Evangelical Message Research Articles

Revival in the City: The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 (review)

Reviewed by: Revival in the City: The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884-1914 Tina Block Revival in the City: The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914. Eric R. Crouse. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. Pp. 230, illus., b&w, $65 Between 1884 and the First World War, several American evangelists travelled across the border to hold revivals in Canadian cities. These campaigns are the subject of Eric Crouse's lively new study, Revival in the City. Crouse argues that American revivals, with their populist approach and conservative evangelical message, were immensely popular in English Canada during this era, particularly among the working classes. While visiting American evangelists initially drew wide support from Canadian Protestant leaders and the secular media, that support began to wane in the 1900s. By 1914, American revivalism had largely ended in Canada, eclipsed by the rise of secularization and the growing criticism of conservative evangelicalism. Drawing on reports in secular and denominational newspapers, Crouse examines the Canadian revival campaigns of five well-known American evangelists between the 1880s and 1911. Although they had varying rates of success, these revivalists shared a conservative evangelical perspective and a willingness to engage popular culture. The arrival of Dwight L. Moody in Toronto in 1884 marked the beginning of this era of revivalism. With his innovative use of popular culture, and his 'preaching of uncomplicated biblical truths' (46), Moody drew widespread support from the Protestant community, the press, and ordinary Canadians. While Moody set the stage for a surge of revivalism in Canada, his popularity was no guarantee of success for those who followed. As Crouse notes, co-evangelists Sam Jones and Sam Small experienced limited success with their Toronto campaigns of 1886–7. Jones and Small faltered because of their sensationalism, their strained relationship with the press and labour, and their weak salvation message. According to Crouse, American revivalists who preached a 'traditional evangelical message' (79), such as Reuben Torrey, drew the most support in Canada. Despite his wide appeal among the working classes, Torrey met with some disapproval in Protestant circles. This disapproval was even more evident in responses to the revivals held by J. Wilbur Chapman and his team of evangelists between 1907 and 1911. Reflecting their increasingly critical attitude towards conservative evangelicalism, Canadian Protestant leaders gradually withdrew their support from American revivalists, precipitating the end of this era of 'revival mania' in Canada. [End Page 503] Revival in the City makes a significant contribution to the historiography of evangelicalism in North America. The study of national religious patterns and traditions is and will remain important, but more attention must be paid to patterns and traditions that crossed national borders. Crouse rightly argues that with respect to religion, the Canada-US border was indeed highly permeable. He also adds to debates about the secularization thesis in Canada. Proponents of the thesis have argued that the clergy contributed to secularization by too readily accommodating popular culture. Although he does not dispute the idea of secularization, Crouse challenges the presumed link between popular culture and religious decline. He points out that popular culture methods did little to dilute the salvation message offered by American revivalists. In suggesting that American revivalism appealed especially to the working classes, Crouse adds to the growing scholarship on class and religion in North America. He joins other scholars in arguing that the working classes were alienated from the churches, but not from religion. While Crouse suggests that evangelists masculinized their message in order to appeal to working-class men, the intersections between class and gender could be further developed. Working-class men figure prominently in Revival in the City, but we are left wondering about other groups, such as working-class women and middle-class men. Throughout the text, Crouse argues that the working classes were attracted to the 'simple' (40) preaching of American evangelists. Since he relies mainly on church and secular papers, Crouse is more convincing when discussing the rhetoric of revival than the motivations of the revival participants themselves. Crouse's richly detailed study provides an important lens on American revivalism in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. It unravels the...

THE REFORMATION AND THE BOOK: A RECONSIDERATION

Perceptions of the role of the book in the Reformation are shaped by our knowledge of the German print world during the first decades of Protestant expansion. All indications point to evangelical domination of the press in the years when Luther first became a public figure, when the printed book undoubtedly played a crucial role in the dissemination of the evangelical message, and printing enjoyed a period of exuberant growth. But it is by no means certain that assumptions derived from this German model hold good for other parts of Europe. This article re-examines the German paradigm of book and Reformation in the light of two recent bibliographical projects. The first, a trial survey of publishing outputs throughout Europe, demonstrates that the different regional print cultures that made up the European book world were organized in radically contrasting ways. These structural differences were highly significant from the point of view of assisting or impeding the output of controversial literature. The lessons from this survey are then applied to an individual case study, France, which, it emerges, deviated from the German model in almost every particular. Together these two sets of data force us to call into question the natural affinity between print and Protestantism suggested by the German paradigm.

