Worship Wars, Gospel Hymns, and Cultural Engagement in American Evangelicalism, 1890–1940

This article argues that gospel hymnody was integral to the construction of modern evangelicalism. Through an analysis of the debate over worship music in three denominations, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Christian Reformed Church, and the Reformed Church in America, from 1890–1940, I reveal how worship music was essential to the negotiation between churchly tradition and practical faith, between institutional authority and popular choice that characterized the twentieth-century “liberal/conservative” divide. While seemingly innocuous, debates over the legitimacy of gospel hymns in congregational worship were a significant aspect of the increasing theological, social, and cultural divisions within denominations as well as between evangelicals more broadly. Gospel hymnody became representative of a newly respectable, nonsectarian, and populist evangelicalism that stressed individualized salvation and personal choice, often putting it at odds with doctrinal orthodoxy and church tradition. These songs fostered an imagined community of conservative evangelicals, one whose formation rested on personal choice and whose authority revolved around a network of nondenominational organizations rather than an institutional body. At the same time, denominational debates about gospel hymnody reveal the fluid nature of the conservative/liberal binary and the complicated relationship between evangelicalism and modernism generally. While characterizations of “liberal” and “conservative” tend to emphasize biblical interpretation, the inclusion of worship music and style complicates this narrow focus. As is evident through the case studies, denominations typically categorized as theologically liberal or conservative also incorporated both traditional and modern elements of worship.

Everyday Musical Ethnicity and Roma (Gypsies) in Hungarian Pentecostalism

This chapter explores the musical negotiation of the ethnic inequalities between Roma and Magyar that characterize secular life in Hungary among Pentecostal believers from both groups. The ethos of “spiritual brotherhood” within Hungarian Pentecostalism was the theological ground for these negotiations. During the communist period the believers mostly sang gospel hymns and a Christian variant of popular music that was meaningful to local Roma. Both ethnic communities modified their musical performance styles to participate in common “brotherhood,” though the secular inequalities between the ethnicities meant that these changes were not equally made (or equally easily demanded) by both groups. Christian contemporary music, renewed Western missionization, and new inequalities came with the postcommunist era.