Guaranteed Pure

The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism

Timothy Gloege

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469621029
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Fundamentalism & Cults

American evangelicalism has long walked hand in hand with modern consumer capitalism. Timothy Gloege shows us why, through an engaging story about God and big business at the Moody Bible Institute. Founded in Chicago by shoe-salesman-turned-revivalist Dwight Lyman Moody in 1889, the institute became a center of fundamentalism under the guidance of the innovative promoter and president of Quaker Oats, Henry Crowell. Gloege explores the framework for understanding humanity shared by these business and evangelical leaders, whose perspectives clearly differed from those underlying modern scientific theories. At the core of their "corporate evangelical" framework was a modern individualism understood primarily in terms of economic relations. Conservative evangelicalism and modern business grew symbiotically, transforming the ways that Americans worshipped, worked, and consumed. Gilded Age evangelicals initially understood themselves primarily as new "Christian workers--employees of God guided by their divine contract, the Bible. But when these ideas were put to revolutionary ends by Populists, corporate evangelicals reimagined themselves as savvy religious consumers and reformulated their beliefs. Their consumer-oriented "orthodoxy" displaced traditional creeds and undermined denominational authority, forever altering the American religious landscape. Guaranteed pure of both liberal theology and Populist excesses, this was a new form of old-time religion not simply compatible with modern consumer capitalism but uniquely dependent on it.

Part One: Christian Workers

One: Christian Work

As the United States teetered on the brink of dissolution in September 1860, the minister and abolitionist editor Thomas M. Eddy was busy addressing another crisis. Eddy had been part of a massive migration that had created his adopted city of Chicago virtually ex nihilo. A fourfold population increase in the last decade had strained housing, sanitation, and government services to the breaking point. The same was true of the moral infrastructure. Like most midcentury Protestants, Eddy believed the bedrock of the social order rested on the twin pillars of home and church. Both were in short supply. The population of the prairie metropolis consisted primarily of unattached young men. Only a handful had church ties for reasons obvious to any careful observer. The city’s few churches sold their seating by the pew at inflated prices, leaving newcomers with the equally humiliating options of standing in the back or being paraded to unused seats as a freeloader. No surprise that the sons of many a Protestant home made their community in neighborhood saloons, gambling halls, even brothels. Urban religion was in danger, Eddy feared, and without its civilizing influence, complete social breakdown loomed on the horizon.

But despite the gravity of the crisis, Eddy was in a celebratory mood. This September evening, his talk was to mark the beginning of a bold new experiment: the Chicago Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Even more than the organization itself, Eddy’s address celebrated the broader impulse behind it, something he called “religion in a work day dress.” Traditionally, Protestants understood the market primarily in reference to its intrinsic temptations to self-interest, greed, and dishonesty—a social space that functioned properly only by the steady infusion of Christian virtue. Of course, this influence was still needed, but Eddy saw the YMCA as the product of a new countercirculation in which business ideas and practices were imported into religion. Seeing that young men needed opportunities to develop Christian community, it was businessmen, not clergy, that took the initiative in promoting this new solution. If businessmen and professionals—lawyers, doctors, merchants, and even mechanics—were to apply their perceptive acuity and “rare mental discipline” to the cause of religion, Eddy preached, who knew what victories were in store? Where “pedlar of divinity” was once a term of derision, Eddy invited his audience to proudly apply their workaday skills to the cause of religion.¹

We do not know for sure that a young Dwight L. Moody heard Eddy’s talk, but it is certain that no one contributed more to the realization of his dream. Indeed, Moody took the idea much farther than Eddy probably intended. Raised outside traditional Protestantism and without formal religious education, Moody used business ideas and techniques not only to spread the message of God’s love for individuals but also to transform that message. By the time Moody began his revival ministry in the 1870s, he had developed a set of interlocking assumptions about the nature of an authentic faith, a believer’s relationship to God, and a modern approach to interpreting the Bible. And within a decade, Moody’s modern evangelicalism, shaped profoundly by ideas imported from the world of business, had been grafted into the belief and practice of many middle-class Protestants.

