The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (review)

Candy Gunther Brown, an assistant professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University, in The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880, investigates how book cultures work and specifically how the evangelical print culture of the nineteenth century sought to transform American society. Her book covers the period from the establishment of the first evangelical printing house, the Methodist Book Concern in 1789, to the publication of Lew Wallace's evangelical best-seller, Ben-Hur, in 1880. In her interpretation of the evangelical experience, she argues that conversion is the beginning, and not the end, of that experience and that the evangelical impulse that motivated religious groups to enter the commercial marketplace did not become the secularizing experience that recent scholars have suggested.

Evangelicals saw themselves as set apart from Roman Catholics by their reliance upon the Bible as sole religious authority and by their belief in the priesthood of all believers. These views united evangelicals into a Church Universal even though they were separated by denominations and doctrine. More important than their differences was the evangelical conviction that they were a community of pilgrims moving through the world together toward eternal life.

The growth of print culture in the nineteenth century was made possible by the spread of literacy, technological innovations such as the steam press, and improvements in transportation and the postal system. By 1850 there were 400 publishing firms in the United States, and virtually every major firm had a denominational affiliate. Evangelicals entered the world of publishing because they recognized the significance of print culture, and they hoped, by joining it, to sanctify that culture. Brown defines this process in terms of presence and purity: evangelicals were determined to establish a presence in the publishing world, but equally determined to maintain their purity in it. She refers to this effort as "a balancing act," as she describes the efforts of evangelical editors, most lacking editorial or commercial experience, to reach a market of consumers without being contaminated by the marketplace.

Perhaps the most interesting sections of this book are those which deal with two issues still critical to publishing: editorial control and copyright. Most evangelical editors were ministers who saw their publications as extensions of their pulpits. Many readers, however, regarded themselves as participants in the discourse, empowered by the belief in the priesthood of believers to challenge editorial control. These tensions were largely missing from Roman Catholic publications, which numbered sixty by 1850, because of a tradition of hierarchical control of doctrine. Prior to the 1840's, no journal exercised copyright, and there was no international standard until 1891. Evangelicals believed that religious writing belonged to the whole community of believers rather than to individual authors, and editors freely appropriated texts, altered, condensed, and added to them as they chose, rarely paying a royalty or even recognizing the author. Brown cites the case of the English evangelical Edmund Bunny, who happened upon the writing of the Jesuit, Robert Parsons, in 1585, and finding it "too good to be lost," proceeded to "cut the Popery out," and reissued the work in his own name (p.79). His example set the tone all the way to the end of the nineteenth century when some evangelicals were still arguing against copyright. In the end, evangelicals transformed neither the world nor the print culture, though they left their mark on both. As Brown concludes in her well researched study, the evangelical sense of identity as a band of pilgrims set apart ultimately removed them from the world they hoped to transform.