The Urban Pulpit: New York City and the Fate of Liberal Evangelicalism

by Matthew Bowman

Matthew Bowman explores the world of a neglected group of American the self-identified liberal evangelicals who began in late nineteenth-century New York to reconcile traditional evangelical spirituality with progressive views on social activism and theological questions. These evangelicals emphasized the importance of supernatural conversion experience, but also argued that scientific advances, new movements in art, and the decline in poverty created by a new industrial economy could facilitate encounters with Christ.

The Urban Pulpit chronicles the struggle of liberal evangelicals against conservative Protestants who questioned their theological sincerity and against secular reformers who grew increasingly devoted to the cause of cultural pluralism and increasingly suspicious of evangelicals over the course of the twentieth century. Liberal evangelicals walked a difficult path, facing increasing polarization in twentieth-century American public life; both conservative evangelicals and secular reformers insisted that religion and science were necessarily at odds and that evangelical Christianity was incompatible with cultural diversity. Liberal evangelicals rejected these simple dichotomies, but nonetheless found it increasingly difficult to defend their middle way.

Drawing on history, anthropology, and religious studies, Bowman paints a complex portrait of these understudied Christians at work, at worship, and engaged in advocacy in the public square.

308 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 2014

About the author

Matthew Bowman teaches American religious history at Hampden-Sydney College, and serves as associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon thought. He’s interested in evangelicalism, fundamentalism, religion and American culture and occasionally dabbles in Mormon history, noir, and the movies. He’s published in Religion and American Culture: a Journal of Interpretation, The Journal of Mormon History, the John Whitmer Journal, and the Journal of the Early Republic.

Reviews

[A. Jacob W. Reinhardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers a lot of the religious and cultural history of New York City that is enlightening in many respects. It outlines up to the crisis era of the 1920s the trajectory of the progressive impulses on New York City churches. Those outside the city do not appreciate always that it was not as diverse as it became in the late 1800s. Bowman's analysis at times does not account adequately for the important of ontological realities for Christian faith. But he is best when he notes the trajectory toward conversion as righteous behavior rather than salvation from sin's penalty and when he notes the inescapable slide toward pluralism that removes the religious and the truly evangelical for liberal evangelicals. He ends the book wrongly, however, to point evangelicals to their diversity as the best form. I beg to differ, and the history narrated demonstrates that. The influence and challenge of pluralism remains a real one for conservative Christians every where because of the Internet, and this book is helpful to spur one's thinking.