Scan barcode
A review by mattshervheim
Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism by Timothy E. W. Gloege, Timothy E. W. Gloege
4.5
This was a complete surprise to me – I found it by chance at my library and borrowed because I didn't feel like continuing with the current audiobook(s) I had started. And I'm really glad I did.
Guaranteed Pure tells two interconnected stories: first, the story of D.L. Moody and the founding of the Moody Bible Institute, and second, the story of The Fundamentals, the 90-essay series widely considered to be the foundation of modern Christian fundamentalism, which the Moody Bible Institute played a role in publishing. Throughout both stories, Timothy Gloege traces the influence of business techniques on ministry and theology – an approach I found revelatory.
Gloege describes Moody as deeply informed by the pragmatism of business practices, which led to a twisty theological journey so convoluted I won't even attempt to summarize it here. (Some highlights include a long controversy over faith-healings, the rise of pentecostalism, and the theological innovations of a realist reading of scripture and dispensationalism.)
One particular detail of the story I found astonishing: the Chicago Evangelization Society (renamed to the Moody Bible Institute after D.L. Moody's death) was founded in the context of the labor strikes and riots in the 1880's and that it was funded by wealthy Chicagoans in the hopes that Moody would be able to train evangelists who would reach the urban masses, who, once converted, would cease agitating for more equitable treatment, including the 8-hour workday.
Though Gloege's depiction of Moody is hardly heroic, it's also no hatchet job. Moody comes across as a complex figure navigating, and in turn shaping, a particularly conflicted phase in American religious history.
It's only after Moody's death, though, and the arrival of Henry Parsons Crowell on the scene that the story really kicks into high gear. Crowell was the founder of the Quaker Oats Company, an extraordinarily successful businessman, and one of the originators of modern corporate branding. He was invited by then-President James M. Gray to financial restructure the Moody Bible Institute, and from his position as Chairman of the Board, Crowell had an enormous impact on the future of evangelicalism.
Though Crowell's insight into branding and focus on productivity/performance was widely influential, the most remarkable and historically important was in the publishing of the The Fundamentals. Quoting from Jonathan Baer's review of Guaranteed Pure at 9Marks:
Guaranteed Pure tells two interconnected stories: first, the story of D.L. Moody and the founding of the Moody Bible Institute, and second, the story of The Fundamentals, the 90-essay series widely considered to be the foundation of modern Christian fundamentalism, which the Moody Bible Institute played a role in publishing. Throughout both stories, Timothy Gloege traces the influence of business techniques on ministry and theology – an approach I found revelatory.
Gloege describes Moody as deeply informed by the pragmatism of business practices, which led to a twisty theological journey so convoluted I won't even attempt to summarize it here. (Some highlights include a long controversy over faith-healings, the rise of pentecostalism, and the theological innovations of a realist reading of scripture and dispensationalism.)
One particular detail of the story I found astonishing: the Chicago Evangelization Society (renamed to the Moody Bible Institute after D.L. Moody's death) was founded in the context of the labor strikes and riots in the 1880's and that it was funded by wealthy Chicagoans in the hopes that Moody would be able to train evangelists who would reach the urban masses, who, once converted, would cease agitating for more equitable treatment, including the 8-hour workday.
Though Gloege's depiction of Moody is hardly heroic, it's also no hatchet job. Moody comes across as a complex figure navigating, and in turn shaping, a particularly conflicted phase in American religious history.
It's only after Moody's death, though, and the arrival of Henry Parsons Crowell on the scene that the story really kicks into high gear. Crowell was the founder of the Quaker Oats Company, an extraordinarily successful businessman, and one of the originators of modern corporate branding. He was invited by then-President James M. Gray to financial restructure the Moody Bible Institute, and from his position as Chairman of the Board, Crowell had an enormous impact on the future of evangelicalism.
Though Crowell's insight into branding and focus on productivity/performance was widely influential, the most remarkable and historically important was in the publishing of the The Fundamentals. Quoting from Jonathan Baer's review of Guaranteed Pure at 9Marks:
Crowell built his company by reshaping the oats market from an undifferentiated commodity business to a branded, packaged, and advertised product market. Instead of scooping oats from unmarked bins in general stores filled by wholesalers, consumers reached for the discretely packaged and aggressively promoted brand whose smiling Quaker guaranteed purity. Crowell effectively cut out the wholesaler and diminished the quality oversight role of the retailer, while using modern methods of advertising to enhance consumer demand and build bonds of trust.
Gloege writes that Crowell applied that same branding approach to the publishing of The Fundamentals, consciously (!) working to subvert denominational authority. Quoting Baer again: "[i]f retailers were ministers and other religious workers, if wholesalers were denominations, and if the laity were consumers, then the nondenominational MBI sought to bypass denominations by going straight to ministers and especially laity with their religious product, trademarked by the Moody name and promoted as the safe and sound faith once delivered to the saints."
In other words, Crowell sought to create a new nondenominational form of Christianity, branded as "ol' time religion" but fundamentally shaped by consumer capitalism, as a response against theological modernism (and pentecostalism, and some radical conservatives) that conveniently left the Moody Bible Institute perceived as a purveyor of "pure and undefiled religion."
After that staggering charge, Gloege continues to follow the Moody Bible Institute through the present day (and with it, a history of fundamentalism more broadly, including the founding of Biola University), all while Moody slowly loses relevance in the market-driven evangelicalism it inaugurated. As University of Dayton Professor of History William Vance Trollinger, Jr. neatly summarizes in his review, "Gloege notes, 'having pioneered the idea that religion was something to be consumed rather than practiced, MBI became lost in the shuffle of competing brands,' which now include (to mention a few examples) the '"praise-and-worship"' industrial complex,' the 'evangelical hipsters in the emergent church movement,' and – in a wonderfully apt description – 'the mash-up of Jonathan Edwards and Ayn Rand in Minneapolis Baptist minister John Piper’s neo-Puritanism'."
In conclusion – Gloege has written a highly readable, well-researched, incisive history of a complex and important chapter in American religious history, and his exploration of the impact of business thinking on D.L. Moody, the Moody Bible Institute, and evangelicalism offers a valuable new perspective for understanding their influence. Trollinger credits Gloege with explaining The Fundamentals better than anyone else he's read, which I would certainly agree with, and Gloege is so clear a writer I almost feel like I understand dispensationalism, no small feat.
Jim Manchester did an excellent job as reader.
Would highly recommend.