William Ashley Sunday was an American professional baseball player, Young Men’s Christian Association worker. He became the most celebrated and influential American evangelist during the first two decades of the 20th century.
Background
Billy Sunday was born on November 19, 1862, in Story County, Iowa, United States; the youngest of three sons of Mary Jane Corey and William Sunday. His boyhood was characterized by poverty and instability resulting from William’s death during the Civil War and Mary Jane’s subsequent unhappy second marriage.
The family’s plight eventually became so difficult that Billy and an older brother spent two years in state-supported orphanages established in Glenwood and Davenport for children whose fathers were victims of the war. After leaving the orphanages in the mid-1870s, Sunday resided briefly with his grandfather in Story County and then moved on to the nearby county seat of Nevada, where he lived and worked throughout his mid and late teens.
Education
When Billy Sunday was ten years old, his impoverished mother sent him and an older brother to the Soldiers' Orphans Home in Glenwood, Iowa, and later to the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa. At the orphanage, Sunday gained orderly habits, a decent primary education, and the realization that he was a good athlete.
Career
In the late 1870s or early 1880s, Sunday moved to Marshalltown, where his athletic prowess in fire company competitions and on the baseball diamond brought him to the attention of Marshalltown native Adrian “Cap” Anson, a successful major league baseball player and manager of the Chicago White Stockings. Anson invited Billy to try out with his team, and the youthful Iowan became a second-stringer with the club. For the next eight years, he had a respectable, though not spectacular, career in the National League, first with Chicago, then Pittsburgh, and briefly with Philadelphia.
While William was in Chicago two important events occurred in Sunday’s life: he married Helen “Nell” Thompson, who afforded him a much-needed sense of security and stability and whose energy, attention to detail, administrative skills, and stabilizing influence were to be instrumental in his later success, and he experienced a religious conversion that ultimately turned him toward evangelism. In 1891 he left professional baseball and became an assistant secretary with the Chicago YMCA. Two years later he accepted a position as an advance man for Presbyterian evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman, working with him until late 1895 when Chapman temporarily abandoned evangelism for the parish ministry. In early 1896 Sunday conducted his first solo revival in Garner, Iowa. Soon, invitations to preach elsewhere began to arrive, and he was launched on his evangelistic career.
After a decade of preaching primarily in the towns and small cities of Iowa and nearby midwestern states, Sunday began moving into larger urban areas across the country. Between 1910 and 1920, he preached in most of the nation’s major metropolitan centers, reaching the zenith of his success with a ten-week revival in New York City in the spring and summer of 1917. Sunday’s popularity waned in the 1920s and 1930s. His advancing age, the moral and financial problems of his three sons, the illness and death of his daughter, and changes in popular values and attitudes enervated his ministry. Although he was never without invitations to preach, increasingly his ministry was relegated to the smaller cities and towns of the South and Midwest, and only rarely was he invited to a major metropolitan center. Yet he remained as active as his health would permit, preaching his last sermon in Mishawaka, Indiana, only a few days before his death in Chicago in early November 1935.
Over the course of his career, Billy Sunday is said to have preached to between 80 and 100 million people, with roughly 1 million of those “hitting the sawdust trail,” accepting his version of the Gospel of rededicating themselves to an understanding of Christianity to which they were already committed. At the peak of his success, he was one of the best known and most admired men in America. By recasting conventional concepts and familiar mores in the mold of modernity, his ministry bridged the gap between the rural and small-town nation of the 19th century and the urban, industrial one of the 20th. In doing so, he helped many of his contemporaries negotiate the challenges inherent in a changing world and left one of the most colorful and controversial legacies in the history of American evangilist.
Achievements
William Ashley Sunday rests on his reputation as an immensely popular revivalist preacher. His fiery platform-style differed dramatically from the dignified manner of his predecessors.
He had stirred the religious enthusiasm of thousands of Americans and had buttressed the conservative religious and social attitudes of many fundamentalists.
