Oyster soup is a standard item in the money-making church supper. The
orphan oyster searching vainly for a playmate in an ocean of church soup
is a favorite object of Billy Sunday's pity. He loves to caricature the
struggling church, with its time-serving, societyfied, tea-drinking,
smirking preachers. "The more oyster soup it takes to run a church," he
shouts sarcastically, "the faster it runs to the devil."
An attitude so scornful as this may seem highly unconventional to the
outsider. It leads him to think that Billy Sunday is a radical. The
agility with which the Rev. Billy climbs to the top of his pulpit and
then pops to the platform on all fours suggests a corresponding mental
agility. He must be a dangerous element in the church, the outsider
imagines; he must be a religious revolutionary. And then the outsider
beholds John Wanamaker or John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the platform
alongside the revivalist--pillars of society, prosperous and respectable
gentlemen who instinctively know their business.
Fond as his friends are of comparing Billy Sunday to Martin Luther or
John the Baptist, none of them pushes the comparison on the lines of
radicalism, and Sunday himself waives the claim to being considered
revolutionary. "I drive the same kind of nails all orthodox preachers
do," he says in one of his sermons. "The only difference is that they
use a tack hammer and I use a sledge." No one supposes that Martin
Luther could have said this. Sledge-hammer orthodoxy was not exactly the
distinguishing characteristic of Martin Luther. The conservatism of
Billy Sunday's message is the first fact about him. Where he differs
from the orthodox preacher is not in his soul but in his resolution. He
has the mind of Martin Tupper rather than of Martin Luther, but it is
combined with that competent American aggressiveness which one finds in
a large way in George M. Cohan, Theodore Roosevelt, even Ty Cobb.
Theology does not interest Billy Sunday. He compares it to ping-pong and
compares himself to a jack-rabbit and says he knows as little about
theology as a jack-rabbit knows about ping-pong. What he cares about is
religious revival. He knows the church is in bitter need of revival. He
is out to administer digitalis, in his own phrase, instead of oyster
soup.
For many years the church has been waning, and Billy Sunday scorns the
effeminate, lily-handed efforts at resuscitation that the churchmen have
employed. To put pepperino into a religious campaign, to make
Christianity hum, requires more than cushioned pews, extra music, coffee
and macaroons. Had Billy Sunday been in the regular theatrical business
he would not have fussed with a little independent theatre. He would
have conducted a Hippodrome. To rival the profane world's attractions he
sees no reason for rejecting the profane world's methods. So tremendous
an object as curing an institution's pernicious anaemia justifies the
most violent, outrageous experiment.
If Jesus Christ were a new automobile or an encyclopaedia or a biscuit,
Billy Sunday would have varied the method he has employed in putting Him
over, but he would not have varied the spirit of his revival-enterprise
in any essential particular. His object, as he sees it, is to sell
Christ. It is an old story that from its economic organization society
takes its complexion. The Sunday revival takes its complexion from
business enterprise without a single serious change. There is one great
argument running all through Billy Sunday's sermons--the argument that
salvation will prove a profitable investment--but much more clearly
derived from business than the ethics preached by Billy Sunday is the
method he has devised for promoting Jesus Christ. Even the quarrel
between "Ma" Sunday and the man who has lost the post-card concession is
an illustration of the far-reaching efficiency of the system. The point
is not that money is being made out of the system. "An effort to corrupt
Billy Sunday," to use a paraphrase, "would be a work of supererogation,
besides being immoral." If Billy Sunday has a large income, $75,000 or
$100,000 a year, it is not because he is mercenary. It is only because a
large income is part of the natural fruits of his promoting ability.
Left to himself, it is quite unlikely that Billy Sunday would care a
straw about his income, beyond enough to live well and to satisfy his
vanity about clothes. It is Mrs. Sunday who sees to it that her
promoter-husband is not left penniless by those Christian business men
who so delightedly utilize his services.
The backbone of Billy Sunday's success is organization. When
organization has delivered the crowd, Billy is ready to sweat for it and
spit for it and war-whoop for it and dive for base before the devil can
reach him. He is ready to have "Rody" come on the programme with his
slide-trombone and to have any volunteer who wishes to do it hit the
sawdust-trail. But he does not let his success depend on any programme.
His audiences are, in great measure, contracted for in advance. It is in
grasping the necessity for this kind of preparedness, in taking from the
business world its lessons as to canvassing and advertising and
standardizing the goods, that Billy can afford to jeer at oyster soup.
As his authorized biographer complacently says, "John the Baptist was
only a voice: but Billy Sunday is a voice, plus a bewildering array of
committees and assistants and organized machinery. He has committees
galore to cooperate in his work: a drilled Army of the Lord. In the
list of Scranton workers that is before me I see tabulated an executive
committee, the directors, a prayer-meeting committee, an entertainment
committee, an usher committee, a dinner committee, a business women's
committee, a building committee, a nursery committee, a personal
worker's committee, a decorating committee, a shop-meetings
committee--and then a whole list of churches and religious organizations
in the city as ex officio workers!" In New York on April 9th there was a
private meeting of 7,000 personal workers, "another step in the
direction of greasing the campaign."
