Renditions of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy commonly feature militant conservers of the “old-time religion” locked in theological battle with enthusiastic accommodators of modernity. Matthew Bowman's The Urban Pulpit weaves a subtler and more convincing story. While some turn-of-the-century New York liberals were ready and willing to abandon historic Christian metaphysics, many more were not so inclined. These liberal evangelicals held as tenaciously to the hope of a Christian city as did their fundamentalist counterparts. Indeed, in Bowman's telling, “Liberal and fundamentalist evangelicalisms were the product of pastoral experimentation, attempts to preserve evangelical faith—and hence, a certain mode of society—in the crucible of tenements and factories and department stores” (13).

Bowman's argument that the emerging fissures within American protestantism were significantly intra-evangelical is centrally related to a further contention: namely, that the substance of disagreements between New York City's believers was as much stylistic as it was theological. Protestants of every persuasion could not help but respond to the concomitant demographic and cultural shifts that dramatically remade the nation's industrializing cities over the course of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Bowman uses a wide variety of evidence—drawn, for example, from the realms of liturgy, architecture, and biblical translation and interpretation—to illustrate the profoundly different instincts that conservatives and liberals displayed in reacting to their changing environs. Fundamentalists tended to define themselves against the ever more polyglot and multicultural metropolis, cultivating a style that was distinctive for its “embrace of confrontation” (92). Bowman cites the work of ministers such as Billy Sunday and John Roach Straton, who emphasized more insistently than ever before the raw power of the spoken word of God in their campaigns to call worldly New Yorkers to repentance. Meanwhile, the city's liberal evangelicals sought ways to connect with their increasingly diverse neighbors by emphasizing religious experience over doctrine, as well as by redoubling their commitment to social reform. If for strategic reasons they did not always foreground their evangelical convictions, they nevertheless conceived of what they were doing in terms of a specifically Christian mission to the city. Indeed, what Bowman writes of the early-twentieth-century Presbyterian divine Henry Sloane Coffin was more broadly true: “he believed the church needed to adapt its methods, though not its goals” (111).

By the 1920s it was apparent that liberal evangelicals would not win the city. Their thoughtful attempts to apply Christianity to the modern urban context were hampered by internal tensions that were always threatening to transmute into contradictions. Meanwhile, their nuanced approach evidently did not resonate with ordinary New Yorkers to the same degree as the more straightforward alternatives: fundamentalism on the right and secular progressivism on the left. As Bowman reflects at the book's outset, “It is a story of failure, and a melancholy one” (2).

The Urban Pulpit represents another fine addition to the suddenly booming historiography on the protestant mainline (a moniker that, as Bowman rightly points out, would have been entirely foreign to his dramatis personae). Its richly textured account of liberal evangelicalism will equip historians to teach and write more carefully about the so-called fundamentalist-modernist controversy. The book stays true to its name, in that it is largely focused on a cadre of New York ministers. Readers will enjoy meeting this lesser known cast of characters, but may also be left wondering how, exactly, their ministries were received by their parishioners, not to mention those countless New Yorkers who would not darken the door of an evangelical church. While Bowman has certainly prepared the way for someone to write a social history of liberal evangelicalism, he has not set out to do so here. His felicitous choice to root his story in New York City is responsible for another of the book's signature contributions: namely, a much clearer sense of how significant a catalyst the industrializing city was for the fracturing of American protestantism; the unprecedented pace and scope of urbanization and industrialization may in fact have provoked as much evangelical infighting as Darwinian science and biblical criticism, the specters that haunt the pages of so many older studies. One only wishes that the class, ethnic, and racial conflicts that beset urban America during these decades were more visible in Bowman's narrative, as attention to these (often) quite literal battles might have accentuated other ways—spoken and not—in which conservative and liberal evangelicals were very much aligned.

But whatever its limitations, this is a well-written and cogently argued book, which should be of great interest not only to religious historians but also to anyone fascinated by the cultural history of the modern American city.