The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism. By Matthew Bowman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. x + 308 pp. $74.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Evangelicalism . By Matthew Bowman . New York : Oxford University Press , 2014. x + 308 pp. $74.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesRenditions of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy commonly feature militant conservers of the old-time religion locked in theological battle with enthusiastic accommodators of modernity. Matthew Bowman's The Urban Pulpit weaves a subtler and more convincing story. While some turn-of-the-century New York liberals were ready and willing to abandon historic Christian metaphysics, many more were not so inclined. These liberal evangelicals held as tenaciously to the hope of a Christian city as did their fundamentalist counterparts. Indeed, in Bowman's telling, Liberal and fundamentalist evangelicalisms were the product of pastoral experimentation, attempts to preserve evangelical faith--and hence, a certain mode of society--in the crucible of tenements and factories and department stores (13).Bowman's argument that the emerging fissures within American protestantism were significantly intra-evangelical is centrally related to a further contention: namely, that the substance of disagreements between New York City's believers was as much stylistic as it was theological. Protestants of every persuasion could not help but respond to the concomitant demographic and cultural shifts that dramatically remade the nation's industrializing cities over the course of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Bowman uses a wide variety of evidence--drawn, for example, from the realms of liturgy, architecture, and biblical translation and interpretation--to illustrate the profoundly different instincts that conservatives and liberals displayed in reacting to their changing environs. Fundamentalists tended to define themselves against the ever more polyglot and multicultural metropolis, cultivating a style that was distinctive for its embrace of confrontation (92). Bowman cites the work of ministers such as Billy Sunday and John Roach Straton, who emphasized more insistently than ever before the raw power of the spoken word of God in their campaigns to call worldly New Yorkers to repentance. Meanwhile, the city's liberal evangelicals sought ways to connect with their increasingly diverse neighbors by emphasizing religious experience over doctrine, as well as by redoubling their commitment to social reform. If for strategic reasons they did not always foreground their evangelical convictions, they nevertheless conceived of what they were doing in terms of a specifically Christian mission to the city. Indeed, what Bowman writes of the early-twentieth-century Presbyterian divine Henry Sloane Coffin was more broadly true: he believed the church needed to adapt its methods, though not its goals (111). …