Sunday, William Ashley, Jr. (Billy Sunday)

(1862-1935) evangelist

Billy Sunday was one of the foremost evangelical ministers of his era. Like many clergymen of the time, his sermons were build upon a combination of devotion to Christ and dedication to hard work and social responsibility. His ability to overcome adversity led him to believe, and then preach, that moral fortitude was the principle prerequisite for success.

Billy’s life was one of hardship and challenge. Just three weeks after his birth, his army father, Private William Ashley Sunday, died of pneumonia. His mother, Mary Jane Corey, kept the Sunday family together for the next nine years. Then in 1872, abject poverty forced Mary Jane to send her two sons, Billy and Edward, to the Civil War Soldier’s Orphans Home in Glenwood, Iowa. The Soldier’s Orphans Home was the first but not the last orphanage for Billy. For almost a decade, he and his brother bounced from orphanage to orphanage.

Sunday was an extremely talented athlete. In 1880, two months before his 18th birthday, he took the first step toward making baseball a career. He was recruited by the Marshalltown Fire Brigade, a voluntary firemen’s organization and team. After a short stint with the Brigade, Billy was drafted by the Chicago White Stockings, and his career as a professional baseball player began. His early career was rather inauspicious; but while he was never a starter in Chicago, he managed to stay with the White Stockings for five years. When he was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1887, Sunday’s career took off, and he was

William Ashley Sunday, Jr. (Library of Congress)

Elevated to the starting lineup. As his skills grew, so did his salary and status.

Despite Sunday’s athletic success and good salary, he was convinced that something was missing from his life. In 1886 he began to see what that might be. It was then that he converted to the Christian faith. A short time later, during a visit to the Pacific Grove Mission, he realized his passion for the gospel and devotion to teaching. Within a few months, Sunday began teaching at the Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church and offering programs at the Chicago Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). His abilities as a public speaker made him one of the most popular in the area. At the end of the 1886 baseball season, Billy met Helen Amelia Thompson at a church social. After a short courtship, the couple was married. Helen changed Billy’s life. She reinforced his devotion to religion and helped to persuade him to continue this education. It was likely Helen who influenced him to enroll in classes at Evanston Academy on the campus of Northwestern University. While taking classes, Sunday coached local students on the fundamentals of baseball.

It was not long after the couple married that Sunday began to question his future as a baseball player. Even though both Philadelphia and Cincinnati had offered him more money than he had made in either Pittsburgh or Chicago, he decided to end his career as a professional baseball player and devote himself to spreading the word of the Lord. He accepted a job with the YMCA paying a mere $1,000 a year, significantly less that the $3,500 that he would have earned playing baseball during the seven-month season. Leaving baseball was a crucial step in Billy’s personal, professional, and spiritual development. Sunday apprenticed himself to Reverend J. Wilburn Chapman, a renowned evangelist, in 1884. After working with Chapman for two years, Sunday ventured out on his own. From January 1896 through November 1907, he preached in approximately 70 different communities.

One of Sunday’s greatest talents was his ability to reach men and women from different social and economic backgrounds. He was close to many of America’s elite. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., became one of his close friends. His friendships with wealthy philanthropists, however, did not make him unapproachable to those on the lower rungs of the ladder. Due in part to his rural upbringing, Sunday retained the ability to speak in a language that farmers could understand. This ease and comfort did not, however, translate to all classes. He often found it difficult to empathize with industrial workers and city dwellers.

Sunday’s sermons went beyond scripture. At times they were overtly political. As a devout member of the Republican Party, Sunday was often criticized for attacking organized labor. He increasingly focused on redeeming American cities from what he believed to be moral sickness. He especially hated what he saw as an urban propensity toward drink. After 1907, he preached his famous booze sermon, “Get on the Water Wagon,” at least once in every city that he visited. Until his death, Sunday remained convinced that the moral weakness of the urban poor, not the economic system, was the source of pain and discomfort in American cities.

Sunday’s life was highlighted by success in athletics and the ministry, but his life was far from charmed. He was viewed by many as a hypocrite and a money monger. His relationship with his family suffered from prolonged absences. And he was often associated with the extreme views of men such as William Jennings Bryan. In the later years of Sunday’s life, his message and style began to lose its appeal. In the early decades of the 20th century, religious liberalism and the Social Gospel arose to challenge conservative Christian churches. With the onset of movies and radio, Sunday soon found his popularity waning, but until his death on November 6, 1935, he remained one of the most influential evangelists on the scene.

Further reading: Lyle W. Dorsett, Billy Sunday and the Redemp-tion of Urban America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1991).

—Steve Freund