Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America

Preface

Preface Charles L. Cohen The history of print culture in the United States has garnered growing scholarly attention over the past several decades, its coming of age signaled by the American Antiquarian Society’s ongoing multivolume A History of the Book in America.1 During the same span, religious history— legitimized intellectually by Sidney Ahlstrom’s prize-winning A Religious History of the American People2 and boosted professionally by religion’s increasing prominence in public policy and discourse—has moved from a relatively narrow focus on denominational and institutional history to wide-ranging analyses of how spirituality permeates and affects social life. Given the interest in interdisciplinarity that now characterizes much historical research, it was perhaps inevitable that laborers in these two vineyards should start cultivating each other’s vines. The collaboration thus far has produced some superior harvests, but for whatever reason , the vintages have clustered in the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries.3 Rectifying this chronological imbalance provides reason enough for the present volume, the first to survey the history of religious print culture in postbellum and modern America. American religious history from the colonial period onward is, as Paul Boyer and I assert in part 1, incomprehensible without reference to the centrality of print materials, and the progress of American print culture has owed much to the religious texts that have provided much of its intellectual substance and wares. Given the historical accidents of European settlement patterns, I maintain, a particularly Reformed Protestant bibliocentrism laid the foundation for a religious print culture that ix was anchored in the text of scripture, although it ranged, as Boyer details, across a variety of genres and formats. By the mid-nineteenth century, an informed observer might reasonably have assumed that Americans’ robust religious print culture reflected—indeed, depended upon—Protestantism’s continuing dominance and coherence. The future , however, disproved any such hypothesis. After the Civil War, an influx of non-Protestant populations and the rise of scientific naturalism reshaped the nation’s religious landscape, and though the Bible’s popularity never waned, Protestants feuded about its capacity for guiding the faithful through modern times. Yet even as Protestant unity fractured, the use of printed media to communicate religious messages ballooned. Although this collection provides no unifying explanation for that relationship , it does suggest that the increasing diversity of American spirituality has gone hand in hand with an ever-expanding supply of literary materials encouraging, explaining, and debating religion. The essays that follow reveal much, albeit not all, of that diversity. They include pieces dedicated to Jewish, Mormon, and New Age print culture, but none devoted solely to Catholicism (though see Matthew Hedstrom’s discussion of Thomas Merton in his piece on psychology and mysticism in the 1940s).4 This lacuna reflects the prevailing underrepresentation of Catholicism within American religious history as a whole; notwithstanding the flourishing but relatively small group of historians working on the Church and the reception accorded recent work by the likes of Jay Dolan, John McGreevy, and Leslie Tentler,5 scholars in general treat Catholicism like a wallflower while crowning Protestantism the belle of the ball. Frustratingly, not a single proposal among the dozens submitted for the conference from which this book has emerged dealt with the Roman Church, a sin of omission compounded by the editors’ sin of (non-)commission in failing to solicit a possible addition while the book was in production. American Catholic print culture still awaits its full due. Happily, that situation is improving. At the 2006 conference sponsored by the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America , Robert Orsi, the preeminent scholar of popular Catholicism in the United States, delivered a keynote address that illuminated the devotional world of Catholic youth while challenging critical assumptions on which the study of religion in print has rested.6 Dispelling notions that the Church’s traditional suspicion of the word made text minimized written language as a vehicle of faith, Orsi discovered a juvenile culture x Preface of print so populated by books, magazines, cards, certificates, scapulars, and guides that he organized them into no fewer than twenty-five different categories. Even more striking are the theoretical implications he has drawn from this evidentiary array. Following the Jesuit scholar Walter Ong, Orsi characterizes Catholicism as a religion of incarnation, a faith in which the supernatural interpenetrates the natural and material objects can embody sacred presence. This perspective puts the...