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

Abstract

David Paul Nord's analysis of the large-scale publishing ventures of early national charitable organizations such as the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society offers valuable insight into the long history of the intimate connection between Protestant evangelicalism and the mass media, and it provides a useful corrective to histories of the book that tend to attribute the sudden growth of print in this period solely to market forces. Nord compellingly shows how voluntary associations, spurred by millennial zeal, pioneered the mass publication of cheap Bibles and tracts and coordinated their distribution to households scattered across remote frontier settlements. Nord observes that these ventures ran counter to market logics even as they provoked the development of techniques we will come to associate with the modern publishing industry. Evangelicals insisted on the mass production and distribution of religious texts despite, or even because of, the lack of demand for such books, and they only cautiously embraced the idea of selling some of their stock (in addition to giving books away) so as to finance the cost of production. Nord delights in the irony of charitable publishers' use of cutting-edge nineteenth-century technology, such as stereotype, steam presses, and machine-made paper, in order to mass-produce and circulate classics of seventeenth-century Protestantism, such as Richard Baxter's A Call to the Unconverted (1658). He traces the idea of mass media to evangelicals' repeated launching of “general supplies” (p. 63), attempts at the universal circulation of identical texts—either a stripped-down Bible, published “without note or comment” (p. 43), or simple stories of Christian conversion that steered clear of doctrinal controversy. In order to achieve this ideal, these voluntary societies employed innovative systems of business administration, such as cost accounting, the keeping of statistics, and the exercise of centralized control over local distribution, well in advance of their adoption by for-profit publishers.