Day 22. October 23, 2006
Movement 2. Solus Jesus
Lecture 11. Jesus in Victorian America (Part 1)
In the Gilded or "Strenuous" Age after the Civil War a recognizably American culture first began to emerge. Mass culture and mass media - which still drive religion today - helped create a Jesus with many faces as yet another wave of evangelical revival swept the nation. Evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody cultivated the new elites and masses on the expanding urban frontier. Moody, the first international evangelical celebrity, set the stage for what was to come. He pioneered the use of advertising and publicity to stage mass urban revivals. In this period Darwin's Origin of the Species first provoked anxiety, argument, and division over the Big Question of design and moral order in the universe and the meaning of life. Northern liberals integrated Darwinian ideas with Christianity, finding Jesus incarnate in culture. Conservatives at Princeton and elsewhere rejected Darwinism as atheistic. Adventism ignored Darwinism, instead seeking separation from the world to prepare for Jesus' return.