The gifts New York City has given me

As the late Tim Keller said, people come here so that they don't feel abnormal.

A few weeks ago, I shared an essay about living in a Christian suburb, and why I couldn’t thrive there as a single woman. I wrote that moving to New York City meant moving out of a social imaginary that sees marriage and family as the pinnacle of Christian fulfillment. Then I suggested some of you should move to NYC, as an aside that could be annoying in the way new converts to anything can be annoying.

The Lower Manhattan skyline seen from Brooklyn Bridge Park.

But it’s true: New York City has been a great gift, a real life glow-up. Not perfect, not without new challenges, but a key setting for growing as a person and as a Christian.

Some of my co-religionists are surprised that a cosmopolitan hub of elite power in a coastal blue state could be the site of spiritual vitality. According to Pew, 9 percent of adults in NYC identify as evangelical, compared with 20 percent of adults in Chicago, 33 percent of adults in Atlanta, and 38 percent in Dallas. Now, if you account for Catholic, ma…