Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism..

• Author: Lessl, Thomas
• Position: Book Review

By Roger Bruns. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002; pp. 7-351. $19.95.

The chief significance that Roger Bruns likes to attribute to his subject, Billy Sunday's (1862-1935) popular evangelistic crusades of the early twentieth century, is that they represent the beginning of a pattern in religious communication that is familiar to us now in Sunday's most notable successors, Billy Graham and such mass mediated evangelists as Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts and Jerry Falwell. Although the connection between Sunday's career and the pervasive presence of evangelical rhetoric in the mass media today cannot be doubted, I come away from the book with some uncertainty as to the importance of this fact. Bruns makes this connection repeatedly but does not explain its significance. We learn from his well-written and entertaining book much about Sunday's extraordinary energy, the lavish theatrical character of his religious oratory, his genius for organization and publicity, and his characteristic blending of fundamentalist theology with cultural conservativism. But the author, perhaps because he has targeted popular audiences as much as scholarly historians, takes only occasional stabs at many of the questions that preoccupy more theoretically minded observers of American religious life. But in spite of this limitation, the book is a colorful and engaging chronicle of evangelical Protestantism in the early part of the twentieth century.

Bruns' strong suit as a writer is his descriptive virtuosity. So vivid is this book, especially in depicting Sunday's oratorical performances, as to constitute almost a verbal photo album of the evangelist's life. Its wonderful portrayals of evangelical rhetoric at the turn of the century and the audiences that consumed it make it almost seem as if Brims had been an eyewitness himself, that his book was based on notes taken as he sat on rough wooden benches with the other thousands who heard Sunday preach in the makeshift tabernacles built to host his crusades. One comes to wonder, also, if the author does not feel some sense of kinship with his subject, and whether we are here getting a narrative that is the historian's own version of the tent revival. The reader often loses track of who is speaking, whether it is the literary effusions of Billy Sunday or Roger Bruns, so much does the author share Sunday's penchant for hyperbole.

The first two chapters of the volume trace Sunday's formative years in rural Iowa...