The Puritan Work Ethic, Paradise Lost, and the Price of Progress
You can’t walk down the aisle of the grocery store without the words “new and improved!” jumping out at you from one product or twenty (see fig. 6).
There’s hardly a sport or a team that doesn’t honor the player who is most improved. The home improvement retail industry in the US brings in over $500 billion per year.1 Across America, government entities, organizations, and committees devote themselves to neighborhood improvement projects. And the already gargantuan category of self-help books (a genre in previous centuries referred to as “improving literature”) continues to grow steadily each year.2
Improvement is good! It’s also such a ubiquitous idea that it can be difficult to distinguish real, good advances from clever marketing and feel-goodism.
Evangelicals are not immune to improvement fever. Not by a long shot. “Christian living,” as it’s called in the publishing industry, is big business. So, too, are the Christian conferences, Instagram accounts, TikToks, Bible studies, marriage manuals, television shows, workshops, classes, and webinars that promise to bring improvement to whatever area of life in which you need it—and plenty of areas where you don’t.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favor of Christian living! And improvement in general. Who isn’t?
Christians especially believe in improvement. After all, the Christian life doesn’t end with conversion. Being born again begins a new life, one that ought to be marked by ongoing growth and maturity, a diet of meat rather than milk, increasing Christlikeness and the ongoing display of the fruit of the Spirit. The Christian is to “improve,” in a way, of course. But there’s a reason this process in the Christian life is more accurately called by another name: sanctification. Sanctification—literally, the process of becoming holy—is a religious, not a consumerist, experience.
The steady beat to improve, improve, improve resounds loudly everywhere. It’s nearly impossible to imagine a world in which improvement isn’t valued for its own sake, as a constant, never-ending pursuit.
Yet, improvement wasn’t always assumed to be something we should constantly be pursuing like hamsters on the wheel. The fact is that the idea of improvement is, well, new. That is, it’s new relative to all of human history. Improvement might even be considered one of the key characteristics that makes the modern age modern, a fact echoed in the familiar phrase “modern progress” (although, as we will see, improvement and progress aren’t exactly the same). Like most things that characterize modernity, the idea of improvement is part of the evangelical social imaginary.
Like the evangelical movement itself, the notion of improvement began in England. According to Paul Slack in The Invention of Improvement, the word appeared there in the early sixteenth century, right around the time of the Reformation. It was first used in the context of making land more profitable through improvements, and it had no exact synonym in other European languages at the time. Unlike existing words such as “reformation” and “revolution,” “improvement” suggested “gradual, piecemeal, but cumulative betterment” rather than a change that was sudden or dramatic.3 Eventually, the word was applied metaphorically to betterment in other areas of life and society until its meaning gradually broadened into the many contexts in which it is used today.4
Because the concept of improvement developed in England, it became “one of the things which made the English different from everyone else.”5 The end of the seventeenth century is often considered the beginning of the “great age of improvement,” and by the early eighteenth century,
improvement was more than an everyday idiom of expression; it was a word essential to political discussion of national affairs and an integral part of English culture. It privileged certain kinds of public and private behaviour above others, encouraging innovative, industrious, and in every sense profitable activities, while discouraging their opposites. It sustained a story about England’s progress and helped to bring it into being.6
Improvement became a distinctive component of the English social imaginary,7 and, eventually, by extension, the early American social imaginary—and evangelicalism itself.
