From the beginning of this century through World War I, an itinerant evangelist and former major league outfielder with the Chicago White Stockings named Billy Sunday is believed to have preached to more people than anyone previously in the history of Christianity.
The consensus is that he addressed 100 million people in more than 300 revivals, with 1 million responding to his altar calls and dedicating their lives and souls to Jesus Christ.
These totals are all the more remarkable because they were achieved before the advent of radio and TV, which has enabled present-day counterparts such as Rev. Billy Graham and top televangelists to reach considerably larger audiences.
Consider, too, that this is the feat of an Iowa farmboy with little education who described himself, according to a new biography, as ”a rube of the rubes and a hayseed of the hayseeds,” a fellow forever carrying ”the malodors of the barnyard.”
Perhaps, but from pulpit and podium he emitted the powerful scent of excitement, seizing attention and touching hearts like few others with his words and his passion and his showmanship, bringing forth laughter and tears at will, inspiring sadness and anger and guilt and joy, and motivating many to discard sinful habits and start afresh.
His own religious conversion occurred at Chicago`s Pacific Garden Mission, still located in the Loop, after a night on the town with teammates, but several seasons would pass before he decided to abandon baseball for the Bible.
When he did so at age 28, Sunday-not a bad monicker for someone with his aspirations-would spend the first decade of his ministry conducting tent meetings in small towns throughout the Midwest, the modern-day equivalent, for him, of wandering in the wilderness.
These years were not wasted, for he was building a repertoire of sermons, polishing his delivery, testing theatrical techniques and developing abilities that one day would lift him to a level of fame accessible only to those with great influence.
As he labored in early obscurity, word gradually spread about this dynamic, spellbinding messenger of the Lord. The communities that beckoned to him grew more populous, and his methods, honed by experience, grew more sophisticated.
In 1909, Spokane became the first city with a population of more than 100,000 to host one of his revivals, now planned with the thoroughness of a military campaign.
Eventually he would lead his expanding operation into Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, New York City, Chicago, Atlanta, Richmond, staying weeks and months at a stretch and preaching two and three sermons a day, six days a week, to congregations consistently exceeding 15,000 that gathered in huge wooden tabernacles built just for him.
In addition to assaulting evil, he also competed with 650 full-time and 1,350 part-time evangelists.
As the figures attest, he did well on both fronts.
Sunday also was forced to speak to his tremendous throngs without benefit of a microphone, his heyday preceding the amplified public address system.
In the end, however, his voice would hold out longer than his appeal, and his decline, commencing at the close of the war, would be faster than his ascent.
Boost for Prohibition
Yet at his peak, during the crusades in the major cities, he was very, very big.
How big? Big enough to pose with Mary Pickford, Mae West and Douglas Fairbanks and to be praised by Theodore Roosevelt, received by Woodrow Wilson and supported by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and other millionaires, including the Armours, Swifts and McCormicks of Chicago.
”Controversial, beloved, feared and admired, Billy Sunday was now a national figure, and his revival team a growing force,” writes historian Roger Bruns of that period in the recently published ”Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism” (W.W. Norton).
Much of the controversy, Bruns writes, arose from Sunday`s strict fundamentalist faith, whose critics were legion, and his repeated attacks on the ”modernists” of mainstream denominations, who did not subscribe to the inerrancy of the Scriptures and other tenets held by conservative Christians. Sunday was dismissive of the new ”higher criticism,” which shunned a literal reading of the Bible for a recognition that some of its lessons were taught through legend and myth.
”I don`t know any more about theology than a jackrabbit knows about Ping-Pong,” he would thunder, ”but I`m on my way to glory.”
The fear he generated sprang largely from the liquor industry, for Sunday was among the fiercest opponents of strong drink and a leading advocate of the movement to make the nation dry.
”Though everyone won`t applaud the result, I think it`s safe to say that Prohibition wouldn`t have become law without Sunday,” said Lyle Dorsett, professor of educational ministries and evangelism at Wheaton College and the author of ”Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America,” published last year by Eerdmans.
”Again, everyone won`t approve the effect,” Dorsett said in an interview, ”but Sunday was an important link in keeping biblical Christianity alive. There has always been a conflict between modernists and conservatives, and he was influential in encouraging many conservatives to remain true to their doctrines.”
The appearance of two biographies in the past two years probably doesn`t signal a vast groundswell of interest in the evangelist, who died in 1935 at age 72, but whether it does or not, both authors are convinced that Sunday`s place in American religion is secure.
A measure of his prominence was the intensive coverage he typically received from the press. To herald his arrival in Chicago in 1918 for a 10-week revival, this newspaper unfurled a banner across the top of its front page in a size usually reserved for earthquakes, wars and love-nest raids.
Almost audible, it read: ”CHICAGO GREETS BILLY SUNDAY.”
