Christians have befriended Mammon.
A friend who visited Japan recently told me how aghast he was to see a Shinto shrine cluttered with Shinto trinket-sellers and teeming with Shinto bric-a-brac for sale. This cheerful mix of religion and money-grubbing grated on his liberal sensitivities, and his first instinct was to blame this exhibition on the baleful influence of American commercialism. But it turned out, on investigation, to have nothing to do with Western influences. In fact, that particular shrine, and others like it, had been selling religious goodies from time out of mind, and without any flicker of guilt for turning Shinto into an object of purchase. What turned out to be really exceptional in this encounter was not the commercialization of the shrine but my friend's instinctive conclusion that this commercialization was both appalling and unnatural. Only someone from a thoroughly Christianized culture, I told him, would have been upset.
Christianity has long policed a great dualism (and, I think, a healthy one) between the sacred and the secular. Some things are defined as "holy to the Lord" and cannot be redefined or reused for other purposes, while other things, such as the meats offered to idols that the apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians, are not holy and can be sold or consumed without concern. Unfortunately, while the exact location of this boundary line is easy to draw in theory, it is often difficult to outline in specifics, especially when the pressures of self-interest and rationalization are turned loose. Simon Magus, bargaining for the power of God for money, was ruled out, while meats offered to idols could not be holy and could therefore be sold or consumed without transgression; but fifteen hundred years later, Martin Luther's nemesis, Johan Tetzel, could offer remission of sins for a few gulden, and meats could not be consumed on Fridays or feast days under threat of a lengthy cruise in purgatory.
Genuine Christianity has always raged against this boundary shifting, but the success of that rage has usually rested on a certain unspoken consensus about what really was, and wasn't, holy. And whenever that consensus has wavered, as it did during the Reformation, commercialism has usually turned up to take advantage. Commercialization is a loaded (and usually negative) term, and it really involves two processes: commodification (stripping an object of all other values except its value for sale to someone else) and marketing (inserting the object into a network of carefully rationalized exchanges of goods). Until the 1700s, commercialization was pretty well limited to commodification since large-volume market networks scarcely existed throughout much of Christian Europe. But with the creation of the first European colonial empires, and even more with the creation of mass industrial production, cheap transportation, and communications in the early 1800s, the marketing of commodities took on a relentless and carefully calculated life of its own.
The pressure to commercialize -- to turn things into commodities and then market them -- was particularly difficult for Protestants to resist, since so much of the Protestant Reformation was geared toward denying the holiness of many things that the church over the centuries had endowed with "holy" meanings, such as the priesthood, wafers, candles, monasteries, and so forth. Once the Reformers removed the protection of "holiness" from these things, secular rulers and merchants often wasted little time in commodifying them (the biggest example being Henry VIII's suppression of the English monasteries, and the subsequent sell-off of everything in them, down to the lead in the roofs). The state churches that the Reformers created in the 1600s could, of course, keep this process under control by officially drawing new lines around what things were now "holy." But what might happen in an environment where government-run churches no longer existed? And what might happen when the emergence of long-distance, rationalized marketing added new pressures to the commodification of religion?
BIBLE PROFITS
The first of those uncomfortable scenarios took shape in America, where state-established Christianity never got much beyond a foot in the door; the second kicked in at the close of the 1800s, just as the American Republic was beginning its political life. The story of what happened as a result-the commercialization of Christianity itself -- is the substance of these three new books, whose near-simultaneous appearance creates an oddly linked commentary on God and Mammon in America.
R. Laurence Moore's "Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture" certainly leads the pack in terms of its visibility (Moore is already on the TV talk-show circuit and was the subject of a recent Yale University colloquium), but Peter J. Wosh's history of the founding of the American Bible Society (ABS) and Frank Lambert's reinterpretation of the methods and personality of the eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield fill in a crowded canvas of crassness and hucksterism. Taken together, these stories are liable to appall us in the same way my friend was appalled by Shinto hucksterism.
Wosh's "Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America" is the sleeper of the three. Although featuring a less compelling cast of characters than Moore or Lambert, Wosh has the best-organized and most morally depressing tale to tell. He begins in 1816 with the original organizers of the ABS, a core group of evangelical merchant laymen drawn largely from the Reformed churches of New York City. Full of self-denying patrician benevolence and republican virtue, the ABS's founders instituted the society as a public volunteer charity with the goal of providing simple, unadorned copies of the Bible "without note or comment" to the American people.
They attempted to do this, however, at a moment of immense economic change in American life, when the American economy was being hooked into the broad and relentlessly rationalized networks of British-dominated markets. The merchants who founded the ABS could not remain unattracted by the success and influence of British commerce, particularly its highly rationalized and unsentimental pursuit of material profit through ever more-efficient forms of organization, production, and distribution. And so the small-scale volunteerism of the ABS quickly yielded to pressure to absorb into its management the larger patterns of market structure and function.
