Dwight L. Moody was one of America’s most eminent Victorians. Revered as an evangelist throughout the English-speaking world, he was admired across denominational as well as national boundaries. He was also something of a representative American. The most lovable of men to his many admirers, he was plain-spoken and mostly self-taught. He had been wounded, probably deeply, by his culture’s individualism. He was also emancipated by it.
Moody’s was the story of a self-made man. Born in Massachusetts in 1837, he survived an impoverished childhood to achieve success in the frontier city of Chicago. But Chicago was a lonely place for a young man barely out of his teens and rife with life-threatening temptations. So Moody’s spiritual hungers grew even as he prospered financially. He was soon involved in a more profound kind of self-transformation, though here too the tale is emblematically American. At least nominally converted prior to his emigration west, Moody was simultaneously affiliated in Chicago with three churches, which together provided the rootless youth with a social circle—indeed, with surrogate parents—and an essential psychological anchor. Nurturance in the faith led to heightened religious activism, and ultimately—at least partly under the stimulus of revival excitement in the late 1850s—to full-time lay ministry. Moody’s work as an evangelist among Chicago’s poorest children had won him sufficient local fame by 1860 to merit the notice of President-elect Lincoln.
Like many men of his generation, Moody was changed in fundamental ways by the Civil War, during which he served as a YMCA-sponsored chaplain. His exposure to wartime suffering seems to have deepened his faith and given him a quickened sense of his capacity for evangelical service. Moody preached extensively in the course of his chaplaincy and engaged for the first time in the one-on-one counseling that soon became a hallmark of his approach to evangelization. His wartime experience, moreover, provided Moody with practical training in leadership and made him into an ardent ecumenist. Disposed even before the war to interdenominational evangelizing, Moody was committed in principle in the postwar years to a ministry that transcended denominational and even confessional barriers. Internationally famous after a triumphant preaching tour of the British Isles in the mid-1870s, Moody was instrumental during the 20-odd years that remained to him not only in the revitalization of American Protestantism but in the creation of a more tolerant national culture.
That a certain irony attaches to this latter achievement seems appropriate, for Moody’s was a complex legacy. “His theology,” as George Marsden reminds us, “although basically orthodox, was ambiguous to the point of seeming not to be theology at all.”1 Though in many respects a founding father of Protestant fundamentalism, Moody was deeply averse to controversy. This kept him conspicuously neutral in the increasingly rancorous theological disputes of the late nineteenth century. His pragmatism, moreover, caused him to downplay—even to ignore—certain “hard teachings,” most notably the doctrine of eternal punishment. “Loving them into the kingdom” was always Moody’s strategy, and he tailored his message accordingly. The results were broadly appealing: Moody was able, almost single-handedly, to adapt antebellum revivalism to the needs and conditions of urban industrial America. But his was a sentimentalized and highly individualistic Christianity—a fusion, predictable in the circumstances, of the gospel and Victorian bourgeois values.
Though Moody is a significant figure in American cultural history, he seldom looms large in any but narratives devoted to the history of American Protestantism. Nearly all of the dozens of Moody biographies, moreover, have told his story with reference almost exclusively to the world defined by Protestant evangelicalism. There is a real need, then, for scholarly biographies that situate Moody in a broader cultural context, and a need, too—given our own era of troubled cities and growing inequality—for studies that address his place in the history of American discourse about poverty, class, race, and gender.In A Passion for Souls, Prof. Lyle Dorsett sets out to accomplish both of these objectives.
Dorsett had the advantage in this ambitious project of access to sources hitherto off-limits to researchers. He also had the advantage of a deep affection and admiration for Moody, which presumably did much to sustain what must have been years of patient work in the archives. Dorsett’s footnotes, at least, are a worthy tribute to the man he seeks to honor. But the book itself is deeply flawed, both as history and as Christian scholarly witness.
Perhaps the most surprising deficiency in Dorsett’s book is his truncated psychological portrait of Moody. Though Dorsett has read more of Moody’s correspondence than any scholar to date, the Moody who emerges in his pages is oddly flat. Dorsett’s Moody is not without his faults—Dorsett is no hagiographer—but it is never wholly clear how these faults fit into the larger psychological picture, for we do not get a nuanced sense of Moody’s emotional and intellectual development, still less a persuasive analysis of his principal relationships.
Perhaps the sources themselves, for all their abundance, made the task more than usually difficult. Dorsett seldom quotes at length from Moody’s letters, but those he does quote tend to be pedestrian—with the signal exception of Moody’s charmingly affectionate letters to his children and grandchildren. Moody’s was the limited vocabulary of a man whose formal schooling had ended well before his teens and who never read widely. Nor was he apparently given to introspection. Still, Dorsett is hardly the first biographer whose subject lacked rhetorical fluency and psychological sophistication. The problem goes deeper than the sources.
