Evangelicals at a Crossroads: Revivalism and Social Reform in Boston, 1860-1910

Abstract

Evangelicals at a Crossroads: Revivalism and Social Reform in Boston, 1860-1910. By Benjamin L. Hartley. Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011. 296 pp. $85.00 (cloth), $39.95 (paper), $37.99 (e-book).New England is stereotyped as Congregationalist, since New England and Boston are, after all, the site of the Puritan founders and their religious legacy. Concurrently, Boston is also recognized as Catholic, owing to the massive influx in the early nineteenth century of Irish to Boston and surrounding areas.While stereotypes exist because they contain at least a kernel of truth, generally life and the world are more complex, more nuanced, and perhaps of a different nature altogether. In the case of New England in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the decades after the Civil War and before World War I, the stereotypes remained somewhat valid while strongly different religious groups of major significance emerged and became a significant, if not overwhelming, force in the evolution of Boston. Benjamin Hartley's well developed study of evangelicals during the period illustrates their impact on a city undergoing major political and structural change, in a religious environment that was changing dynamically as well.Evangelicals, regardless of denomination, believe in the need to be born again, to have an emotional experience of conversion rather than just an intellectual acceptance of the faith. They feel obligated to proselytize, to spread the faith to others, both the unchurched and those of competing faiths. They are not fundamentalists necessarily, although fundamentalists tend to be evangelical. Evangelicals belong to no particular denomination, and denominations routinely encompass both evangelical and nonevangelical believers. In Boston, evangelicals were strong in the Salvationist and Baptist denominations, but the largest evangelical contingents, and the most addressed in Hartley's work, were Methodists, leaders of the nondenominational open church, or social reformers of various types. Revivals were popular in the period. In fact, the author frames his work beginning with a massive revival by Dwight Moody in 1877 and ending with a more subdued revival by a lesser-known revivalist thirty years later.Methodists are representative of the flux of the era because they most clearly had to decide whether to maintain their somewhat primitive emotionalism in the face of newly emerging social stances. Methodism in the late nineteenth century was redefined from historical emotionalism and individualism to the more structured and formal approximation of a socially involved high church that, later, defined Methodism in the twentieth century.Not just in Boston but across the nation, religious turbulence affected both the old denominations and the new, evangelicals and non-evangelicals alike. There was the rise of the premillennial movement, whose tenet was that the world was not going to get any better until after the second coming. …