Big Tent Revivalism

Abstract

Abstract The huge popularity of big tent revivalism coincided with the rise of consumer and therapeutic culture at the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter argues that big tent revivalists participated in the shift away from Victorianism and helped in the construction of a new consumer culture. Revivalism’s adaptation to and innovation of newer cultural understandings was largely the product of revivalists’ desire to reach the masses with their Christian message. This populist impulse made big tent evangelists highly sensitive to cultural trends. Revivals attempted to temper consumer culture by retaining nineteenth-century Protestant language that emphasized sin, character, salvation, and hard work, but this language was increasingly spoken with a consumer accent. Big tent revivals were fashioned to fit the urban consumer culture, drawing on the city’s idioms of consumption, entertainment, abundance, celebrity, and therapeutic self-fulfilment, offering old-time religion, but in novel ways.