Dorsett also pays surprisingly little attention to Moody’s various audiences, though Moody’s achievements can hardly be understood apart from them. To whom did he preach? To what extent did his message vary over time and from place to place? One would not expect nineteenth-century sources to yield precise audience profiles. But Moody’s campaigns were generously covered in the local press, and many of his sermons were published. Evidence of this sort, imaginatively used, could do much to contextualize Moody’s ministry in terms of audience and content. It is especially odd that Dorsett does so little by way of analyzing Moody’s sermons, either in terms of theological content or rhetorical strategy. Nor does he probe the popular religious culture that made Moody into an icon. Though Moody defined his ministry in terms of the Word, there was an apparently insatiable market for images of the man and for souvenirs that bore his name. That Moody objected to such traffic is important, as Dorsett is quick to point out. But the traffic itself is arguably of greater significance to the historian.
Finally, Dorsett has remarkably little to say about the meaning of Moody’s career for American religious culture. It is certainly true that Moody touched an incalculable number of lives, and true too that his influence is still felt today. Dorsett is right to draw the attention of a secularized academy to these realities. But there is much more to the story, as Dorsett himself acknowledges. Moody played a pivotal role in the rise of lay ministry in the United States and in the development of nondenominational churches and missionary organizations. He also contributed in major ways to the steady evisceration of Calvinist theology in the second half of the nineteenth century. “The result was that by the time of Moody’s death a more Arminian or Wesleyan view of God spread through the training programs and ministry command posts of urban and foreign missions. It also seeped into the major denominations, and early on it took root in many independent churches.”
Few historians would quarrel with Dorsett’s logic. Most, however, would urge him to take his analysis further—to probe the ramifications of Moody’s achievements and the varied meanings of his career. Moody’s humane theology, his emphasis on individual counseling as the principal arena of conversion, his eschewal of creedal debates—these surely helped American Protestantism adapt to new urban circumstances. But for all his good will and success, Moody can fairly be seen as the unwitting progenitor of certain troubling trends in American Christianity: a severe erosion of doctrinal content (and hence of intellectual rigor), a sometimes excessive individualism, an uncritical orientation to the therapeutic mode. Moody seems to have had no real theology of church. Thus he left unaddressed the important issue of what constitutes authority—doctrinal and otherwise—in a postdenominational age. One wishes that Dorsett had plumbed this problematic legacy more deeply.
He failed to do so, I suspect, because of his particular biases as a self-consciously Christian scholar. Moody’s career, Dorsett asserts, provides unambiguous illustration of the Spirit’s work in the world. To accommodate problematic legacies in such a context requires an ironist’s sense of history, and Dorsett’s is not the ironic mode. Quite the contrary: he seems undaunted by the prospect of Christian scholars incorporating the supernatural into the historical narratives they construct. One need not be the village atheist to regard this view as both naive and troubling.
As a Christian, I do indeed believe that God is at work in history. But as a finite and contingent being, I do not presume to know his particular purposes. I do strive, both as scholar and citizen, to discern God’s will in discrete historical circumstances, and to order my political and scholarly choices accordingly. But I also know that, at best, I see only in part. I believe too that the God of history honors our freedom as men and women: that he works within the limits of culture, social organization, and personality structure. This means that avowedly Christian historians must be as rigorous in their analysis of setting and actors as secular historians are required to be. When we fail to do this, we are rightly dismissed by our colleagues as not very interesting theologians. If we want to assert a graced dimension to history, then, we must be wiser than serpents and more guileless than doves. We must play the “secular” historical game with as much skill as our most gifted nonbelieving counterparts. And we must learn to speak of grace and other “forbidden” topics in language that gains a hearing in the secular academy.
In both these regards, Dorsett’s book could stand as a model of what not to do. He invokes Providence so frequently and so casually in the course of Moody’s story that he leaves himself little room for rigorous analysis. Why ask hard questions about Moody’s psychology or the nature of his popular appeal when one can invoke the will of God for purposes of explanation? Why probe the religious culture of Moody’s day in all its complexity and ambiguity when the Holy Spirit was so obviously at work in its midst? Omissions of this sort virtually ensure that Dorsett’s prodigious research will have almost no impact on the secular academy. Nor will he necessarily fare better with scholarly readers who are sympathetic to his Christianity.
Must Christian scholars, then, deny their most deeply held beliefs in order to gain scholarly acceptance? I think not. Today’s academy is open to multiple perspectives, and there is no reason why we should not be frank about ours. We believe that God is active in history, that human beings are touched by grace, that naturalistic explanations are sometimes inadequate. And we should say so—though preferably in the introductions and perhaps the conclusions to our monographs and articles. For the rest, our Christian commitment will be shown in our choice of subject and the seriousness and sympathy we bring to issues of belief. We honor God and our calling as historians by proceeding so modestly. “Judgment is God’s province,” as Dom Jean LeClerq noted in his preface to The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. “The historian must be satisfied to learn why men and events were what the texts tell him they were.”2
Leslie Woodcock Tentler is professor of history at the Catholic University of America.
1. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1920 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 32.
2. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New American Library, 1962), p. viii.
Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
