The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism: The Pulpit versus the Press, 1833–1923

Abstract

Ronald R. Rodgers outlines the engagement between American Protestant clergy and secular culture in a series of debates about the function of the press in society, from the advent of the penny press to the conclusion of the Progressive Era. At the heart is the issue of how the press served the public by educating readers, shaping public opinion, and cultivating a public morality consistent with Protestant values. At odds with these functions were the partisanship of political newspapers and the demands of advertising revenue. Clergy opposed these forces because they bent the papers away from serving the greater social good. The clergy whom Rodgers sampled expected newspapers to serve a prophetic role, calling the public's attention to social ills and offering remedies. Rodgers concentrates heavily on the convergence of the Social Gospel and Progressive Era between the 1880s and 1920s as an era in which the press was meeting some but not all of the liberal Protestants' expectations. Thus, three of the book's six chapters focus on the engagement between the Social Gospel and journalism. The first chapter outlines the opinions of the press held by six luminaries of the Social Gospel. Chapter 5 offers a vignette into the week-long editorship of Charles Sheldon, who applied the Christian principles of newspaper management at the Topeka Capital in 1900 that he had opined in his novel In His Steps (1896). The final chapter looks more closely at the Social Gospel leaders' scrutiny of the press and specifically at how their notions of journalistic mission did or did not square with journalistic practice. Historians of the Social Gospel may not find much new in these chapters, but they will appeal to historians of journalism.