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Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2008

John Lardas Modern
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Extract

Statistics point to a “surge” in evangelical publications as well as in the practices of evangelical piety in the first half of the nineteenth century. In order to explain these parallel trends, however, mere measurement falls short in adequately addressing the strange power evangelical media institutions assumed during this period. In 1825, for example, the American Tract Society announced its agenda of “systematic organization,” a directive that applied equally, and simultaneously, to words on the page, to readers on the ground, and to the airy abstractions of the nation-state.

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Extended Article
Information
Church History , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 801 - 876
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2008

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References

2 Noll, Mark A., America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 162–170CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Address of the Executive Committee of the American Tract Society to the Christian Public (New York: D. Fanshaw, 1825), 12.

4 For an account of the resonating effect of media practices among contemporary evangelicals, see Connolly, William E., “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,” Political Theory 33:6 (December 2005): 869–886CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 An Abstract of the American Bible Society, Containing an Account of Its Principles and Operations (New York: Daniel Fanshaw, 1830), 38.

6 A Brief Analysis of the System of the American Bible Society, Containing a Full Account of its Principles and Operations (New York: Daniel Fanshaw, 1830), 29; Address of the Executive Committee, 5. See also Brief Analysis of the System of the American Bible Society, 126–127; Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the American Tract Society (New York: American Tract Society, 1850), 62.

7 Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Senellart, Michel, trans. Bell, Graham (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 12Google Scholar. For Foucault, the inessential nature of the human was laid bare in the process of discourse analysis.

8 [Cook, R. S.], Home Evangelization: A View of the Wants and Prospects of Our Country, Based on the Facts and Relations of Colportage (New York: American Tract Society, 1849), 111Google Scholar.

9 See Foucault, Michel, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., eds. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow, Paul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–226Google Scholar. The American Bible Society, for example, premised its project of “moral purification” on the syllogism that “society [was] composed of families, and families of individuals. Improve the moral character of individuals, and families will be virtuous and happy; and the divine declaration will be illustrated and confirmed, that ‘righteousness exalteth a nation’ ”: Strickland, W. P., History of the American Bible Society from its Organization to the Present Time (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850), xxviGoogle Scholar.

10 Cited in Nord, David Paul, “Religious Reading and Readers in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 15:2 (Summer 1995): 247CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Address of the Executive Committee, 12.

12 Gallaudet, T. H., The History of Jonah, for Children and Youth (New York: American Tract Society, 1833), 10, 4Google Scholar.

13 The Bible Agent's Manual (New York: American Bible Society, 1856), 3. The American Tract Society is now based in Garland, Texas. Its motto: “Always Telling Someone.”

14 Baird, Robert, The Christian Retrospect and Register; A Summary of the Scientific, Moral, and Religious Progress of the First Half of the XIXth Century (New York: Dodd, 1851), 237Google Scholar.

15 Instructions of the Executive Committee of the American Tract Society to Colporteurs and Agents (New York: American Tract Society, 1848), 99–100.

16 Cited in Nord, “Religious Reading,” 247.

17 [Cook, R. S.], Home Evangelization: A View of the Wants and Prospects of Our Country, Based on the Facts and Relations of Colportage (New York: American Tract Society, 1849), 65–66Google Scholar.

18 Channing, William Ellery, “Remarks on Associations,” in The Works of William Ellery Channing (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1889), 139–140Google Scholar. For other critical accounts of the excesses of voluntary associations, see Wayland, Francis, The Limitations of Human Responsibility (New York: D. Appleton, 1838)Google Scholar; and An Appeal to the Christian Public, on the Evil and Impolicy of the Church Engaging in Merchandise; and Setting Forth the Wrong Done to Booksellers and the Extravagance, Inutility, and Evil-working, of Charity Publication Societies (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1849).

19 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 11.

20 Dunn, William, Catherine Warden; or, the Pious Scholar (New York: The American Tract Society, ca. 1841), 4Google Scholar.

21 Secularism, here, does not refer to a process of secularization or a decreasing influence of the religious. On the contrary, I use the analytical category of secularism to encompass a field of tropes, styles, and sensibilities that not only generated a particular distinction between the religious and the secular but also made this distinction a matter of common sense. Protestant Christianity, colonialism, and capitalism each played a significant role in the emergence of secularism in the nineteenth century. Most notably, each has been integral in the process of defining religion as a matter of interior and, more often than not, highly rationalized belief. The discursive formation of secularism is also constituted by new forms of economic exchange, speculation, production, and consumption; new forms of governance and statecraft; new technologies and technics of media; new conceptions of personhood and human rights; and finally, new ideals of epistemic virtue. There is, of course, a Foucauldian lineage to the relatively recent and ongoing recognition of secularism as a disciplinary structure that is, first and foremost, invested in its own evolutionary progression and naturalization. For incisive works on secularism, see Connolly, William E., Why I am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)Google Scholar, Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, and Anidjar, Gil, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33:1 (Autumn 2006): 52–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On secularism in the American grain, see Fessenden, Tracy, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; as well as my essay, “Ghosts of Sing Sing, or the Metaphysics of Secularism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75:3 (September 2007): 615–650.

22 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 6; Wilson, Jon E., “Subjects and Agents in the History of Imperialism and Resistance,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, eds. Scott, David and Hirschkind, Charles (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 180Google Scholar.

23 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 65–67.

24 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale, eds. Parker, Hershel and Hayford, Harrison (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 83Google Scholar.

25 Melville, Herman, Correspondence (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), 65–66Google Scholar.

26 Melville, Herman, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life during a Four Months' Residence in the Valley of the Marquesas (New York: Signet Classics, 1964), 38, 224, 42, 144–145, 222Google Scholar. For an excellent discussion of the trope of cannibalism in Typee, see Sanborn, Geoffrey, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 75–118Google Scholar. For a defense of missionary activity in the Marquesas, see Page, Harlan, Memoir of Thomas H. Patoo, A Native of the Marquesas Islands (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1840)Google Scholar.

27 , H. C., New-York Evangelist (9 April 1846): 60Google Scholar.

28 [Bourne, Wm. Oland], “Typee: The Traducers of Missions,” Christian Parlor Magazine 3 (July 1846): 74Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., 74; Bourne, William Oland, “The Divine Mission,” in Poems of Hope and Action (New York: George P. Putnam, 1850), 99Google Scholar. See also “The Doom of the Children,” Southern Literary Messenger 10 (April 1844): 201–206.

30 Bourne, William Oland, “Sonnets to Franklin's Printing Press,” Southern Literary Messenger 10 (October 1844): 583–584Google Scholar.

31 [Bourne], “Typee,” 75.

32 Compare with the opening stanza of “The Atheist World-Builder” in which Bourne rests “on a gentle knoll, / Pondering o'er Thought's secret things, / Turning inward to my soul, / Followed I its wanderings”: The American Whig Review 4 (October 1846): 345.