The idea of improvement included a number of accompanying activities and contexts that made articulation of the concept possible. These included “the use of calculation and measurement as instruments of understanding and control” within what was quickly becoming an “information-rich” culture. Measurement itself, and the increased reliance on it, produced the idea of progress (now that it could be measured) and the “conviction that moral and material progress” were both possible and desirable.8 Indeed, like the sound of a tree falling in a forest, improvement wasn’t really improvement if no one recognized it as such. Rather, improvement as a concept “depended on knowledge that it was happening.”9
Perhaps no monument to such knowledge—knowledge that improvement was indeed happening—serves as a better symbol than the Crystal Palace, a gargantuan edifice of steel and glass of nearly one million square feet that held England’s Great Exhibition in 1851. Essentially the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition showcased tens of thousands of objects, inventions, and technological improvements from thousands of contributors from around the world. When the event ended, the massive Crystal Palace—a miracle of technology and design, the crown jewel of the industrial revolution—was dismantled and reassembled in South London, where it was destroyed by fire less than a century later, proving Shakespeare’s wisdom true: “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”10
The Price of Progress
Improvement requires a willingness to break from tradition and the past, which is part of the idea of progress.11 This posture is not unrelated to evangelicalism’s emphasis on conversion as a sudden turning or break from the past. Conversion is, after all, the ultimate improvement.
Progress, while connected to the idea of improvement, differs from it. The concept of progress gained traction after improvement did, arising in the eighteenth century and manifesting in a number of ways. As with improvement, “people have not always thought that progress was a fact.”12 Progress—the belief that history is “moving inexorably toward a more peaceful, intelligent, and commodious life” for humankind—is a product of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, one widely embraced by the start of the eighteenth century. Once such a notion gained widespread acceptance, it became “self-generating,” cultivating “rising expectations” of ongoing improvements across societies.13
Yet not everyone was so hopeful about the human condition. Traditional thinkers and radicals alike contested the idea of true human progress.
Throughout his body of work, for example, famous English satirist Jonathan Swift roundly mocks the idea that human beings can “progress” in any meaningful way. For Swift, the notion that “moderns” are better or even could be better than the “ancients” is rooted in the deadly sin of pride. In many of his works, but most directly and devastatingly in Gulliver’s Travels, Swift casts aspersions on excessive pride in human progress and its byproducts: projects, methods, experiments, inventions, and any science that dehumanizes. It’s notable that Swift was an Anglican clergyman through and through—grounded in orthodox theology and church tradition. He predicted (and satirized) the sort of individualized religious experience that evangelicalism birthed as “enthusiasm”—defined by his contemporary Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of the English Language as “a vain belief of private revelation.”14 (During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critics would more and more associate “enthusiasm” with evangelicals.)
Another prominent critic of progress in the eighteenth century was painter William Hogarth, who satirized the notion of progress through several series of paintings using that term ironically, including A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress, which depicted the decline (not improvement) of the two subjects (see fig. 7). Hogarth’s paintings offered harsh social critiques of the conditions that would facilitate the fall of a young woman of poverty and a young man of means into moral decay.
Swift and Hogarth were not so much against progress as a possibility but rather against the assumption that the human condition could change, let alone improve. A more radical opposition to belief in progress came in the nineteenth century, most notably from Romantic poet-philosophers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley (and numerous others). The Romantics rightly understood that there could be no progress based on reason alone. They knew that our full humanity encompassed not just our rational nature but our emotional, imaginative, and spiritual nature too. Any moral calculus based on reason alone leads inevitably to inhumanity—whether that of the “new and improved” efficiency of the guillotine, the free labor of the slave trade, or the “final solution” of the concentration camp.
Somewhere between the two anti-rationalist camps—the traditional Anglicanism of Swift and radical Romanticism of Shelley—the first evangelicals landed.
Evangelicalism was (and is) inherently not conservative, not traditional, but rather innovative and therefore progressive (in a social and cultural sense, not necessarily politically or theologically). Recall the definition of evangelicalism given by John Stackhouse in chapter 1: evangelicals appropriate from tradition selectively and innovate as necessary in order to fulfill their mission.
Similarly, the founding of America was an exercise in newly emerging concepts of liberty, democracy, and self-rule—a “new and improved” version of government and nationhood. The American Dream itself is a vision of successive, generational improvement; its essence is that no matter where you start, you can build a better life, one that will be even better for your children and their children.
