted by the newly zealous, they concluded, “can but tend to make citizens more loyal, merchants more honest, men and women nobler, kinder, more just, and generous, and brave, in all the concerns of life.” But it’s clear that they had no intention of attending one of these meetings themselves, any more than Dan Piepenbring would dine at a Chick-fil-A for a reason other than to write a piece for the New Yorker.
The sort of simple and open Christian devotion expressed by the supplicants of 1858, and merely hinted at by the cheerful servers of chicken sandwiches in 2018, is always and everywhere slightly out of place. Piepenberg is basically right to see it as an infiltration. The urbane and forward-thinking commentariat always find it so—alien, gauche, vaguely menacing.
To them it smells fried. To others it smells of life.
