CHAPTER IX
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
The purpose of this scholarly endeavor has been to demonstrate D. L. Moody’s attempt to reach the workingman and to relate this attempt to his social views. An effort has also been made to evaluate the success of Moody’s endeavors to relate the gospel to the working masses.
Because of Moody’s attempt to reach the masses in the industrial complexes of Great Britain and the United States, his major contribution to the American church was the systematization of urban revivalism. Moody’s method of mass evangelism, taught in the schools he had founded, included plenty of prayer and pre-event planning to organize enlisted churches and to stir the faithful to action. Moody’s methods of urban evangelism lived on in the revival work of Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, and others. Although his great success has been as an unordained, lay evangelist, Moody also had great ability in getting movements started and inspiring individuals. During the Gilded Age he stood at the center of almost every agency devised by the churches to implement their tasks.
Bruce J. Evensen writes, “Perhaps most important to those who came after him was Moody’s recognition that a great enemy of church life, the secular press, could be harnessed to further the purposes of the church. Those who slept in on the sabbath and opened their morning paper could also be reached. . . through the devil’s advocate. . . . The person who would never pick up a sermon . . . might read an account of it in the daily press. He understood that America had entered ‘an age of advertising’ and its many ministers needed to exploit it if they wanted to get their message out.”1 One needed to work through newspapers to create a sense of community excitement to encourage believers to anticipate a blessing of unusual proportion. When the first crowds came, headlines in the newspapers would follow. Readers would learn that something was occurring –Christ had come to their city–and they would then be avid to get in on the blessing.2
The age of Moody was a period of great change on the American scene. The forces of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization had a profound impact upon the era and brought growing, massive problems to the nation’s cities. At first Protestantism was indifferent to the problems but not for long. It sought to remedy the social ills through changing the hearts of individuals or/and through redeeming social structures. Moody was a strong proponent of the change-of-heart approach. This approach directed its message to the laboring classes, especially the immigrants.
Although one of Moody’s lifelong goals was to reach the urban workingman, he failed to understand the growing antagonism between labor and capital which was developing after the Civil War. Capital’s impersonal viewpoint toward labor caused labor to revolt through the use of strikes. Some of these were explosive in nature. Moody also failed to understand labor’s hostility toward institutional Protestantism. He worked with the institutional churches to plan and execute his revival meetings. Although labor was hostile toward institutional forms of Protestantism, it did have a more favorable attitude toward Roman Catholicism. Some labor leaders also espoused a social Christianity that had Protestant antecedents.
Since Moody lived in an age of socioeconomic change, one would expect him to have views in regard to labor, capital, and social change. Moody’s target was the masses–common laborers and industrial workers, immigrants, the poor, and the so-called criminal element. He viewed men of labor as individuals rather than as a part of a class. He failed to understand group structures and group identity and how these relate to an individual’s plight. Moody was convinced that laborers were poor because of personal sin, i.e., laziness, lack of thrift, and consumption of liquor and tobacco. The evangelist was also convinced that Christian conversion could work wonders in making lazy, poor men into energetic prosperous persons. Moody was hard put to explain the wicked men who were wealthy or the poor who were Christian converts. He also looked upon evangelization as necessary to the Americanization of immigrant laborers.
Moody, in the main, supported the values of the business community. Although the evangelist questioned some businessmen who seemed to be ruthless money-grabbers, he never questioned in an ultimate sense the values of an acquisitive society. He was unable to criticize big business for several reasons. Both Moody’s revivalism and big business’ gospel of wealth were rooted in traditional Christian orthodoxy. His fund-raising activities among the wealthy affected his critical faculties. The evangelist’s own success put him in sympathy with the rag-to-riches mythology. The need as an evangelist to oversimplify caused him to overlook critical distinctions in complex social issues. Moody’s preoccupation with salvation and his legalistic conception of perfectionism as well as his refusal to relate the gospel to social and political issues removed his thought from being critical of business values. Finally, the evangelist was the embodiment of middle-class values of the Gilded Age.
Moody felt that social change was not possible to any large degree. He felt that the possibility of reform apart from personal regeneration was ridiculous. His charity was always tempered by evangelistic motivations. He never gave a loaf of bread to a man simply because he was hungry. Such a gift was always followed by an evangelistic exhortation. Moody had little use for the social gospel despite the fact some of his best friends were its founding fathers. The evangelist’s pessimism in regard to social change was heavily colored by his premillennial views; also, his inability to change was probably due to his rural background, and to his inability intellectually to perceive the social, economic, and intellectual change of his era.
In regard to Moody’s social views a potential doctoral dissertation awaits some energetic scholar. The only systematized work that has been done to the present was written by James F. Findlay, Jr. In his doctoral dissertation.1 William G. McLaughlin, Jr.’s two chapters on Moody in his Modern Revivalism demonstrates an awareness of Moody’s social views, but they are not presented in any systematic formation.2
Moody’s social views were in the developing stage and being tested in his early years in Chicago. By beginning in Chicago, Moody unknowingly began his religious career on the major battlefront of the churches–the city. It was there that he developed the second largest Sunday school in America, gave dynamic leadership to the local Y.M.C.A., and founded the Illinois Street Church.
