Print Media
The second point about the uncontrollable quality of private reading is even more complex as it is tied inextricably to the larger issue of religious publishing in America. The Protestant clergy generally had to assume that believers deviated from their intended reading practices. In Faith in Reading (2004), David Paul Nord examines the reports about reading habits
of laity compiled by colporteurs, traveling professors of faith peddling Bibles and other publications in the name of the great mission of morally reforming America. These reports illustrate the discrepancies between prescribed and practiced reading habits amongst America’s faithful. Organizations such as the American Tract Society advocated “intensity” as the only reading style for their materials; as such, careful reading came to be equated with virtue while cursory reading was associated with vice (Nord 148). However, the clergy was very specific as to what kind of intense reading efforts they condoned: “Religious tracts often dismissed skeptical arguments out of hand and considered freethinking a shallow attempt to rationalize vice” (Grasso 485). For instance, in his Lectures on Skepticism (1839), Lyman Beecher argued that skeptics overestimate their own reason in following misguided German critics (Grasso 486). These reactions show that fear that the reach of irreligious ideas would reach and corrupt the American people en masse was real, even if the actual numbers of infidel conversions were limited. What is beyond question is the fact that skeptical works were broadly accessible and could potentially be digested by a rather broad audience literate in a variety of rather specialized religious discourses. Commenting on reading habits in the nineteenth-century as promoted by the evangelical press, Gunther Brown stresses the ability of mid-century religious readers to move “between older and newer genres, steady sellers and recently popular titles, intensive and extensive reading styles, and evangelical and nonevangelical textual communities” while maintaining a sense of writing and reading as sacred processes (138).29 Hall, Nord, and Gunther Brown all emphasize that the clergy’s control over reading habits was never absolute and at best embattled even if readers did not always confront them face on like the deists.
29 The arguments for eclectic readings by non-expert audiences I assemble, ultimately, serve to disprove
Wright’s hypothesis that Natalia Wright cautions that when considering Melville's use of the Bible, one should assume “[. . .] a background of middle-class morality rather than of religion, and to disengage the elements of the Biblical, the Calvinistic, and the socially conventional which composed it would hardly be possible” (5).
Despite the orthodox lamentations, the kind of skepticism American Christianity faced down in the first half of the nineteenth century was not the result of a political cabal or natural depravity but rather grew from the seed of Protestant thinking. Programmatic versions of skepticism, such as deism, were symptoms of a fever that Protestantism had contracted from its proclivity to tap into new intellectual currents in discourses it no longer fully controlled.
Intellectuals, Grasso explains, “struggled with religious doubt not because they were naturally exercising their reflective reason [. . .], but because they had imbibed styles of Protestant philosophical and scientific thought without understanding their limitation” (503). Sanctifying reason had been part of the Protestant rhetoric in one form or another since the Reformation, and marking rational faculties as inherent became part of the Protestant program in the eighteenth century in an effort to modernize the foundations of faith. What skeptics lacked, from the
perspective of orthodox theologians, was a sense of propriety as to how far they could push their investigations. As such, charges of infidelity or atheism frequently were misnomers for the qualitatively different charges of impropriety and academic zeal. The problem was that using reason for exegetical purposes became increasingly difficult to distinguish from the impulse of free inquiry, an impulse that was galvanized by the atmosphere of the American Revolution and its rhetoric of personal freedom.30
Particularly liberal brands of Protestantism, such as Unitarianism, picked up the gauntlet thrown down by deists and higher critics to developed original theologies of their own. Cities were not only centers of technology and industry but also presented spaces in which religious debates were at their most direct and volatile. It is therefore unsurprising that ventures such as the evangelical religious press launched from places such as New York City. Here,
30 Orestes Brownson, indeed, is quite consistent here: after his conversion to Catholicism he traced back the
confrontations with so-called infidels were magnified. To religious organizations like the religious press, the city functioned as an echo chamber whose resonances fed the narrative of fears about the state of American faith. This fear galvanized the missionizing effort because, in the ongoing march towards the millennium, every soul counted. Groups such as the American Tract Society, the Bible Society and the Sunday School Union still worked towards the
Protestant ideal of a “universal priesthood,” as both clergy and laity “mediate between the sacred Word and the profane world” (Gunther Brown 169). Unlike the old New England Calvinists, evangelicals, Gunther Brown cautions, were not concerned with consolidating political power (19). Paul Gutjahr emphasizes the centrality of this development for how the Bible was
perceived in the minds of Americans by arguing that “With the emergence of the American Bible Society in 1816, the United States had come into its own in the area of bible production, making it for more difficult for foreign publishers to make a profit by importing and selling their bibles in America” (7). American publishers began to push back against foreign control, particularly British, of its literary market place and simultaneously began to cultivate its own printing technologies and logistical structures. Yet publishers’ decision to proselytize by means of new technological and commercial tools created a particular conundrum within the movement: “Evangelicals anxiously acknowledged that their project of going into the world to preach the gospel could be derailed in either of two directions: if they withdrew from the world to maintain purity or if, in their zeal to transform the world, they diluted their distinctive message” (Gunther Brown 20). Earlier, I talked about how the discourse of science and reason, which religious leaders utilized to reconnected Christianity to the changed intellectual sensibilities of their audience, both turned out to be detrimental to precisely these efforts because it could not function within the religious framework without challenging absolutist notions of truth. At the
same time, these influences went both ways, as organizations such as the aforementioned American Tract Society and its partners incidentally also drove technological and logistical progress. Most importantly, however, the studies I mentioned all seem to suggest that
Protestantism’s inclination to appropriate other discourses in order to unify seemingly disparate and fragmented congregation almost consistently compromises Christianity’s textual foundation. With evangelicals, for instance, the publication of hymns was seen as such a unifying agent. Hymns aimed at creating a sense of “unity as members of a timeless placeless church universal” (Gunther Brown 242). To this end, editors freely mutilated and altered hymns, which in turn created controversies.