The reporter`s account, an exercise in the avoidance of understatement, began: ”Billy Sunday, casual citizen, stepped from a train in the Union station yesterday and instantly became heroic. Thousands of cheering citizens went hoarse in the emphasis of their greeting. Mr. Sunday and `Ma` (his wife, Nell) and Billy Jr. were seized in a rippling rapids of humanity which swirled them about and presently tossed them forth into an automobile on Canal street. A great salvo of applause sent the Sundays . . . into Chicago, and now the arraignment of the devil begins.”
The next day, more of the same, featuring another gigantic front-page headline (”SUNDAY TALKS TO 50,000”), another breathless story, another dramatic picture layout inside the paper.
Throughout the revival, the Tribune provided a daily review of each service`s highlights and Sunday`s most salient statements, plus summaries of sermons.
There was always a fascination with his flamboyant style. William McLoughlin, professor of history at Brown University and author of ”His Real Name is Billy Sunday,” published in 1955 by the University of Chicago Press, observed in that book: ”It was estimated (Sunday) walked a mile back and forth across the 30-foot platform in every sermon-150 miles in every campaign. ”But it was not merely walking; it was running, sliding, jumping, falling, staggering, whirling and throwing himself around the platform. . . . When he was not pounding the lectern or the reinforced kitchen chair on which he sat before he began to speak, he was often as not standing on one or the other, sometimes with one foot on the chair and one on the pulpit.”
A master of the hyperbolic harangue, Sunday loved to unleash a string of invectives, heavy on the hyphens. He would rail against ”the red-nosed, buttermilk-eyed, beetle-browed, peanut-brained, stall-fed old saloon keeper.” Pontius Pilate`s wife was ”a miserable, pliable, plastic, two-faced, two-by-four, lick-spittle, toot-my-own-horn sort of woman,” and Pilate ”was just one of those rat-hole, pin-headed, pliable, stand-pat, free-lunch, pie-counter politicians.”
Immortalized in song
A sally against booze is a classic: ”I have sworn eternal and everlasting enmity to the liquor traffic. As long as I have a foot, I`ll kick it; as long as I have a fist, I`ll hit it; as long as I have a tooth, I`ll bite it; as long as I have a head, I`ll butt it; and when I`m old and gray and bootless and toothless, I`ll gum it till I go to heaven and it goes to hell.” His biographers agree that Sunday would be delighted to join the discussion of family values that has been injected into the `92 presidential race by Vice President Dan Quayle, although they say Sunday would be far more specific and demanding.
Sunday`s ideal family abstained from alcohol and tobacco and did not attend most plays and movies. A Christian woman would never rouge her cheeks
(though a powdered nose was acceptable), and listening to jazz and dancing
(”a hugging match set to music”) were out of the question.
”If Billy Sunday were here today,” Bruns said, ”you could predict his position on every issue. He was a right-wing Republican then and he would be one today, a strong militarist, disapproving of liberals, opposing abortion.” Sunday could also side with Quayle in denouncing a ”cultural elite.” At the Chicago revival in 1918 the evangelist flailed ”professional society women” as ”hags of uncleanliness who walk our streets, rest behind rich tapestries, cruise upon their yachts, or flaunt themselves at us from their limousines.”
Newspapers would regularly compile columns of such Sundayisms and unfailingly offer a tally of conversions.
But to judge Sunday`s success by numbers, Dorsett said, is to miss the point. ”People testified that their lives were changed by his preaching, and I don`t think you can quantify this sort of thing.”
Another contribution was his emphasis on outreach ministries. ”You can go all over the country and find rescue missions he inspired, supported and encouraged,” Dorsett said.
Bruns credits Sunday with ”perfecting the business organization of evangelism” and ”interjecting political and social issues into a 20th Century setting like no other evangelist had done before.”
Billy Graham has adopted many of Sunday`s methods, Dorsett said. ”Graham also learned from Billy`s mistakes about money. Sunday`s revivals raised millions, and he gave most to churches and religious causes. But he also took far too much for himself. Graham has always limited himself to a modest salary.”
Whether history regards Sunday as heavyweight or footnote, his immortality seems assured by ”Chicago,” a breezy song often played as a quasi-official municipal anthem at special events in the city, including all Chicago Bulls home games.
The song was written in 1922, when everybody understood what composer Fred Fisher had in mind when he wrote the line calling Chicago ”the town that Billy Sunday could not shut down.” It was a salute to a city still defiantly wet three years after Prohibition and a jab at the evangelist`s fight for its passage.
Sunday`s ties to Chicago, of course, entailed more than a lyric. As previously noted, the city gave Sunday his first good job, his first moments in a national limelight. Chicago is where he found God, where he met his wife and was married, where he began saving souls as a worker for the YMCA, where he died and is buried.
McLoughlin`s book suggests an epitaph. ”His revivals were the product of the profound struggle of Americans to cope with the challenge and the responsibility of a new and inconceivably more complex industrial civilization than they had ever dreamed of. . . He (was) a representative spokesman for the time in which he lived . . . because he embodied so accurately the cultural pattern of his era.”
