Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism

He wildly tore across the stage, thrashing his arms, kicking, bellowing. He jumped on a chair, then on the pulpit, bent backward like the foil of a fencer's sword, and bobbed back and forth. The thousands in the frenzied crowd gasped. Leaping down, he began to shadowbox the Devil, then threw himself prostrate on the floor. He roared at the crowd, "If you want to live in sin, all right, live in sin, and go to hell in the end."This was the Reverend Billy Sunday at the height of his revival power in 1915. To legions of followers across the country, this ex-baseball player from Iowa was God's mouthpiece ordained to drive sin-soaked infidels out of their muck and grime and into the fold of the Lord. Honing the business of revivalism to dizzying power, Billy crusaded for an array of moral and social causes; entered the political arena; took on radical leaders, intellectuals, evolutionists, modernists, foreigners, birth-control advocates, liquor, and newfangled ologies and isms.Eight decades ago, Billy Sunday was standing four-square for the issues embraced so emotionally by today's evangelists--the supreme authority and inerrancy of the Bible, aggressive patriotism, and a commitment to eradicate vice and moral rot from American society. He was a symbol of old-fashioned, militant fundamentalism, and his great crusades presaged the later evangelists: Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson.Preacher examines the Sunday phenomenon in light of the evangelistic roots from which his own career sprang and the later emergence of an American religious industry that has powerfully moved into the country's politics and national affairs. It has been a long road from the crude tent meetings of the early evangelists to the media drives of Falwell and Robertson; Billy Sunday stands as the towering figure on that road.