Unless Billy Sunday had some skill as a performer he naturally could not
hold his place as a revivalist. His success consists largely, however,
in the legendary character that has been given him by all the agencies
that seek to promote this desperate revival of orthodox religion. His
acrobatic stunts on the platform are sufficiently shocking to make good
publicity. His much-advertised slang, repeated over and over, has a
similar sensational value. But the main point about him is the
dramatization of his own personality. His virility is perhaps his chief
stock-in-trade. No one, not Mr. Roosevelt himself, has insisted so much
on his personal militant masculinity. Although well over fifty, his
youthful prowess as a baseball-player is still a headline-item in his
story, and every sermon he preaches gives him a chance to prove he is
physically fit. In addition to this heroic characteristic there is his
fame as a self-made man. He is a plain man of the people, as he never
fails to insist. He carries "the malodors of the barnyard" with him. But
he has succeeded. The cost of his special tabernacle is one of his big
distinctions. The size of his collections is another. His personal
fortune, in spite of all criticism, is a third. Besides these heroic
attributes of strength and wealth there is his melodramatic simplicity
of mind. All of his sermons are "canned" and a great deal of the
material in them is borrowed, but he manages to deliver his message
straight from the shoulder, as if it were his own. There can be no doubt
that his shouting, his slang, his familiarity with Jesus, his
buttonholing old God, his slang-version of the Bible, do offend large
numbers of people. They arrest attention so successfully, even in these
cases, that they turn out to be well advised. There is nothing
spontaneous about these antics. They are switched on at the beginning of
a revival and switched off as it succeeds. They are Sunday's native way
of lighting up the strait and narrow path with wriggling electric signs.
Billy Sunday has too much energy to stick completely fast in the mud of
conservatism. He is capable of advocating sex instruction for the young,
for example, and he permits himself the wild radicalism of woman
suffrage. But as regards vested interests and patriotism and war he is a
conservative, practically a troglodyte. What he attacks with fervor are
the delinquents in ordinary conduct, especially the people who lack
self-control. "Booze-hoisters" and card-players and tango-dancers and
cigarette-smokers are his pet abominations--genuine abominations.
Profanity, strange to say, is another evil that he fights with fire.
Honesty, sobriety, chastity--these are virtues that he exalts,
illustrating the horror of failing in them by means of innumerable
chromatic anecdotes. The devil he constantly attacks, though never with
real solemnity. "The devil has been practicing for six thousand years
and he has never had appendicitis, rheumatism or tonsillitis. If you get
to playing tag with the devil he will beat you every chip." It is more
for spice and snap that he introduces the devil than to terrify his
public. The Bible is his serious theme, and he feels about it almost the
way Martin Tupper did:
The dear old Family Bible should be still our champion volume,
The Medo-Persic law to us, the standard of our Rights ...
It is a joy, an honor, yea a wisdom, to declare
A boundless, an infantile faith in our dear English Bible!
--The garden, and the apple, and the serpent, and the ark,
And every word in every verse, and in its literal meaning,
And histories and prophecies and miracles and visions,
In spite of learned unbelief,--we hold it all plain truth:
Not blindly, but intelligently, after search and study;
Hobbes and Paine considered well, and Germany and Colenso ...
The Bible made us what we are, the mightiest Christian nation
...
The Bible, standing in its strength a pyramid four-square,
The plain old English Bible, a gem with all its flaws ...
Is still the heaven-blest fountain of conversion and salvation.
One of Billy Sunday's boasts is that the liquor interests hate him.
"That dirty, stinking bunch of moral assassins hires men to sit in the
audience to hear me, to write down what I say and then try to find some
author who said something like it, and accuse me of having stolen my
ideas. I know that $30,000 was offered a man in New York City to write a
series of articles attacking me. All right; if you know anything about
me that you want to publish, go to it. Everything they say about me is a
dirty, stinking, black-hearted lie. The whole thing is a frame-up from A
to Izzard. I'll fight them till hell freezes over, and then borrow a
pair of skates. By the grace of God, I've helped to make Colorado and
Nebraska and Iowa and Michigan and West Virginia dry, and I serve notice
on the dirty gang that I'll help to make the whole nation dry." (New
York Times, April 19th, 1917.)
Assuming these points to be well taken, there is still great room to
doubt the deep religious effect of a Billy Sunday revival. Men like
William Allen White and Henry Allen have testified on his behalf in
Kansas, and he has the undying gratitude of many hundred human beings
for moral stimulus in a time of need. In spite of the thousands who have
hit the sawdust trail, however, it is difficult to believe that more
than a tiny proportion of his auditors are religiously affected by him.
The great majority of those who hit the trail are people who merely want
to shake his hand. Very few give any signs of seriousness or
"conversion." The atmosphere of the tabernacle, bright with electric
light and friendly with hymn-singing, is not religiously inspiring, and
in the voice and manner of Billy Sunday there is seldom a contagious
note. His audiences are curious to see him and hear him. He is a
remarkable public entertainer, and much that he says has keen humor and
verbal art and horse sense. But for all his militancy, for all his
pugnacious vociferation, he leaves an impression of being at once
violent and incommunicative, a sales agent for Christianity but not a
guide or a friend.
Still, as between Billy Sunday's gymnastics and the average oyster soup,
Messrs. Wanamaker and Rockefeller naturally put their money on Sunday.
Theirs is the world of business enterprise, of carpets and socks, Socony
and Nujol, and if Christ could have been put over in the same way, by
live-wire salesmanship, Billy was the man.