33 “Then a shoreless, radiant sea,” wrote Bourne in “The Atheist World-Builder,” “stretched beyond Thought's farthest verge, / From whose deep Infinity / Worlds on worlds I saw emerge.” Bourne's assumption that language could be used to secure the unification of self was poignantly on display in 1865 when he established the “Left-hand Writing” award for Union soldiers who had lost their right arms in battle. As editor of The Soldier's Friend, Bourne issued prize money to disabled veterans who displayed the “best specimen[s] of left-hand penmanship”: Such monetary incentive, it was presumed, would allow soldiers to achieve spiritual integrity despite their physical loss.

34 “The American Christian Citizen,” Christian Parlor Magazine 2 (November 1845): 195.

35 [Bourne], “Typee,” 75.

36 Bourne, William Oland, “British Oppression,” Southern Literary Messenger 9 (August 1843): 506–507Google Scholar. A republic was commonly held to be “a form of government in which the people, or at the very least a large portion of them, are acknowledgedly the source of power, and have the direct appointment of the officers of the legislature and executive”: cited in “Principles of Civil Government,” in Chambers's Information for the People: A Popular EncyclopÆdia, vol. 1, 15th ed. (Philadelphia: J. & J. L. Gihon, 1851), 329.

37 Bourne, Wm. Oland, “Science and Priestcraft,” Christian Parlor Book Devoted to Science, Literature, and Religion 9 (July 1852): 80Google Scholar.

38 “The Steam-Engine,” in Chambers's Information for the People: A Popular EncyclopÆdia, vol. 2, 15th ed. (Philadelphia: J. & J. L. Gihon, 1851), 85.

39 “Improved Gold Separator,” Scientific American II:8 (18 February 1860): 113. See also Bourne's “Specifications of Letters Patent No. 30,290 (9 October 1860).

40 This was in keeping with evangelical hermeneutics, Enlightenment projects of language reform and political order, and the poetics of American Romanticism. For a sermon on the possibility for language to fulfill “its designed office as a sign of realities, and as a medium, or currency, for thought,” see Huntington', F. D.s defense of the “Businessman's Revival,” Permanent Realities of Religion and the Present Religious Interest (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1858)Google Scholar. On the reception of Enlightenment projects of linguistic and political reform in America, see Gustafson, Thomas, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, esp. 137–192. On Emerson's extension of Protestant hermeneutics in a Romantic key, see Gura, Philip F., The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 75–105Google Scholar.

41 On the imagery of kinesis and motion within the genre of American Romanticism, see Albanese, Catherine L., Corresponding Motion: Transcendental Religion and the New America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

42 On the shift from republican to a corporate form of liberalism within the work of Emerson, see Newfield's, ChristopherThe Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

43 In a review of Typee and Melville's second novel, Omoo, Horace Greeley wrote of Melville being “positively diseased in moral tone, and will be fairly condemned as dangerous reading for those of immature intellects and unsettled principles.” Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, avid reader of Marx and Engels, a Fourierist, and a political radical, was no evangelical. But adopting the language of infection, Greeley's concerns resonated with those espoused by Bourne as well as others in the evangelical press. Novels written by the likes of Melville were considered dangerous, not because of their worldliness, but because they resulted in an “ill-regulated and over-excited imagination.” They were not consistent with a properly constituted public because they were not consistent with themselves. “Unsanctified literature,” linked with criminality, unreason, and alcoholism, threatened the “mind” of the individual and the “morals” of the “population of the land.” Greeley's 1847 review is cited in Parker, Hershel, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, 1819–1851 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 531Google Scholar. See also Apswood, Annie, “Confessions of a Novel Reader,” The Christian Parlor Book 6 (October 1849): 181–185Google Scholar; “The Irreligious Element of General Literature,” Christian Parlor Book 6 (September 1849): 154–155; Backus, M. M., “Novel Writers and Publishers,” Christian Parlor Magazine 1 (May 1844): 19–23Google Scholar.

44 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 48. Although Foucault associates this “game of language” with nineteenth-century liberalism, the imagery of circulation was rampant in a variety of contemporary persuasions—the formations of capitalism and democracy, the emergent concepts of culture and political economy, and the practices of phrenology and spiritualism. Each posited a closed loop between physics and metaphysics, immanent doings and transcendent meanings. For a discussion of this metaphysical attitude within American history, see Gilmore, Michael T., Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 See, for example, Mintz, Steven, Moralists & Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Abzug, Robert H., Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Griffin, Clifford S., Their Brothers' Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

46 The distribution of Bibles, tracts, Almanacs, and classic texts of Puritan devotion was not unprecedented in antebellum America. The ATS, ABS, and the American Sunday-School Union (1824) modeled themselves on previous publishing cooperatives such as the New England Tract Society (1814), the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1803), and the colonial project of the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians and Others in North-America (1787).

47 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 66–67; [Cook], Home Evangelization, 8.

48 Baird, Christian Retrospect and Register, 188.

49 It is precisely this affective role that must be accounted for in order to gain leverage on the power of evangelical publishing. Media practices of evangelicals sought to generate habits: “the state[s] of feeling and action formed by the repetition of the same train of thought and the same course of conduct”: Clarke, T. S., “The Power of Habit,” Christian Parlor Magazine 1 (July 1844): 86 [86–88]Google Scholar. Consequently, it is imperative that one read the practices of mid-century evangelicals on their own terms as well as against the grain of their own assumptions about the world, assumptions that were (and are) very much operative within the works of their chroniclers. See, for example, Brown, Candy Gunther, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar. In her exhaustive history of evangelical media, Brown writes that “The Word became incarnate in American culture by the 1850s as publishers demonstrated its relevance to diverse cultural settings, ranging from the refined Victorian parlor to the rough-hewn frontier farm” (6). This statement is by no means incorrect, but it should be noted that Brown, like the evangelicals she studies, naturalizes the “relevance” of the Word while leaving unquestioned the aggressive strategies that invested the Word with an air of verisimilitude across a range of contexts. David Paul Nord, by contrast, has devoted much attention to the strategies of persuasion pursued by evangelical publishers. See Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). In this book and in a series of substantial articles, Nord has done much to illuminate the motivation and technics of tract and Bible societies in antebellum America. Nord's general approach to the history of evangelical media, however, avoids genealogical excavation of the categories evangelicals used, publicly, to understand themselves and others. David Morgan, in slight contrast to Nord, argues that in order “not to be swept away by [the] propaganda” of evangelical publishers, scholars need to pay closer attention to the reception of tracts, particularly when “matters religious met with resistance or even rejection”: see his “Studying Religion and Popular Culture: Prospects, Presuppositions, Procedures,” in Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture, ed. Gordon Lynch (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 30–31. I take up the subjects of reception and agency in relation to evangelical publishers later in this piece.