La predicación como fuente de comunicación. Sus posibilidades y límites

La predicación, objeto de muchos estudios por su importancia en la relación de la Iglesia con la sociedad, ha sido bastante ineficaz a lo largo de los siglos e incapaz de transformar las sociedades llamadas cristianas. Las causas de ese fracaso han sido muchas. Entre las más importantes, la corrupción de la misma Iglesia, la ignorancia del clero y la incapacidad del pueblo para entender en toda su profundidad el mensaje evangélico prostituido por una Iglesia (entendida como jerarquía y clero) inhábil para acomodar su vida a su predicación.

Pamphlets, Propaganda and Witch- Hunting in Germany c.156o-c.1630

Historians of the European Witch-Hunt have, for the most part, paid only scant attention to the popular pamphlets on witchcraft, because they regarded such broadsheets as providing little more than entertainment literature for a sensation-seeking public. However, this study suggests that the pamphlets, particularly those published in Germany between 1560 and 1630, should be viewed from a more wide-ranging perspective. Greater consideration needs to be given to the pamphlets’ potential for ‘propaganda’ purposes, and for encouraging the common people to demand that the magistrates engage in witch-hunts. In a similar manner to the early Reformation broadsheets’ propagation of the evangelical message to a mass audience, witchcraft pamphlets helped to disseminate to the public the learned ideas about witches and their supposed demonic crimes. Pamphlets often adopted some of the propagandist techniques utilized by Reformation pamphleteers to convey ideas to a mainly illiterate audience: for example, they presented information in the form of a popular song, and they supplemented the written text with woodcut illustrations that drew on the common people’s predominantly visual culture. Through such devices, the peasantry were provided with information in a straightforward and easily comprehensible manner about conspiracies of destructive witches-witches that threatened to destroy the lower orders’ crops and livestock. Under the intensely distressing circumstances of serious climatic deterioration and severe subsistence crises associated with the onset of the ‘Little Ice Age’, ordinary men and women may have been especially receptive to the pamphlets’ message that evil witches were directly responsible for their economic troubles. Nuremberg’s city council, in particular, was deeply concerned about the pamphlets’ potential for inciting witch-scares, and it banned the sale of a recently published witch-newsletter. The city’s prompt act of censorship had practical consequences and helped to ensure that Nuremberg was not engulfed by the current witch-anxieties raging in neighbouring Bamberg and Wiirzburg. Pamphlets could certainly play an active part in promoting the persecutions, and they could act as a significant form of propaganda for the war waged against the demonic witch sect.

Evangelism and Consumer Culture in Northern Tanzania

Ethnographic description of a revival camp in Northern Tanzania illustrates how the social idea of "youth as consumers" emerges in the context of government downsizing and expanding international markets. An evangelical message effects a link between religion and consumerism. It imbues decisions about what to buy with moral understandings of good and evil. At the same time, the interconnection of evangelism and consumerism gives rise to a paradox: that "youth" who are supposed to be Born Again, and as such, removed from the temptations of consumer culture, in many cases identify themselves as experts in consumption. Participants' descriptions of themselves as consumers point to the consumerist values that underlie revivalism. They also show how "youthful consumption" itself is influenced by alternative registers of value and understandings of personhood.

Millroy the Magician

Award-winning writer Paul Theroux tells a bewitching tale of circus magic and hypnotism which seems to hide a more sinister objective in his exquisite novel the Magician. Fourteen-year-old Jilly Farina walks into the tent at the County Fair and finds her life transformed. Fixing her with her hypnotic gaze, the Magician performs astonishing miracles. When she is later magicked into his trailer and Millroy promised to train her as his assistant, Jilly feels safe for the first time her her short life. But Millroy is more than a mere stage-show magician. vegetarian and health fanatic, a possessor of healing and hypnotic powers, Millroy is on a mission to change the eating habits og an entire nation. And through Jilly he has found the strength to preach his evangelical message. With Millroy's messianic fervour ever growing, Jilly begins to have doubts - but Millroy knows that without Jilly there will be no magic...Brilliantly done. Theroux's best book for a very long time. (Jonathan Raban, The Times Literary Supplement). Fresh and unexpected...among Theroux's best. (Philip Hensher, Guardian). Magical. (Daily Telegraph). American travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people and places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his novels and collected short stories, My Other Life, The Collected Stories, My Secret History, The Lower River, The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, A Dead Hand, The Elephanta Suite, Saint Jack, The Consul's File, The Family Arsenal, The Mosquito Coast, and his works of non-fiction, including the iconic The Great Railway Bazaar are available from Penguin.