DWIGHT L. MOODY WAS born in 1837, the sixth child of Betsey and Edwin Moody in Northfield, Massachusetts. It was a year remembered for a financial panic and depression so severe that it shook the nation’s basic economic assumptions at their core. The Moody family could not avoid its impact. Though Edwin was a hardworking and frugal brick mason, his debtors’ defaults swept him into financial ruin along with the libertines and real estate speculators. The resulting stress no doubt contributed to the heart attack that took Edwin’s life when young Dwight was four. The Moody family’s estate consisted of debts and a new set of twins, leaving Edwin’s destitute widow with eight children to feed.

Betsey staved off poverty through connections to kin and her Unitarian church, a denomination most Protestants deemed unorthodox. Dwight was baptized in the church at six, and their minister faithfully paid the family home visits. The Moody home was loving, but never secure. Betsey was a proud woman, and this meant skipped meals and winter mornings without firewood. Moody would later recall his trauma as an eight-year-old briefly lent out to an ill-tempered elderly couple who lived a day’s walk from his home.² Surely this uncertainty contributed to his being a poor and disruptive student. He was impulsive, hotheaded, and stubborn—characteristics that portended a future of failure by the metrics of mid-nineteenth-century business philosophy. A dozen terms of schooling reaped only a rudimentary literacy.³

Moody’s less-admirable qualities were on full display in his impulsive move to Boston, against his mother’s wishes, at seventeen. Confident in the strength of his bootstraps, he then impudently rejected his uncle’s offer of employment, only to crawl back when he found that his narrow attainments made such self-making impossible. Unsteady start notwithstanding, Moody made good as a clerk in his uncle’s shoe and boot shop. He yoked a winsome, confident personality to a ruthlessly pragmatic business philosophy born of poverty. He ignored existing agreements between clerks to equally divide sales opportunities, souring his relationship to his coworkers. But he did not care; business was not a communal activity.

Moody was more disturbed by his difficulties navigating the communal world of respectable middle-class Protestantism. He attended the Mount Vernon Congregational Church with his uncle as a stipulation of employment, but the weekly chore only further depressed his scant interest in religious things. It was the high-water mark of churchly Protestantism, a religious orientation marked by three key characteristics. First was a conviction that theological traditions mattered. Creeds, rituals like baptism and communion, and church organization and governance were all important markers between denominations. These topics were preached on Sundays, often in technical terms that were mind-numbing to the uneducated. A second characteristic of churchly Protestantism was its affirmation that religious authority resided in the institution of the church. God met and engaged his people in church, through a Bible carefully interpreted by ordained ministers and guided by tradition. Finally, churchly Protestantism meant that the evidences of an authentic faith were found inside the church—both in the vitality of the institution itself and in the functioning of the community it fostered. Christianity was primarily a matter of being—in church, in community—rather than doing or choosing. Children were saved under this same communal canopy of God’s grace, unless they decided as adults to leave it. All this made church a comforting haven to established members, but a difficult community for outsiders to join. At this time especially, urban congregations were turned decidedly inward, focused on middle-class reproduction and foiling the “confidence men” angling for the benefits of church membership.⁴ For a young illiterate Unitarian, it made for a cold and baffling initiation to orthodox Protestantism. And the brash and uncouth Moody had little that would appeal to the well-mannered and educated congregation.

Although a churchly orientation prevailed among respectable Protestants, a handful leaned toward an evangelical orientation. Among these was Edward Kimball, the Sunday school teacher who converted Moody to evangelical Protestantism. Unlike their churchly counterparts, evangelicals emphasized a personal relationship to God over church and tradition. They also tended to vest religious authority in the individual; that is to say, birthing an authentic faith was a matter of individual choosing, and maintaining that faith was a matter of following one’s individual conscience and feeding one’s soul through personal Bible reading, prayer, and authentic engagement in worship. But in the 1850s, among respectable evangelicals at least, this dimension was significantly muted. As a matter of course, they admitted that church and tradition were necessary evils to corral extremism, though they also believed these instruments might suffocate a sincere faith. Finally, these evangelicals believed that their faith, if truly authentic, would bring about some tangible good. For Kimball, this meant that he was on the lookout for outsiders like Moody. It was fitting, given Moody’s future, that his conversion took place at work. Kimball felt led to call on Moody and offered him a simple explanation of “Christ’s love for him and the love Christ wanted in return.” He later judged this presentation as “very weak,” but it deeply touched the lonely boy. It had demonstrated Kimball’s personal concern and God’s love. So Moody made a simple choice: he accepted the invitation to convert.⁵

The decision to accept Jesus settled the matter for Moody, but church leadership was not convinced. His first application for church membership was flatly rejected when he failed a rudimentary theological exam. For his examiners, conversion involved the mind as well as the will. Committed to joining the church, Moody spent ten months preparing for his next examination, but it did little more than solidify a lifelong dislike of theology. In the end, his examiners were swayed less by his theological proficiency than his sincere, if defiant, insistence that he would “never give up his hope, or love Christ less, whether admitted to the church or not.”⁶ Better to get such a boy within a church, where he could be guided properly. The experience made Moody suspicious of religious institutions and the barriers that theological traditions posed to uneducated believers.

