Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America

The Religious Book Club: Print Culture, Consumerism, and the Spiritual Life of American Protestants between the Wars

“Matters of the spirit are common subjects of conversation,” asserted Publishers’ Weekly in 1924. “People may be heard discussing them in crowded elevators, in restaurants, in subway trains or between the acts.”1 The sentiment was widely held. Most cultural critics of the 1920s agreed that Americans were undergoing a “religious renaissance” that profoundly influenced the print culture of the age.2 A new translation of the New Testament was running in newspaper syndication. The front pages were filled with the Scopes “monkey trial” and the banning in Boston of Sinclair Lewis’s novel about a thoroughly corrupt minister, Elmer Gantry. The year 1925 was the much-ballyhooed four-hundredth birthday of the Tyndale Bible, the first printed translation of the New Testament into English, and the Church of England spent much of the decade embroiled in well-publicized controversy over a new Book of Common Prayer. Mass-market magazines like Pictorial Review, Woman’s Home Companion, and Ladies’ Home Journal ran religious texts as their leading serials. The number of religious books published increased dramatically , and religious titles—Henrik Van Loon’s The Story of the Bible (1923), Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ (trans. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 1923), 217 > The Religious Book Club Print Culture, Consumerism, and the Spiritual Life of American Protestants between the Wars  .  and Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925) and The Book Nobody Knows (1926)—held top spots on the nonfiction best-seller lists, even outselling most popular novels.3 In 1927 two trade publishing houses (Harper ’s and Winston & Co.) added religion departments. The same year, amid this surge of activity in the world of religious print culture, the Religious Book Club was founded.4 A mail-order book club modeled after the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Religious Book Club (RBC) was created to take advantage of the burgeoning interest of lay men and women in religious topics and to serve as a reading service for clergy and church workers. The RBC redefined “religious books” in extraordinarily broad terms—those “in which moral and spiritual ideals find effective expression.”5 Possible subjects included philosophy, history, contemporary domestic and international problems, psychology, fiction and poetry, some of which lacked an obvious connection to religion. For example, a number of manuals such as Love and Marriage, Problems of the Family, and Sex and Youth appeared as alternate selections. Occasionally, RBC editorial board members would point out the usefulness of such (secular) guides for ministers counseling young people or troubled congregants, or offer reassurance: “An atmosphere of religious and social idealism surrounds the book.”6 The RBC further muddied the sacred/secular distinction by experimenting with general interest (“wholesome,” “idealistic”) alternate selections.7 Shortly after the founding of the Club in November 1927, Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, the chair of the editorial board, explained its purpose in a Publishers’ Weekly article: “The Religious Book Club is one more indication of the extraordinary interest in religion today. The undertaking was born in the conviction that hosts of men and women all over the United States are hungrily seeking for light on the great problems of religious life and thought. Such people are eager to avail themselves of the opportunity to keep abreast of the best insight and scholarship in the realm of religion. And it is a great mistake to assume that they are found only among clergymen and professional religious workers. The man in the street, who often seems concerned only with the stock market and the World Series, is really immensely interested in religion .”8 The RBC was the brainchild of Samuel McCrea Cavert, editor of Federal Council Bulletin, and his friend, Maxwell Geffen, president of Select Printing Company. Cavert and Geffen were inspired by a letter from a California pastor asking if the Federal Council of Churches (an umbrella organization of twenty-eight Protestant denominations) would 218  .  start a reading service for ministers that would inform them of new developments in religious literature and make available the best such books. The Council declined the proposition, but Cavert and Geffen formed their own company modeled on the Book-of-the-Month Club (founded in 1926), which would “create a wider interest in religious literature ” by each month sending members “the best new book in the religious field as selected by an editorial committee of five outstanding religious leaders of the country.”9 The five original judges were distinguished leaders with...