Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston's Churches, 1885-1950

Abstract

Historical investigation of Protestant Fundamentalism hit a speed bump in 1980 with the publication of George M. Marsden's magisterial Fundamentalism and American Culture. The problem was not the book's defects, which were few, but that it was a historical synthesis written before scholars had put together a sufficient series of monographic studies on which to construct such a summary. Consequently, for the last quarter of a century, Marsden's interpretation has been the standard against which historians of conservative Protestantism evaluate their subjects, even when they explore people, events, organizations, or ideas that either do not show up or receive only a few pages in the 1980 book. Margaret Lamberts Bendroth's new study of Fundamentalism in Boston is a good illustration of the difficulty under which historians of early twentieth-century Protestantism labor. Hers is a valuable investigation of Protestantism in Boston from the late nineteenth century to after World War II that offers the kind of specificity out of which good syntheses emerge. The book is divided into two sections. The first covers a series of ethnocultural conflicts in Boston, from open-air preaching on the Common and Protestant&-Roman Catholic antagonism over public education to the politics of temperance. Most of those conflicts stemmed from Protestants' efforts to maintain their hegemony in a city that demographically was fast turning Roman Catholic. The second section follows the evangelistic meetings of three prominent urban revivalists, J. Wilbur Chapman, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham. Thrown in for good measure are chapters on Boston's two largest evangelical congregations, Park Street Church and Tremont Temple Baptist Church. What emerges is a type of Fundamentalism that does not fit the received definitions: it was more anti-Catholic than commonly supposed, provided more leadership roles for women until men assumed the spotlight with mass revivalism, and was less belligerent. It may not even have been Fundamentalist. But Bendroth apparently feels constrained to use the label to make sense of her subjects.