Sam Jones

Sam Jones, a drunken ex-lawyer and ex-schoolteacher who got converted at the age of 24, went on to become the greatest Methodist evangelist since the Wesleys, and one of the greatest gospel preachers of all time.

Jones was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1868. However, he began to drink heavily and almost destroyed his career and his marriage. When his father pled with Sam on his deathbed to become a Christian, Jones quit drinking and was converted. He set out to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ in 1872. No other American evangelist ever used his methods or his language. Troubadour to plain folks, he came out of the South with a vernacular that startled audiences everywhere and shocked them into salvation. He was called "the South's greatest spokesman for God."

No man ever yawned under his preaching. He had a devastating wit and humor, a pet hate in liquor, and an undismayed love for God and man. He blasted the hypocrite mercilessly; he made the sinner see himself as God sees him. He often turned his homiletic guns on church folk and even on preachers, and they were better Christians for it.

She was among the first to take her preaching to the radio, bringing innovative ideas to the airwaves. In the first half of this century she was a celebrity of the first order, listened to by movie stars and common folk. She was a striking stage presence who used humor and song to make her message heard. In the first of these two segments, we hear from the movie actor Anthony Quinn who played saxophone at her rallies as a boy in East Los Angeles. He tells us he learned a lot of his stage presence from her - using pauses and staring at the audience to get attention. We learn how scandal rocked her life. McPherson vanished at Venice Beach and turned up a month later in a Mexican border town with a strange story that few believed. There were rumors she had been seen in a love nest with a married man in California. This shadow over her Godliness was compounded during the stock market crash of 1929 by money woes and family arguments over money. She died in 1944 at age 54, long after her heyday ended.

In the 1900s, he sold what was then a unique brand of muscular, testosterone laden Christianity.

Today, ministers in some of the country's largest churches preach in shirtsleeves and talk about God in terms of football or golf. Billy Sunday was one of the first to do this. He was a professional baseball player turned tent preacher who became the richest and most influential preacher of his time.

The physicality of Sunday's sermons was an outgrowth of the preacher's stint as a pro baseball player. There, he not only wowed the crowd with his considerable athletic skills, but he won the public over with his "squeaky clean Christian image. And the transition to preaching was almost seamless. He often employed football and baseball metaphors (sometimes in the same sentence) in his sermons.

The prohibition movement gave Sunday a political platform. "Sunday's rise to national prominence really corresponds to the rise of the prohibition movement. In arguing for prohibition, Sunday was particularly animated and sometimes vitriolic. The "muscularity" and movement of his sermons was meant to counter the view by some that Christians were docile and fragile.

Catholic priest who first took to the airwaves in 1926, broadcasting weekly sermons over the radio. By the early 1930s his broadcasts shifted from theology to economics and politics.

Just as the rest of the nation was obsessed by economic and political matters during and after the Depression, so too was Father Coughlin. Coughlin had a well-developed theory of what he termed "social justice," predicated on monetary reforms. He began as a Roosevelt supporter, coining a famous expression, that the nation's choice was between "Roosevelt or ruin." Later in the 1930s he turned against FDR and became one of the president's harshest critics. His program of "social justice" was a very radical challenge to capitalism and to many of the political institutions of his day.

Father Coughlin's influence on Depression-era America was enormous. Millions of Americans listened to his weekly radio broadcast. At the height of his popularity, one-third of the nation was tuned into his weekly broadcasts. In the early 1930s, Coughlin was, arguably, one of the most influential men in America.

Robert Reynolds Jones, best known as Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., was born October 30, 1883, the eleventh of twelve  children, in Shipperville, Alabama. Converted at age 11, he was a Sunday school superintendent at 12 and ordained to the ministry by a Methodist church at 15. “Dr. Bob” was a Christ-exalting, sin-condemning preacher who first began preaching in the cotton fields, in country churches and in brush arbors.

Later he held huge campaigns in American cities large and small and preached around the world.

Billy Sunday called him the greatest evangelist of all time, saying, “He has the wit of Sam Jones, the homely philosophy of George Stuart, the eloquence of Sam Small and the spiritual fervency of Dwight L. Moody.” He saw crowds up to 10,000 in his meetings, with many thousands finding Christ in one single campaign. But Dr. Jones was more than an evangelist.  As a pioneer in the field of Christian education, he founded Bob Jones University in 1927.

The United House of Prayer for All People has been seen as one of the most extreme charismatic sects in the country. The United House of Prayer for All People was a one-man dominated organization and Bishop Grace was the undisputed head and direct source of all major decisions. Bishop Grace had several churches in both the South and the North, House of Prayer churches scattered along the East Coast from New York to Florida. His movement seemed to be initiated by himself and his sect is not a schism from another church in the traditional sense. Its devotees are drawn from all other sects and from the general population. The majority of his followers came from economically depressed black ghettos.

To the poor his sermons held out the possibility of self improvement, upward social mobility, and respectability. The sect's organizational structure created offices for about 25 percent of its followers, thus giving them a feeling of importance and identity. In Daddy Grace members perceived a charismatic figure who offered security. "Sweet Daddy" Grace, healer and miracle worker, and to many even God Incarnate, the second Christ.

African-American religious leader, founder of the Peace Mission movement, b. probably near Savannah, Ga. and named George Baker. After preaching in the South, he moved to Harlem (1915) in New York City, became one of the neighborhood's biggest landlords, acquired wealth through other businesses, including restaurants and grocery stores, and began styling himself Major M. J. Divine, later Father Divine.

Although once dismissed as a cult leader, he built the largest religious movement in northern ghettos during the Great Depression. His role as an early civil-rights activist. He led anti-lynching campaigns, instituted economic cooperatives, and organized political action against racial discrimination. He has lately come to be more appreciated. The movement spread beyond New York City to other places in the United States and abroad, sometimes after the group sent whites to purchase property in segregated areas. During the 1940s, his health and influence declined, but his movement symbolized the progressive spirit in the black church and helped define the church's active role in the civil-rights movement.