One of the most famous advocates of self-improvement in nineteenth-century America was Horatio Alger, author of numerous juvenile novels (precursors to today’s young adult genre). Alger’s stories typically depicted impoverished boys who improved their material conditions through pluck and virtues of character that usually led to the notice and support of wealthy patrons, who gave the boys a leg up in the world. The most famous of these novels is Ragged Dick. Published in 1868 after being printed serially, Ragged Dick exemplifies the pattern of Alger’s stories by portraying a young ruffian with enough good qualities to eventually achieve financial and social improvement. Alger was one of the key promoters of a dominant metaphor of America’s Gilded Age (the last decades of the nineteenth century, so called for ushering in an explosion of wealth and prosperity). That metaphor, one that persists today, attributes material success to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.15 Martin Luther King Jr. famously pointed out later that “it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”16
But there is another reason, besides King’s pointed critique, to question Alger’s vision for self-improvement. In 1866, Alger, who was an ordained Unitarian minister, was expelled from the ministry for sexual abuse of boys. These abuses were documented at the time but not widely known until a century later.17
There are times when a message should be rightly understood apart from the messenger. But sometimes the agenda in the message cannot be separated from that of the messenger. Horatio Alger’s work is an example of the latter.
To understand improvement as a concept, value, or underlying assumption that is specifically modern (and not universal) can lead to other important understandings. To be able to imagine a world in which improvement as a concept isn’t part of the shared imagination helps us to see both the advantages and the limits of a world driven by an impulse toward constant betterment.
In his foundational book Understanding Media, twentieth-century communications theorist Marshall McLuhan observes that when a new technology is developed, we tend to consider only what we gain from that technology while overlooking what we lose. It’s easy to see, for example, what we gained with the invention of the automobile but to forget about what we lose in a society in which we spend so much time zipping over the land sealed up in metal and glass rather than walking or riding on horseback at a slower pace. Considering what is lost is not to say that the new technology doesn’t give more than it takes. But acknowledging that there are losses gives us a healthier, fuller account of reality as a whole and of the particularities of our own social imaginary, one in which certain ideas that encourage improvement are a given and other ideas are diminished. Improvement can be an improvement—but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t entail some loss.
“Improvements” not only alter how we relate to the world but also change the very meaning of the world and our lives in it. Martin Luther King Jr. offers a sober assessment of this aspect of modern life in our spiritual lives:
Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that suggestive phrase of Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.”18
As the idea of improvement grew in the eighteenth century, so too did the “idea of national improvement,”19 which brought with it the assumption that material progress will bring only benefits and incur no losses. “That’s the price of progress,” we often hear. We don’t nearly as often ask what exactly that price is.
There’s a poignant scene in Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story) by Daniel Nayeri in which he tells the story of moving to Oklahoma as a young boy from his native Iran. Daniel recalls taking a field trip with his class at school to see a museum—a house that was ninety-eight years old. “So every ninety-eight years, people move out of their houses and turn them into museums?” Daniel asks, incredulously. His own grandfather’s home back in Iran is six hundred years old.20
One price that can be exacted is that some kinds of improvement require disposing of the old in favor of the new. What is disposed of includes material goods: whether old flooring or outdated fashion. It includes the intangibles too: leaving one job to take a better one or leaving a church for another down the road. Sometimes, of course, these are necessary and good decisions! But as the illustration from Nayeri’s book shows, what is “old” and what is still perfectly fine is largely culturally determined. That cultural determination also includes the level of quality we expect—and are willing to pay for. The level of waste we routinely produce is telling. According to the EPA, the amount of waste generated in 1960 was 2.68 pounds per person per day. In 2018, it was 4.9 pounds.21 Clothing generated from today’s fast fashion is one major source of the world’s garbage. Many of us (myself included) assuage our guilt about buying new, improved clothes by donating our old ones. But clothing donations—especially of poor-quality items—have increased so much that underdeveloped nations are begging richer countries to stop sending our throwaways to them. Not surprisingly, the US is the biggest source of used clothing, exporting an average of $662 million each year, constituting 40 percent of exports from within the top three exporters of worn clothing.22 One quick search will bring countless news reports filled with images from nations across the world covered with mountains of discarded clothing that is unwearable, unburnable, and unusable. The problem has been described as “an environmental disaster.”23
New and improved, indeed.