Moody chose his beginning point in “the Sands.” Through hard work and identification with the children, Moody built a successful Sunday school. He used candy, prizes, picnics, pony rides, spankings, and romps to tame the wild children of the immigrant workers of the Sands. Moody’s influence helped many of these children become respectable citizens in their various communities. The school aided poor families with charity, helped drunken fathers become sober, found homes for daughters of prostitutes and keepers of brothels, and helped overcome illiteracy. Moody’s school helped immigrant children and their working parents find their way into the American system.
Moody in 1854 in Boston became associated with the Y.M.C.A. Upon moving to Chicago he became one of the prime movers of the local association. He directed its activities toward the needs of urban workers as well as attempting to evangelize them through the association’s aid. Moody later became the chief evangelist, organizer, financier, and statesman for the Y.M.C.A. in the United States and Great Britain. The Y.M.C.A. in America also made an effort like Moody to reach the working masses, but the organization’s main attraction was to its founders, the white-collar workers.
Moody’s Sunday school was such a success among the children and their parents that it became a church. Although Moody had no intention of founding a church, his Sunday school converts felt out of place in Chicago’s middle-class churches and pleaded with Moody to use the new Sunday school building for a church home. It soon became busy with activity, and today is one of the strongest bulwarks of independent fundamentalism in the nation. Whether or not the church still appeals to the working class would have to be a matter of further study. During these Chicago years Moody had a great deal of success in aiding and evangelizing the working class. However, his conservative social views did not allow him to challenge the covetous values of an industrial society and in this way seek to benefit his parishioners.
In 1873 Moody’s revival career began in Great Britain. The evangelist had hoped to reach the great working masses in British cities. However, despite many innovations, he failed to reach the masses in great numbers. The revival campaigns appealed primarily to those who were already within the church’s fold. Although the evangelist was unsuccessful in reaching the workingman through his revival campaigns, he did inspire others to enter the Christian pursuit for the workingman and founded institutions to carry the gospel and charity to the working classes.
Moody’s revivals in the United States turned out to be about the same as those in Great Britain; they were a middle-class churchgoers phenomenon. The industrial workers of American cities were largely left untouched. This researcher was unable to find evidence supporting the same phenomenon in the United States that occurred in Great Britain, i.e., Moody’s inspiring the dollars of philanthropists and the founding of institutions in behalf of the working class. There is a need for further research in regard to this aspect of Moody’s American career. As a result of failing to reach the workingman in large industrial areas through mass revivalism, Moody changed his strategy. He attempted to reach the regular churchgoers, hoping they would in turn be inspired to reach the laboring class. Further research is need to see if anyone was so inspired. At present evidence is lacking to support the making of such a claim.
Although Moody failed to reach the workers, he had substantial success with the middle class. In the eighties and nineties he attempted to consolidate his gains by the establishment of different institutions and movements. During the period he founded the Moody Bible Institute. Its background, development, and purpose was to train lay workers who would give their lives in behalf of the workingman. The foundation of the Institute starkly revealed Moody’s wedding of his evangelism with his social views more than any of his other endeavors. Whether or not the Institute was successful in reaching labor would have to be a matter of further research. However, this researcher believes the evidence would prove to be negative because of the Institute’s reputation as a bulwark of premillennial fundamentalism.
Moody’s greatest success in reaching the working class was during his early Chicago years. At that time he was on the frontier of the church’s effort to reach the working masses. In the Chicago Y.M.C.A. he learned to be a lay evangelist. In his revival campaigns Moody hoped to reach the working class in great masses, but he failed as the movement appealed mostly to the middle class. Moody’s last attempt to find a way to reach the working class was the founding of Moody Bible Institute.
Moody had a tremendous organizational ability. His ability to organize is particularly evident in his attempt to reach the workingman, for he had used the Sunday school to reach the workingman’s children as well as the worker himself, the Y.M.C.A. to aid and evangelize poor laborers, a church to reach Chicago’s north side workers, urban revivalism to evangelize the working masses in industrial centers in Great Britain and the United States, and the Chicago Bible Institute to train lay people to be missionaries among laborers.
Although Moody was a great organizer and innovator, he lacked a keen intellect and failed to understand the great undercurrents, social, economic, and intellectual, that were taking place during his lifetime. Moody was unable to understand what the proponents of the social gospel movement were saying. His shunning of social Christianity isolated his form of revivalism from the great, developing issues of the nineteenth century. One wonders what his impact would have been if he had taken the prestige of his position as a renowned evangelist and had attacked the problems of industrial America as Charles G. Finney had used revivalism to attack slavery in the 1840's.
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