Billy Sunday

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Billy Sunday

Billy Sunday, real name William Ashley Sunday (born November 19, 1862 in Ames , Iowa , † November 6, 1935 ), was an American athlete and Presbyterian mass preacher. He became the most famous and influential American evangelist in the 1880s, and this continued into the first two decades of the 20th century.

Live and act

Billy Sunday was born near Ames , Iowa . His father, William Sunday, was a soldier in the American Civil War . He died of pneumonia five weeks after Billy Sunday was born. When Sunday was ten years old, his mother sent him to an orphanage for soldiers' children in Glenwood , Iowa. There he got to know orderly relationships and during school his extraordinary athletic skills emerged, which brought him to the Chicago White Socks in 1883 , a little later to the Pittsburgh Pirates , in 1890 to the Philadelphia Athletics and the national baseball team. Sundays speed was his greatest asset. In 1885 there was a spectacular race between Sunday and Arlie Latham , the fastest runner in the American athletics rankings at the time. Sunday won this hundred meter run.

Sundays charismatic personality and demeanor made him popular with fans, which he quickly learned to use. In 1886 he turned around while listening to ancient gospel songs and began attending Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church. He soon worked for the Chicago Pacific Garden Mission, and in 1891 he joined the YMCA . He was initially influenced by his former housemother from the orphanage, who gave him the task of preaching the “words of the Lord”. The evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody was also an important role model . From this he developed evangelistic events from 1896, a religious mass spectacle for which the convertible audience always paid admission. The first was in rural Garner , Iowa. With the help of new forms of communication, loudspeakers and amplifiers, he reached 100 million people over the course of his 30 years of service as an itinerant preacher at over 300 revival meetings, first mainly in rural areas and later in the larger cities of the USA. At the end of his events, he called for repentance, and there are said to have been 300,000 conversions. Homer A. Rodeheaver accompanied him as choirmaster, and his wife Helen Amelia Thompson, whom he married in 1888, helped organize and improve his vocabulary and phrasing. In 1903, Sunday was ordained a Presbyterian minister.

His sermons were rather vulgar and suitable for the masses. He even rented a circus tent for his traveling sermons, later he had large tabernacles set up long before his arrival and the congregations build larger preacher's halls which, to his regret, were later converted into cinemas. He displayed his wealth early on with the words: "For every soul converted I got two dollars". He was one of the richest Americans in his day, but his lifestyle remained unremarkable. Sinclair Lewis and Mark Twain caricatured him as a simonist blender . The novel Elmer Gantry should also be mentioned. Still, that didn't detract from Sunday's success. He was neither a theologian nor an intellectual, but he had a thorough knowledge of the Bible and was well-read to answer the religious and social questions of his day. He advocated America's entry into World War I and preached alcohol-free. He saw alcohol as the source of all evil and campaigned vehemently for prohibition and against child labor. Sundays popularity waned after World War I when radio and movie theaters emerged that he couldn't do much with.

The Cologne composer Fred Fisher , who emigrated to the USA, quotes Sunday in his 1922 jazz song Chicago (That Toddling Town) .

literature

  • Ackva, F et al. a. (Ed.): History of Pietism, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ISBN 978-3-525-55347-3 , 1st edition 1995
  • Ellis, William T .: Billy Sunday, The Man and His Message With his own words which have won thousands for Christ LT Mayers, 1914
  • Bruns, Roger: Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism. New York: WW Norton, ISBN 978-0-252-07075-4 , 1992

Web links

Commons : Billy Sunday  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Britannica: Billy Sunday - American Evangelist (English)
  2. ↑ Christianity Today: Billy Sunday - Salty evangelist (English)
personal data
SURNAME Sunday, Billy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sunday, William Ashley (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American athlete and Presbyterian mass preacher
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH near Ames , Iowa, USA
DATE OF DEATH November 6, 1935