50 Abstract of the American Bible Society, 26, 29. The position of the ABS was theologically consistent with American copyright law in which was established a Republican notion that the proprietary value of text was disseminated at publication (Wheaton v. Peters). As McGill, Meredith L. has written, “where as the argument from common law sought to identify the text with inalienable private property, the argument from statutory law sought to establish print as a form of public property that could only be rendered private at the whim, and for the benefit of, the state”: see American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 48, 63–64Google Scholar.

51 Address of the Executive Committee, 5.

52 Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of the American Tract Society (New York: American Tract Society, 1854), 22.

53 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 74–75.

54 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 63.

55 Melville, Typee, 247, 250.

56 Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 55Google Scholar. Timothy Mitchell, utilizing Martin Heidegger's concept of enframing, refers to such commitments as the most common of performances within Anglo-European modernity. Attuned to the fact that the colonizing impulse within European history owed as much to the logocentric discourses of Romanticism as to that which came before them, Mitchell argues that the “metaphysics of modernity” may be glimpsed when the difference between representation and reality is staged as a matter of surface and depth. “The effect of this staging,” he writes, “is to generate a new world of multiple significations and simulation. But its more profound effect is to generate another realm that appears to precede and stand unaffected by these proliferating signs; reality itself”: “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 26. See also Mitchell's, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

57 Lawrence, Edward A., The Mission of the Church; or, Systematic Beneficence (New York: American Tract Society, 1850), 141–142, 145Google Scholar.

58 Baird, Robert, Religion in the United States of America, or an Account of the Origin, Progress, Relations to the State, and Present Condition of the Evangelical Churches in the United States with Notices of the Unevangelical Denominations (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1844), 273Google Scholar.

59 Bourne, “Science and Priestcraft,” 80, 80–81, 84.

60 Ibid., 83; Ewbank, Thomas, A Descriptive and Historical Account of Hydraulic and Other Machines for raising Water, Ancient and Modern; with Observations on Various Subjects Connected with the Mechanic Arts: Including the Progressive Development of the Steam Engine (New York: Bangs, Platt, and Co., 1851), 387Google Scholar.

61 Ewbank, A Descriptive and Historical Account, 2–4, 382. Ewbank would make visible the workings of power, guiding the reader into “the secret recesses in their temples!—places where their chemical processes were matured, their automaton figures and other mechanical apparatus conceived and fabricated, and where experiments were made before the miracles were consummated in public” (viii).

62 See, for example, “Railroads,” New-York Evangelist 23 (October 1852): 178.

63 Maltby's “Connection between Domestic Missions and the Political Prospects of our Country” (1825) is quoted in Harris, Michael H., “‘Spiritual Cakes upon the Waters’: The Church as a Disseminator of the Printed Word on the Ohio Valley Frontier to 1850,” in Getting the Books Out: Papers of the Chicago Conference on the Book in 19th-Century America, ed. Hackenberg, Michale R. (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 1987), 110Google Scholar.

64 Rev. Maltby, J., “Secular Progress and Christianity,” Christian Parlor Book 7 (January 1851): 278–279Google Scholar. All citations are from this article unless otherwise noted.

65 Within evangelical discourse, the notion of the “secular” was deployed with intense ambivalence. On one hand, the secular world was a haven of infidelity and “terrible moral convulsions.” In its inaugural address, for example, the executive committee of the American Tract Society condemned what it called “modern liberality” associated with “Voltaire and his infidel associates.” This view of the world “discovers no difference between the precious and the vile, and which consists in a virtual indifference to all religious opinions”: Address of the Executive Committee, 77–78. The secular, here, connoted relativism, obfuscation, anarchy—all that exceeds or, worse, threatened to exceed the promise of order. “Secular pursuits,” then, were not simply worldly but undisciplined, un-American, an affront to order itself. But on the other hand, secularity also connoted progressive overcoming, the mark of epistemic clarity and political transparency in potentia. See [Cook], Home Evangelization, 117. See also Profane Swearing (New York: American Tract Society, 1825).

66 See also Strickland, History of the American Bible Society, xxvi–xxvii.

67 Anidjar, “Secularism,” 60.

68 Ibid., 59.

69 Howe, Daniel Walker, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North during the Second Party System,” Journal of American History 77:4 (March 1991): 1216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Martin, Terrence, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 5Google Scholar; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 286.

71 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 49; Anidjar, “Secularism,” 59–61.

72 Noll, America's God, 9, 443.

73 Ibid., 94.

74 On the Common Sense dimensions of American theology, in general, see Ahlstrom, Sydney E., “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” Church History 24:3 (September 1955): 261CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Moore, George, Man and His Motives (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1848), 211Google Scholar. See, especially, the English Baptist physician's chapter on “Self-Management.”

76 Or as Moore wrote, like steering a ship. “Like the mariner, whose hope and safety depend on his steering rightly, if we have faith, we can no more neglect to look outward, onward, and upward, than he can fail to regard the chart, the compass, and the stars, while breasts the tempest, or takes advantage of the wind that wafts him homeward”: Man and His Motives, 211.

77 Noll, America's God, 91, 90, 56, 439, 175. Addressing Habermas's discussion of the “bourgeois public sphere,” Noll writes that this model “fits the American situation well” but not perfectly given the overarching emphasis on the rights of the individual (188–189).

78 Ibid., 188.

79 This assumption is shared by a great number of evangelical historians, including Hatch, Nathan O. in The Democratization of Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. See also Mead, Sidney E., “From Coercion to Persuasion: Another Look at the Rise of Religious Liberty and the Emergence of Denominationalism,” Church History 24:4 (Dec. 1956): 317–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Noll is responding, in part, to Johnson's, Paul E.A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978)Google Scholar.

81 Noll rejects any suggestion that mid-century evangelicalism was a form of false consciousness, an ideology foisted on a dim-witted and desperate populace. For the original contours of this debate, see Griffin, Clifford S., “Religious Benevolence as Social Control, 1815–1860,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44:3 (December 1957): 423–444CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Banner, Lois W., “Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation,” The Journal of American History 60 (June 1973): 23–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Noll, America's God, 189.

83 As Paul S. Boyer noted, well before the publication of Noll's magisterial history, “the difficulty” with the social control thesis is “not that it is wrong but that it obscures important nuances and necessary qualifications”: Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 58.

84 “In the religious life it is by faith we begin, by faith we go on; by faith we stand, by faith we grow; by faith we run, by faith we fight; by faith we endure, by faith we live; by faith we die, by faith we enter into glory; and without genuine faith we are not, we cannot be Christians”: “The Power of Faith,” New-York Evangelist 18 (23 September 1847): 150.

85 “We are conscious of sensation, thought, and volition,” wrote Dugald Stewart, “operations which imply the existence of something which feels, thinks, and wills. Every man too is impressed with an irresistible conviction that all these sensations, thoughts, and volitions, belong to one and the same being; to that being which he calls himself; a being, which he is led, by the constitution of his nature, to consider as something distinct from his body, and as not liable to be impaired by the loss or mutilation of any of his organs”: Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1855), 3.

