Sunday, Billy

Sunday, Billy (1862–1935), evangelist. William Ashley Sunday was born in Ames, Iowa. His youth was marked by poverty and intermittent education. A gifted athlete, Sunday in 1883 joined the Chicago White Stockings baseball team. Having converted to Christ in 1886, he left baseball in 1891 to engage in Christian ministry. After assisting two traveling evangelists, Sunday set out on his own in 1896. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1903, he maintained a grueling schedule of revival meetings in small midwestern towns. But by 1910 he was holding huge evangelistic campaigns in major cities throughout America.

Over his lifetime, Sunday preached to and converted more people than any American revivalist before Billy Graham. He “got results” because of his simple language, physical stunts, and dramatic theatrics. Undergirding Sunday's showmanship was an extraordinary organizational apparatus managed by his wife, Nell Sunday.

Sunday vehemently attacked what he viewed as the evils afflicting modern America, including urban corruption, immigration, and most important, alcohol—concerns shared by many Progressive Era reformers. Sunday's solution was appealingly (or appallingly) simple: Conversion to Christ brought with it common decency; if enough people converted, America could be righteous again.

During World War I, Sunday was a prominent and chauvinistic supporter of the U.S. war effort and vehement in his denunciations of Germany. Soon thereafter his career began to fade, in part because of family and health problems, but he kept preaching until his death. Billy Sunday's legacy includes the estimated one million individuals who came forward in his revivals, and the Fundamentalist movement that continued his crusade against forces perceived to be turning America into a moral wasteland.
See also Protestantism; Revivalism; Temperance and Prohibition; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

William G. McLoughlin Jr. , Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, 1955.
Douglas W. Frank , Less than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century, 1986.
Lyle W. Dorsett , Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America, 1991.

William Vance Trollinger Jr.