The Gospel According to Frank Wood - Christopher D. Cantwell

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 cultur
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