86 As John Corrigan notes in his review of America's God, Noll pays little attention to practices beyond those of intellection: The Journal of American History 91:2 (September 2004): 595–596.

87 Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 9. “The secularization of American Protestantism,” argues Fessenden, was “inseparable from its expansion” (59). This “effect of Protestant consensus” is still very much a reality “for American religious historiography” (17)—a matter of looking at religion as a way of orienting oneself to the world, of making meaning, of overcoming or, at the very least, living within human limitations rather than thinking about the ways in which the world orients humans, makes them meaningful to themselves and others, and defines for them what is possible, and what is not. The triumph of “good religion” as both the default position of social practice and the default object of academic inquiry is bound up, Fessenden argues, with its compatibility with the liberal state and its rhetorical accoutrements: democracy, capitalism, autonomy, empiricism (4).

88 Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002), 67–74Google Scholar. See also The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

89 As Charles Hirschkind has written, building on Warner's insight, “this conception of a public builds in a structural blindness to the material conditions of the discourses it produces and circulates”: in The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 106.

90 Alexander, Archibald, Practical Truths (New York: American Tract Society, 1852), 387Google Scholar.

91 Baird, Christian Retrospect and Register, 57, 62, 165; Religion in the United States, 376–377.

92 David Paul Nord, “The Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America, 1815–1835,” Journalism Monographs 88 (Columbia: Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, College of Journalism, University of South Carolina, 1984): 4.

93 Noll, America's God, 443.

94 “The Science of Sciences,” opined the New-York Evangelist, “as far as it prevails, [] produces peace and happiness … When the knowledge of the Lord shall fill the earth, peace and plenty will succeed to poverty and disorder. If statesmen were not blind, they might see that the disciples of the Lord Jesus are, in all countries, the best subjects”: in “The Science of Sciences,” New-York Evangelist 19 (15 June 1848): 97.

95 Thomas S. Grimke, The Temperance Reformation (1833) as quoted in Foster, Charles I., An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 123Google Scholar.

96 Hageman, John Frelinghuysen, History of Princeton and its Institutions, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1878), 238–239Google Scholar; Baird, Henry M., The Life of the Rev. Robert Baird, D.D. (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1866), 44–45Google Scholar.

97 For other historically minded, taxonomic, yet less comprehensive accounts of evangelicalism as “agreeable to the doctrines of Christianity,” see Buck, Charles, A Theological Dictionary: Containing Definitions of all Religious Terms (Philadelphia: W. W. Woodward, 1825), 170Google Scholar; Rupp, Israel D., Original History of the Religious Denominations in the United States (Philadelphia: J. Y. Humphreys, 1840)Google Scholar; Hayward, John, The Book of Religions; Comprising the Views, Creeds, Sentiments, or Opinions, of all the Principal Religious Sects in the World Particularly of All Christian Denominations in Europe and America (Boston: Albert Colby and Company, 1842)Google Scholar; Barber, J. W., History of the Most Important and Interesting Religious Events, Which have Transpired from the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Present Time (Boston: L. P. Crown and Co., 1848)Google Scholar; Goodrich, Charles A., The Bible History of Prayer, with Practical Reflection (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Tiffany, and Co., 1850)Google Scholar.

98 “Religion and Religionism,” New-York Evangelist 21 (29 August 1850): 138.

99 Baird, Religion in the United States, 54.

100 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, J. P. (New York: Anchor, 1969), 692Google Scholar.

101 Baird accused Tocqueville of lacking in Common Sense—having no evidence for his slander and no capacity for deduction “according to the principles of the Baconian philosophy”: Baird, Religion in the United States, 54–55.

102 Baird, Religion in the United States, 438–439; Abercrombie, John, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigations of Truth (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1832), 33Google Scholar.

103 Barnes, Albert, “Influence of Religion upon the Intellect,” Christian Parlor Book 6 (August 1849): 111–113Google Scholar.

104 Baird, Religion in the United States, 439, 463.

105 Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. by Walker, James (Cambridge: John Bartlett, 1851), 353Google Scholar.

106 Baird, Religion in the United States, 471–472. Baird, here, was drawing on the notion of sympathy as expressed in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), an idea (and a text) that was widely circulated in antebellum America. See, for example, the lengthy review of the 1817 edition published by Wells & Lilly in The North American Review 8 (March 1819): 371–396.

107 Ibid., 289–290. Relying on census data, Baird calculated the rate of increase of the population and made projections for the coming decades in the service of refining the missionary strategies of evangelicals. See also chapter 12, “A Brief Geographical Notice of the United States” (63–69), as well as Baird's anxiety over the U.S. population—particularly its “comparative thinness” and “floating [] character”—as “a great obstacle to the progress of religion” (73, 76).

108 Ibid., 59, 395, 286, 288, 410, 292, 396, 71–72, 77. “The American people, taken as a whole,” wrote Baird, were “mainly characterized by” something they all shared, “a disposition to depend upon their own exertions to the utmost”: ibid., 43. This will toward self-exertion was the necessary precondition for the security of State as well as the primary effect of that security. For other examples of Baird's language of automaticity, see 311, 326, 352, 388.

109 In addition to the newfound historicist impulse among evangelicals, the nineteenth century was rife with theories of the State, its mechanics, and its ideal functions. See Pecora, Vincent P., Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, & Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 108–109Google Scholar. Works of antebellum political economy sought to demarcate a civic space set apart from the workings of state government and owed much to yet another figure in the Scottish Enlightenment: Adam Ferguson and his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). See, for example, Leiber, Francis, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, and Co., 1853)Google Scholar; and Smith, Erasmus Pershine, A Manual of Political Economy (New York: Putnam, 1853)Google Scholar. And finally, it should be noted that the working title of Baird's history was The Religious Economy of the United States: Baird, The Life of Rev. Robert Baird, 203–204.

110 Carey, Henry, Harmony of Interests, Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial (Philadelphia: J. S. Skinner, 1851)Google Scholar. According to Carey, the State was a mediating force, a system that provided direct access for those who lived within it—to each other, to the market, to the land, to truth itself.

111 Whereas Baird posited voluntarism as that which mediated the collective will and guaranteed the autonomy of the individual, in Harmony of Interests a fluid, almost viral rationality assumed this dual function. Carey employed statistics to confirm various interrelations that already existed within the population and suggested how they could be more effectively promoted in the name of “perfect self-government.” “The American system” would usher in an “empire” of “universal peace,” wrote Carey, “ELEVATING while EQUALIZING, the condition of man.” Society would become a “harmony of interests,” an economy that revolved around ideological and material loops of production, exchange, and consumption—the “establishment of real free-trade.” Pure circulation as a state of affairs was, according to Carey, the best way to secure the presence of the State, the latter being the tangible and manageable dimension of human rationality that transcended any single individual: Harmony of Interests (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1868), 229, 209.

