Old-time Religion Research Articles

God on Psychedelics: Tripping Across the Rubble of Old-time Religion, by Don Lattin

God on Psychedelics: Tripping Across the Rubble of Old-time Religion, by Don Lattin. The Apocryphile Press, 2023. Pb. 170pp. $14.00. ISBN-13: 9781958061282

Review: God on Psychedelics: Tripping Across the Rubble of Old-time Religion, by Don Lattin

Review: <i>God on Psychedelics: Tripping Across the Rubble of Old-time Religion</i>, by Don Lattin

Song of the Andoumboulou: 300

Song of the Andoumboulou: 300

‘Old-Time Religion in a New-Fashioned Way’: The Ministry of ‘Billy’ Richards, 1943–74

In 1943 a twenty-six-year-old Pentecostal pastor arrived in Slough, a fast-growing industrial town that many church leaders found spiritually tough. Over the next thirty years Billy Richards built a thriving church with six hundred adult members and a thousand children attending groups across the town. His ministry extended beyond Slough through books, radio broadcasts, correspondence courses and international speaking tours. His methods embraced modern media, new forms of worship, conservative theology and a focus on the active work of the Holy Spirit. One local newspaper characterized it as ‘Old-Time Religion in a New-Fashioned Way’. This article explores the inspirational aspects of Richards's ministry, how these took institutional expression in his lifetime, and why that institution continues to be influential today. His ministry provides one example of how local churches could adapt successfully to the changing social and cultural landscape of late twentieth-century Britain. This has implications for the understanding of urban mission and the contribution made by the agency of organized religious institutions to twentieth-century secularization.

Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America. By Daniel Vaca (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2019) 329 pp. $39.95

Historians long took fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals at face value when they claimed to be champions of “the old-time religion.” In fact, the dramatic tension in leading scholarly accounts of modern American Protestantism often emanated from the epic clash between these putative conservatives, intent on preserving biblical authority and essential doctrines, and their modernizing liberal counterparts.But in recent years, this consensus has come under fire, as a rising chorus of scholars has insisted that evangelicals were, from the very beginning, modernizers in their own right. Books by Gloege, Dochuk, and others have sought to redefine evangelicalism, not as a stable tradition marked by an unwavering commitment to an unchanging deposit of faith, but as a profoundly anti-institutional orientation that prized disruptive innovation and despised all would-be regulators, federal and denominational alike. In these scholars’ telling “the old-time religion” was always, first and foremost, a brand.1Vaca’s Evangelicals Incorporated represents a brilliant addition to this emerging literature. Drawing from previously untapped archival sources and interviews with a number of leading figures in the publishing industry, Vaca explores how “books have served as engines of transdenominational evangelical consciousness” (12). In the modern United States, that consciousness expanded as publishers sought more expansive markets for their books. Although companies such as Eerdmans and Zondervan arose in the early twentieth century to serve relatively small Dutch Reformed communities, they always had broader ambitions. Hence, as Vaca shows, “[Eerdmans’] branding strategies…prioritized capacious concepts, which allowed consumers and supporters to associate the firm with whatever strain of Protestantism they valued most” (104). In the early going, the company styled its carefully curated list as “distinctive,” thus making inroads into a wider world of fundamentalist readers. Its leadership, however, always longed to connect with a mass market. By the 1940s, it increasingly seemed that one way was to refashion itself as an “evangelical” publisher. In latching onto the term—which evoked an aspirationally broad-based, though decidedly white, coalition of conservative Protestants—companies like Eerdmans and Zondervan were not so much promoting an evangelicalism that already existed out in the world. Rather, Vaca contends, they were teaming up with fledgling organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals in efforts to bring just such an evangelical public into being.This project gained momentum with the emergence of the Christian Booksellers Association, founded in 1950, and with the subsequent proliferation of evangelical bookstores across suburban landscapes. Vaca persuasively argues that the establishment of such bookstores as subcultural spaces situated within mass-market shopping venues expedited the diffusion of evangelical tropes and forms into the American mainstream. The rise of this “ambient evangelicalism” did not go unnoticed in the nation’s executive suites. By the 1980s, major New York publishing houses were seeking to acquire smaller evangelical publishers, many of which saw God’s hand at work in the deal. As Vaca relates, “the evangelical publishing industry put faith in corporate finance as the best way to reap ever more abundant metaphysical and financial harvests” (163). Insisting that evangelical publishers’ motivations are not reducible to either the material or the spiritual, Vaca casts these firms instead as purveyors of “financial faith” (182). Their extraordinary success can be measured in a variety of ways, but most of all in the fact that, by the early-twenty-first century, evangelicalism was not merely “an identity category and a media market” (227). It had become, as Vaca declares in closing, “the commercial religion of our time” (234).Evangelicals Incorporated is an exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship. Vaca’s approach reflects not only his dexterity with historical and ethnographic methodologies but also his ability to weave together theoretical insights drawn from a variety of different fields, including religious studies, American history, whiteness studies, the history of the book, the history of capitalism, and more. What emerges as a result is a provocative and compelling reinterpretation of evangelicalism in the modern United States with which scholars and general readers alike will be wrestling for a long time to come.