The “Chiliasm of Despair” Reconsidered: Revivalism and Working-Class Agitation in County Durham

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.

The Case of the Abbé Barreau

If I were very irreverent, and had thoughts only of a world from which Coco Chanel and Maurice Chevalier have disappeared, I’m not sure I ought to take with desperate seriousness the defection of one young clergyman from the ranks of Parisian ecclesiastics. Or is this being frivolous? In a sense, it is, because although there is something banal about the way in which the press here or in France seizes upon the marriage of a priest for a ready headline, Barreau is not just any priest. His origins, for one thing, were most unusual in a candidate for the priesthood. His parents were atheists, with those Freemasonry connections which make French Catholic hair stand on end in a Pavlovian instant; in fact his grandfather was chef de cabinet to Combes, whose anti-religious education laws under the Third Republic in the early years of this century drove the religious orders—for a time—out of French education. To cap it all, his great-grandfather was a communard, shot by the Versaillais. All in all, the number of tongues that wagged with I-told-you-so’s and what-can-you-expect’s must have been pretty considerable when Barreau announced his intention to marry one of his parishioners. But he had come to the Church the hard way. His education at the lycée Condorcet and then his studies in law at the University can have done nothing other than confirm him in the dry positivism which characterizes a good many French agnostics. For Barreau, though, there was the Christianity of the personal encounter which made all the difference. His history teacher at Condorcet was Olivier Clément, whose person and example converted him to Christianity. Not that Clément preached at his pupils. But what Barreau learned from him of the true nature of the real evangelical message—‘subversion, scandal, madness to the world’—showed him that he had been content to dismiss what was merely a caricatured Christianity, itself dechristianized.

A Retrospective Look at Undergraduate Economics

With humor, as well as wisdom, experience, and insight, Ben Lewis conveys an “evangelical message” admonishing college economists to give “top priority” to the introductory courses. Deploring the lack of concern about the beginning course, he calls upon us to make it so attractive to students that few will want to miss it. A policy-oriented course with opportunity cost as “the great recurrent theme” is proposed.

The Case of the Abbé Barreau

If I were very irreverent, and had thoughts only of a world from which Coco Chanel and Maurice Chevalier have disappeared, I’m not sure I ought to take with desperate seriousness the defection of one young clergyman from the ranks of Parisian ecclesiastics. Or is this being frivolous? In a sense, it is, because although there is something banal about the way in which the press here or in France seizes upon the marriage of a priest for a ready headline, Barreau is not just any priest. His origins, for one thing, were most unusual in a candidate for the priesthood. His parents were atheists, with those Freemasonry connections which make French Catholic hair stand on end in a Pavlovian instant; in fact his grandfather was chef de cabinet to Combes, whose anti-religious education laws under the Third Republic in the early years of this century drove the religious orders—for a time—out of French education. To cap it all, his greatgrandfather was a communard, shot by the Versaillais. All in all, the number of tongues that wagged with I-told-you-so’s and what-can-you-expect’s must have been pretty considerable when Barreau announced his intention to marry one of his parishioners. But he had come to the Church the hard way. His education at the lycée Condorcet and then his studies in law at the University can have done nothing other than confirm him in the dry positivism which characterizes a good many French agnostics. For Barreau, though, there was the Christianity of the personal encounter which made all the difference. His history teacher at Condorcet was Olivier Clément, whose person and example converted him to Christianity. Not that Clément preached at his pupils. But what Barreau learned from him of the true nature of the real evangelical message—‘subversion, scandal, madness to the world’—showed him that he had been content to dismiss what was merely a caricatured Christianity, itself dechristianized.