How does one become 'righteous among the Nations'? In the case of Henri Nick (1868-1954) and Andre Trocme (1901-1971), two French Protestant pastors who received the title for their acts of solidarity toward persecuted Jews, it was because they had been immersed, from an early age, in the discourses and practices of social Christianity. Focussing on the lives of these two remarkable figures of twentieth-century Christianity, Revivalism and Social Christianity is the first study in English on the Social Gospel in French Protestantism. Chalamet presents a genealogy of the movement, from its emergence in the last decades of the nineteenth century to its high point during World War II, in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Trocme and many local people rescued hundreds of Jewish refugees. As social Christians who prayed and worked for the coming of God's kingdom on earth in the midst of a society ravaged by two world wars, Henri Nick and Andre Trocme combined a deep revivalist faith with a concern for the concrete conditions in which people live.
The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, George M. Thomas addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the nineteenth century. Thomas argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data, he claims that revivalism in this period framed the rules and identities of the expanding market economy and the national policy. "Subtle and complex. . . . Fascinating."—Randolph Roth, Pennsylvania History "[Revivalism and Cultural Change] should be read with interest by those interested in religious movements as well as the connections among religion, economics, and politics."—Charles L. Harper, Contemporary Sociology "Readers old and new stand to gain much from Thomas's sophisticated study of the macrosociology of religion in the United States during the nineteenth century. . . . He has given the sociology of religion its best quantitative study of revivalism since the close of the 1970s."—Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
Today's businessman stretches his lunch hour with a third martini or a fast game of handball. His nineteenth-century counterpart might well have stretched his to take in a religious revival. Across America, especially in 1857-58 and 1875-77, two men, Ira D. Sankey and Dwight L. Moody, were holding immensely popular meetings that would lay the foundation for the tradition of hymnody and revivalism that extends through Billy Sunday to Billy Graham. They added major new developments to an already existing revival tradition; mass meetings in large auditoriums, careful organization of local "Christian workers," and a completely interdenominational approach. But the most remarkable feature of the Moody/Sankey act was Sankey himself: he sang the gospel. He also had his own book of songs to sell. Sankey's Gospel Hymns was by far the most successful of American hymnals and deserves some special attention, some attempt to account for its impact. Why did gospel hymns have such appeal? In this unique study, Sandra Sizer addresses that question by discussing the emergence of Moody-Sandy revivalism and popular religion in the white urban North. One cannot account for the popularity of revivalism by generalizations about industrialization or urbanization. This book offers a new perspective by looking at the rhetoric of the hymns themselves. It also examines what sorts of events and developments in American society made hymn-singing and revivals so attractive to so many people. The author's method is a sociology of religious language, which employs the insights and methods of several disciplines, especially anthropology and literary criticism, emphasizing cultural phenomena as linguistic phenomena intimately related to particular social settings. The approach is historical, but not chronological. The task the author has set herself is an interpreta-tion of the kind of hymn found in Gospel Hymns, illuminating in the process the way in which the hymns, and the revivals, helped to create a "social religion," a community based in likeness of feeling. The community was sacred and promoted moral behavior; people gave up alcohol, were honest and gentle, in accord with the feminine ideal on which the communal feeling was based. The hymns became vehicles for articulating a widespread community defined purely in terms of feeling: they became symbols of unity against later "evils" such as Communists, Catholics, and homosexuals. The analysis in this book allows for a critical perspective on the ideas and forms of revivalism which have shaped much of American culture and rhetoric--the idea of the individual's inner states as the key to his character, the "social" as a realm which creates uniformity through bonds of emotion, the segregation of home and woman from the real world, and the potential political uses of apolitical rhetoric. This book, in short, goes far beyond the discussion of gospel hymns; it raises issues which go to the heart of white, protestant, urban America and suggests that the assumptions lodged there demand argument, not acceptance [Publisher description]
A historical account of how leading evangelicals in the late nineteenth century fused a passion for evangelism with social service, cultural engagement and political activism.
The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, George M. Thomas addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the nineteenth century. Thomas argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data, he claims that revivalism in this period framed the rules and identities of the expanding market economy and the national policy. "Subtle and complex. . . . Fascinating."—Randolph Roth, Pennsylvania History "[Revivalism and Cultural Change] should be read with interest by those interested in religious movements as well as the connections among religion, economics, and politics."—Charles L. Harper, Contemporary Sociology "Readers old and new stand to gain much from Thomas's sophisticated study of the macrosociology of religion in the United States during the nineteenth century. . . . He has given the sociology of religion its best quantitative study of revivalism since the close of the 1970s."—Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
Today's businessman stretches his lunch hour with a third martini or a fast game of handball. His nineteenth-century counterpart might well have stretched his to take in a religious revival. Across America, especially in 1857-58 and 1875-77, two men, Ira D. Sankey and Dwight L. Moody, were holding immensely popular meetings that would lay the foundation for the tradition of hymnody and revivalism that extends through Billy Sunday to Billy Graham. They added major new developments to an already existing revival tradition; mass meetings in large auditoriums, careful organization of local "Christian workers," and a completely interdenominational approach. But the most remarkable feature of the Moody/Sankey act was Sankey himself: he sang the gospel. He also had his own book of songs to sell. Sankey's Gospel Hymns was by far the most successful of American hymnals and deserves some special attention, some attempt to account for its impact. Why did gospel hymns have such appeal? In this unique study, Sandra Sizer addresses that question by discussing the emergence of Moody-Sandy revivalism and popular religion in the white urban North. One cannot account for the popularity of revivalism by generalizations about industrialization or urbanization. This book offers a new perspective by looking at the rhetoric of the hymns themselves. It also examines what sorts of events and developments in American society made hymn-singing and revivals so attractive to so many people. The author's method is a sociology of religious language, which employs the insights and methods of several disciplines, especially anthropology and literary criticism, emphasizing cultural phenomena as linguistic phenomena intimately related to particular social settings. The approach is historical, but not chronological. The task the author has set herself is an interpreta-tion of the kind of hymn found in Gospel Hymns, illuminating in the process the way in which the hymns, and the revivals, helped to create a "social religion," a community based in likeness of feeling. The community was sacred and promoted moral behavior; people gave up alcohol, were honest and gentle, in accord with the feminine ideal on which the communal feeling was based. The hymns became vehicles for articulating a widespread community defined purely in terms of feeling: they became symbols of unity against later "evils" such as Communists, Catholics, and homosexuals. The analysis in this book allows for a critical perspective on the ideas and forms of revivalism which have shaped much of American culture and rhetoric--the idea of the individual's inner states as the key to his character, the "social" as a realm which creates uniformity through bonds of emotion, the segregation of home and woman from the real world, and the potential political uses of apolitical rhetoric. This book, in short, goes far beyond the discussion of gospel hymns; it raises issues which go to the heart of white, protestant, urban America and suggests that the assumptions lodged there demand argument, not acceptance [Publisher description]