Having learned the basics of the shoe business, a restless Moody tried his prospects in Chicago in 1856. His timing was impeccable. The prairie metropolis was booming thanks to its status as the terminus of most major rail lines in the eastern United States. Its many shoe manufacturers had no established distribution networks, and Moody easily found a position as a drummer, supplying stock to rural stores. These positions were important avenues to respectability and thus typically available only to white, native-born Protestant men like Moody.⁷ As in Boston, he made unorthodox innovations to established business practice. At a time when rural retailers typically traveled to Chicago to purchase inventory, Moody shrewdly cherry-picked the most promising customers from hotel registries and train manifests, promising to visit them the next time. This became standard practice twenty years later, but it earned him bitter complaints in the 1850s.⁸ Moody was rewarded handsomely by his employer, however. His base salary of $30 per week was well above the wage of an average industrial worker and nearly four times his Boston earnings.⁹ Including commissions, he was earning $5,000 annually, which even by wage levels thirty years later placed him among the “well-to-do.”¹⁰ And with his returns on subsequent real estate investments and personal loans, his dream of accumulating $100,000 seemed within reach.

Despite Moody’s economic success, he struggled to find a spiritual home within churchly Protestantism. He transferred his membership to the respectable Plymouth Congregationalist Church, but he found navigating its middle-class norms difficult. He was deeply wounded when, after speaking up at a prayer meeting, his minister advised him that he “could serve the Lord better by keeping still.”¹¹ He also attended Methodist and Baptist churches but met similar resistance. He persisted, however, and eventually earned the respect of a small coterie of businessmen with evangelical sympathies. His first and closest friend was John V. Farwell, a devout Methodist soon known as the city’s largest dry-goods wholesaler. Among the Baptists, he met the prominent attorney Cyrus Bentley, who later orchestrated the creation of International Harvester with its future president, Cyrus McCormick, another important Moody supporter.

Moody’s devout business friends had the most important influence on his early faith. This was especially true during a period of evangelical-oriented renewal that spread across America’s business districts amid a sharp, but brief, financial panic in 1857. In Chicago, Farwell and Bentley helped organize daily noon-hour prayer meetings that attracted an interdenominational following. To preserve the peace, they avoided theological and political issues and focused instead on heartfelt prayer, singing, and Bible reading, which all Protestants embraced. This was conventional piety in one sense, but it fostered revolutionary undercurrents. In an age of feminine and domestic-oriented religion, participants depicted the movement as explicitly male, literally erasing women from published illustrations and relegating their bodies to balconies and other peripheral spaces. They conducted meetings in business-district theatres, symbolically centering the movement in public economic life, removed from home and church. Devoid of ministerial oversight, the meetings thus became open space in which these men could reimagine faith in terms of their workaday lives. They brushed aside thorny philosophical conundrums. Rather than trying to square an all-powerful and all-knowing God with human freedom at the moment of conversion, for example, they made conversion another routine decision. It was a choice offered by God that anyone could accept or reject.¹²

The so-called businessman’s revival positioned Moody as a religious insider for the first time in his life, and when Bentley and Farwell institutionalized the movement in the Chicago YMCA, he knew he had found a spiritual home. The YMCA straddled the space between church and the public square. It was blessed by the city’s respectable denominations but was operated by pious businessmen independent of denominational control. While the noontime prayer meetings continued, members were also encouraged to invite acquaintances to the association rooms for wholesome evening recreation and Christian camaraderie.¹³

The “religion in a workday dress” that suffused the YMCA also spurred Moody to action, but, given his scant education, he was not initially sure what to do. Even reading the Bible aloud mea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Guaranteed Pure
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Christian Workers
• Part Two: Christian Consumers
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index