112 This line appears in the American edition of Religion in the United States (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844), 321.

113 Cited in “Benevolence upon Principle,” New-York Evangelist 16 (16 January 1845): 10.

114 Baird, Religion in the United States, 298–300, 414–415, ix. As Fessenden has pointed out, this maneuver allowed Baird to figure America as a de facto Protestant nation, “subtly align[ing] religious identity with political identity”: Culture and Redemption, 62–63.

115 In Baird's words, the difference between the “temporal well-being of the Human race” and the “enlargement of the kingdom of the Messiah” was a difference in register and not in essence: Baird, Christian Retrospect and Register, iv.

116 “System,” New-York Evangelist 23 (5 August 1852): 128. Sistema, from the Greek meaning organized whole, government, constitution, a body of men or animals or ideas made harmonious with each other.

117 Baird, Religion in the United States, 221.

118 “Men are so constituted,” wrote Baird, as to become “ ‘co-workers for God’ in promoting his glory, and the true welfare of their fellow-men.” Like these individuated “co-workers,” different denominations “resembled” the “various corps of an army, which, though arranged in various divisions, and each division having an organization perfect in itself, yet form but one great host, and are under the command of one chief”: Baird, Religion in the United States, 411, 499.

119 Baird's portrayal of the population as both potentially autonomous and sovereign with respect to institutions was not surprising given the degree to which evangelicals distrusted histories that revolved around the institutional development of Christianity. Such histories threatened to portray Protestantism in a Catholic light, that is, focusing on “the medium through which we become Christians” at the expense of charting the circulating presence of the “Holy Spirit”: “The Work of Dr. Schaf on Protestantism,” New-York Evangelist 16 (11 September 1845): 146.

120 Baird, Religion in the United States, 692–693, 697, 695. See also Report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Presented at the Thirty-Second Annual Meeting (Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1841), 46.

121 Baird, Christian Retrospect and Register, 165. On “mission apologetics” and the “language of spiritual expansionism,” see Hutchison, William R., Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 46–61Google Scholar.

122 On the concept of a “religio-political force field,” see Chidester, David, Patterns of Power: Religion & Politics in American Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988)Google Scholar. See also Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 220.

123 As Wilfred Cantwell Smith remarked long ago, such narratives were part of a larger development within Western modernity—“reifying” religion, prioritizing its various forms, and playing a game of “cosmic legitimacy” that was not necessarily religious but depended on common understandings of what the religious entailed: The Meaning and End of Religion; a New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 15, 48.

124 Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the American Tract Society (New York: American Tract Society, 1851), 112–153; Nelson, David, The Cause and Cure of Infidelity (New York: American Tract Society, 1841), 13Google Scholar. The evangelical critique of monarchy and superstition went hand in hand, exemplified in two accounts that appeared on opposite pages of ATS's American Messenger (January 1858): 2–3. In “East India Company and Missions,” recent turmoil in India is attributed to “divine judgments upon the English government.” In “A Cannibal King Converted,” the king of the Feejee Islands, Thakambau, is reported to have given up his crown and “confess[ed] the sins of his former life.”

125 Gutzlaff, Charles, Visit to The Chinese Coast (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1840), 4Google Scholar. Evangelicals, insisted Gutzlaff, must act and “open a door of entrance for the gospel into China.” His first pitch to the reader was not in the name of God but in the name of the economic security promised by international trade: “My dear readers, has the thought ever arisen in your hearts, when sitting down with kind friends and companions, that the tea you drink came from a land of idolaters … Surely you have a vast debt of love to pay, and should no longer delay contributing your mite to assist the poor Chinese” (5).

126 Ibid., 11, 7, 9. On the “unparalleled” density of the population of China's eastern seaboard, see “Population of China,” American Messenger (April 1858): 15.

127 Leslie's Method with the Deists; and Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (New York: American Tract Society, 1836), 20, 1–2.

128 Anidjar, “Secularism,” 58–60.

129 Address of the Executive Committee, 14–15.

130 Scott, David, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text 43 (Autumn 1995): 205Google Scholar.

131 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 190–191. See also Bacon, Leonard, “Responsibility in the Management of Societies,” New Englander and Yale Review 5 (January 1847): 28Google Scholar.

132 Baird, Religion in the United States, 665.

133 In “How Shall They Secure This?” The Home Missionary 21 (April 1849): 266.

134 Or as the New York Auxiliary of the Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge contended, “the press, in the hands of a truly faithful ministry, and of an intelligent pious laity, is one of the mightiest weapons for the maintenance and defense of truth”: “Christian Toleration,” New-York Evangelist 20 (19 April 1849): 58.

135 Instructions of the Executive Committee (1848), 99–100; [Cook], Home Evangelization, 7, 11, 6; “Christian Toleration,” 58.

136 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 53; see also Archibald Alexander's discussion, “Christianity in its Nature Aggressive,” in which he equates Christ's injunction to be “doers of the word” with an admirable intolerance. “Christianity is so intolerant,” he reasoned, “that it will bear no other religion; it seeks to overthrow every other system”: in Practical Truths, 33.

137 “A Standing Army of Bibles,” New-York Evangelist 22 (11 September 1851): 149; [Cook], Home Evangelization, 7, 11, 8.

138 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 63. For the persistent focus on the population, see the tables of population statistics that appeared in many of the Christian Family Almanacs (published by ATS) at mid-century as well as articles such as “Area and Population,” New-York Evangelist 20 (22 February 1849): 32.

139 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 63–64. See also the unedited and handwritten reports of tract society agents in Providence, R.I., in which there is a persistent attention to demographic changes: “American Tract Society Records, 1832–35,” Rhode Island Historical Society. My thanks to David Morgan for directing me to this archive.

140 Alexander, Practical Truths, 54.

141 Hatch, The Democratization of Christianity, 142.

142 Hall, Peter Dobkin, “Religion and the Organizational Revolution in the United States,” in Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations, eds. Demerath, N. J. III, Hall, Peter Dobkin, Schmitt, Terry, and Williams, Rhys H. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 101Google Scholar.

143 Noll refers to this shift as an “epidemic of organization”: Noll, America's God, 198. Noll borrows this phrase from Mathews's, Donald G. “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process,” in Religion in American History, ed. Mulder, John M. and Wilson, John F. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1978), 208Google Scholar.

144 Zboray, Ronald J., A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 136–137Google Scholar; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 29. I use the words “spirit” here to refer to the “disposition of the mind of intellect” as well as “the principle of animal life, common to men and animals”: see A Dictionary of the Holy Bible, for General Use in the Study of the Scriptures (New York: American Tract Society, 1859), 436.

145 Cited in Noll, America's God, 64.

146 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 31–32; Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, 66–67.

147 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 63; Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, 70.

148 See Woolf, Stuart, “Statistics and the Modern State,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:3 (July 1989): 588–604CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Theodore M., The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Hacking, Ian, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Numbers,” Humanities in Society 5:3/4 (Summer/Fall 1982): 279–294Google Scholar.

