The period between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II was a critical time for the development of a religiously pluralistic United States. With more people living in the cities than in the countryside, urban culture began to overshadow agricultural life. Earlier generations of foreign-born Americans – many of whom were Catholics – now had children who were voting and assuming positions of power in the government, economy and education. Disputes over the nature of the scriptures and the place of Christians in the modern world fragmented the Protestant community into ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘modernists’. Other Christians established their own church communities based on religious innovations such as speaking in tongues or sanctification. Additional diversification occurred as Dust Bowl migrants carried their evangelical ways to the west and African Americans left the rural south for the urban north. The economic and social insecurities of the Depression encouraged both intense devotional practices that focused on the miraculous and creative combinations of politics with faith. All leaders, including religious ones, took advantage of new forms of communication, especially radio, to spread their messages. While certain forms of Protestantism would decline in the twenties and thirties, for the most part Christianity in the United States was varied and flourishing.