How the Reformation Brought About Improvement
While, as we’ve seen, the word “improvement” emerged within a particular context in England, the idea captured by the word is much older, broader, and deeper.
Improvement began as an effort connected to society as a whole, to the civilization that results from civility. The medieval codes of courtesy, which applied only to those in and around the court (hence the word), grew into an ideal that expanded into the broader population, Charles Taylor explains in A Secular Age.24 In Taylor’s account, this ideal of civility, which emphasizes individual will (to be civil, or to show manners, requires intention; it does not occur naturally), undergirds the entire shift from the premodern to the modern age. Taylor describes the shift as “a stance of reconstruction toward ourselves,” a posture that stresses “modes of discipline,” programs, “methods,” and “procedures” directed toward “self-fashioning”25 that lead to peaceful, rational collaboration for everyone’s mutual benefit.26
In a chapter of A Secular Age titled “The Rise of the Disciplinary Society” (the chapter’s title is helpfully descriptive), Taylor describes how the Renaissance ideal of civility combined with the Reformation’s emphasis on piety to create a social and cultural transformation in which improvement, achieved through discipline, “came to be seen as a duty for itself.”27 First a duty, then an assumption. Once improvement (and, later, self-improvement) had become an assumed good, it became part of the social imaginary. One would hardly think to even question whether or not improvement is good. It now goes without saying within certain social imaginaries.
Before the concept of improvement as a universal and assumed good had taken hold, moralists had actually “condemned luxury and the pursuit of profit and material comfort.”28 But the value of the leisure and rest required for the contemplative monastic life was replaced by the value of work (and restlessness) reflected in the Puritan work ethic. For the Reformers, work was a form of works, and clearly not a means of salvation. However, the success of one’s work (namely, the improvement and progress that result from it) could be seen as evidence of one’s election.29 The changes that both led to and followed from the Protestant Reformation were those applied first to systems, structures, and institutions, then to individuals in the form of self-improvement.
The way in which the theology of the Reformers led to the idea of improvement manifests in several ways. In The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, Max Weber argues that first Protestant, then Puritan, theology led to a rational, utilitarian, and individualistic approach to life and work that replaced the older enchanted and communal view of life and work.30
Weber paints this contrast vividly by comparing the closing scenes of two central works of Christian literature. Dante’s medieval Catholic masterpiece The Divine Comedy ends with the poet-sojourner absorbed by the ineffable mystery of the divine presence (see fig. 17). Centuries later, following the Reformation, the Puritan John Milton closes his epic poem Paradise Lost with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. The pair, having been instructed by the angel Michael to add to the knowledge they gained by ill means the honest gains of good deeds and virtues, join hands and head out into the wide world that lies before them. The contrast between these two works—the first quintessentially Catholic, the second purely Protestant—reveals seismic shifts, not only in theological doctrine but in competing images of human telos: to ponder (Dante) or to improve (Milton). This contrast reflects an age-old debate between the superiority of the contemplative life versus the active life. Remarking on the closing of Paradise Lost, Weber writes, “Anyone can sense immediately that this mightiest expression of earnest Protestant worldliness, that is, valuing life as a task to be accomplished, would have been impossible in the mouth of a medieval writer.”31
Two centuries after Milton, John Henry Newman would echo the ending of Paradise Lost when he preached a sermon in which he began with the question, “Why were you sent into the world?” and answered it with, essentially, “To work.”32
Please Be Courteous
Bodies of imaginative literature over the centuries have expressed, embodied, and encouraged the idea of improvement on a societal and personal level, primarily through work.
Long before the Reformation, and the more general spirit of reform that accompanied it, a genre known as “courtesy literature” arose during the medieval period. These works taught readers, mainly of the aristocratic class, the manners expected of people in and around the court.
