Document Type
Thesis - University Access Only
Award Date
2009
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department / School
English
Abstract
In the last thirty years, the contemporary evangelical movement in America has successfully appropriated market principles to grow churches and, in tum, to wield substantial economic, social, and political power in the secular sphere. This trend raises many concerns, one of which involves the basis of evangelical Christianity. For what becomes of genuine faith when, to promote its benefits, the church employs the mechanisms of democratic populism and of commercial power? Historically, American Protestantism in the early 1800s transformed from a faith grounded in Calvinistic Puritanism to one increasingly shaped by Unitarianism and transcendentalism as well as by democratic populism, a shift highlighted in Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1838 "'Divinity School Address." And after the Civil War, as some churches began accepting and even appropriating secular science and philosophy into their doctrine, they in tum adopted large-scale business models during the period between roughly 1880 and 1930. Novelists of the period, including Henry Adams in Esther (1884), Frank Norris in The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1902), and Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry (1927), noted the tensions between the allure of the modem-the rationalized efficiencies of business and the marketplace-and the longings for a revival of genuine religious faith, as well as the increasing dominance of secular philosophical and economic influences within evangelicalism. The novels' conclusions about the fate of genuine faith anticipated late twentieth and early twenty-first-century concern about an increasingly diluted, amorphous popular evangelicalism, one that imperils a truly devout and civic-minded America.
Library of Congress Subject Headings
Adams, Henry, 1838-1918. Esther
Norris, Frank, 1870-1902. Pit
Lewis, Sinclair, 1885-1951. Elmer Gantry
Evangelicalism in literature
Secularism in literature
American fiction -- History and criticism
Format
application/pdf
Number of Pages
174
Publisher
South Dakota State University
Recommended Citation
Olson, Emily S., "In the Name of the Spirit: The Secularization of American Evangelicalism in Esther, The Pit: A Story of Chicago, and Elmer Gantry" (2009). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1608.
https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/etd2/1608
