Abstract: Surveying the social, geographical, and political context of late 19th and early 20th century Boston, Bendroth offers a new perspective on the rise of American fundamentalism. Her approach emphasizes the importance of local events in dividing Protestant liberals from conservative evangelicals, particularly the energizing force of anti-Catholicism in the 1880s and 1890s. Her analysis emphasizes the interaction of leaders and laypeople, with particular attention to the role of women in generating a militant response to perceived Catholic encroachment. Bendroth also looks at urban fundamentalism within its church context, providing demographic and institutional background on the growth of two very different downtown churches. The first, Tremont Temple, was a revivalist Baptist preaching center that steered clear of militant fundamentalism. The second, Park Street Congregational, aimed at preserving Protestant orthodoxy and, in the 1930s and 1940s, became the nucleus of a conservative evangelical movement that eventually encompassed all of New England. Bendroth tracks the gradual disengagement of conservative Protestants from their urban environment by comparing the strategies of three major city-wide revivals, beginning with J. Wilbur Chapman and Billy Sunday in the World War I era, and ending with Billy Graham’s crusade in 1950. Her book depicts fundamentalists not as militant anti-modernists, but as ordinary people struggling to find a consistent rallying point in a city that was both too liberal to accommodate their beliefs and too conservative to contain their entrepreneurial zeal for change.

Keywords: fundamentalism, anti-Catholicism, Protestant liberals, revivalism, women, conservative evangelicals, J. Wilbur Chapman, Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, Boston