After the Reformation, when literacy, social mobility, and religious piety grew, courtesy literature was replaced by conduct literature. Conduct books, which were particularly popular in the seventeenth century, conveyed instruction not only in manners but also in behavior, morals, and religion. Reading itself became a primary means of improvement, one advocated by conduct books. One of the most famous and influential of these works, for example, Thomas Gisborne’s 1787 An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, lists among the “duties” of “every woman, whether single or married, the habit of regularly allotting to improving books a portion of each day.”33
Both courtesy books and conduct books are the direct forerunners to the etiquette books that became popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the sort that instruct readers on how to set a table or address wedding invitations and so on. All of these works presuppose the possibility of upward social mobility, because people who were born into families that already possessed these manners didn’t need to read such instruction manuals. Such manners and traditions were handed down. (The Latin root word from which we get the word “tradition” means “hand.” Thus, traditions are “handed down.”) Conduct literature emerged from a newly emerging assumption that sufficient knowledge of proper conduct and manners would not be handed down from within the family of one’s origin because one had attained (or was hoping to attain) a higher social status than that of one’s birth. The attainment of such improvement had become possible to achieve, if not by birth then by one’s own effort.
The first novels were, in many respects, conduct books—instructions for better living—made more interesting by being in the guise of lively tales. What was novel about the novel was that it combined instruction and delight in a revolutionary (or, at least, improving) way. It is one of the great ironies of literary history that the Puritans, who were generally suspicious of fiction, played a significant part in developing the genre of the novel. While Puritans and evangelicals in the Puritan strain objected to earlier forms of fiction—drama, tales, romances, and stories of adventure—early novels demonstrated the possibilities for redeeming fiction. In both form and content, long prose narratives had the capacity to replicate the ongoing sanctification that occurs in a person’s life journey. Drawing on the forms of Puritan spiritual autobiography as well as allegory such as The Pilgrim’s Progress, the novel form combined personal introspection with the age-old symbol of the spiritual quest or journey into a long personal narrative, a unique but relatable story.
And it was another Puritan writer by the name of Daniel Defoe who, half a century after The Pilgrim’s Progress, helped turn serious conduct literature into a form that would become the novel. Defoe was a prolific journalist and writer, producing hundreds of publications, including pamphlets, political treatises, and fictional works that served as precursors to the novel. His most famous of these are Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). For almost two centuries, Robinson Crusoe was, along with The Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the most popular and influential works ever printed (after the Bible).
The novel as a literary form developed around a more subjective point of view, one that in its subjectivity offered an inherent search for a meaning that was no longer merely a given—which is the essential quality that defines the modern age. Such a search gave shape to the narrative of the novel itself, unifying, particularizing, and relativizing it in a way that, paradoxically, lent it an indirect universality. In other words, to encounter a fictional character like Moll Flanders—a child born in prison who grew up to be a prostitute and thief before undergoing a dramatic conversion to Christian faith—a character so very likely to be unlike anyone reading the account, offers the opportunity to see what in Moll is similar to oneself. To witness Moll’s “improvement” is a sideways lesson in how to improve oneself. If one so bad as she could undergo such radical transformation, why couldn’t I?
It helped that Defoe had political and theological street cred with conservative readers, including evangelicals. When Queen Anne ascended the throne in 1702, religious Dissenters such as Defoe (who was a Calvinist Presbyterian) were targeted for persecution. Before writing his famous works of fiction, Defoe published a scathing satire on the oppression of religious freedom; he was arrested, tried, and convicted of seditious libel and sent to prison after spending three days in the pillory.
Although sometimes referred to as novels, Defoe’s fictional works are, for a number of reasons, generally considered precursors to the novel. Combining genres such as journalism, narrative, and spiritual autobiography in these works, Defoe made significant contributions to developments in fiction that reflected specifically modern concerns. One of these is the Puritan (or Protestant) work ethic. Defoe’s characters improve by their own diligent efforts, as is befitting good Puritans.
