Moody, Dwight L.
MOODY, DWIGHT L.
MOODY, DWIGHT L. (1837–1899), American revivalist preacher. Dwight Lyman Moody was born in Northfield, Massachusetts. Like many Americans of his era, he left home as a teenager for the city—first Boston, then Chicago. In each city he quickly established a reputation as an aggressive boot and shoe salesman, but in Chicago he soon turned his organizational talents to religious endeavors, especially those of the local YMCA. During the nearly two decades he lived in Chicago, Moody moved from volunteer to full-time religious work, developed his techniques as an urban evangelist, and began to establish a national reputation as a leader in church circles. After several tentative, exploratory trips overseas, Moody in 1873 launched a career in England as a full-time revivalist. Within two years he had established himself as a highly effective revivalist, able to stir religious feelings in large numbers of people during lengthy revival "campaigns" conducted in the principal cities of England and Scotland.
Moody parlayed his fame overseas into even greater public acclaim in the United States. Beginning in 1875 he conducted a series of lengthy revivals, carefully planned and orchestrated, in most major American cities. True religious sentiment and feeling were to be found in these revivals, even though Moody's activism, efficient organization, and rough-hewn appearance seemed also to exemplify the emerging materialism of industrial America.
By 1880 Moody had established a permanent residence at his birthplace, Northfield, Massachusetts. This act, combined with the evangelist's continuing round of annual urban revivals, exemplified the tension many late nineteenth-century Americans felt in living between the two worlds of small-town origins and big city realities. Moody broadened his concerns beyond mass revivalism in the 1880s. Shifting part of his energy and interest into education, he founded Mount Hermon and Northfield academies in his hometown, and the Moody Bible Institute, for training urban evangelists, in Chicago.
In the last years of Moody's life, growing divisions between liberals and conservatives in American Protestantism somewhat undermined his leadership. His personal integrity and his irenic temperament, however, made it possible for him to bridge the gap between these divergent groups, and only after his death in 1899 did tensions grow so great that open conflict erupted.
In numerous ways Moody epitomized popular American Protestantism in the second half of the nineteenth century. His family life and personal values reflected evangelical Protestant ideals of personal piety and morality. In the public realm, also, Moody embodied key characteristics of the evangelical world. He had transformed that world by adapting the revival tradition to the new urban, industrial context of late nineteenth-century America. His public activities in his later years also offer fascinating glimpses of the breakup of the cultural synthesis evangelism had provided in the nineteenth century. To the end of his life, Moody remained one of the best representatives and reflectors of popular Protestant culture and practice in the United States.
Bibliography
Findlay, James F. Dwight L. Moody, American Evangelist, 1837–1899. Chicago, 1969.
Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism in American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925. New York, 1980.
McLoughlin, William G. Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham. New York, 1959.
Sizer, Sandra S. Gospel Hymns and Social Religion: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism. Philadelphia, 1978.
Weisberger, Bernard A. They Gathered at the River: The Story of the Great Revivalists and Their Impact upon Religion in America. Boston, 1958.
James F. Findlay (1987)