October 6, 2006
Walking in Billy Sunday’s Footsteps Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:00 PM EST Today’s New York Times includes a lengthy front-page article on the efforts of Christian evangelical leaders to stoke the fires of faith among young people, whom they fear are leaving the evangelical fold in large numbers. So disconcerting are the reports of diminished Christian commitment that some 6,000 ministers are discussing the problem this fall in 44 different cities.
The Times notes that one of the devices that evangelical leaders are employing to win back or firm up the allegiance of young people is multi-day Christian rock concerts, where thousands of Christian teens gather to listen to Christian music , to dance, to pray, and—in some cases—to write down on tiny pieces of paper the various temptations they encounter from day to day, and to deposit these scraps of paper in conveniently positioned trash cans.
The Times presents these events as unusually innovative, but in fact they claim deep roots in American religious history.
In 1830 and 1831 Charles Finney, the great evangelical revivalist, staged enormous, three- and four-day revivals in Rochester, New York, where he called on penitent sinners to walk down a sawdust aisle, sit on the “anxious bench,” confess their earthly transgressions before their friends and neighbors, and recommit their lives to Christ. The events were carefully staged and fused the elements of religion and popular spectacle. The anxious bench was, in many ways, a predecessor to the scrap paper and trash cans that await today’s teenage penitents.
Fast-forward to the 1870s, when Dwight Moody electrified the nation with his dramatic evening revivals, or the early 1900s, when Billy Sunday fused modern media and evangelical fervor to convert tens of thousands of souls for Christ.
Born into wrenching poverty on the Iowa prairie, Sunday wandered from one dead-end job to another until friends encouraged him to channel his natural athleticism into baseball, a game that was quickly assuming its place in the 1870s and 1880s as America’s national pastime.
In 1883 Sunday came to the attention of Cap Anson, the legendary club manager whose Chicago White Stockings dominated professional baseball throughout the 1880s. Anson carefully tutored the Iowa farm boy on the finer points of the game, and though he never excelled as a hitter (his batting average fluctuated between .222 and .256), Sunday’s speed and agility made him a sensational outfielder. He played several winning seasons for Chicago until 1888, when Anson traded him (and several other star players) to Pittsburgh.
Sunday could have continued raking in handsome earnings as a professional athlete, but even before his move to Pennsylvania he gradually found that his attentions were being drawn in another direction: religion. He came to it almost by accident. June 1886, on the eve of an important series with the New York Giants, Sunday was out gallivanting with the other players when he happened across a troupe of roving evangelists who were singing the old religious hymns he had grown up with on the prairie. His eyes misted over as he recalled that much simpler childhood. His memories contrasted sharply with the filth and degeneracy of Chicago’s red-light district. By his own account he spent hours that night at Pacific Garden, singing hymns, listening to the testimony of wayward men and women, and breathing in the pure air of evangelical Christianity. “Boys,” he told some those present, “I bid the old life goodbye.” Billy Sunday had been saved.
Increasingly committed to his religious activities, Sunday retired five years later from professional baseball—even turning down a $5,000-per-season offer from the Cincinnati Reds—and took a job at $83.33 a month as a paid organizer for the YMCA. After three years, missing the open road and itinerant life of his baseball days, he signed on as an assistant to John Wilbur Chapman, one of the nation’s leading camp revivalists. Scarcely 12 months later, Chapman retired from the circuit, and Billy Sunday struck out on his own. By the eve of World War I, just as the fundamentalist-modernist debate was reaching a fever pitch, he was America’s most revered religious leader.
The Sunday machine was a complicated operation. His advance team would roll into town weeks ahead of a scheduled revival and immediately begin recruiting upwards of 20,000 volunteer staff members. His famous 1905 Boston revival drew on the labor of 700 secretaries, 200 doorkeepers, 5,000 prayer leaders, 8,000 choir members, and 2,000 ushers. The campaign succeeded beyond Sunday’s wildest expectations. Over 60,000 people were so moved as to make the ultimate gesture: They walked down the aisle and signed special preprinted pledge cards, offering their lives anew to Christ.
At every destination the advance men spread word of the upcoming event—at Protestant churches and fraternal orders, in hospitals and hotels, outside factories and offices. In each city they also raised a giant wooden tabernacle, strictly according to an architectural design that provided for maximum acoustics and seating. Inside the tabernacle, rows of pine benches circled a five-foot-high dais, specially equipped with a podium at its center. The floors were covered over in sawdust and wood shavings, to form an easy path for the throng of penitent sinners who would soon march in step to the podium and sign themselves over to the Lord.
In addition to the advance and construction teams, Sunday’s organization included a director of Bible study, a women’s outreach director, a pianist, a choir director, a chief-of-staff, and even a postmaster, who was responsible for processing thousands of pledge cards each week, in order to match up new converts with prospective churches.
Thinking back on Finney, Moody, and Sunday, it’s hard not to think of the current wave of Christian revivalism—and the events staged for the benefit of evangelical teenagers—as the latest chapter in a long and rich story. The fusion of mass culture and religion is almost as old as the nation itself.
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