The Prince

The Prince Tarek Masoud (bio) MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman. By Ben Hubbard. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2020. 384 pp. Is there any less promising terrain for the emergence of liberal, democratic government than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Debates rage over the precise alchemy that transforms dictatorships into democracies, but whatever one's preferred ingredient, Saudi Arabia is almost sure to be bereft of it. The country's history is entirely authoritarian, its people denied even the barest hint of political participation. The Kingdom's performance on the Polity IV Index—a common measure of a country's degree of democracy—is impressive in its dismal consistency: Saudi Arabia has earned the lowest possible score every year since 1946 (the first year for which data are available), a feat unmatched even by tyrannies such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Hafez al-Assad's Syria, or Kim Il Sung's North Korea.1 Culturally, Saudi Arabia is tribal, patriarchal, and religiously conservative—characteristics ideally suited to the maintenance of absolute monarchy. Autocracy is even encoded into the Saudi economic formula, in which the ruling elite draws liquid from the ground, sells it to foreigners, and uses the resulting windfall to buy off would-be dissenters and to acquire implements of violence to deploy against those who cannot be bought. If all that were not enough, the Kingdom's peculiarly premodern form of government has been sustained by a geopolitical bargain with the world's most powerful democracies, which offer protection and support in exchange for uninterrupted access to the elixir that flows beneath the sands. Given the obstacles arrayed against it, how might the political emancipation of Saudis ever be achieved? If this question had been posed prior to 2 October 2018, one could have been forgiven for pointing to Mohammed bin Salman, the 34-year-old heir to his country's throne and, as the New York Times's Ben Hubbard reports in his penetrating new biography, the [End Page 172] real power behind it. When the crown prince—known in the West by his initials, MBS—burst onto the scene, he seemed to many (including the author of these lines) to be the deliverer that the Kingdom had long needed. No one, of course, thought that the man was a democrat, but he presented himself—and was presented to us by the likes of the Washington Post's David Ignatius and the New York Times's Thomas Friedman—as a modernizer in the tradition of Japan's Emperor Meiji and Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In this telling, MBS was a farsighted leader who recognized the need to liberate his country from both its addiction to oil and the shackles of old-time religion. To read MBS's "Vision 2030"—the national economic and social roadmap he put forward in 2016 (with the help of a passel of high-priced McKinsey consultants)—was to catch a glimpse of a Saudi Arabia that might one day be a candidate, if not for democracy, then for more participatory, inclusive governance than it had hitherto enjoyed. In addition to promising "a vibrant society," "a thriving economy," and "a tolerant country," MBS pledged to "adopt wide-ranging transparency and accountability reforms," and to "be transparent and open about our failures as well as our successes."2 This was not language one was accustomed to hearing from the leaders of that most absolute of absolute monarchies. With the talk came action. The same month that Vision 2030 was announced, a law was passed weakening Saudi Arabia's feared Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—a force of religious zealots primarily responsible for shuttering shops during prayer times, harassing women whose appearance they deemed improper, and generally cowing people into conformity with their cramped conception of the faith. "With a single royal decree," Hubbard writes, "MBS had defanged the clerics, clearing the way for vast changes they most certainly would have opposed" (p. 63). Nowhere was the prince's commitment to "unlinking the clerics from the monarchy" (p. 279) more evident than in his efforts to challenge the country's clerically sanctioned edifice...