It was a couple of decades later, in 1740, that Samuel Richardson published the groundbreaking Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, which we considered in a previous chapter. Drawing heavily from the popular genre of conduct books, Pamela is presented as a series of letters (followed by a journal) written by a poor, virtuous servant girl to her equally poor and virtuous parents about her troubles being pursued by her wealthy master. Pamela resists—through very hard work and strenuous effort—various temptations and attacks from her employer, and she wins him, not only to marriage (which occurs two-thirds of the way into the plot) but even more importantly to Christian repentance and sanctification.
What Pamela shares in common with The Pilgrim’s Progress and Defoe’s fiction—and with many novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—is the depiction of gradual improvement over sudden conversion. Such improvement in early novels and their precursors often features an individual in oppressive circumstances laboring through individual will and determination against various social systems and structures to achieve progress. As the genre of the novel developed, novels increasingly took into view not merely the rise of the individual but the improvement of society as a whole. This circle of improvement—the way in which individuals who improve help bring about social improvement and vice versa—is reflected through the history of the concept. It’s reflective, too, of the dance that takes place throughout evangelicalism between the role of the individual and the community, the believer and the church, saving personal faith and the great cloud of witnesses. Conversion, sanctification, and perseverance are the true forms—and the modern, secular idea of improvement but a metaphor of those forms. And whether we are talking about improvement or sanctification, the notion that either can be achieved by individual will alone, apart from community, is a myth.
Methods of Improvement
Like improvement, the phenomenon of “methods” was newly emerging in the eighteenth century. When the Wesley brothers formed their Holy Club at Oxford, a systematic approach to spending time each day in continual prayer and devotion, they were mockingly jeered by their critics as “methodists” because of these methodical practices. This derisive nickname, as already mentioned, is the origin of the eventual name of what became the Methodist denomination. Weber observes that this pejorative term indicates just how new and odd such a devotional life—what would become the normal aspiration for evangelicals—was at the time. While pre-Reformation Christians tried to perform good works and “traditional duties conscientiously,” Protestants and the later evangelicals viewed good works as evidence of sanctification. Thus, Weber explains, “the ethical practice of ordinary people was divested of its random and unsystematic nature and built up into a consistent method for the whole conduct of one’s life.”34
Evangelical history, from its start to the present, is filled with examples of those who saw improvement (their own and others’) as the outgrowth of their faith.
For example, one of the most famous evangelicals of the eighteenth century, William Wilberforce, stepped into a context in which a vision of social and moral improvement was emerging. A few years after his conversion, he wrote these famous words in his journal in 1787: “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”35 Wilberforce, along with many of his evangelical peers, did indeed succeed toward both these ends. To think of the abolition of the slave trade as an effort at “improvement” may seem odd, but it works on two accounts. First, until improvement across all of society was imaginable, it would not be attempted, let alone accomplished. Once improvement of various dramatic kinds (including social, personal, and moral) became imaginable, it became possible. Second, as significant as abolition was, by no means did it end human trafficking, racism, or oppression. It was something, but not everything, as our continued struggles in these matters prove. It was an improvement.
Other efforts at social and self-improvement marked the years leading to and through the nineteenth century. Wilberforce’s friend Hannah More embodied in one person many of the efforts of the age. She wrote conduct books for the poor and the wealthy. She wrote a bestselling novel aimed at the middle class, a story filled with lessons about education, marriage, and family. She published poetry, drama, antirevolutionary essays, and devotionals. In addition to voluminous writing, she opened Sunday schools throughout southwest England where the children of the laboring classes were catechized, taught to read, and instructed in skills that would help them find better work. The work of More, Wilberforce, and their like-minded friends was rooted in the evangelical ethos of activism, specifically oriented toward moral and social improvement. Courtesy literature, conduct books, and works like More’s aimed at moral reform had in common a social concern. The improved manners and morals these works aimed to teach individuals would help improve society.