149 Kazanjian, David, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 110–111Google Scholar. On Jefferson's penchant for calculation and intolerance for ambiguity, see Cohen, Patricia Cline, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 112–114Google Scholar. See also “Population—Poor Laws—Life-Assurance,” in Chambers's Information for the People: A Popular EncyclopÆdia, Vol. 2, 15th ed. (Philadelphia: J. & J. L. Gihon, 1851), 289–305.

150 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 87, 25–26. On the rise of corporate practices of management and internal communication in the nineteenth century, see Yates, JoAnn, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982)Google Scholar.

151 Abstract of the American Bible Society, 27, 29; [Cook], Home Evangelization, 5, 100–102. See also Brief Analysis of the System of the American Bible Society, 34–36, 81–83.

152 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 56. Similarly, the ABS was “conducted by Managers, under whose inspection, and by whose control, all its business is transacted.” Such managers had “no other interest in the institution than a desire for the advancement of its glorious object”: Abstract of the American Bible Society, 25–26.

153 Fourth Annual Report of the American Bible Society (1820). Cited in The Christian Herald 7:7 (5 August 1820): 218; as well as in Nord, Faith in Reading, 71.

154 ATS, for example, made decisions according to the logic of the market even as it designated the market as “secular.” The market was secular, not in essence, but on account of the economic motive behind contemporary practices of it. The logic, itself, was sound. The incentives were not. Economic reasoning, in other words, was not profane when practiced in the service of moral calculations.

155 Thirtieth Annual Report of the American Tract Society (New York: American Tract Society, 1855), 37; Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, 66; Proceedings of a Public Deliberative Meeting of the Board and Friends of the American Tract Society (New York: American Tract Society, 1842), 61; [Cook], Home Evangelization, 107.

156 “Circular—New Tracts,” The American Tract Magazine 7 (November 1832): 133–134.

157 Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, 66–67; Bible Agent's Manual, 2; Nord, “Religious Reading,” 247.

158 “If you would know the power of a battery,” declared one ATS executive in 1850, “you must not go to the men who work it, but to those who receive the discharges”: Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 10.

159 Nord, “Religious Reading,” 247; Colporteur Reports to the American Tract Society, 1841–1846 (Newark, N.J.: The Historical Records Survey, 1940), 52.

160 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 108; Twenty-Fifth Annul Report, 63; Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, 66.

161 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 76–78, 108–109; Abstract of the American Bible Society, 37; Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, 48; Instructions of the Executive Committee of the American Tract Society to Colporteurs and Agents (New York: American Tract Society, 1859), 10. The French term colporteur derives from the pack a book peddler carried (porter) around his neck (col): Nord, Faith in Reading, 97–98; Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 100. The following definition was offered in the Twenty-Sixth Annual Report: “The combination of the elements of tract visitation and volume circulation, or the association of individual Christian influence with the diffusion of religious reading, with special reference to the destitute, constitute Colportage” (45).

162 Instructions of the Executive (1848), 70–71. In 1843 in New Egypt, N.J., for example, a trio of colporteurs did not respond to a public challenge to debate with local Universalists. “Just as we were leaving this village,” they reported, “we received a written ‘challenge’ to hold a Public Controversy with Universalists on the Question ‘Does the Bible teach the doctrines of endless misery, or the final holiness of all mankind?’—We of course declined the honor they conferred on us, & left them to manage as they could with the plane [sic] pungent truths of Gods [sic] word as set forth in the Society's publications—the somewhat extensive circulation of which seemed to give them much trouble. A copy of the Letter containing the ‘Challenge’ is herewith transmitted”: Colporteur Reports, 39.

163 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 91; Instructions of the Executive Committee (1848), 71–72.

164 Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, 34.

165 Colporteur Reports, 65; [Cook], Home Evangelization, 12.

166 Colporteur Reports, 77, 83–84, 63, 67, 46, 50, 53; [Cook], Home Evangelization, 10, 35, 37. See also the colporteur reports from rural districts in Twenty-Third Annual Report of the American Tract Society (New York: American Tract Society, 1848), 71–76.

167 Colporteur Reports, 63; Twentieth Annual Report of the American Tract Society (New York: American Tract Society, 1845), 73, Nord, Faith in Reading, 103. See also Instructions of the Executive Committee (1848), 21.

168 Instructions of the Executive Committee (1848), 91; see also the dialogues crafted by Archibald Alexander in which a colporteur interacts with a “cottager,” a “farmer,” an “aged man,” and a “Roman-Catholic”: Practical Truths, 247–353.

169 Abstract of the American Bible Society, 38.

170 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 63–64, 109. See also “Narratives Illustrating the Usefulness of Religious Tracts” as appended to The Address of the Executive Committee.

171 Colporteur reports would sometimes question existing instructions and ask for further guidance in light of experience in the field: Colporteur Reports, 108.

172 Abstract of the American Bible Society, 42.

173 Colporteur Reports, 16; Abstract of the American Bible Society, 23; [Cook], Home Evangelization, 83; “Pioneer Colportage,” American Messenger (April 1858): 15.

174 Instructions of the Executive (1859), 10; Colporteur Reports, 16; Sturtevant, J. M., “The American Colporteur System,” The American Biblical Repository LV:23 (July 1844): 230Google Scholar.

175 American Tract Society Report [Rhode Island Historical Society], October 1832, 24. On the formal structures of organization reflecting the spirit of their institutional environments rather than the letter of their mission statements, see Meyer, John W. and Rowan, Brian, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, eds. Powell, Walter D. and DiMaggio, Paul J. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 41–62Google Scholar.

176 Thomas, Amy M., “Reading the Silences: Documenting the History of American Tract Society Readers in the Antebellum South,” in Reading Acts: U.S. Readers' Interaction with Literature, 1800–1950 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 107Google Scholar. Thomas is interested in recovering the “personal voice” of readers in an effort to reconstruct their agency and resistance to the corporate strategies of ATS.

177 Cross, Jonathan, Five Years in the Alleghanies (New York: American Tract Society, 1863), 37–38Google Scholar; American Tract Society Reports [Rhode Island Historical Society], February 1834, 20; May 1833, 5; June 1833; February 1833, 9–11. David Morgan cites this final example in noting the “limits of studying production” and warning scholars not to “be swept away by [ATS] propaganda.” Morgan's timely inquiry into the reception of tracts suggests a range of responses—from complicity and acquiescence to what he calls “resistance,” “rejection,” and “abrupt opposition.” See “Studying Religion and Popular Culture,” 30–33. To be sure, colporteur encounters did not simply reproduce the institutional agenda of saving souls or even the modest goal of successfully depositing tracts into households. But this is often the irony of institutions whose success depends more on generating semiotic fields than in successfully fulfilling the promise of their propaganda. On institutions “as both supraorganizational patterns of activity through which humans conduct their material life” and “symbolic systems through which they categorize that activity and infuse it with meaning,” see Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford, “Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, eds. Powell and DiMaggio, 233–263.

