Sin in the City: Chicago and Revivalism, 1880??1920
Thekla Ellen Joiner | 2007-07-31 00:00:00 | University of Missouri | 288 | 19th Century
Long before today s culture wars, the Third Great Awakening rocked America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday roused citizens to renounce sin as it manifested in popular culture, moral ambiguity, and the changing role of women. Sin in the City examines three urban revivals in turn-of-the-century Chicago to show how sermons and street activism negotiated that era s perceived racial, sexual, and class threats. It also shows that the legacy of the Third Awakening lives on today in the religious right s sociopolitical activism; crusade for family values; disparagement of feminism; and promotion of spirituality in middle-class, racial, and cultural terms.
Reviews
At first glance this book looks like a comparative study of three major evangelistic campaigns in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century: those of D. L. Moody, J. Wilbur Chapman, and Billy Sunday. In fact, Sin in the City is just a revised 1991 PhD dissertation, a tiresome academic production that rings the changes on race, class, and (especially) gender to the near exclusion of its erstwhile subject, religion. Not surprisingly, the final chapter, which purports to demonstrate a connection between the turn-of-the-century revivals and modern evangelicalism, is especially weak because the author has a limited understanding of modern evangelical religion.
Joiner's writing is not that bad when compared to similar productions of the academy. Still, there are a lot of sentences like, "Revivalism's ritualistic construction and expression of these dichotomies--in a heightened public sphere--provided both the means and the opportunity to encode these cultural assumptions with spiritual or immanent meanings." (16)
Academic authors regularly have difficulty taking the behavior of their historical characters at something approaching face value. So, for instance, when revivalists made profitable use of the notion that mothers' prayers followed their wayward children, they wouldn't consider investigating the possibility that mothers might actually have been doing a lot more long-distance praying for wayward children during this period than would have been the case earlier (when families were less separated geographically) or later (when mothers were less religious and more preoccupied with careers and personal lives). Or, when revivalists claimed that cities were more sinful than rural areas, that they had more than adequate evidence that this was indeed the case.
Some long-suffering graduate students will probably be required to find profundity in Joiner's book, but for the reader interested in investigating turn-of-the-century Chicago, the "Third Great Awakening," or modern evangelicalism, I suggest ignoring the thesis as much as possible and skimming the text for bibliography and occasional nuggets of useful information, especially material about women connected to the Chicago campaigns.
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