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THE URBAN PULPIT: EVANGELICALS AND THE CITY IN NEW YORK, 1880-1930 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Matthew Bowman, MA Washington, DC February 22, 2011 Copyright 2011 by Matthew Bowman All Rights Reserved ii THE URBAN PULPIT: EVANGELICALS AND THE CITY IN NEW YORK, 1880-1930 Matthew Bowman, MA Thesis Advisor: Michael Kazin, PhD. ABSTRACT This study examines how the rise of liberal and fundamentalist factions of American evangelicalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – a dispute usually assumed to be basically theological - appeared from the perspective of the ministers and congregations of New York City’s Protestant churches. I argue that conflict should be understood not as a theological clash but as an exhibition of the resilience of American evangelical culture in the modern age. The rise of liberalism and fundamentalism cannot be understood apart from their interaction with the social and cultural forces of the changing modern city. I investigate the ways evangelicals explained and sought to master a city transforming first into an industrial powerhouse dominated by immigrants and eventually into the hub of a commercial consumer society. The dissertation makes two interwoven arguments. First, the division of religion in New York City’s congregations was the result of varying pastoral strategies. Problems of poverty, industrialization and commercialization were not merely worrying for social or economic reasons; they hampered the ritual acts of evangelical piety centered upon the act of preaching and its relationship to the conversion experience. Both liberals and fundamentalists offered ways to preserve the power of evangelical religious practice, and their disagreements were based on these varying solutions. This is a useful corrective to arguments that the pressures of social reform led liberal evangelicals toward secularization. The second argument is that the closer one gets to the lived experience of American evangelicals, the blurrier definitions become. Though the terms “fundamentalist” and “liberal” iii had distinct meanings, evangelicals were equally aware that both lay claim to a way of understanding what it was to be religious derived from their common heritage in American evangelicalism’s language and history and methods. Today, despite the popular historiographical perspective that conservatives beat a retreat in the 1920s, many Americans associate the label “evangelical” with a politically threatening subculture premised upon a rather humorless orthodoxy. The dispute over what constitutes “evangelicalism” is a persistent one, both in and outside the academy. Taking practice seriously is a first step toward restoring the movement’s rich heritage. iv Contents Introduction 1 1. The Word in the City 26 2. The Revised Version 74 3. The Word Made Stone: Churchbuilding in 1880s New York 107 4. Charles Briggs and the Rise of Liberal Evangelicalism 150 5. Liberal Piety and the Institutional Church 183 6. Isaac Haldeman and the Bible 232 7. Billy Sunday and the Revival of the Preached Word 263 8. The Union School of Religion and the Limits of Liberal Evangelicalism 297 9. John Roach Straton and the Fundamentalist Style 345 10. Harry Emerson Fosdick and Baptism at Riverside 382 Conclusion 423 Bibliography 434 v Introduction On a cold Sunday in February, 1931, the Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick, minister of the Riverside Church on the upper west side of Manhattan, delivered a meditative sermon on the passing of what he called the “old-fashioned Christianity” dominant when his own career had begun thirty years earlier. “They did not join so many committees as we do, but they understood better the meaning of prayer,” he said. “Sometimes, in consequence, there emerged a personal, spiritual power that puts us to shame.”1 Throughout the sermon, Fosdick used the phrases “old- fashioned,” “old time Christians,” and “fundamentalist” as synonyms, assuming a dichotomy with his own version of faith, which he called “modernism.” He insisted that despite his elegiac tone, modern Christianity was essential: it met the needs of his congregation, it ensured the preservation of faith in a bustling urban and scientific world, while the version of Christianity he declared past clung to “old theologies and outworn sectarianisms” of the Puritans, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. And indeed, that Fosdick was willing to preach a sermon that approached “old- fashioned Christianity” with longing and nostalgia indicated how confident he was that it had faded into irrelevancy. Only ten years before, after all, he had thrown down a gauntlet in his combative 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” But despite – or perhaps because of - the easy triumphalism implicit in his past tense, Fosdick did not hesitate to admit that there might be continuities between “old-fashioned Christianity” and his own version of Christianity that went far deeper than the intellectual and doctrinal disputes that tore them apart. He hungered for a certain type of spirituality, religious experience, devotional life, and he suspected, if only unconsciously, that it lived more vitally in the faith he came to praise and bury than in his own. He insisted, “We, of course, stand stoutly 1 Harry Emerson Fosdick, “A Fundamentalist Sermon by a Modernist Preacher,” in David Turley, ed., American Religion: literary sources and documents (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1998) 313. 1 here for the gains of modernism. We do not . identify our Christian convictions with obsolete doctrines.”2 But the desire to recover what had been lost that lingered throughout the very sermon that espoused such clarity belied the force of the distinction. Fosdick protested too much. Fosdick’s sermon reveals the anxiety that lay at the heart of the turbulent experiences of American evangelicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a matter of decades American Protestants faced a sudden concentration of challenges to their worldview and accustomed way of life. New research into biology and geology seemed to challenge assumptions about the creation story of Genesis, and Biblical scholarship common assumptions about the authorship and source of the Bible. And American Protestantism fractured. This period is often called the “fundamentalist-modernist controversy,” a title which evokes images of competing camps with clear intellectual proclivity toward either conservation or innovation waging a war over Christian doctrine. And there is some truth to this: some evangelicals synthesized concentrated versions of traditional Reformation theology, most particularly addressing the Bible. Theologians at Princeton drew upon Reformation ideas about inspiration to maintain that the original Biblical manuscripts were without error, that God regularly intervened into human history, and that Biblical miracles were historical. Some evangelicals, inspired by the work of a United Brethren preacher named John Nelson Darby, fashioned a dispensational interpretation of human history that divided the Bible into a set of divine epochs and offered an apocalyptic road map of the human future. All of these positions offered an aggressive defense of the supernatural presence of God in the world. By World War I, many Protestants who subscribed to one or both of these 2 Fosdick, “A Fundamentalist Sermon by a Modernist Preacher,” 309. 2 ideas had begun calling themselves fundamentalists, and aggressively challenging those who seemed to be watering down Christianity.3 Those evangelicals, fundamentalism’s antagonists, Fosdick’s modernists, or, as they often called themselves, liberal evangelicals or liberal Protestants, had since the 1880s sought to deal with the problem of scholarship by assimilating it, arguing that, contra dispensationalism or direct divine intervention, God revealed his will through the progressive developments of human history and the broadening of human knowledge and ability to influence the world. Contra inerrantism, they often dealt with historically implausible or problematic areas of scripture by labeling them myth describing deeper realities about God or the human condition. They maintained that religion had to adapt itself to the intellectual languages of the age, and collapsed supernaturalism into a broadly optimistic view of human potential.4 By the early 1920s, these two camps were in open rivalry. Fosdick’s confrontational sermon was echoed in the rhetoric of many other liberals, and the fundamentalists returned the favor by attempting to cast the liberals from the great evangelical denominations, particularly the Northern Baptist and Presbyterian churches. Their clashes were often mediated by centralist groups sometimes called “traditionalists,” or “denominational loyalists,” who sought to preserve the integrity of denominational bodies, and hence tended to reject fundamentalist calls to expel those they deemed heretics however distasteful their theology might be. By the late 1920s, defeated in denominational maneuverings and humiliated by the spectacle of the Scopes trial, 3 The best analysis of fundamentalism is George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture 2nd ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially 3-4. His interpretations revised the older argument of Earnest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American premillennialism, 1800 – 1930 (Chicago: University