178 Colporteur Reports, 110, 28, 108. American Tract Society Report [Rhode Island Historical Society], September 1832, 14.

179 On the psychological power of statistics, see Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

180 American Tract Society Report [Rhode Island Historical Society], January 1833, 2.

181 Colporteur Reports, 78, 111, 67, 40.

182 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 41. Such reports, however, were careful to differentiate evangelical publishing from mere marketing. Tracts were not commodities. On the contrary, they were distributed in “the most inoffensive and unobtrusive way; with no magisterial authority; no claims of superior wisdom or goodness; and no alarm to human pride or forwardness”: Address of the Executive Committee, 6.

183 Lawrence, Edward A., The Mission of the Church; or, Systematic Beneficence (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1850), 9Google Scholar. For a critique of such self-promotion leading to complacency among the populace, see “Systematic Benevolence,” New Englander and Yale Review 9 (February 1851): 18.

184 Anecdotes, Illustrating the Beneficial Effects of Religious Tracts (New York: American Tract Society, 1832); “The Colporteur,” published in ATS's The Child's Paper 3 (December 1854): 45.

185 Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 64. As one tract suggested, publicity was also an integral part of God's final judgment—“And consider, Reader, that the Gospel will prove either the means of salvation to you, or the means of increasing your punishment at last. The time is not far distant, when the hand of the writer shall moulder into dust, and the eye of the reader shall be closed in death: they may never meet but at the judgment seat of Christ. Then, the reception which has been given to the truths contained in these pages, will be disclosed before an assembled world”: in The Sailor's Friend (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1825), 8.

186 Colporteur Reports, 64.

187 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 92. These statistics “record such evidences of industry and energy, and such a broadcast sowing of the seed of the word, as can rarely be found on the pages of the history of evangelization.”

188 See, for example, Twenty-Sixth Annual Report, 15–22; and Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the American Tract Society (New York: American Tract Society, 1852), 18–22.

189 The Sailor's Friend, 5. See also McIlvaine, Charles P., Importance of Consideration (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1835)Google Scholar and The Talking Bible (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1851).

190 Friendly Conversation (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1840).

191 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, “The Interior or Hidden Life,” New-York Evangelist 16 (April 1845): 61Google Scholar. Jane Tompkins has argued that sentimental fiction in the antebellum era not only overlapped with the “stories” of the American Tract Society, but together helped structure a convincing picture of the world—“a theory of power that stipulates that all true action is not material, but spiritual; that one obtains spiritual power through prayer; and that those who know how, in the privacy of their closets, to struggle for possession of their souls will one day possess the world through the power given to them by God”: see Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 151.

192 Hodge, Charles, Collection of Tracts in Biblical Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Press, 1825), 58Google Scholar; Spring, Gardiner, A Dissertation on the Rule of Faith, Delivered at Cincinnati, Ohio, at the Annual Meeting of the American Bible Society (New York: Leavitt, Trow, and Co., 1844), 78Google Scholar. On the specific ironies endemic to the practice of Luther's principle of “sola scriptura,” see Edwards, Mark U., Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar. On the general ironies of this version of Protestant hermeneutics, see Keane, Webb, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Missionary Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar as well as Foucault, Michel, “The Order of Discourse,” in Language and Politics, ed. Shapiro, Michael J. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 108–138Google Scholar.

193 “Dr. Bushnell's View of Language Considered,” New-York Evangelist 20 (15 November 1849): 182. This position was very much in keeping with the Common Sense revision of Lockean approaches to signification. According to Dugald Stewart, for example, words were the product of empirical conditions but were in no way arbitrary, grounded as they were not in the response to the environment but in the environment itself. In the first half of the nineteenth century this position took hold among evangelicals as well as a host of liberal denominations. This pursuit of logical precision in and through language would form the backdrop for various acts of resistance, from Emerson and Bushnell to Melville and Dickinson: Gura, Wisdom of Words, 20–22.

194 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 50.

195 See Morgan's, David “The Aura of Print,” in The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (New York: Routledge, 2007), 7–36Google Scholar.

196 Nord, “Religious Reading,” 262. This was in keeping with how Scottish Common Sense affirmed a decisive gap between subject and object yet denied that the distractions of consciousness played any role in constituting the world of perception. On this point, see Ahlstrom, “The Scottish Philosophy,” 268.

197 “Training of the Mind,” New-York Evangelist 22 (27 March 1851): 53.

198 Cross, Five Years in the Alleghanies, 111–112.

199 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 52. Numerous articles on reading habits appeared in the ATS periodical, American Messenger.

200 The New Birth (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1830), 5–6.

201 “Habits of Reading,” American Messenger (August 1843): 33; and “The Manner of Reading,” American Messenger (October 1845): 43. See Nord's transcription of both in Faith in Reading, 161–163.

202 “Books for the Fire,” New-York Evangelist 20 (November 1849): 188. A book was judged, religiously, on the basis of its potential to contribute to the intense practice of “self-government” and, more important, whether it promoted both personal morality and political stability. “Bad” books, by contrast, threatened to emasculate the evangelical public sphere. “No man can do his friend or child a more real service,” instructed ATS, “than to snatch out of his hand the book that relaxes and effeminates him, lest he destroy his solids and make his fibre flaccid”: “Bad Books,” American Messenger (March 1858), 10.

203 The New Birth, 9; The Closet Companion; or, A Help to Self-Examination (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1830), 1–2.

204 Alleine, J., Pause and Think, Am I a Christian? (New York: American Tract Society, 1831), 4Google Scholar; “Self-culture,” Christian Parlor Magazine 1 (October 1844), 187; “The Supremacy of the Bible,” New-York Evangelist 23 (19 August 1852): 133.

205 [Knight, Helen Cross], The Rocket (New York: American Tract Society, 1860)Google Scholar. Knight wrote many works geared toward the doctrinal instruction of children. See, for example, Reuben Kent at School, or, Influence as it Should Be (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1844) and her memoir of London Tract Society founder Hannah More—A New Memoir of Hannah More; or, Life in Hall and Cottage (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1853).

206 Cited in Nord, “Religious Reading,” 247.

207 Knight, The Rocket, 13.

208 Ibid., 15, 24, 31, 26–28.

209 Ibid., 41, 99–100, 107. Such time-saving technologies should also allow for a more rigorous observance of the Sabbath (108): “Every railroad corporation is bound to be a Sabbath-keeping corporation. It makes time enough to do its work” (111).

210 The Rocket also stands out for its progressive narrative of benevolent capitalism. Like the prized engine of the story's title, “trade is one of the great progressive elements of the world. It goes ahead. It will have the right of way. It will have the right way, the best, safest, cheapest way of doing its business. Yet it is not selfish, its object is the comfort and well-being of men” (58).

