Timothy Gloege convincingly demonstrates that influential evangelicals adapted modern corporate structures, promotional techniques, and marketing strategies to reorient conservative Christianity between the 1870s and 1920s. In the process, they created a consumer-based and pan-denominational religious tradition that made their theological interventions palatable to white middle-class audiences, even as they marginalized more radical elements within their own constituency. Gloege makes Moody Bible Institute (MBI), a key institutional player in this transformation, the cornerstone of his study. He also ranges widely over the evangelical and corporate landscape. Readers interested in such diverse institutions as the Quaker Oats Company, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA), the World Christian Fundamentals Association, and Union Oil will find the study illuminating. As Gloege probes the intricate and often unexpected connections between evangelicalism and corporate capitalism, he enhances our understanding of the ways in which these seemingly disparate sectors continue to intersect and influence each other.

Several factors make this an especially appealing book. Gloege paints compelling portraits of the people behind the institutions, deftly explaining the ways in which individual life stories, ideologies, and experiences contributed to organizational change. Not surprisingly, Dwight Moody looms large. The first half of the book focuses on the way in which this celebrity evangelist crafted a new “practical” and producer-oriented approach to Protestantism on the working-class streets of Chicago, independent of existing denominations and churchly traditions. Moody's plainspoken sermons and respectable appearance, carefully embedded within efficient organizational structures and popular media spectacles, mobilized businessmen especially to embrace a more individualistic religious ethos during an age of intense class conflict. By the time of his death in 1899, Moody had evolved into a recognizable brand that stood for a solid, middle-class, broad-based Christianity. Throughout the early twentieth century, MBI effectively used this brand to promote organizational forms, theological emphases, and programmatic innovations that the founder might have found peculiar and unsettling. In a delicious irony, Moody's own children eventually chastised MBI for departing from the spirit of the founder, correctly observing that the institute had appropriated their father as a trademark to promote premillennialist and sectarian ends.

Other, less-well-known evangelical luminaries also receive their due in Guaranteed Pure, including Reuben Torrey, Lyman Stewart, Cyrus Scofield, and John Alexander Dowie. Perhaps the most fascinating character to grace the narrative, however, is Henry Parsons Crowell. As president and a major shareholder of Quaker Oats, Crowell created the trademark smiling Quaker as a guarantor of product purity, much to the chagrin of the Society of Friends who in 1916 unsuccessfully sought governmental protection against the appropriation of the name for commercial purposes. One especially compelling segment examines the way in which Crowell used the “trifecta of trademark, package, and production” in order to break the power of millinery wholesalers, promote his product directly to consumers, and cultivate product loyalty (p. 117). When Crowell began a forty-year term as president of MBI's board of trustees, in 1903, he deftly applied these same principles to evangelical religion. Viewing modernist ministers and traditional denominations as business competitors, MBI bypassed such religious retailers as respectable ministers to appeal directly to laypersons, the ultimate religious consumers. Crowell and his colleagues especially promoted the publication and dissemination of The Fundamentals. This influential series of essays effectively defined conservative Christianity in the early twentieth century, creating a new evangelical standard that guaranteed doctrinal purity in much the same way that the friendly Quaker reassured consumers about the superior standards used to process their oats.

Gloege also excels at explaining both sacred and secular trends. Non-evangelical academics will find clear and lucid discussions of such topics as premillennialism and the Keswick Holiness Movement, which played key roles in defining and modifying MBI's theological stance following Moody's death. An extended discussion of faith healing, which precipitated a serious schism at the institution in the late nineteenth century, illustrates the reasons why evangelicals kept their Pentecostal brethren at a distance in the interest of maintaining mainstream respectability. Gloege always places his institutional history within a broader economic context, paying sufficient attention to labor discord, corporate consolidation, and the rise of mass advertising. Guaranteed Pure draws fascinating connections between business and religion throughout. Gloege's interpretive framework clearly describes the transformation from producer-driven to consumer-oriented religious traditions. Along the way, though, we also learn some important historical lessons about such smaller topics as mailing lists, publication design, and fund-raising techniques.

All good books raise intriguing questions; here, two themes especially seem ripe for future research. First, Gloege admittedly takes a top-down approach toward institutional history. He focuses primarily on organizational policies as defined by a relative handful of powerful board members, major administrators, and wealthy donors. This emphasis seems especially appropriate because he seeks to explain the coalescence of a national transdenominational conservative network in early-twentieth-century America. His methodology leaves open the question, however, of how board decisions affected other levels of the organization. Who staffed the various departments? How did policies translate into actual practices? Did alumni thoroughly imbibe the overarching institutional philosophy and how did MBI influence their subsequent lives and careers? Who were the backsliders? Could more radical elements still find a safe harbor within the organization?

Second, though this book explores the interaction between business and religion, most of the influence appears unidirectional. Gloege undeniably demonstrates that MBI administrators borrowed corporate concepts and integrated dominant business philosophies into their operations. It remains less clear whether Christian businessmen allowed their moral and ethical frameworks to guide their secular practices. Crowell and Lyman Stewart, the oil magnate, both apparently turned to philanthropic work only after successfully consolidating their corporate assets and developing their business philosophies. Similarly, much of the current literature concerning twentieth-century religion seems to concentrate on its conservative accommodation to social and corporate norms. Perhaps a similarly well-crafted and archives-based study of a secular institution might reveal that religiously motivated entrepreneurs carried some unexpected spiritual lessons and prophetic stances into the business world as well.