American Decades
Straton, John Roach 1874-1929
MINISTER
Major Fundamentalists.
John Roach Straton was born into a Baptist preacher's home and early in his life dedicated himself to the ministry. He attended Mercer University and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary but did not earn any degrees. After serving a series of churches in the South, in 1918 he was called to Calvary Baptist Church in New York City, where he became a leading public figure in city life and a major force in the Fundamentalist struggles of the 1920s.
Public Figure.
Straton quickly became a public figure in New York with his attacks on vice and corruption, which he charged made the city a modern Babylon suitable for God's wrath. In 1920 he singled out the Broadway play Aphrodite as a target, charging that it marked a new low in morality and a "degrading bondage to Mammon." He was disgusted, he said, by this "nightmare of nude men and women slobbering over each other,...
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1920's Religion