The ABS managers moved, for example, to abandon the society's reliance on part-time evangelists as its regional agents, largely because the evangelists concentrated too much of their energies on evangelizing rather than promoting the sales of Bibles and wrote long, baggy letters about the triumph of the gospel while paying too little attention to keeping adequate records of stock and the movement of funds from regional Bible societies to the home office in New York. It went without saying, too, that the part-timers were usually younger men, fresh out of Andover or Yale, whose real aim was to move on to full-time ministry rather than a career in retail sales. By the 1850s, the ABS managers had junked the evangelists and turned instead to a rationalized system of paid professional agents who were more concerned with the bottom line of the Bible business than with soul winning.
By contrast, the ABS's original efforts at unalloyed benevolence -- missions to seamen and immigrants -- failed miserably and were allowed to drift off the horizon by the 1860s. But far from regretting the loss of evangelical effort, the managers kept on quietly eliminating any activity, even for the most minimal evangelical ends, that might distract the society's agents from the pursuit of Bible sales. When Southern slaveholders grew suspicious of the activities of the ABS's Northern -- born Calvinist agents -- not to mention the uncontrolled distribution of the Bible, with those annoying bits in Exodus -- the managers' first fear was how the loss of slaveholder confidence might split the ABS's financial base. With one consent, they all began to make excuses and knuckled under to slaveholder demands (it did no good: Southerners eventually organized their own Bible societies to make sure the Bible got into the right hands).
But it was not only the abs that changed; the Bible it sold changed, too, though in more subtle ways. The original unadorned editions of the King James Version marketed by the abs through the 1830s ran into serious competition from other New York publishers-chiefly the Methodist Harper Brothers -- who produced the Bible in a variety of pictorial, illustrated, fancy-gilt, silver-clasped, Dore-engraved editions. The new Bibles, in other words, ceased to be mere vehicles of divine revelation and became commodities, to be compared and prized as much for what they revealed about the status and wealth of their purchasers as for their message, and the ABS rushed to issue the same.
By the 1870s, the chief mark of the society's success was not the number of Bibles it had distributed -- much less the souls redeemed through reading them -- but the fabulous new headquarters building it erected on Astor Place. Thus, the story Wosh tells (and with a perfectly poker-faced intensity) is how Mammon, in the form of nineteenth-century commercialization, corrupted the evangelical intentions of the ABS's founders. "By the late nineteenth century," writes Wosh, "the ABS had forfeited its role as social critic, abdicated its responsibilities as part of an international Christianizing force, and subordinated its missionary impulse in the interest of managing a successful business concern." (The ABS, it should be noted, still exists, having undergone significant changes since the period surveyed by Wosh.)
RELIGION AS CHOICE
Frank Lambert's study of George Whitefield pushes the arrival date for the commercialization of evangelicalism back into the middle of the eighteenth century. Lambert begins by showing how Britain, emerging victorious in the 1700s from its century-and-a-half struggle with Spain, the Netherlands, and France, created not only a colonial empire but also a new "superhighway" for the international exchange of commodities. Britain had long been a remarkably open-ended environment for low-intensity commodity dealing, but the creation of a British empire, centrally organized and governed from London, sparked a market revolution and saturated distant British colonies (like those in America) with an unprecedented and alluring flood of cheap commodities.
Placing Whitefield squarely in the stream of this market revolution, Lambert explains how Whitefield was able to exploit the new-found potential of mass- produced and mass-distributed books and newspapers to promote himself and his preaching as no English-speaking preacher had been promoted before. Relying on the skills of William Seward (significantly, a converted stock jobber), Whitefield turned himself, like everything else in this market revolution, into a marketable commodity through a barrage of cleverly coordinated publications, disingenuous letter writing, and commercial newspaper advertising, and then used the long reach of imperial markets to offer himself simultaneously throughout the British Isles and British North America.
Lambert thus sets himself clearly against Harry S. Stout's recent biography of Whitefield, "The Divine Dramatist," which found the great evangelist's chief attractiveness in his sentimental oral performance skills, rather than his canny self-marketing angles. But Lambert treats Whitefield's magnificent preaching moments largely as a means toward promoting his printed commodities; after all, every oral preaching tour of Whitefield's led to some sort of confrontation with "Old Light" church authorities, and those confrontations in turn enhanced the appeal of Whitefield's books and pamphlets and of the papers that published news of him. Indeed, these confrontations turned ordinary Anglo-Americans into religious consumers, in the sense that they were now freely invited (for the first time in Western history) to choose which religious commodities they preferred, the Old Light stodgies or the new-improved-Light.
However, Lambert's book is much less of a complaint about this process than Wosh's; in fact, Lambert celebrates Whitefield as a pioneer in evangelistic strategies, in the use of commercial advertising and distribution, and in the creation of what Jurgen Habermas has called a "public sphere" in which a rational public was invited to make decisions on the basis of persuasion and rationality rather than tradition or force. But there is still a note of regret: Lambert points out that Whitefield himself was never personally comfortable with marketing himself and his message, and he remained ambivalent toward "the spreading consumer market."
He had good reason. The market revolution was feared by the Old Guard as well as by the Old Lights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because of the great power it had for smashing doddering aristocracies, ripping away the coverings with which hereditary incompetence protected itself, and dumping its own chieftains from their thrones the moment they got too comfortable or too outrageous. In the process of commodifying well-nigh everything, the pioneers of marketing undermined authority, thwarted the restraints of tradition, and threw onto individuals the burdens once borne by whole communities.
[see #3666]
