Daniel Vaca, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 214–216 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.26 Book Review Daniel Vaca, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019) Darren E. Grem University of Mississippi, Oxford, USA In Evangelicals Incorporated, Daniel Vaca casts book-buying and selling as the means by which conservative forms of evangelicalism became “the commercial religion of our time” (234). It is the flip side of Matthew Hedstrom’s The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (2012), which, in contrast, examined liberal Christians who used books to legitimize their intellectual, social, and political ventures. Vaca begins with two of the earliest evangelical book businesses: Revell and Eerdmans. “By the end of the 1880s,” Vaca writes, “many observers had come to see Fleming Revell’s company as the unofficial publication division of [Dwight] Moody’s expansive empire” (40). Revell “offered [a] robust book production infrastructure” and “the same respectability and legitimacy that Moody cultivated among his public” (41). After Revell revealed bookselling as effectively shaping the terms and conditions of who or what counted as “evangelical,” William B. Eerdmans’s outfit staked its claim to Reformed communities. During the Great Depression, Eerdmans built up a roster of writers and a sense of brand distinction that “provided fundamentalists and other ‘distinctive’ Protestants with a common commercial and cultural infrastructure” (76). Other book companies pursued a similar end, seeking to coordinate writers, book distribution platforms, Darren E. Grem 215 marketing and branding, and book-reading around an acceptable and sellable “religion” that Vaca equates with “evangelicalism.” Rejecting scholars “who have often described evangelicals as members of a religious ‘subculture,’” Vaca uses Eerdmans, Zondervan, and other booksellers to detail the twentieth-century evangelical “desire to saturate American society with their ‘distinctive’ brand of Protestantism” (99). Zondervan in particular took the commercial sphere by storm. Founded in 1931 by former Eerdmans associates , Zondervan worked feverishly to achieve “evangelical allegiance in the mass market” (97). This effort, of course, overlapped with the National Association of Evangelicals and Billy Graham’s concomitant crusade to legitimize conservative evangelicalism in post-World War II social and political spheres. Booksellers copped from mainstream trade organizations like the American Booksellers’ Association via the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA), which first held annual meetings in 1950. The CBA reinforced “an understanding of bookselling as a spiritual vocation rather [than] as mere business” while teaching “members to see their businesses as the primary means through which they might achieve their shared cultural priorities,” especially marginalizing non-fundamentalist interpretations of Christianity in the mass market (121). The first half of Vaca’s study is predominantly a top-down business history, detailing the boardroom decisions behind the earliest days of a “distinctive” (a word Vaca leans on) evangelical book industry. Vaca’s most original chapter is a transitional one, where he puts labor—most notably, women’s labor—at the forefront of the rising evangelical consumer market in books. “Before evangelical women worked for Wal-Mart,” he argues, “they worked in evangelical bookstores , where ideas about essential gender differences between men and women shaped the scope and style of evangelical women’s retail employment” (143). Major book publishers like Eerdmans and Zondervan all maintained male-led workforces while tapping women’s labor as essential to deducing what ordinary evangelicals bought and wanted to read. Similarly, an emerging youth market in the 1960s and 1970s granted new markets to evangelical publishers, especially as evangelical mothers equated what their children read with the most pressing social, sexual, and political matters of the day. Still, Vaca is careful to note that booksellers were not quite hard-nosed culture warriors. In suburban markets, especially in shopping malls, Zondervan especially pioneered what Vaca terms “ambient evangelicalism.” Using the insights of anthropologist Matthew Engelke regarding “religious forms that publics accept without question, but not without interest,” Vaca argues that bookstores by the 1970s and 1980s had established “a presence in people’s world without seeking deliberate or conscious commitment ,” thereby allowing “even more people to develop a general awareness of and sympathy” for the evangelicalism sold...