Protestantism: December 2005 Archives

We might trace the history of RELEVANT and the Christian mass media in America back to the late eighteenth century, when technological advancements had made printed material cheaper to produce, bringing about rapid changes in the publishing industry and causing concern among religious leaders. Where bibles and devotional books had once dominated, non-religious titles now outnumbered religious texts. There was a growing market for materials that protestant clerics disapproved of, such as novels. Fiction was thought to corrupt morals because it departed from truth, appealed to the dangerous realm of the imagination, and was frequently sexually bawdy. Now that the citizenry had more choices about what sort of material they wished to read, protestant clerics were faced with the task of convincing readers to choose materials that would reinforce rather than threaten the nation’s religious and moral fiber. To retain its influence and stay relevant, religion would have to compete with other cultural products.

Mason Locke Weems, an Episcopal clergyman and entepreneur, was keenly aware of this dilemma. Weems worked as a traveling bookseller spreading the gospel through the circulation of “sound books that explained religion and right living.” Yet he found that sermons sold slowly. Devotional books like Little Stories for Little Folk of All Denominationswhich were more sentimental if less doctrinally substantial, were easier to sell. He had even more success with Onania, which warned both sexes against the “frightful consequences” of masturbation, though his distribution of the book brought him “a good deal of ridicule as well as serious blame.” Weems realized that the logic of the free market required an appeal to popular tastes and integration of a moral message into a salable format. He begged his publisher to stop “oppressing and crushing me to the earth by ten thousand puritanical books,” and instead send books that would sell: “novels, decent plays, elegant histories.” Weems also realized that visual style mattered too, he requested books “adorned with the graces of style and clothed in splendid binding.”

Weems soon took up the pen himself and used his marketing knowledge to devise books that would sustain reader interest while promoting Christian morality. He penned a successful line of biographies telling of “the lives of great men.” Hagiographical in tone, these books chronicled the exploits of figures like George Washington, revolutionary war hero General Francis Marion, and Quaker colonist William Penn. To depict these men, the celebrities of their times, as paragons of Christian virtue required some creative license; Weems is today most widely remembered as the fabricator of the famous tale of young Washington and the cherry tree.

Another of Weems' ideas was to depict the wages of sin in a series of tracts included God’s Revenge Against Murder, God’s Revenge Against Gambling, God’s Revenge Against Adultery, and God’s Revenge Against Cruelty to Husbands. In these slim books, the first appearing in 1807, drunkards, killers, and sexually impure women all faced bloody consequences for their actions and their parents’ poor child-rearing. Their fates were depicted in exceedingly gory detail, accompanied by engraved illustrations which served as shocking frontispieces for each pamphlet. The sensationalism, thought Weems, was justifiable, since each characters were shown to be duly rewarded for their virtue or punished for their vice. In deference to the prevailing Christian attitude toward fiction, these tracts were marketed as non-fictional “true tales” despite being products of Weems’ imagination; for Weems “truth” had an unconventional meaning. Though critics feared that he was polluting the faith and dragging culture down to the lowest common denominator, Weems had invented a genre that had the ability to successfully compete with the much-despised novel. The gospel was spread, the readers were entertained, and money was made.

At a time when entertainment itself the was the subject of much religious controversy, Weems was willing to use entertaining cultural mediums and forms that many considered vulgar to carry his moral message. As R. Laurence Moore points out in Selling God, the success of Weems’ moral sensationalist tracts “convinced many American religious leaders to pay attention to popular taste as reflected in consumer choices.” Tract societies began publishing their own “true narratives”, some rife with sex and violence, some telling adventurous stories of brave Christians captured by Indians, but always bearing moral messages; these became the most popular form of religious literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. Moore argues that these true tales contributed at this time to changes in the cultural practice of reading itself, “People learned to read through a book quickly, less to savor its story or to pore over its wisdom again and again [as with a bible] than to get done with it”, thus feeding addictive buying habits and laying the groundwork for today’s consumer culture. This continued as through the 1800s clerics gradually eased their opposition to fiction and some started writing their own; if people were going to read novels anyway, Christian ministers might as well provide them with novels that promoted virtuous living.