Atlantic Monthly picks 100 most influential Americans
Posted November 24, 2006
The Atlantic Monthly has created a list of the 100 most influential Americans of all time. Religious leaders on the list include:
8. Martin Luther King
52. Joseph Smith
74. Brigham Young
86. Mary Baker Eddy
90. Jonathan Edwards
91. Lyman Beecher
Placing Dr. King on the list is a no-brainer. How could it not include the Nobel peace prize winner, "I have a dream" author, Montgomery bus boycott leader and martyr in the fight for civil and human rights.
Likewise, Joseph Smith had to be there. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the largest new religion to appear in the United States. And it dominates not only the state of Utah, but much of Idaho as well. Its influence is substantial across the west. (The Mormon Church is the second largest religious group in Oregon and Washington state for example.) Brigham Young isn't a shocking pick either. He helped the church survive after a mob killed Smith and led it to Salt Lake City.
But what about the others? Was Mary Baker Eddy (founder of the Christian Science movement) really the most influential female religious leader in U.S. history? A Seventh-day Adventist could make a strong case that Ellen G. White was more influential. The Adventist Church's teachings on health (including the benefits of vegetarianism) were 100 years ahead of their time and today, the church is renowned for its schools and hospitals. Worldwide, the church counts 14.8 million members.
Pentecostals might argue that Aimee Semple McPherson was more influential than Eddy. McPherson was a pioneer radio preacher and arguably the most famous female evangelist in U.S. history. She founded a denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, that now has millions of followers around the world.
Beecher and Edwards could also face stiff competiton. Was Edwards ("Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") really more influential than Billy Graham? Did Beecher change the American landscape more than Francis Asbury -- the circuit-riding father of American Methodism?
Are there any religious leaders that should've been included that didn't make the cut?
To see the complete list, go to: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200612/influentials
Archived Comments
I don't know the whole list, but I hope they included Gloria Gaither, Joni Eariksen-Tada, Hannah Whittal-Smith (authoress of the super-influential "The Christian's Secret To A Happy Life"), Elisabeth Eliot (widow of martyred Ecuador missionary Jim Eliot, prolific authoress, radio, and conference speaker), Amy Grant, and Madelyn Murray O'Hare. I throw O'Hare in there even though she was an atheist, because she had a huge impact on American religious life. I include Amy Grant because I think she almost incarnates what was both good and evil about the rise of contemporary Christian "pop" music.
I just looked at the list. Very few religious figures there, and none of the ones I thought of. I wonder whether our habit of treating politicians as automatically "influential" is right, while we ignore all the religious writers and activists who are flying around under the MSM radar. I'd say Chuck Colson has been more substantially important than Mary Baker Eddy.
Well, to nitpick if it can be excused for a moment...think you made a typo there, wasn't McPherson's church named something like the International Church of the Four Square Gospel? Not sure, myself. Anyway, to your question about Edwards and Billy Graham: I do not think Edwards would have made the cut in that list had it not been for Billy Graham's ancestor in spirit and practice, George Whitefield. I assume that the only reason he wasn't included in the list himself was the fact he never settled permanently on this continent; even so, he was the founder of the campmeeting-type crusade in America, he literally preached himself to death here because he chose to ignore his symptoms of congestive heart failure and he is buried in Massachusetts, and he, along with the indirect labor of John and Charles Wesley, influenced a larger segment of the American population in its colonial days than did Edwards and Beecher put together. Not only can his work be considered ancestral to that of Billy Graham, but to most others named on that list including both Joseph Smith, Martin Luther King, and the Pentecostals as well.
I suspect this list is biased to some degree by the fact that the Atlantic is based in Boston, the home of the "Mother Church" of Christian science. While Mary Baker Eddy's movement never gained a huge following nationwide, it was very influential in the New England intellectual circles that originally produced the Atlantic.
I'm a little bit surprised by the inclusion of Lyman Beecher; I know that the Beecher family was the royalty of northern abolitionists, but I would think Lyman's son Henry Ward Beecher, or his daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, might be considered more influential, though perhaps as political rabblerousers rather than religious leaders. Again, I suspect this shows the old line New England thought at the Atlantic, as does the inclusion of Jonathan Edwards, who I would put behind Cotton Mather in influence in early New England circles, though I suppose he is tainted by his support of those witch trials.
I would second the nomination for Stone and Campbell, whose movement is extremely influential in the south and midwest, but virtually unknown in New England, and of course, of Billy Graham.
When dealing with, as they used to say, "popular preachers," it's hard to decide who makes the cut and who doesn't. We forget that even before television, there were prachers (Jonathan Edwards, for example) who were well known beyond their own congregations. Harry Emerson Fosdick, whose sermons from New York's Riverside Church were carried nationwide in the 1920s on NBC radio, is largely responsible for popularizing the liberal approach to theology which characterizes all of the modern mainstream denominations; I suspect there are a lot more copies of the Riverside Sermons lying around mainstream churches than anything by Eddy, Edwards, any of the Beechers, or certainly Billy Graham.
And many credit Phillips Brooks, the extraordinarily popular rector of Boston's Trinity Church (which is still for my money the most beautiful church in the world) with reviving the Episcopal Church in the late 1800s and bringing it to the prominence it developed among upper class northeasterners of that era.
Interestingly, there are apparently no Catholic leaders on the list. We tend to forget how popular Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's television programs were in the '50s nationwide; they introduced Catholocism to an audience which had rarely been exposed to it. As an aside, the actor Martin Sheen took that name as his screen name based on the first name of Martin Luther King and the last name of Bishop Sheen. Some have suggested that Sheen's positive portrayal of his faith helped lay the groundwork for JKF to successfully run for president.
To me, though, the largest single omission is of Jerry Falwell. I am no fan of Falwell, but he was influential in bringing conservative christians into the conservative political fold, and we still see the repercussions of this. Ditto the other members of that movement like Pat Robertson. If you're only going to list 100 people in total, you have to make choices, but I don't see how they could keep Falwell off the list.
As always with lists, the issue is not who to include, but whom to leave out.
On this list:
I agree that Aimee Semple McPherson was more important than Eddy, but I think she's been marginalized in her own denomination -- as women have taken a back seat as Pentecostalism embraces conservative evangelicalism.
On Edwards, he is often considered America's greatest theologian. A brilliant thinker he was not just a preacher, but a philosopher of note. Billy Graham had the benefit of TV and media, which Edwards did not have.
I might add another -- Alexander Campbell. Campbell and Barton Stone are the founding fathers of a movement that includes the Disciples of Christ, Chuch of Christ, and the Christian Church (Churches of Christ). Of course, as a Disciples pastor, I'm sort of biased.