Protestant revivalists and evangelists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America navigated between a declining Victorian culture on the one hand and an emerging modern consumerism on the other. Historians have typically understood these itinerants as unsophisticated defenders of a rural, populist traditionalism who railed against urban decadence and the forces undermining the Christian culture that had made America great and good. Josh McMullen instead finds astute preachers worried about the transformation underway yet eager to accommodate the ‘saw dust trail’ to muscular Christianity, the message of therapeutic wellbeing, modern media and mass marketing, and the cult of celebrity that animated consumer culture. Rather than simply nostalgic for a dying world, crusaders such as Billy Sunday, ‘Gipsy’ Smith, and Aimee Semple-McPherson ‘helped in the construction of a new consumer culture’ by packing the old vocabulary of sin, redemption and morality in the new idiom of entertainment and merchandising. If the medium is the message, in Marshall McLuhan's famous epigram, then the implications of McMullen's thesis run deep and far. Despite the revivalists' intentions, the old-time religion may not have survived their concessions to cultural modernity. Their strategy helps to explain why they often made common cause with such liberals as Lyman Abbott and John D. Rockefeller. McMullan steps out of the Fundamentalist-Modernist interpretive framework to make big-tent revivalists unfamiliar once again to students of American Protestantism who thought that they knew all that they needed to know about them. While remaining uncertain about consumerism's excesses, these savvy promoters helped to create the odd mix of old-time religion and material abundance that permeates the American gospel. As promised, McMullen's book ‘helps us understand the continued appeal of both the therapeutic and salvific worldviews to many Americans as well as the ambivalence that attends this combination’. Pietism and publicity made for a powerful cultural force of enduring significance in American life.