The Gospel of Efficiency: Billy Sunday's Revival Bureaucracy and Evangelicalism in the Progressive Era
This essay investigates the roles of Billy Sunday's staff during his urban revivals in the 1910s, especially the committees and departments they administered. Understanding this revival organization is central to understanding Sunday's success. A corporate organization not only allowed Sun...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
[2016]
|
| In: |
Church history
Year: 2016, Volume: 85, Issue: 3, Pages: 587-616 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Sunday, Billy 1862-1935
/ USA
/ Protestantism
/ Historiography
/ Appraisal
|
| IxTheo Classification: | KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history KBQ North America KDD Protestant Church |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | This essay investigates the roles of Billy Sunday's staff during his urban revivals in the 1910s, especially the committees and departments they administered. Understanding this revival organization is central to understanding Sunday's success. A corporate organization not only allowed Sunday's team to reach urban populations, it also put evangelicalism culturally in step with the times. This committee structure made outpourings of the Holy Spirit predictable and even guaranteed, and it helped Sunday create a revivalism for an age of mass production, one that was palatable to a cross-class and nationwide audience and reproducible in cities across the country. Most scholars of American religion are familiar with the outline of Sunday's career, but the labors of his staff and their contributions remain virtually unexplored. Further, there is a looming historiographical problem with how scholars treat Sunday. His most important years as a revivalist were in the 1910s, before the fundamentalist movement began, but his name is virtually synonymous with fundamentalism. This article challenges scholars to interpret Progressive Era evangelicals not in terms of what they became in the 1920s, but in terms of how they shaped and were shaped by an era of urbanization and consumer capitalism. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1755-2613 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0009640716000482 |