One can always count on Charles Dickens to offer the voice of conscientious objection to the whole ethos of his age. “Improvement” was no exception. In Bleak House, Dickens portrays Mrs. Pardiggle as a satirical picture of an evangelical do-gooder whose good deeds are done in a spirit of cruelty and condescension. Mrs. Pardiggle moralizes and reads the Bible to the poor people she visits, for example, but does nothing to alleviate their material distress. She forces her five children to devote themselves to her charitable causes, denying them joy or fun. All this is offered in the name of social improvement. Nevertheless, despite Dickens’s satirical jab at such wrongheaded efforts, probably no other writer did more than him to effect real social improvements across society in the nineteenth century, particularly for children, criminals, and the poor.
The Rise of Self-Help
A new version of improvement literature that emerged in the nineteenth century centered on personal improvement: the self-help book. The first work of this kind was titled, appropriately, Self Help, published by Samuel Smiles in 1859.
“Heaven helps those who help themselves,” declares the book’s opening, a line that would become so famous that some would come to think it was the word of Scripture itself. Smiles continues, “The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.”36 And it is entirely toward the individual—largely apart from institutions and community—that the book is focused. In his preface to the later 1866 edition, Smiles explains that the object of the book “is to stimulate youths to apply themselves diligently to right pursuits,—sparing neither labour, pains, nor self-denial in prosecuting them,—and to rely upon their own efforts in life, rather than depend upon the help or patronage of others.”37 Smiles claims,
Even the best institutions can give a man no active help. Perhaps the most they can do is, to leave him free to develop himself and improve his individual condition. But in all times men have been prone to believe that their happiness and well-being were to be secured by means of institutions rather than by their own conduct.38
Most of what follows consists of inspiring vignettes of almost entirely European men, whether greatly or lesser known, throughout history who demonstrated Smiles’s vision of self-improvement. His vast array of exemplary people shows, he writes, that “great men” come from “no exclusive class nor rank in life.” Rather, greatness is achievable by anyone who sets their mind to it. Even the greatest difficulties, in Smiles’s rendering, become the “best helpers” by creating “powers of labour and endurance, stimulating into life faculties which might otherwise have lain dormant.”39 For Smiles, improvement and even greatness are merely matters of individual will—not birth, circumstance, opportunity, or social structures.
The same economic and other variables that made social mobility possible for the first time in human history made improvement in general—whether on a large or small scale—more appealing and attainable. Everyone wanted to emulate the lives of those in the superior ranks.
To have wealth was to be respectable,40 but most people weren’t born with it. In contrast, improvement was an egalitarian value. Anyone could improve from any starting point. Idleness, for example, was denounced among the rich and the poor. As Benjamin Franklin famously advised, “Time is money.” Frugality could be practiced by both the haves and the have-nots. The “way to wealth, if you so desire it,” Franklin urged, “is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality. Waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both.”41 In a letter Franklin wrote to his grandson, who was away at school, Franklin remarked that there are “two sorts of people”:
One who are well dress’d, live comfortably in Good Houses, whose Conversation is sensible and instructive, and who are Respected for their Virtue. The other Sort are poor, and dirty, and ragged and ignorant, and vicious, & live in miserable Cabbins or Garrets, on Coarse Provisions, which they must work hard to obtain, or which if they are idle, they must go without or Starve.42
Franklin went on to urge his grandson “to make good use of every moment” so as to become one of the better, rather than the “other sort.” This ideal of the good house possessed by the supposedly better sort is captured in a 1789 painting by British painter George Morland, titled Fruits of Early Industry and Economy (see fig. 8).
