Sin In The City

Long before today's culture wars, the "Third Great Awakening" rocked America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday roused citizens to renounce sin as it manifested in popular culture, moral ambiguity, and the changing role of women. "Sin in the City" examines three urban revivals in turn-of-the-century Chicago to show how sermons and street activism negotiated that era's perceived racial, sexual, and class threats. It also shows that the legacy of the Third Awakening lives on today in the religious right's sociopolitical activism; crusade for family values; disparagement of feminism; and promotion of spirituality in middle-class, racial, and cultural terms.