Many have felt that faith seemed distant from their real lives, made for another kind of person. Billy Sunday was born poor, spent time in an orphanage, and first became famous as an athlete before becoming one of the most listened to preachers in American history.
William Ashley Sunday was born in 1862 near Ames, Iowa. His father, a bricklayer who had enlisted as a Civil War soldier, died of pneumonia in a military camp just weeks after his son’s birth, and the family lived through years of poverty, during which Billy passed through the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home, first in Glenwood and then in Davenport.
A gifted runner and baseball player, he played in the American professional league between 1883 and 1890. In 1886, he connected with the Pacific Garden Mission, an evangelical mission in Chicago, after hearing hymns that reminded him of his mother. That experience marked his conversion to evangelical Christianity.
He left sports, worked at the Chicago YMCA, and from 1896 began preaching in small towns across the Midwest. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1903, he gained national fame with campaigns in large cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.
His sermons were theatrical: he ran and gestured across the stage, mimicked baseball plays, and smashed furniture to illustrate the struggle against sin. He preached forcefully against the consumption of alcohol and helped mobilize popular support for Prohibition, passed in 1919.
His preaching also had darker sides. During the First World War, he used hostile language against German immigrants, and in the 1920s he accepted donations from members of the Ku Klux Klan and referred to striking miners in dehumanizing terms. Contemporaries accused him of profiting too much from revival offerings.
In his final years, he saw his audiences shrink with the arrival of radio and film, and he faced personal tragedies, including the death of a daughter and the suicide of one of his sons. He died in 1935, in Chicago, a week after preaching his last sermon.
Despite his failures, Sunday left behind a model of mass evangelism that would influence generations of itinerant preachers. His emphasis on a personal decision for Christ, marked by the public act of “hitting the sawdust trail,” still echoes today in the conversion appeals of evangelistic crusades around the world.