The Brontë Badasses, and: Emily’s Apocrypha, and: Reading Emily Brontë by Long Island Sound

The Brontë Badasses, and: Emily’s Apocrypha, and: Reading Emily Brontë by Long Island Sound Jane Satterfield THE BRONTË BADASSES are up to here with their aunt’s old-time religion,their brother’s boozy brawls. They’ll walk milesin unhip boots, unfazed by hail or funnel clouds,slinging sweet iambics to help them keep the pace.Anne’s irked past words with nannying and given inher notice—good riddance to the coked-upfinancier and his straying wife, the schoolboystoning sparrows, the chronic cleaning up.She’s breathing freer now that a Gothic cross heavesbetween her breasts. Some nights she leadskitchen karaoke, is not above canoodlingin the crypts with her father’s curate. Charlotte downsa dirty chai to plot another romance novel.She’ll lock the doors and justify their genius,rifling through her sisters’ desks. She’s no ordinarybusybody, just looking for a pen. Her love lettersto her old prof are full of pretty filthy stuff—submissive dreams and words like whips. Emily’san insomniac, works from dusk till dawn and stillfinds time for pistol practice—survivalism calls.When hailed to play piano, she’ll unleash a darkfugue on unwitting guests and call her hawkdown with a whistle—watch out, she’ll throwred wine in your face. Beguiling cocktails?They can’t even. Their laughter sets the houseabuzz as any hive. They go commando whenthey can, in town or on the primrose path. [End Page 526] EMILY’S APOCRYPHA Wafting across the moors in a cloud of Yorkshire mist, the so-called sphinx of English literature has acquired almost supernatural status. The absences surrounding her have made her all the more magnetic and some colorful apocrypha has emerged to fill the gaps. —Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth did not include the dour black plumageof today’s lashing rain, though the hillsin her time and town would have rung with a similar hammering sound,worsening wind erasing horizonsand heather. Did not include the whirl of sirens, though maybe you’d have heardthe purring cat curled up to the grating’sedge while embers alternately flared and cooled. Moor walker and maybemystic who knew a book might be an indexof birds, maybe amid a brother’s intemperate rage, Emily Brontë watched a spider cross the flagstonefloor, ink-thick in its advance, retreat;reckoned that a pistol’s kickback is nothing next to the heart’s: torquedmuscle pumping its own fugue.Linnet, skylark, curlew, cuckoo; lapwing with rainbow feathers and furling crest,merlin of the steel grey eye—You did know the world of tearing talons, poacher’s traps, what cruelty in manbegets. Sometimes you spoke too franklybut mostly held your tongue, tired out at teas, [End Page 527] with social calls. Village paths gave or didn’tbeneath those scruffy boots.You were no small-town sibyl, stitching stuttered measures from some divine source.Nor did you die on an ebony horsehair-filled couchseveral inches short of your lanky height. If good sense demanded a fire ironacross your arm to seal a sheepdog’s bite,you wore its flaming sigil, and if a spray of flour hung in the kitchen’s heat,it shone as moments, marginalia, scrawlednotes stashed in a locked desk box, your mastiff crouched nearby,becalmed though still a beast,held at bay like a devouring flame. [End Page 528] READING EMILY BRONTË BY LONG ISLAND SOUND Life is short & art is all & the day is dazzling, a glassine surface, the clouds a mottled counterpane. The view splays blue, ring-billed gulls parse the tide. No lark or heather-bells, just pages where the seasons swing. You walked away from village chatter, toward the waterfall’s campaign, up moorland hills where a wind beat a path through grass. Such license in stolen afternoons where you saw hidden constellations— the silver trail of snails, a fistful of bees roused from sleep. Your dress was a welter of thunder clouds and lighting bolts— Today I’m gauze and flutter sleeves. Would you say the here and now’s a horizon...

Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture: American Fundamentalism between the Wars by Douglas Carl Abrams

Reviewed by: Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture: American Fundamentalism between the Wars by Douglas Carl Abrams C. Delane Tew Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture: American Fundamentalism between the Wars. By Douglas Carl Abrams. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxiv, 233. $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4985-4505-1.) In Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture: American Fundamentalism between the Wars, Douglas Carl Abrams offers a nuanced exploration of fundamentalist leaders, ideology, and responses to modernist culture during the early twentieth century. Abrams avoids the temptation to focus on the infamous Scopes trial of 1925 and instead analyzes fundamentalist responses to changing societal views on science, reason, Marxism, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Fundamentalists navigated these challenges using "Common Sense Realism" and a firm faith in the supernatural power of God (p. xix). Abrams bases his research on the publications of leaders such as James M. Gray, J. Gresham Machen, and Bob Jones Sr., material that rarely mentions women. In addition, Abrams sparingly covers the South, noting that in general fundamentalists did not leave southern denominations and briefly discussing Bob Jones Sr., Dallas Theological Seminary, and Southern Baptist firebrand J. Frank Norris. Abrams begins by evaluating how fundamentalist leaders disseminated their ideas. He reaches beyond The Fundamentals, a well-known series of pamphlets produced between 1910 and 1915, in his evaluation. For example, Abrams draws on the Moody Bible Institute Monthly, a significant periodical with a national circulation of 40,000 by 1935, and The King's Business, which was [End Page 492] supported by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Through these publications, fundamentalist leaders expressed their understandings of many theological issues, especially their views on scripture. In the face of higher criticism, taught by mainline Protestant denominations, leaders such as James M. Gray argued for the belief in an inspired "Word of God" (p. 12). Again, Abrams points to a variety of beliefs regarding the Bible among fundamentalist leaders, not simply focusing on the movement's well-known belief in the inerrancy of scripture. The developing field of psychology presented conflicts for fundamentalists. Sigmund Freud posited a human psyche that responded to natural causes, with no need for a relationship with a god figure. Freud also legitimated a wide range of sexual behavior, most of which fundamentalists viewed as sins. Overall, psychologists seemingly denied the existence of sin and therefore the need for redemption as well, implying that humans were responsible for saving themselves. Moreover, fundamentalists noted that other elements in society used psychology to lead society down hazardous paths. Advertising, for instance, played on and encouraged American consumerism. However, some fundamentalist leaders recognized that modernist ideas, such as psychology, offered potential clues as how to reach people with the gospel's message. In painting a picture of fundamentalism's response to modern philosophy, Abrams highlights the beliefs of Friedrich Nietzsche, which were often connected with German aggression in Europe. The murder trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold in Chicago offers the author a focus for this discussion, since it represented what fundamentalists saw as dangerous modern thinking. The two defendants referred to their acceptance of Nietzsche's beliefs as a justification for their crime, particularly Nietzsche's assertion that humans are governed by intelligence and that it alone separates them from the beasts. Overall Abrams does a masterful job of demonstrating that fundamentalism between the wars was not a monolithic movement. No one leader spoke for all fundamentalists; instead, many offered a variety of interpretations of the threats presented by modernity. Abrams's view helps the reader understand how fundamentalist leaders struggled with these issues in American society between the wars. C. Delane Tew Samford University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern EvangelismTimothy E. W.Gloege. