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James Duane Bolin, Avenues of Faith: Shaping the Urban Religious Culture of Richmond, Virginia, 1900–1929, Journal of American History, Volume 89, Issue 3, December 2002, Pages 1087–1088, https://doi.org/10.2307/3092435
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Samuel C. Shepherd Jr.'s Avenues of Faith contributes significantly to the historiography of southern religion and the urban South. The real value of this fine book, however, comes from the author's thoughtful analysis of how those two areas intersect in Richmond, Virginia, in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Centering on Southern Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, the Disciples of Christ, and Lutherans, Shepherd argues that white mainline Protestant groups created a distinctively urban religious culture, at least in Richmond, a city boasting dramatic monuments attesting to its unique past but also “restless” residents such as the journalist/ historian/churchman Douglas Southall Freeman, whose support for various reforms characterized Richmond's progressive spirit after the turn of the century. This church-led progressivism became increasingly evident as the city's “cadres of Confederate veterans shrank” and “the ranks of industrial workers, urban boosters, and reformers swelled.”
Church leaders led the way against vice under its various guises of saloons, gambling, prostitution, dancing, and motion pictures. Richmond's Protestant churches went to “work in social service,” attempting to bring the Gospel to bear on modern society. In the metaphor of Hugh David Cathcart Maclachlan, the pastor of Richmond's Seventh Street Christian Church, churches demonstrated “a new language, much like the disciples after Pentecost.” Thus, Richmond's religious leaders played significant roles in the city's juvenile court movement—Maclachlan served as president of the Juvenile Protective Society—and in efforts for prison reform.