211 “Heavenly Arithmetic,” New-York Evangelist 19 (1848): 33.

212 Knight, The Rocket, 119–120, 114; see also What is a Star? (New York: American Tract Society, 1848).

213 See, for example, Keith, A., The Evidence of Prophecy (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1825)Google Scholar as well as The Seaman's Spy-Glass; or God's Ways and Works Discovered at Sea (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1825), in which piety is equated with the navigational talents of a ship's captain. See also the genealogy of epistemic virtues in Daston, Lorraine and Galison, Peter, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007)Google Scholar.

214 American Tract Society Report [Rhode Island Historical Society], March 1833, 12–15. The agent then adds that “once tracts went over the wide oceans to heathen “living in ignorance” and “abominable idolatry” and we “get Tahiti to read, [then] we may be disposed to think more highly of them.”

215 See, for example, Henry, T. Carlton, Letters to an Anxious Inquirer, Designed to Relieve the Difficulties of a Friend under Serious Impressions (Philadelphia, Key & Biddle, 1833), 177–194Google Scholar; James, John Angell, The Anxious Inquirer After Salvation (New York: American Tract Society, 1838), 1–11Google Scholar; Novel-Reading (New York: American Tract Society, 1840).

216 M'Ilvaine, J. H., A Discourse upon the Power of Voluntary Attention (Rochester, N.Y.: D. M. Dewey, 1849), 21Google Scholar. “Voluntary attention” would also enable the individual to bid at an auction with assurance precisely because that individual would make “allowance for the effect which the excitement of competition, and the arts of the salesman have upon judgment” (22).

217 Ibid., 16. According to this model of human consciousness, salvation and worldly success were all but interchangeable. On one hand, by seeing the reality that underlies Christological symbolism, “you will see that in Him by which you will be wholly captivated—filled with passionate admiration and love. And you will be thereby transformed” (37). On the other hand, this same subject will be able to “possess,” for himself, “those methods of inquiry to which we owe all the discoveries of modern times, and especially, that perfection of the natural sciences, in their application to the arts of the industrial world, in the midst of which we live” (25). Such methods were akin to gold mining—one had to know how to read the signs on the surface in order to access the deeper meaning. Unlike the “indolent Mexican hunter, and rude Indian [who] had wandered for generations over that country of which the very dust was gold, and whose stones were jewels, and knew it not,” the evangelical reader was like the “man of another race [who] came, with an eye that could see.” To him who “digs,” the “earth revealed those inexhaustible riches” (15–16).

218 Ibid., 16.

219 See, for example, Richmond, Leigh, The Dairyman's Daughter (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1830)Google Scholar; Interesting History of Mrs. Tooly (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1840); The Blue Flag (New York: American Tract Society, 1861); Sabbath Occupations (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1840); and Saturday Night: A Dialogue Between William Ready and Robert Wise at the Pay Table (New York: American Tract Society, ca. 1840).

220 Cited in Nord, “Religious Reading,” 247.

221 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 212–114.

222 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 145.

223 On the biologization of language among Protestant media of a later vintage, see Klassen, Pamela E., “Textual Healing: Mainstream Protestants and the Therapeutic Text, 1900–1925,” Church History 75:4 (December 2006): 809–848CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

224 Quoted in Nord, Faith in Reading, 146.

225 American Colporteur System (New York: American Tract Society, 1836), 8; “The Word of God the Security of Freedom,” New-York Evangelist 17 (14 May 1846): 79.

226 Moore, R. Laurence, “Religion, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Culture Industry in Antebellum America,” American Quarterly 41:2 (June 1989): 227CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

227 On the ambivalent rhetoric of ATS literature regarding the rise of the market revolution, see Schantz, Mark S., “Religious Tracts, Evangelical Reform, and the Market Revolution in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 17:3 (Autumn 1997): 425–466CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

228 Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 98; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 47. Susan M. Ryan has done much to point out the ironies of evangelical reformers in terms of race, documenting, for example, the degree to which Indian missions were expressions of “benevolent violence” and an instance of good intentions gone intensely and devastatingly awry: The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 25–45.

229 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 3, 276.

230 Hayles defines reflexivity as “the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates”: In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 8–9.

231 There are two broad categories of feedback: positive feedback in which the output reinforces the input, and negative feedback in which the output serves to achieve a stable situation by increasing or decreasing the input depending on a predetermined variable. Evangelical narratives of secularism possessed elements of both categories.

232 Hirschhorn, Larry, Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Postindustrial Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 27Google Scholar.

233 [Cook], Home Evangelization, 65–67.

234 Twenty-Seventh Annual Report, 53; Nord, “Evangelical Origins of Mass Media,” 6, 10, 11.

235 Jenkins, G. M., “Feedforward-Feedback Control Schemes,” Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences, vol. 3, eds. Kotz, Samuel and Johnson, Norman L. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1983), 57Google Scholar.

236 As Joel L. From has argued, evangelical media organizations were “vigorous agents of a particular account of the social world. They should be regarded as part of a grand application of a moral-economic theory to nineteenth century conditions.” From, however, addresses neither the nature of this agency nor how its application generated conditions of future application: see “Moral Economy of Nineteenth Century Evangelical Activism,” Christian Scholar's Review 30:1 (Fall 2000): 46.

237 As Giles Deleuze reminds us, social experience cannot be reduced to the technologies that inform that experience. “One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don't explain anything, you have to analyze the collective apparatuses to which the machines are just one component”: “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 175.

238 1 Timothy, ii. 5 and 6. “There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ; who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.” This passage is cited in Oracles (for January 25), a calendrical portioning of the Bible popular among evangelicals at mid-century (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1858), 16. See also “Christ—His Threefold Character,” American Messenger (October 1853): 37.

239 “There is no radical instant when religion began to exist,” argues Durkheim. “Like every other human institution, religion begins nowhere”: Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Fields, Karen E. (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 7Google Scholar. See also Foucault's, statement that “God is perhaps not so much a region beyond knowledge as something prior to the sentences we speak”: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 298Google Scholar.

240 Ewbank, A Descriptive and Historical Account, 425, 388.

241 Bourne, “Science and Priestcraft,” 80–82.

242 The first wave of critique includes Welter, Barbara, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Raboteau, Albert J., Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Moore, R. Laurence, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Turner, James, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Orsi, Robert Anthony, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Albanese, Catherine L., Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

243 The most remarkable exception in this area has been Fessenden's Culture and Redemption. Taves's, AnnFits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar is also notable for the way in which it implicates the making of American religious history, as a field, in the object of its inquiry. Other works that have moved in this direction include Harding, Susan Friend, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Corrigan, John, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Orsi, Robert A., Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars who Study Them (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Albanese, Catherine L., A Republic of Mind & Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

244 Foucault, Michel, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Bouchard, Donald F. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–164Google Scholar.

245 Howe, “The Evangelical Movement,” 1220.