Consumed: Reuben A. Torrey and the Construction of Corporate Fundamentalism

This dissertation studies the intersection of Protestant fundamentalism and modern consumer capitalism during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It examines the life of Reuben A. Torrey, an important fundamentalist leader, and his association with the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago (MBI), a central fundamentalist institution. Torrey reformulated evangelical religious experience and practice to better accommodate the challenges of modern unbelief, which reinvigorated evangelicalism for a new generation. However Torrey's conviction of God's regular intervention, both for miraculous provision in 'faith work' and physical health in 'faith healing,' contained the potential to disrupt existing middle-class institutions.In 1889, Torrey's ongoing success in evangelizing the working class and his involvement in the evangelical precursor to the Social Gospel led to his leadership at MBI. Chicago's business elite helped found MBI in part as a response to rising worker unrest. Here, Torrey's theology was further synchronized with the work relations of industrial capitalism. However, a controversy involving the controversial faith healer John Alexander Dowie, and Torrey's close resemblance to working-class Pentecostalism, alienated him from administrative authority at MBI. Torrey was succeeded by the dispensational Bible teacher James M. Gray and the president of Quaker Oats, Henry Parsons Crowell. Gray's dispensational theology minimized God's present miraculous action and better accommodated middle-class norms. Crowell transformed MBI into a multifaceted educational and religious media conglomerate that promoted this new theology to a middle-class audience using the tools of consumer capitalism. In 1909 Lyman Stewart, president of both Union Oil and the strikingly similar Bible Institute of Los Angeles headed a project to reformulate Protestant orthodoxy, stripped of denominational distinctions. Stewart, with assistance from Crowell and Torrey, distributed this belief in a quarterly pamphlet titled The Fundamentals that was given free of charge to every Protestant religious worker in America. MBI used its founder, the famed revivalist Dwight L. Moody as a trademark to promote this form of belief. By reinventing the religious individual, making religion another form of consumption, and subverting denominational authority, corporate fundamentalism both naturalized consumer capitalism and created a new form of conservative Protestantism.