ABSTRACT
Introduction to Chapter 4: Although often in the shadow of histories that focus on the Jazz Age with it flappers, gangsters, speakeasies, and other popular aspects of the “roaring twenties,” religion in the 1920s was exciting in its own way. Its most visible figures – Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, Daddy Grace, and Father Divine – were as aggressive, flamboyant, and controversial as secular stars. As historian Barry Hankins has recently written: “Religious folk were full participants in this bombastic spirit, even as they condemned it.” But it was also during this period that modernists and fundamentalists had a showdown in the most unlikely of places, in Dayton, Tennessee, featuring two of the nation’s most popular figures, three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and perhaps the best-known attorney of his day, Clarence Darrow. And finally, as will be discussed, the “roaring twenties,” which posed one challenge to religion, was followed by the Great Depression, which posed yet another.
