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introduction In recent years, prominent American evangelicals such as Jim Wallis and Rick Warren have described themselves as “nineteenth-century evangelicals” and have expressed their desire to take contemporary evangelicals “back to the nineteenth century,” when revivalist fervor and valiant efforts at social reform were both emphasized.1 Indeed, many nineteenth-century evangelicals did have this dual focus. Outreach efforts among sailors, immigrants, and the desperately poor were begun at the same time that evangelicals also devoted enormous amounts of energy to citywide revivals. Evangelical revivalism and social reform were the movement’s most public expressions of their corporate identity. But this double commitment was no more easily attained than it is now. A complex array of historical events, people, religious ideas, and shrewd political decisions shaped evangelicals’ involvement in revival and social reform in growing nineteenth-century cities. Simply put, evangelical involvement in revivalism and social reform was a messy affair that involved politics and piety and showcased evangelicals’ contradictions as much as their consistency. The Methodist, Baptist, and (especially) Salvation Army evangelicals discussed in this book—whom I sometimes call “upstart evangelicals”—were newcomers to nineteenth-century Boston, and they, in turn, sought to come to grips with even more recently arrived immigrants from Europe. The upstart evangelicals, though a diverse lot, could be generally categorized as persons of lower socioeconomic status with relatively little formal education compared with more established Protestants in Boston. Evangelical rural migrants , in particular, seemed especially adept at finding a creative marginal space for themselves in Boston. The concept of “marginality” has been utilized by other scholars to describe residents of lodging houses in late-nineteenthcentury Boston who created a new subculture that “differed in important ways from those formed by earlier groups of Americans or immigrants, or by native- and foreign-born tenants at the higher and lower reaches of the social scale.” This concept of a marginal middle class describes both how upstart evangelicals were often perceived by other Protestants as well as how they understood themselves in the era immediately preceding and following the Civil War.2 Upstart evangelical initiatives in the city were sometimes remarkably brash and frequently caught more established Protestants off guard. These revivalistic upstarts often led in efforts for labor reform, public school reform , temperance, and tenement housing reform as these movements swept through the city and prompted dramatic political rearrangements and new 2 · Evangelicals at a Crossroads alliances during the fifty years under consideration. Although never controlling city politics in Boston in ways that the Irish and Boston Brahmins did in the late nineteenth century, evangelicals nonetheless influenced the outcome of many mayoral elections—at times in precisely the opposite way than the way they had intended. As insightfully noted by Margaret Bendroth, upstart evangelicals could also be identified by the relatively marginal position of their church buildings. Much of the prime real estate had already been taken before Baptists and Methodists arrived in any significant numbers.3 A similar phenomenon of a new sort of “upstart evangelical” is occurring among American evangelicals today as an older generation of leaders gives way to younger evangelicals— many of whom are recent immigrants or the children of immigrant parents. The storefronts that house these churches are often in neighborhoods with the lowest rents, and their churches frequently lease space from declining congregations, which may themselves have been characterized as “upstarts” a century earlier.4 Experts predict that by the year 2050 the population of the United States will grow by an additional 100 million persons, almost entirely the result of immigration streams from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The vast majority of these immigrants will have some kind of affiliation with the Christian faith.5 Dramatic changes in urban neighborhoods in late-nineteenthcentury -Boston because of immigration from southern and southeastern Europe were as apparent to residents then as the effects of growing numbers of immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere are in today’s city—perhaps even more so.6 This book will not try to point out all the similarities and differences between today’s Boston and that of the nineteenth century; readers are left to draw their own conclusions in this regard. Nevertheless, I insist that this story of Boston evangelicals, in all its particularity, does indeed shed light on contemporary debates in American religious life. Generalizations are difficult to make about contemporary American evangelicals just as they were in the late nineteenth century. The study of any broad-based religious movement requires careful...

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