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Guaranteed Pure: Moody Bible Institute, Business, and Making of Modern Evangelism Timothy E. W. Gloege. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.Guaranteed Pure: Moody Bible Institute, Business, and Making of Modern Evangelicalism tells story of founding and evolution of Moody Bible Institute through its history of practical management. front cover hosts a photograph of A. F. Gaylord, manager of Moody Bible Institute (MBI, named after Moody's death in 1900). inside cover describes emergence of a consumer-oriented ?orthodoxy'... [guaranteed of both liberal theology and Populist excesses, calling it old-time religion dependent on consumer capitalism. Reviewers praise book for advancing readers' knowledge of Protestant fundamentalism. author Timothy E. W. Gloege writes, This book attempts to explain continuing vibrancy of conservative and its ideological and political allegiances to consumer capitalism (13). Noting fundamentalism embraces an impossibly diverse coalition of people, Gloege limits his inclusion to those claiming label in 1910s and 1920s; he also bounds modern consumer capitalism, warning it cannot explain all aspects of conservative evangelicalism (14). book does, however, claim that core leadership of early fundamentalist movement-those who controlled key institutions, funded its endeavors, and helped define what ?fundamentals' were-was profoundly influenced by business (14).Gloege organizes the story of corporate in two parts: rise of post-Civil war and ensuing crisis; and, after 1900, its evolution into conservative evangelicalism. first chapter traces Dwight L. Moody's early life, rise of evangelical realism, and Moody's ideas of Christian work; Chapter 2 treats rising labor unrest and development of Moody Bible Institute (MBI); and Chapter 3 introduces early life of American evangelist Rueben A. Torrey (1889-1908), head of Bible Institute of Chicago Evangelization Society, later to become Moody Bible Institute, and his ideas about power for service. Chapter 4 examines 1890's crisis at Moody, involving radical evangelicals and faith healer John Alexander Dowie. Belonging to Part Two, Chapter 5 devotes itself to a Business Basis spearheaded by Henry Parsons Crowell, a leader in oatmeal in 1882 and Quaker Oats in 1891. Following a leave of absence by Reuben A. Torrey, Crowell reorganized MBI, giving it a sound plan and a vision for future. Gloege describes Crowell as early pioneer in the trifecta of trademark, package, and promotion proved to be applicable to any consumer good, including story of MBI (117). Chapter 6 charts pivot at MBI from identity rooted in Christian work to one of pure religion rooted in consumer identity, and Chapter 7 focuses on The Fundamentals, a project resulting in creation of an ad hoc ?orthodoxy' (11). Finally, Chapter 8 describes a conflict between fundamentalists and modernists arising in 1910s and rise in 1920s of a fundamentalist coalition. Epilogue returns to role of MBI in development of conservative evangelicalism.Succinctly, Gloege lays out a framework for understanding American Protestantism. He first describes a ?churchly' orientation influenced North American settlement and emphasized authentic faith as requiring church membership in a particular church, religious authority rooted in Bible but exercised by church, and a biblical interpretation guided by theological tradition and ordained clergy (5). After rise of intellectual Enlightenment, responsibility for thinking became privilege of individual, who used reason and empirical observation to question long-standing assumptions (6). …

