Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America

?Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America,? by Lyle W. Dorsett for the ?Library of Religious Biography? series and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company is a short, yet well rounded and objective, biography of Billy Sunday.A first-rate biography covering Billy Sunday from A-Z in less than 160 pages: no small task considering the importance of Billy Sunday and early 20th Century evangelism. However, Dorsett subtitle is somewhat misleading: ?and the Redemption of Urban America,? as he only devotes one chapter to it and its mainly regarding Billy Sunday?s pitfalls regarding his enormous financial success in from 1908-1920. Very little detail on Sunday?s most historically significant reform movements: movements heavily tied towards his Midwestern background and Mid-America?s fear of industrialization and urbanization in the early 20th Century: temperance and prohibition legislation, Sunday closing laws, gambling, card playing, reading love novels, Saturday and Sunday drives in the county with members of the opposite sex in that devilish automobile when you should have been going to church, non-religious dancing and music, liberalism, evolution, alleged decadent dress and loss morals of modern women and the general discontentment of masculine Christianity in early 20th Century America. Topics covered in greater detail in Roger A. Bruns?, ?Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism? and in Robert Francis Martin?s ?Hero of the Heartland: Billy Sunday and the Transformation of America.?Regrettable too is the lack of footnotes or endnotes in his text: only a brief section towards the end of his book on sources.Included in his biography are two complete sermons of Billy Sunday in the appendix titled, ?Heaven? and ?Get on the Water Wagon.? Two important sermons of Sunday that Dorsett believes have been misquoted by other biographers and historians. While it is lacking in significant detail concerning these reform movements, it is still a first-rate and objective biography of Billy Sunday that can be read in a short amount of time.

The book chronicles the life and ministry of Billy Sunday (1862-1935), the most popular American evangelist at the turn of the twentieth century. It does not avoid sensitive aspects of Sunday?s life, such as his sumptuous lifestyle at the height of his career, the personal and financial scandals of his children, and his swift decline from public favor. Dorsett was one of the first scholars to use the Sunday Family Papers, in addition to press coverage of Sunday?s evangelistic campaigns and previous Sunday biographies, to present a critical account of Sunday?s life and ministry. Dorsett describes the context and setting for Sunday?s ministry, from the rural Midwestern communities of his early days to the sprawling urban centers at the peak of his career. Most of all, Dorsett attempts to capture Sunday?s complex personality, a man caught between a genuine desire to bring sinners to salvation through Jesus Christ and the allure of fame and fortune in American society.