Thus, the new virtue of duty, an obligation anyone could fulfill regardless of rank, replaced the old code of honor.43 While gentility was a status granted only by birth, more and more the ability to be a “gentleman” or a “gentlewoman” evolved into a matter of character and manner rather than inherited class. John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University included a lengthy passage redefining the gentleman as someone who gives ease and comfort to others.44 While having material and economic means is one of the easiest ways to provide ease and comfort to others, good manners (which are free but must be acquired) can too. By emulating the wealthy, anyone could try to gain respectability in this way. On the other hand, the failure of anyone to succeed could then be attributed to poor character. This idea became common and is expressed by the fictional character John Thornton, a manufacturer in Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South who blames the misery of the poor workers in his industrial town on themselves:
I believe that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is impressed on the countenances of the people of Milton, is but the natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure, at some former period of their lives. I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character.45
Not surprisingly, then, the signs of respectability—which overlapped greatly with the signs of success—became increasingly important. Wealth was one. But so, too, were the signs of wealth: conspicuous consumption and the display of that consumption. Keeping up appearances, so to speak. As we will see in a later chapter, Victorian architecture, decor, and clothing were characterized by excess, ornamentation, and abundance—improvement made manifest (see fig. 9). To the extent to which evangelicalism today is a commercial religion (and there is ample evidence that commercialism has been profoundly formative in the movement’s identity, growth, and direction46), that commercial spirit took hold in the Victorian era, a period commonly called “the age of progress.”
This appropriation of the signs of upper-class society by evangelicalism was paradoxical given that much about the lifestyle of the envied aristocratic class opposed evangelical practices and values. In fact, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicals aimed many of their reform efforts specifically toward the upper classes because reform of them would have the additional effect of setting an example for everyone else.
Evangelicals’ emphasis on improvement (and that of the larger Enlightenment worldview) eventually held considerable sway. “It is not surprising,” observes one historian, “that the early Victorian middle classes, seeking a code of behavior which would suit their professional needs and ambitions, eagerly espoused the model provided by the evangelicals.”47 By the middle of the Victorian age and beyond, self-improvement, especially economic self-improvement, had come to be regarded not merely as an aspiration but as a social duty: “To do the best for yourself was to do the best for society.”48 Art critic John Ruskin, who had deconverted from his earlier evangelical faith, advised, “See that no day passes in which you do not make yourself a somewhat better creature.”49 Today’s hashtaggable idea of personal growth and improvement has a long history.
Evangelicalism’s infatuation with secular notions of social progress and self-improvement is marked throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While evangelicals initially opposed nineteenth-century movements that emphasized the possibility that human effort could bring physical healing, mind cures, victory over sin—movements such as New Thought, the Keswick movement, and the Victorious Life—the influence of these popular teachings could not be entirely stemmed: therapeutic culture snaked its way into evangelicalism. Nineteenth-century revivalists such as D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday were among those whose teachings blended evangelicalism with notions of social progress and transformation through personal purity and piety.50 In the twentieth century, spurred significantly by the popularity of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, the self-help ethos became “a fully entrenched part of American life.”51
As religion became increasingly a private experience, and as the modern age became increasingly oriented toward individualism, “even evangelicals were integrating psychological concepts of self-worth into evangelicalism.” Jesus became “the friend who helps us find happiness and self-improvement.”52 God became not merely omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent—but he became these things for the benefit of each individual—a kind of personal therapist, benefactor, and ever-present friend.53 Therapeutic evangelicalism exists so you can “become a better you.”54 Eventually, it leads to a sense of saving yourself. Or being saved by improvement, a notion Flannery O’Connor skewers with a line delivered in earnest by the antihero of her novel Wise Blood: “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”55
A recent glance at the bestsellers in Christian self-help books on Amazon showed Peale’s book in first place, followed by books on topics such as boundaries, anxiety, hurry, self-discovery, washing your face, and becoming untamed. There’s always room for improvement, I guess.
Evangelical culture is so steeped today in the self-improvement waters that it hardly needs to be stated. But it should also be pointed out that this is the ethos of our age in general. Evangelicals and ex-vangelicals alike seem unable to resist the lure of selling Substack subscriptions, online courses, and personal coaching opportunities56 as a way to improve by being more (or less) evangelical, more (or less) Christian, and less (or more) something else. In such a culture, even in the church, it can be difficult to distinguish conversion from self-help, spiritual growth from worldly success, sanctification from self-improvement.
But the converted person isn’t merely “new and improved.” She is a new creature.