Sunday was a conservative evangelical who accepted fundamentalist doctrines. He affirmed and preached the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection of Christ, a literal devil and hell, and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
Views
Sunday’s unconventionality was a matter of style and not substance. His theology was simple and conformed largely to a few basic tenets of fundamentalism. He took for granted the social and economic orthodoxy of his native region, and he equated the evangelical moral code of rural and small-town mid and late-19th-century Iowa with Chris- tian conduct. His manner of delivering the Gospel was, however, unorthodox. He was a gifted showman at a time when options for entertainment were limited, and his flamboyant showmanship was unquestionably an integral part of his appeal. So too was his connection to professional baseball, espousal of business methods in religion, advocacy of various moral reforms, and rise from poverty and obscurity to fame and wealth, which seemingly validated the American myth of success.
Fundamentalist in outlook, Sunday viewed Sabbath-breaking and alcohol as the gravest social problems besetting modern society. Among his other achievements, he was significant in bringing about prohibition.
Quotations:
"Helen was a Presbyterian, so I am a Presbyterian. Had she been a Catholic, I would have been a Catholic-because I was hot on the trail of Nell."
“Better die an old maid, sister, than marry the wrong man.”
“The law tells me how crooked I am. Grace comes along and straightens me out.”
“You can't measure manhood with a tape line around his biceps.”
“The reason you don't like the Bible, you old sinner, is because it knows all about you.”
“The backslider likes the preaching that wouldn't hit the side of a house, while the real disciple is delighted when the truth brings him to his knees.”
“One reason sin flourishes is that it is treated like a cream puff instead of a rattlesnake.”
“Listen, I'm against sin. I'll kick it as long as I've got a foot, I'll fight it as long as I've got a fist, I've butt it as long as I've got a head, and I'll bite it as long as I've got a tooth. And when I'm old, fistless, footless, and toothless, I'll gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition.”
“The Bible will always be full of things you cannot understand, as long as you will not live according to those you can understand.”
“Give your face to God, and He will put his shine on it.”
“The only way to keep a broken vessel full is to keep it always under the tap.”
“Temptation is the devil looking through the keyhole. Yielding is opening the door and inviting him in.”
“Being a kind, emperor, or president is mighty small potatoes compared to being a mother. Commanding an army is little more than sweeping a street compared with training a boy or girl. The mother of Moses did more for the world than all the kinds that Egypt ever had. Oh, you wait until you reach the mountains of eternity, then read the mothers' names in God's Hall of Fame.”
“Whenever a day comes when I can stand and preach God's Word without an agony of anxiety lest the people will not accept Christ; whenever a day comes when I can see men and women coming down the aisles without joy in my heart, I'll quit preaching.”
“Yank some of the groans out of your prayers and shove in some shouts.”
“O Devil, why do you hit us when we are down? Old boy, I know that you have no time for me, and I guess that you have about learned that I have no time for you. I will never apologize for anything I have ever done against you. If I have ever said anything that has does not hurt you, tell me about it, and I'll take it out of my sermon.”
“They tell me that I rub the fur the wrong way. I don't; let the cat turn around.”
“Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.”
“There are two hundred and fifty-six names given in the Bible for the Lord Jesus Christ, and I suppose this was because He was infinitely beyond all that any one name could express.”
“More men fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent.”
Membership
Billy Sunday was a member of the Young Men's Christian Association in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Personality
Sunday was as controversial as he was popular. Critics, pointing to the flamboyant Presbyterian revivalist’s wealth, showmanship, and lack of sophistication, considered him a reactionary or charlatan. Admirers, noting his courage, businesslike methods, and advocacy of reforms such as prohibition, regarded him as God’s unconventional messenger to age in dire need of the Gospel.
Connections
On September 5, 1888, William married Helen Amelia "Nell" Thompson. They had four children, George Marquis Sunday, Paul Thompson Sunday, Helen Edith Sunday, William Ashley Sunday Jr.
Father:
William Sunday
Mother:
Mary Jane Corey
Wife:
Helen Amelia "Nell" Thompson
Son:
George Marquis Sunday
Son:
Paul Thompson Sunday
Daughter:
Helen Edith Sunday
Daughter:
William Ashley Sunday Jr.
References
The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa
Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs.