One little-mentioned fact in the discussion on the spectrum of nineteenth-century religious publishing is that while metropolitan centers such as New York and Boston were headquarters to the religious press, they also housed a variety critical and skeptical organizations and publishers. What is noteworthy in this context is that religious leaders perceived the spheres of influence of both religious and irreligious presses to be equal, despite the obvious advantages of the religious press in the areas of funding, organizational structure, and professionalization:
Antebellum urban spaces were particularly conducive for efforts by infidels and partisans of political religion to print, organize, and ultimately mobilize
constituencies that would translate their ideas and beliefs into public action.
Evangelical reformers surpassed free enquirers on all of these fronts, but such success did little to alter an asymmetry of perception that endowed political religion and political irreligion with nearly limitless reach in the imagination of their opponents. (Schlereth 236, emphasis added)
A paranoid fear of infidel corruption seemingly offset the structural advantages religious institutions had in the arena of publishing and distribution; although evangelicals plainly outspent skeptical counter-offers, they consistently feared annihilation from an impossibly powerful enemy. This paradoxical scenario illustrates just how much Calvinism’s reliance on
rationalism had damaged Protestantism’s reliance in its own argumentative methodology. Hence evangelicalism’s turn to a discourse of the heart must be seen as the attempt to tapping into an uncontaminated argumentative mode. Unitarianism in particular functioned as a theological catalyst for new literary modes, particularly in the urban spaces of Boston and New York. In his account of Melville’s connection to the New York Unitarians, Donald Kring traces Melville’s first exposure to heterodox religious thinking to Ellery Channing’s time as a minister in New York during Melville’s youth (8). “It is perhaps portentous to the fate of American literature,” Kring speculates, “that Unitarianism gained its roots in New York City the very year that Herman Melville was born” (9). In 1819, the year of Melville’s birth, Channing had taken a stand for the liberal faction within American religion by delivering his sermon on “Unitarian Christianity.” In it, he laid out, among other things, the view that “First and foremost, the Bible was rightly to be seen as a record of ‘God’s successive revelations to man’; each successive revelation marked a new stage of progress from the “childhood of the human race’” (qtd. in Brown 62). Following his encounter with higher criticism, Channing did not see the Bible as supernaturally inspired and thus came to the position skeptics had occupied for over a hundred years, namely that it could be interpreted by the same methods applicable to any ancient text.
Like evangelical publishing, free thinkers and skeptics also ran their own irreligious presses and thus circulated dissenting ideas. These latter publishers injected into the market a variety of controversial European theological tractates and pamphlets. One such publisher was George Washington Matsell of Chatham St., New York (in close proximity to Melville’s friend and patron Evert Duyckinck’s offices). True to the deist method of challenging religion on its own formal terms, Matsell took a page out of the playbook of evangelical publishers and printed a series called the Free Enquirer’s Family Library—a nod to Harper Brothers’ famous Family
Library series (Gunther Brown 75). Matsell’s line-up featured prominent European skeptics, deists, and materialists such as Thomas Paine, Robert Dale Owen, Ethan Allen, and Baron Thiry d’Holbach, but also poets and writers of fiction such as Percy Shelley. Among his publications were Thomas Paine’s famous and influential Age of Reason, Thiry d’Holbach’s System of Nature
(1835), and Ethan Allen’s Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1836). These texts crystalized eighteenth-century continental skeptical philosophy. While little research has been done on Matsell in particular and the irreligious press in general, Matsell’s New York Times obituary acknowledges the publisher’s controversial catalog and thus evinces the impact of his productions on the New York intellectual scene. The editor notes that Matsell “gained
considerable notoriety from the peculiar character of the books and periodicals which he exposed for sale, being chiefly works considered at that time infidel productions [. . .] his store naturally became the rendezvous of the advanced philosophers and free thinkers of the day” (“Death”). Thus Matsell’s offices functioned as a meeting place for that particular segment of New York’s literary scene that existed separately from the national political (like Lewis Clark’s
Knickerbocker or Evert Duyckinck’s numerous Young America magazines) or orthodox religious players. Such comments speak to the figurative and literal role publishing houses played as facilitators of intellectual exchange and shapers of cultural discourses.