Sin in the City: Chicago and Revivalism, 1880-1920

Preface

In some ways, I should not be writing a book on sin. I am not a theologian , and I am not interested in philosophizing about the nature of good and evil. I am interested, however, in how a society defines “sin,” and in how history and culture can mold its meaning. I am particularly intrigued with America’s twenty-first-century “culture wars” and the way that “New Right” evangelicals tout the righteousness of “traditional family values” and label alternative or conflicting viewpoints as “sin.” The passion and political activism that surrounds these issues, I suspect, is less a contemporary initiative than an outgrowth of two centuries of evangelicals working to implement their vision of morality and to change America. In particular , current commitments by evangelicals to “moral values” find clear roots in successive waves of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious revivals that historians have anointed the “Great Awakenings.” Revivalism’s mandate for social transformation originated in communities of the prerevolutionary colonies, reappeared in towns of antebellum America, and, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, became a nationwide phenomenon that enveloped major urban areas in a “Third Great Awakening.”1 Third Awakening revivals were organized during a dynamic period of American history. The thirty years between 1890 and 1920 marked the rise of urban, corporate America as well as the arduous transition from Victorian to modern culture. During these same years the country also became racialized as large immigrant groups flooded urban, industrial areas and African ix Preface 1. Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” 305–25; William McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham; William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977; Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, 19–43. Americans migrated north during World War I. The significant economic and demographic shifts of this period laid the groundwork for what we now know as modern American culture. Changes of this magnitude also impacted gender expectations, challenging many of the ideals for womanhood and manhood that had predominated throughout the Victorian era. This era also saw the construction of a color line that was formulated around ideas of ethnicity and race but supported by economic discrimination as well. The extent of this transformation was seen most clearly in the “new” American city—metropolitan areas that became microcosms of the rapid and oftentimes tumultuous change of the era. Conservative Protestants, or evangelicals, confronted the city with a combination of optimism and dread. On the one hand, turn-of-the-century evangelicals weathered the economic, political, and social changes with little difficulty. As members of the white middle class they oftentimes were in the vanguard of American modernization. In other ways, however, evangelicals found the magnitude of change in urban America disorienting and even threatening, particularly to their sense of moral order. Evangelicals saw the tumult of the American city loosening the grip that family and community had held on an individual’s belief and behavior. They saw the decline of these formative influences as “sin,” and they responded with religious revivals that were highly organized assaults on evil. This book focuses on three Chicago revivals—Dwight L. Moody’s 1893 World’s Fair Revival, the 1910 Chapman-Alexander Simultaneous Evangelistic Campaign, and Billy Sunday’s 1918 revival—all part of the Third Awakening. The three revivals offer a longitudinal opportunity to examine this phenomenon and to observe its interaction with the city. The theology of this book is minimal because, rather than focusing on a specific theologian or denominational doctrine, I am primarily interested in studying popular religious expression and the culture in which it incubates. More specifically, the book examines the influence of gender, race, and status on evangelicalism’s definition of morality, and how Third Awakening narratives and rituals expressed and reinforced this moral ideal. In response to the city, revivalists instituted a moral regime rooted in class and racial advantage that was represented by moral models of womanhood and manhood . To redeem the city, revivalists enshrined white middle-class gender norms as ideals of righteousness and worked to bring about social and political reform as evidence of religious transformation. x Preface Despite the century that separates the Third Awakening from the hardfought “wars” waged by evangelical conservatives and sanctioned by three Republican presidential administrations since 1980, current efforts to sustain evangelical hegemony resonate with earlier turn-of-the-century revivalist efforts. Even...