Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America Erin A. Smith Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. By David Paul Nord. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. viii, 212 pp. Index. $35.00. Faith in Reading contributes to the fields of business history, popular religion, and the history of reading in America. Nord argues that the origins of the mass media in the United States were noncommercial and religious. In a compelling, engagingly written account, he narrates how the American Bible Society (ABS), the American Tract Society (ATS), and the American Sunday School Union (ASSU)—founded in 1816, 1825, and 1824, respectively—mobilized modern business practices to get religious texts into the hands of every American. Fueled not by the profit motive, but by missionary zeal, these organizations pioneered a new business enterprise—the modern, not-for-profit corporation. The enterprise was filled with ironies. Although many nineteenth-century evangelicals felt that modern technology and mass media were eroding traditional religious faith, they harnessed these same technologies to win souls for Jesus. Religious publishers were pioneers in the modernization of printing, adopting stereotyped plates, steam-powered presses, and machine-made paper, but they did so in the name of "traditional" literacy—that is, intensive reading of a few, classic texts of the Protestant tradition (Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Baxter's A Call to the Unconverted). Where profit-seeking enterprises concentrated their efforts in densely populated, well-to-do markets, the flow of Bibles, tracts, and religious periodicals was aimed particularly at poor, isolated readers. The early chapters of Faith in Reading are dedicated to faith in the power of the written word and the idea of salvation through scripture alone that made possible the founding of these missionary societies. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 narrate the birth of the nonprofit business organization through examining the economic foundations, institution building, and attempts to systematize distribution of print at the ABS, ATS, and ASSU. Calling tracts the first mass medium in America, Nord details the noteworthy attempts of these societies to achieve universal circulation in the 1820s and 1830s. Critical to their success was the combination of centralized, efficient mass production and locally [End Page 115] organized and controlled distribution. In the 1840s and 1850s, the organizations focused on improving distribution networks. For example, the ABS sent their local auxiliaries standard forms, record-keeping guides and "helps" detailing the best way to distribute according to differential pricing schemes. Frustrated by the tendency of the market to turn their efforts back toward the populated East, the ATS in 1841 built a national distribution system based on colporteurs (itinerant booksellers) whose salaries mitigated pressure to sell rather than give away religious texts. Nord estimates that half the population received a visit from an ATS colporteur in the system's first ten years (98). He also demonstrates how centralized budgeting and accounting, systematic gathering of statistics, formal recruitment and training of colporteurs, standardized record-keeping, and the circulation of monthly magazines pioneered modern administrative practices. Chapters 6 and 7 take up two central questions in history-of-the-book scholarship—how people were supposed to read, and how they actually did. In the pages of their monthly periodical, American Messenger (founded 1843), the ATS represented how religious reading ought to work. The perusal of a single tract could bring about the conversion of a sinner. Conversely, young readers of either "infidel" (heretical) literature or morally poisonous French novels were often driven to suicide, murder, or madness (116). Moreover, religious reading required study, prayer, and sustained reflection, not cursory skimming. What colporteurs encountered in the field was more diverse and complicated than the accounts of reading in the Messenger. Although most households had a Bible and one or two other religious books, many colporteurs were horrified by the material and literary destitution on the frontier. They told stories of books that had been lovingly repaired or rebound after a community of readers had worn them out through repeated borrowing. Some readers traveled many miles to get their hands on a religious text and willingly spent their last cent for books; others...