Breaking Bad: Public Pensions and the Loss of that Old-Time Fiscal Religion

The Keynesian Revolution ushered in a new milieu of government deficit spending that overturned a historical tradition of balanced budgets. The historical tradition, the so-called “old-time fiscal religion,” maintained that balanced budgets ensured that those receiving the benefits of government services were also the individuals paying the taxes to cover those benefits. This provided an important taxpayer constraint on government spending. By overturning this old-time fiscal religion, the Keynesian revolution led to massive increases in government deficit spending. Keynesianism provided the intellectual support to push the costs of current government programs onto future generations. While most U.S. states have balanced budget provisions, and thus would seem to avoid this Keynesian tendency towards debt accumulation followed at the national level, the ability for states to underfund pension liabilities for state employees has broken the old-time fiscal religion even at the state level. Defined benefit pension plans, combined with the lack of transparency and misleading actuarial assumptions, have enabled state legislators and taxpayers to push the costs of future obligations made to current employees onto future taxpayers. Akin to the rise in deficit spending at the federal level, breaking the old-time fiscal religion at the state level has led to rising unfunded liability expenditures. Transitioning public pensions from defined benefit to defined contribution models would help redeem the old-time fiscal religion going forward, restoring taxpayer constraint on the growth of state and local government.

The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism by Matthew Bowman

Reviewed by: The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism by Matthew Bowman Devin C. Manzullo The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism. By Matthew Bowman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 308 pages, Cloth. The Urban Pulpit offers a convincing and much-needed revisionist history of Protestant religion in Progressive Era America. For too long, historians of American religion have understood late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Protestant Christians as divided into what scholar Martin E. Marty has famously called a "two-party system": modernists and fundamentalists, liberals and conservatives, Social Gospelers and born-again evangelicals. This division (the story goes) resulted from polarized reactions to tectonic shifts in American cultural, social, and political life near the turn of the century: challenges to the historical and scientific veracity of the Bible, waves of Catholic and non-religious immigrants, and the emergence of a leisure industry that provided a desirable alternative to Sunday morning worship. Since Protestants could not agree on how to respond, they fractured. Modernists embraced these developments, as well as other aspects of social pluralism, and sought to integrate them into their religious practice. Fundamentalists rejected these developments in favor of theological and ideological innovations, such as biblical inerrancy and dispensational premillennialism that buttressed the "old-time religion." [End Page 106] Historians and other scholars routinely describe this doctrinal cleavage as the "fundamentalist-modernist controversy." In The Urban Pulpit, Matthew Bowman nuances this story in two ways. First, he introduces into the scholarly discussion a Protestant style—"liberal evangelicalism"—that maintained ties to the old evangelical understanding of salvation and the Bible but did so using a framework that adapted these ideas to the social realities of turn-of-the-century urban America. Second, he depicts the rupture of Protestantism not as a theological debate over religious dogma but as both a pragmatic response to the crisis of the city and as a "product of pastoral experimentation" (13) to uncover the most effective way to preach the Word in a modernizing world. Bowman charts the emergence and decline of liberal evangelicalism and its responses to the urban crisis in eight brief chapters. The first four explain the development of the liberal evangelical style; the final four describe the tensions from the left and right that emerged in opposition to it. According to Bowman, those who would become liberal evangelicals emerged sometime between the 1880s and 1915, departing from the religious consensus of those in the conservative Protestant "mainstream" by self-consciously identifying as "liberal evangelicals." During these decades, virtually all evangelicals lost confidence in their ability to reach postbellum American cities by conventional means. At an earlier time, there had existed an intimate "connection between the city's cultural and physical landscapes and evangelical piety" (13). But now that connection had shattered, and the verbal and written Word of God seemed less powerful in a city teeming with immigrants and saturated with entertainment and recreational opportunities. This crisis necessitated new methods for converting others to Christianity. Liberal evangelicals realized that redemption would not come just by hearing the Word preached: It also had to be embodied and lived out. Bowman explains how this reconceptualization of the Bible occurred, primarily in academic circles, and then further details how liberal evangelical ministers and social activists put it to work. He successfully shows that as social reform movements flourished in New York City in the early twentieth century, liberal evangelicals began to see their activism as a form of religious liturgy, as "rituals of conversion that would draw both the reformer and the reformed into the orbit of the Word enacted, and bring conversion to their souls no less than preaching might" (112). [End Page 107] After describing the development of the liberal evangelical style, Bowman also analyzes the challenges faced by this nascent movement from both religious conservatives and religious liberals. While liberal evangelicals sought to embody the Word rather than merely preach it, the emergent fundamentalists took the opposite tack. In seeking to "assert faith in the unaltered Word," they delivered "strident and aggressive" verbal proclamations (165), a feature that would become a primary identifier of fundamentalism in subsequent...

Latino Landscapes: Postwar Cities and the Transnational Origins of a New Urban America

In 1992 Texas Monthly magazine commissioned Grover Lewis to write a long article about Oak Cliff, the Dallas neighborhood where he grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. Lewis had made his name as a promising literary talent alongside figures such as Larry McMurtry and Dave Hickey and spent more than a quarter century helping define the New Journalism in such publications as Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. Lewis was not one to idealize the Oak Cliff of his youth. He entitled his essay “Farewell to Cracker Eden” and described “the ethos of the place” as having been “absolute white supremacy, reinforced by old-time religion and male chauvinist prickism.” But upon revisiting his “boyhood haunts,” he was moved to offer up an elegiac account of past decline and present blight. “The devastation was total,” he wrote, “an entire neighborhood sunk in rot. The surviving houses were vine-choked, boarded up, literally atomizing in a ghastly mockery of the thriving community I recalled.” Walking the length of Oak Cliff's main shopping street, Lewis continued: “I groped for terms to encompass the scope of the disaster: systemic collapse, municipal cancer, de facto apartheid, social time bomb, a thousand points of dark.” A description such as this one could have been written about any number of city districts that hit bottom in the depths of the urban crisis. Oak Cliff, like much of the urban United States, had reached its peak population and greatest prosperity at midcentury and then entered a lengthy period of decline.1

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.

