Moody & Sankey 1875 in London (Santamaria)

  Moody’s London work (especially the big Moody–Sankey campaign in 1875) drew real-time criticism that it produced unhealthy side-effects, even from people who weren’t denying that some good also occurred.

What “event” are we talking about?

In London (1875) Moody and Ira Sankey ran mass evangelistic meetings in huge venues—most famously, Agricultural Hall, Islington, plus other large halls/theaters. (Wholesome Words)

What “bad consequences” were alleged?

Contemporary observers (including a piece reprinting The Times and circulated widely) complained about several effects:

• Alienating ordinary clergy / bypassing parish ministry. The report notes that, as a rule, Church of England clergy were not attending, and it describes a widening social/ecclesiastical distance between the revival campaign and regular church life. (Trove)

• A short-lived excitement that starts to “wear out.” The same report argues the novelty was fading (“interest… rapidly falling off”) and implies the movement was being kept alive by escalating appeals and repetition—classic critique of revival “machinery.” (Trove)

• Denunciatory tone backfiring. It explicitly warns that the style of denunciation would likely lessen whatever good the meetings might do by turning away “calm and reasoning” hearers. (Trove)

• The “after-care” problem. A later critical assessment (from a strongly confessional Reformed angle) summarizes the complaint bluntly: after Moody left, local pastors had to “pick up the pieces”—dealing with spiritually confused or shallow “converts” left in the wake of mass meetings. (CPRC)

• Institutional dependency. The Times-linked report even notes talk of arranging “means for continuing the movement” after Moody left—essentially a system for keeping the revival going by importing celebrity revivalists—exactly the kind of thing Old-School critics thought displaced ordinary church order. (Trove)

The historian’s bottom line

There was a widely discussed concern that Moody’s London campaign could yield transient enthusiasm, friction with the regular ministry, and confusion that churches would have to sort out afterward—even while supporters insisted that the net effect was evangelistically positive.

The Strict Baptists

Strict (Gospel Standard) Baptists wrote directly and sharply about Moody & Sankey, especially during/just after the 1875 British tour.

The clearest example is J. K. Popham (a Strict Baptist minister, later a major Gospel Standard leader), who published a tract in 1875 titled Moody and Sankey’s Errors versus The Scriptures of Truth. In the tract’s own preface, he says he felt “necessity” lay on him to withstand them when they came to Liverpool. (Gospel Standard)

His core criticism is methodological and doctrinal: he insists the movement must be evaluated not by “results” but by whether its teaching matches Scripture—“judge… more by its doctrines than by… paraded results.” (Gospel Standard)

And this wasn’t a one-off pamphlet that vanished into the fog: the same Gospel Standard material notes that Popham’s first pamphlet ran through multiple editions and was widely received among his circle. (Gospel Standard)

Physical Disorder

Crowd-pressure and occasional disruptions, not as sustained “riot” conditions.

In London (Agricultural Hall, Islington, May 1875) the opening night was over capacity: seating was laid out for about 15,000, yet the correspondent says “well on to seventeen thousand” forced their way in. That kind of overfilling is already a physical hazard (crushing, overheating, panic risk), even if the crowd is morally respectable. (Trove)

The same report records a direct incident of disorder: Moody stopped and ordered the removal of a man who appeared to be “under the influence of intoxicating liquors,” telling the stewards to eject him while the congregation sang. (Trove)

Outside London, the pattern repeats: enormous meetings could become dangerously crowded. A contemporary narrative of the Scottish campaign describes a building “crowded up to the fainting point,” with the meeting “partly spoiled by its numerical success” because ticket-holders still couldn’t get in. (Internet Archive) It also notes that organizers sometimes split men/women meetings specifically because the crowds were so large — a crowd-control move meant to prevent “unseemly disorder.” (Internet Archive)

And there were cases of rowdy audience behavior (notably among students): one account of Oxford describes a meeting reduced to “a hubbub,” with “opprobrious epithets,” until Moody publicly rebuked the crowd into silence. (Log College Press)

So: yes, physical disorder happened—overcrowding, crushing/fainting risk, the occasional drunk or heckling outbreak—while the dominant theme in most reports is that the meetings were usually kept orderly through ticketing, ushers, and blunt intervention when needed.

Rowdy behavior at Moody’s meetings tended to fall into a few recurring types—usually brief flare-ups rather than sustained chaos—and the contemporary reports are pretty consistent about how it happened and how Moody handled it.

1) Student heckling and “hubbub” (Oxford is the clearest case)

In the Oxford accounts, the disorder isn’t a stampede; it’s noise, jeering, and shouted insults—enough that a meeting could devolve into what one report literally calls a “hubbub,” with “opprobrious epithets” flying. The noteworthy part is Moody’s response: he rebukes the crowd directly and forces the meeting back into silence—more like a hard-nosed courtroom reset than a soothing pastoral “let’s all calm down.”

What’s going on sociologically is pretty obvious: university audiences can be performative, and a mass-evangelist in an elite setting is basically a magnet for “let’s test the speaker” energy.

2) The occasional intoxicated disruptor (London example)

A London report describes Moody stopping the flow of the meeting to have a man removed who appeared to be intoxicated, and it notes the stewards ejected him while the congregation sang. That’s not a “riot,” but it is a concrete example of physical disruption and removal by staff.

This kind of thing shows up in big urban gatherings for the boring reason that big crowds contain a few unpredictable people.

3) Overcrowding as “disorder pressure” (noise, surging, fainting risk)

A lot of what gets remembered as “disorder” is really crowd mechanics: entrances jam, people surge, latecomers push, people faint.

• London’s Agricultural Hall report describes seating planned for about 15,000, but with well over 17,000 getting in, overcapacity conditions that can create constant friction even if everyone is “well behaved.”

• Scottish accounts describe crowding “up to the fainting point,” and even say the meeting was “partly spoiled by its numerical success” because ticket-holders couldn’t enter. That’s the physics-of-human-bodies version of disorder.

4) Why these flare-ups mattered to critics

Even when rowdiness was quickly suppressed, critics treated it as a symptom of a deeper problem: mass-meeting evangelism can create a spectator dynamic where attention, emotion, and social pressure become part of the mechanism. That’s why “rowdy behavior” shows up in polemics—not just as a security note, but as evidence that something “theatrical” is happening.

5) The practical control methods used

Across reports you repeatedly see:

• stewards/ushers acting as informal security,

• ticketing/separate meetings to manage crowd size, and

• Moody’s own willingness to interrupt and publicly confront disruption rather than ignore it.

Net: the rowdy moments were real (especially in student settings), but the more common “disorder” was the predictable byproduct of huge crowds—noise, surging, and occasional removals—rather than street-riot violence.