The Gospel According to Frank Wood - North American Religions by Christopher D Cantwell Paperback

Book Synopsis

An eye-opening history of how white evangelicals came to see America's past as sacred and themselves as its rightful stewards

Though unknown to scholars of religion today, Frank Wood (1864-1945) was a prominent Protestant figure in his day. He taught what was said to be the largest Bible class in Chicago and helped found the city's first neighborhood historical society. In this compelling microhistory, Christopher D. Cantwell draws upon these features of Wood's life to uncover the historic rise and historical origins of the white evangelical nostalgia that haunts the United States today. In fact, Wood's religious life and historical interests directly reveal how evangelicalism itself is something of an invented tradition--a religious movement devised by layfolk like Frank Wood to defend their white, Protestant privilege.

Beginning with Wood's move to Chicago, the book situates the origins of the modern evangelical movement in the mass migration of rural, white Protestants from the country to the city at the turn of the twentieth century. The sense of dislocation that accompanied this move made recreating the rhythms of rural social life a major feature of the Bible classes that Wood and millions of other white Protestants joined. The sense of cultural displacement that came with city living, meanwhile, placed an aggrieved sense of nativism and a commitment to Protestant nationalism at the center this community's religious faith and political vision. Out of this culturally meaningful, but racially charged sense of nostalgia would emerge what Wood and others like him called "the old-time religion," a wooden yet pliable phrase that spoke to the religious commitments and the social anxieties of an emerging community that identified itself as "evangelical." The historical importance that everyday white evangelicals attributed to their religious history became a stand-in for the white, Christian nationalism that animated their social vision.

Through this surprising and compelling social biography, The Gospel According to Frank Wood offers a bottom-up examination of American evangelicalism, grounding the movement's history in the religious beliefs, cultural memories, and social anxieties of white American Protestants.

Review Quotes

"This is an extraordinary book. Cantwell masterfully turns the forgotten Frank L. Wood into a mirror of American culture itself--revealing the conflicts and currents that still shape modern life."--Matthew Avery Sutton, author of Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity

"This brilliantly illuminating book is more than a biography of a white Chicago bible teacher who helped to invent the tradition of Evangelicalism; it is an exploration of how histories and traditions are created and then come to be seen as stable fixtures in otherwise unstable and ever-shifting worlds."--Paul Harvey, author of Christianity and Race in the American South: A History

About the Author

Christopher D. Cantwell is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Loyola University Chicago.