One of the best parts of writing a book is finding colorful characters who can drive your narrative by telling the stories of their lives. The evangelical world is full of them, and a major challenge with this book was deciding who to leave out! Over the next few weeks, I’ll highlight a few people who did the most to shape evangelicalism.
Billy Sunday — yes, that is indeed the preacher’s given name — achieved fame early as a ballplayer with the Chicago White Stockings starting in 1883. After his playing career wrapped up in 1890, he joined the Chicago YMCA and then served as an apprentice to a traveling preacher. Sunday embarked on his own ministry career and won over audiences with simple messages animated with a brawny athleticism honed on the baseball diamond.
Sunday preached biblical inerrancy — the notion that the Bible is free of all error — thus, people only needed to read the Bible for themselves and obey it. His views clashed with Protestants steeped in the liberal theology that dominated seminaries and colleges. In 1908, these churches advanced a “social creed” that called for an end to child labor, mandates ensuring workplace safety, and a living wage for all workers.
Sunday portrayed such efforts as threats to the American capitalist system. He opposed government reforms as un-Christian and un-American. The only true reform was for people to make a personal conversion to Christ. (This argument was used by evangelicals against civil rights legislation.) Treating churches as just another charitable organization was “godless social service nonsense,” he said.
Sunday himself was a big business. When he decided to hold a revival in a city, he organized committees to raise money to build a tabernacle from the ground up since no church was large enough to hold his admirers. In 1917, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and other business barons raised $65,000 to build a “glory barn” at 168th Street and Broadway that could accommodate 18,000 people. Sunday filled it for 10 weeks.
Sunday was handsomely rewarded for his efforts. Sunday walked away from his 1916 campaign in Detroit with a “thanks offering” of $46,102.28 in cash, which translates to well over $1 million in today’s dollars. Henry M. Leland, founder and president of Cadillac, presented Sunday with an $8,000 limousine with special features such as a hidden pocket designed to hold a Bible. Leland had served on the Sunday campaign’s executive committee.
Sunday believed that Christian service and financial success were intertwined — a precursor of prosperity gospel preachers and modern televangelists. If Sunday could rise from a log-cabin childhood to a position of wealth and fame, perhaps his admirers could, too. Sunday also linked Christianity and patriotism in a manner similar to today’s Christian nationalists. World War I supercharged Sunday’s jingoism, and he applauded the postwar Palmer Raids that targeted communists and leftists. “If they don’t like the way we do things, let them get out of here and leave. We don’t propose to adjust the country to suit a lot of anarchists,” he thundered.
Sunday’s feverish style fell out of fashion as the age of radio dawned, and his message curdled into nativism in his later years. (His archives at Grace College in Indiana include a 1931 letter from the Kanton Klan of Canton, Ohio, thanking Sunday for his work in the “furtherance of God’s Kingdom and the perpetuation of our American heritage.”) Yet his life story is a guide to understanding the political attitudes and flamboyance that are hallmarks of evangelicalism to this day.