(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). …

Old-Time Religion in New New China: Alternative Religious Movements in the Post-Mao Era

Old-Time Religion in New New China: Alternative Religious Movements in the Post-Mao Era

Personally Prudent but Publicly Profligate: Reagan’s Generation and Budget Deficits

According to economic historian Robert Higgs (Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, 1987), during the early part of the twentieth century, government spending at all levels (federal, state, and local) rarely exceeded 6 or 7 % of Gross National Product (GNP). Even after rising to 21 % of GNP during WWI, the government’s share of the economy returned to 8 % by the late 1920s. During the Great Depression, however, government’s share of the economy rose to between 14 and 15 % and would never drop below that point again. Public sector economists have wrestled with an explanation for this seemingly permanent increase in this size and scope of government for some time. Explanations include changes in the composition of the voting population (Husted and Kenny, “The Effect of the Expansion of the Voting Franchise on the Size of Government,” Journal of Political Economy, 1997), political entrepreneurship (Holcombe, “Veterans Interests and the Transition to Government Growth: 1870–1915,” Public Choice, 1999), crisis (Higgs, 1987), and Keynesian ideology (Buchanan and Wagner, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes, 2000). It is this last argument we explore more in-depth in this note. In their seminal work, Buchanan and Wagner argue that Keynesian economics eliminated the old-time fiscal religion that had existed prior to the Great Depression. The old time fiscal religion was represented by a correspondence between prudence in personal finance and public finance. Government was expected to run surpluses in good economic times, to prepare for unforeseen bad times. Deficits were only to be

American Literary Supernaturalism

In 1923, Aimee Semple McPherson offered a new illustrated sermon titled “The Trial of the Modern Liberalist College Professor Versus the Lord Jesus Christ” at Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, arguably the nation’s first mega-church, which had opened its doors earlier that year and was already attracting thousands of visitors to each of its three daily services. Blending old-time religion with Hollywood-like spectacle, illustrated sermons were a large part of “Sister” Aimee’s appeal. A rising star in the Pentecostal movement that fanned out across the country following the 1906 Azusa Street Revival, McPherson—whom Sarah Comstock labeled “the prima donna of revivalism” in The Nation—would become even more widely known in subsequent years as a defender of traditional church teachings and values against what she and other evangelical leaders called modernism (qtd. in Sutton 74). Sister Aimee’s latest illustrated sermon cast this antimodernist crusade in particularly dramatic fashion— indeed, in the form of a courtroom drama. “In this sermon,” the historian Matthew Avery Sutton observes, “the evangelist played the role of prosecutor in a mock trial that focused on infiltration of modernism into American churches” (50). Large exhibits featuring biblical verses and quotations from prominent fundamentalist preachers (as well as Abraham Lincoln) were set off against other statements from leading professors of the day. “The jury’s job,” Sutton notes, “was to determine how such leading institutions of revivalism in previous centuries as Yale and Princeton currently stacked up next to the word of God” (50). Predictably, the jury returned a unanimous verdict, finding in favor of Jesus Christ and against the Modern Liberalist College Professor. Although Gregory S. Jackson makes no mention of Angelus Temple or McPherson in his book The Word and Its Witness:

Christians in the American empire: faith and citizenship in the new world order

PREFACE INTRODUCTION 1. Old-Time Religion in a Free Market Empire 2. Combining Faith and Reason in the Modern World Through Catholic Social Thought 3. Justice, Community and Solidarity in the American Battle over Affirmative Action 4. Enter the Poor: American Welfare Reform, Solidarity and the Capability of Human Flourishing 5. Fear of the Other 6. Christian Cosmopolitans in the American Empire CONCLUSION

Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41 (review)

