Building The Old Time Religion

"During the Progressive Era, a period of unprecedented ingenuity, women evangelists built the old time religion with brick and mortar, uniforms and automobiles, fresh converts and devoted protégés. Across America, entrepreneurial women founded churches, denominations, religious training schools, rescue homes, rescue missions, and evangelistic organizations. Until now, these intrepid women have gone largely unnoticed, though their collective yet unchoreographed decision to build institutions in the service of evangelism marked a seismic shift in American Christianity. In this ground-breaking study, Priscilla Pope-Levison dusts off the unpublished letters, diaries, sermons, and yearbooks of these pioneers to share their personal tribulations and public achievements. The effect is staggering. With an uncanny eye for essential details and a knack for historical nuance, Pope-Levison breathes life into not just one or two of these women, but two dozen. The evangelistic empire of Aimee Semple McPherson represents the pinnacle of this shift from itinerancy to institution building. Her name remains legendary. Yet she built her institutions on the foundation of the work of women evangelists who preceded her. Their stories -- untold until now -- reveal the cunning and strength of women who forged a path for every generation, including our own, to follow."--Back cover.

Based on the author’s childhood this fictional novel is filled with spirituality and humor and gives the reader a glimpse into the world of a Baptist minister. Set in 1963, Rev. Shepard and his family move to Millington where he has been called to pastor the Great Saints Baptist Church. Millington is a small town that is racially divided by the river that runs through it. The whites occupy the town’s west side, while a community of influential Negroes occupy the east side. During this literary journey, the lives of the church members and townspeople are exposed and we bear witness to an adult world of scandal, secrets, and disgrace. Before he can get settled into his new position, Rev. Shepard is bombarded with the needs of church members. The timid Murlene Combs whose husband has fallen prey to the town whore, Magic, is in serious need of counselling. Other Millingtonites are Rev. Barry Nichols, whose love of himself makes him vulnerable to the temptations of Magic; the Higgins’ who struggle through an old family secret; Billy, the giggly kid who cannot maintain his composure during church; Sadie Green, the church secretary who is always complaining about her corns; the controversial Deacon Chester Hawkins; Smooth, the pimp from The Bottom; and a den of gossiping woman. Love and salvation emanate from the trials and tribulations of the denizens in Millington. While some are redeemed, the damned must pay the price for their sins.

This book proves there is nothing new under the sun regarding many of our modern religious beliefs. This includes Christianity, and how many of its beliefs could be far older than what we have suspected. It gives a complete run-down of the stellar, lunar, and solar evolution of our religious systems and contains new, long-awaited, exhaustive research on the gods and our beliefs.

Many sincere Christians dismiss evangelism due to enduring evangelistic caricatures. This book helps readers move beyond those caricatures to consider thoughtfully and practically how they can engage in evangelism, whether it's through one-on-one conversations, social media, social justice, or the liturgy of worship services. At once biblical, theological, historical, and practical, this book by a seasoned scholar offers an engaging, well-researched, and well-organized presentation and analysis of eight models of evangelism. Covering a breadth of approaches--from personal evangelism to media evangelism and everything in between--Priscilla Pope-Levison encourages readers to take a deeper look at evangelism and discover a model that captures their attention. Each chapter introduces and assesses a model biblically, theologically, historically, and practically, allowing for easy comparison across the board. The book also includes end-of-chapter study questions to further help readers interact with each model.

Old-Time Religion Embracing Modernist Culture focuses on the founding generation of American fundamentalism in the 1920s and 1930s and their interactions with modernity. While there were culture wars, there was also an embrace. Through a book culture, fostered by liberal Protestants, and thriving periodicals, they strengthened their place in American culture and their adaptation helps explain their resilience in the decades to come. The most significant adaptation to modernist culture was the embrace of the modern, secular university as a model for evangelical higher education. After political battles along sectarian lines in the twenties, fundamentalists learned to compete in a pluralist society. By the thirties they were among the strongest supporters of Jews and began working with Catholics to fight communism. In politics and higher education they encountered issues of race, gender, and class. While opposing higher critics of the Bible, their approaches to texts were in some cases similar: a focus on the original languages, commitment to scholarship, ambiguities about both the role of reason and the interpretation of key doctrines. Several had graduate training, some even in European universities. With their views of end times, they continued innovative approaches to prophetic texts from nineteenth-century dispensationalists. In response to evolution and prophetic texts, in a time-conscious age, they also had innovative ideas about biblical time. Fundamentalists engaged in debate with Freud and, while rejecting his ideas, absorbed elements of psychology. Some understood William James’ effort to accommodate religion and modern ideas. Although rejecting John Dewey’s pragmatism, fundamentalists found value in studying modern philosophy. They tapped a secular, Enlightenment philosophy to defend their supernatural Christianity. Between the wars they even participated in the interest in Nietzsche. Usually dismissed as fractious, they rose above core differences and cooperated among themselves across denominational lines in building organizations. In doing so, they reflected both the ecumenism of the liberal Protestants and the organizational impulse in modern urban, industrial society. This study, the first to focus on the founding generation, also covers a broad spectrum of fundamentalists, from the Northeast, Midwest, the South, and the West Coast, including some often overlooked by other historians

The relationship between Protestant fundamentalists and mass culture is often considered complex and ambiguous. Selling the Old-Time Religion examines this relationship and shows how the first generation of fundamentalists embraced the modern business and entertainment techniques of marketing, advertising, drama, film, radio, and publishing to spread the gospel. Selectively, and with more sophistication than has been accorded to them, fundamentalists adapted to the consumer society and popular culture with the accompanying values of materialism and immediate gratification, despite the seeming conflict between these values and certain tenets of their religious beliefs. Selling the Old-Time Religion is written by a fundamentalist who is based at the country's foremost fundamentalist institute of higher education. It is a candid and remarkable piece of scholarship that reveals from the inside the movement's first encounters with some of the media methods it now wields with well-documented virtuosity. Carl Abrams draws extensively on sermons, popular journals, and educational archives to reveal the attitudes and actions of the fundamental leadership and the laity. Abrams discusses how fundamentalists' outlook toward contemporary trends and events shifted from aloofness to engagement as they moved inward from the margins of American culture and began to weigh in on the day's issues--from jazz to "flappers"--in large numbers. Fundamentalists in the 1920s and 1930s "were willing to compromise certain traditions that defined the movement, such as premillennialism, holiness, and defense of the faith," Abrams concludes, "but their flexibility with forms of consumption and pleasure strengthened their evangelistic emphasis, perhaps the movement's core." Contrary to the myth of fundamentalism's demise after the Scopes Trial, the movement's uses of mass culture help explain their success in the decades following it. In the end fundamentalists imitated mass culture not to be like the world but to evangelize it.

This edited collection of exciting new scholarship provides comprehensive coverage of the broad sweep of twentieth century religious activism on the American left. The volume covers a diversity of perspectives, including Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish history, and important essays on African-American, Latino, and women’s spirituality. Taken together, these essays offer a comparative and long-term perspective on religious groups and social movements often studied in isolation, and fully integrate faith-based action into the history of progressive social movements and politics in the modern United States. It becomes clear that throughout the twentieth century, religious faith has served as a powerful motivator and generator for activism, not just as on the right, where observers regularly link religion and politics, but on the left. This volume will appeal to historians of modern American politics, religion, and social movements, religious studies scholars, and contemporary activists.