Historians long took fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals at face value when they claimed to be champions of “the old-time religion.” In fact, the dramatic tension in leading scholarly accounts of modern American Protestantism often emanated from the epic clash between these putative conservatives, intent on preserving biblical authority and essential doctrines, and their modernizing liberal counterparts.But in recent years, this consensus has come under fire, as a rising chorus of scholars has insisted that evangelicals were, from the very beginning, modernizers in their own right. Books by Gloege, Dochuk, and others have sought to redefine evangelicalism, not as a stable tradition marked by an unwavering commitment to an unchanging deposit of faith, but as a profoundly anti-institutional orientation that prized disruptive innovation and despised all would-be regulators, federal and denominational alike. In these scholars’ telling “the old-time religion” was always, first and foremost, a brand.1Vaca’s Evangelicals Incorporated represents a brilliant addition to this emerging literature. Drawing from previously untapped archival sources and interviews with a number of leading figures in the publishing industry, Vaca explores how “books have served as engines of transdenominational evangelical consciousness” (12). In the modern United States, that consciousness expanded as publishers sought more expansive markets for their books. Although companies such as Eerdmans and Zondervan arose in the early twentieth century to serve relatively small Dutch Reformed communities, they always had broader ambitions. Hence, as Vaca shows, “[Eerdmans’] branding strategies…prioritized capacious concepts, which allowed consumers and supporters to associate the firm with whatever strain of Protestantism they valued most” (104). In the early going, the company styled its carefully curated list as “distinctive,” thus making inroads into a wider world of fundamentalist readers. Its leadership, however, always longed to connect with a mass market. By the 1940s, it increasingly seemed that one way was to refashion itself as an “evangelical” publisher. In latching onto the term—which evoked an aspirationally broad-based, though decidedly white, coalition of conservative Protestants—companies like Eerdmans and Zondervan were not so much promoting an evangelicalism that already existed out in the world. Rather, Vaca contends, they were teaming up with fledgling organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals in efforts to bring just such an evangelical public into being.This project gained momentum with the emergence of the Christian Booksellers Association, founded in 1950, and with the subsequent proliferation of evangelical bookstores across suburban landscapes. Vaca persuasively argues that the establishment of such bookstores as subcultural spaces situated within mass-market shopping venues expedited the diffusion of evangelical tropes and forms into the American mainstream. The rise of this “ambient evangelicalism” did not go unnoticed in the nation’s executive suites. By the 1980s, major New York publishing houses were seeking to acquire smaller evangelical publishers, many of which saw God’s hand at work in the deal. As Vaca relates, “the evangelical publishing industry put faith in corporate finance as the best way to reap ever more abundant metaphysical and financial harvests” (163). Insisting that evangelical publishers’ motivations are not reducible to either the material or the spiritual, Vaca casts these firms instead as purveyors of “financial faith” (182). Their extraordinary success can be measured in a variety of ways, but most of all in the fact that, by the early-twenty-first century, evangelicalism was not merely “an identity category and a media market” (227). It had become, as Vaca declares in closing, “the commercial religion of our time” (234).Evangelicals Incorporated is an exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship. Vaca’s approach reflects not only his dexterity with historical and ethnographic methodologies but also his ability to weave together theoretical insights drawn from a variety of different fields, including religious studies, American history, whiteness studies, the history of the book, the history of capitalism, and more. What emerges as a result is a provocative and compelling reinterpretation of evangelicalism in the modern United States with which scholars and general readers alike will be wrestling for a long time to come.
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Jul 11, 2024
Alma Cohen + 2
Open Access