Matthew Bowman explores the world of a neglected group of American Christians: the self-identified liberal evangelicals who began in late nineteenth-century New York to reconcile traditional evangelical spirituality with progressive views on social activism and theological questions. These evangelicals emphasized the importance of supernatural conversion experience, but also argued that scientific advances, new movements in art, and the decline in poverty created by a new industrial economy could facilitate encounters with Christ.The Urban Pulpit chronicles the struggle of liberal evangelicals against conservative Protestants who questioned their theological sincerity and against secular reformers who grew increasingly devoted to the cause of cultural pluralism and increasingly suspicious of evangelicals over the course of the twentieth century. Liberal evangelicals walked a difficult path, facing increasing polarization in twentieth-century American public life; both conservative evangelicals and secular reformers insisted that religion and science were necessarily at odds and that evangelical Christianity was incompatible with cultural diversity. Liberal evangelicals rejected these simple dichotomies, but nonetheless found it increasingly difficult to defend their middle way.Drawing on history, anthropology, and religious studies, Bowman paints a complex portrait of these understudied Christians at work, at worship, and engaged in advocacy in the public square.

AcknowledgementsIntroductionPart I1. The Word and Old New York2. The Word Made Stone: Churchbuilding in 1880s New York3. The Revised Version: Scripture and the Rise of Liberal Evangelicalism4. Liberal Piety, Social Reform, and the Institutional ChurchPart II5. The Word and New New York6. The Union School of Religion and the Limits of Liberal Evangelicalism7. John Roach Straton, Prophecy and the Fundamentalist Style8. Harry Emerson Fosdick and Baptism at RiversideConclusionIndex