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...