Reviewed by: Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41 Gerard Rice Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41. By Brian Mac Cuarta. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distrib. in the United States by ISBS, Portland, OR. 2007. Pp. 282. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-846-82051-9.) The imposition of the Protestant state church in Ireland was a turning point in Irish history, but the question of the survival of the medieval Catholic Church, alone in northern Europe, has never been satisfactorily explained. Past explanations abound from the use of the inheritance of the church lands and sources of income, vast in dioceses like Meath and Armagh, to pay the salaries of civil servants in Dublin and reward the Old English landowners for political support instead of endowing the state church; there was also the endemic political resistance of at least the Gaelic chiefs and many of the Old English local landowners to the changes imposed from above on worship, on liturgy, on customs of devotion. By 1641 it was obvious that Ireland, alone of the other nations that formed the British Isles, was to be a Catholic country. Brian Mac Cuarta has given in this book a convincing explanation of the phenomenon. He has found all kinds of forgotten sources from both sides of the religious and state divide and placed them in a convincing psychological context. He is at his ease, too, in Latin. He has picked the northern ecclesiastical province conveniently, as it contained the Gaelic North racked by the Nine Years’ War and the Ulster plantation [End Page 397] together with the settled and prosperous Old English diocese of Meath and Clonmacnoise. Essentially he presents a paradigm for events in the whole island, as well as the wider perspective on a hostile state’s attempt to change people’s religion that is eventually defeated with the support of an outside power like the Vatican. Briefly, Mac Cuarta charts the Church in Gaelic Ulster, rudderless after the Nine Years’ War, where clerics, unformed theologically, nominally joined the state church. He shows how the blurred lines between the Protestant state church and the Catholic population became clearer with the arrival in Gaelic Ulster, especially of the Franciscans, many of whom came from their newly established college at Louvain. New life was given to old practices. The habit of confession that seemed to have been dead in practice was renewed, retreats were given, and there was a general stiffening of the attitudes of the native clergy. Interesting was the tolerance of the London merchants in their plantation of Derry and the support and shelter offered by the Hamilton families settled in Tyrone from Scotland. Of course, there was not the same threat to the old-time religion in Meath and Clonmacnoise. Settled and prosperous landowners began to send their children to one or more of the Irish colleges recently established in the Low Countries, France, and Spain. Many became priests and were embued with a vision of the Counter-Reformation, returned home, and remained protected in their ministry by their relations or a network of families related to them. For Meath, a resident bishop, Thomas Dease, arrived, the former rector of the Irish College in Paris. Above all, the Franciscans, the European-trained secular priests, the Jesuits, and the Capuchins provided focus for the work of the clergy. Their efforts seem to have been orchestrated by the Waterford-born Peter Lombard, primate of all Ireland who was resident in Rome. He sent his secretary, David Roth, as vice primate to Ireland to control, as far as possible, and motivate the clergy by appointing the equivalent of bishops, called variously vicars apostolic or vicars general, to the dioceses in the northern province. They restored normal Catholic life as best they could with a priest for every parish. There were, of course, great differences in the effectiveness of their campaign: weak east of the Bann, relatively strong in Derry and Tyrone, and strong in Meath. But an easing off of persecution, because of the efforts of the English king to marry his son, Charles, to a Spanish infanta, helped as well. It is a fascinating, interesting, engagingly told...

Old-Time Religion: Christian Experimentalism and Preaching to the “Unchurched”

Old-Time Religion: Christian Experimentalism and Preaching to the “Unchurched”

The Third Great Awakening: Religion and the Civil Rights Movement

During a recent research trip to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, Mississippi, I studied photographs documenting the interiors of black homes from the early 1900s to the present. I was particularly interested in uses of religious art. Although I found little of what I was looking for, two archivists reminded me about a common feature of the visual culture of African-American domestic popular at mid-century and persisting in some rural areas today. These archivists, both middle-aged black women who had grown up in Mississippi, told me that during the 1950s and 1960s every black home, no matter how rich or poor, displayed two portraits next to one another in the kitchen or living room. One was of Jesus, the other of Martin Luther King, Jr. Finding images of Jesus and King tacked side-by-side to the walls of black homes fifty years ago would come as no surprise to David Chappell in his book about the role of religion in the civil rights movement, Stone of Hope. For this particular visual dimension of modern African-American symbolizes the key point to his work-that the integration of religion and politics among blacks laboring to overthrow the system of Jim Crow was a crucial reason for their many victories. King and his followers found a unifying sense of political purpose and a range of cultural resources in African-American churches that ultimately ensured their triumphs. By contrast, Chappell argues, segregationists failed to garner the popular support necessary to turn back threats to the southern way of life because they lacked the enthusiastic backing of most of their spiritual leaders; for them, religion was a source of dissent and fragmentation that undermined their defensive stand. As he puts it, The civil rights movement succeeded for many reasons. This book isolates and magnifies one reason that has received insufficient attention: black activists got strength from old-time religion, and white