4

THE AGENCY OF WORDS

Ask many Protestants what their religion is about and you are likely to hear something about “God’s word”: doing God’s word, hearing God’s word, studying God’s word, sharing God’s word, living God’s word. To be sure, Evangelicals are more inclined to speak this way than are members of the Anglican community or the Quakers. But reading the Bible, reading devotional texts that reflect on the Bible, listening to the Bible read aloud in worship, committing sacred writ to memory, and reciting or declaiming it on important occasions are practices that can be found across the spectrum of Protestant groups. That is in part because, for Protestants, the sound and pronunciation of scriptural texts is a modulation of spiritual reality. Speaking the word of God articulates more than sound. It conveys power and spirit. Spoken, read, or written, the word is a vital medium for Protestants because it gives sound or visual presence to the voice of God.

Many Protestants are fond of rubricated or red-letter Bibles, which print in red all words attributed to the direct discourse of Jesus. Doing so may allow readers to feel more directly the presence of the speaker, particularly when they read or hear aloud the red-lettered words. The inventor of the device, Louis Klopsch, wrote in the preface to The Red Letter Bible, which first appeared in 1899: “Modern Christianity is striving zealously to draw nearer to the great Founder of the Faith. Setting aside mere human doctrines and theories regarding Him, it presses close to the Divine Presence, to gather from His own lips the definition of His mission to the world and His own revelation of the Father.”1 But why would speaking bring one closer to God than would seeing images of the sacred? The answer lies in what we noted in chapter 2 regarding Protestant textuality: the iconicity or transparency of words.

THE SPIRIT OF PRINT

In response to the Reformation’s rejection of devotional images and of the cult of the saints, Catholic polemicists Hieronymous Emser and Johannes Eck each invoked Basil, John of Damascus, and the Second Nicene Council in their respective pamphlets, both issued in 1522.2 Images, Basil had declared, direct whatever the devout utter by way of request or praise straight to the saint himself or herself. The Council of Trent followed suit, reaffirming the 750-year-old doctrine that images of saints should be venerated for their ability to convey all praise and petitions to their celestial prototypes.³ Protestants insisted, to the contrary, that images were of no avail, that only the word of God delivered the saving grace that enabled faith. Intercourse with heaven was limited to receiving the word and responding to its power of grace with prayer and good works. The word of God exerted power in its own right. Rather than compelling people to abandon the Catholic mass, Luther asserted that God’s “word should do the work alone, without our work. Why? Because it is not in my power to fashion the hearts of men as the potter moulds the clay, and to do with them as I please . . . . We must first win the hearts of the people. And that is done when I teach only the Word of God . . . [which] would sink into the heart and perform its work.”⁴ Luther countered Karlstadt’s iconophobia by “attacking the attack on images because I first tore [images] from the heart by means of God’s Word and made them meaningless and despicable, which was happening before Dr. Karlstadt even dreamt of assailing images. For when they are removed from the heart, they can do no evil before the eyes.”⁵

For the Protestant tradition, the word of God, scripture, as conveyed by human discourses of preaching and teaching—but also in ejaculations and invocations associated with healing, exorcism, rituals of baptism and communion, and prayer—is the privileged avenue for transmitting the power of the spirit of God to work in the soul, or heart, as Luther called it, as well as in other theaters of action. One finds this medium commonly in use among Protestants and others around the world today; its emphasis is particularly strong in West Africa, where religious messages and scriptural passages appear on bumper stickers and car windows, broadcasting messages that evangelize other drivers, testify to the owner’s faith, link the driver with a particular social group, and, not uncommonly for Charismatic Protestants, pronounce publicly the divine blessing the owner expects by faith to receive (figure 26).⁶ In figure 26, the scripture verse Exodus 14:14 appears in the rear window of a van in Ghana, prompting anyone unfamiliar with it to look up the text, which is a direct address from God to Moses, but reads, in this context, as a personal message to the reader: “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still.” In the setting of Charismatic Protestantism, where spiritual warfare is a compelling theme, the owner of the van would likely expect the message to be gratefully received.

The display of printed, embroidered, and painted scripture passages is a venerable Protestant practice that is centuries old. Broadsides, hand-stitched samplers, text panels, lithographed house blessings, and printed mottoes have commonly been displayed by Protestants in their homes, schools, churches, mission fields, and places of work.⁷ Such texts have integrated seeing and reading, space and memory, to give words material presence in daily life. Another instance of language as a conductor of spiritual power in the present day was articulated in a short sermon on miracles by the televangelist, Pat Robertson, who began the sermon by saying that the power to invoke miracles requires that one have faith. Robertson proceeded to explain that by faith one enters the presence of God, beholds his glory, and in a state of being born again, is able to communicate directly with the spirit of God, which is then channeled into the world in the medium of speech.8 “Now here’s how it works,” he continued:

The principle of power comes from this. It comes from God, who is the eternal mind. God speaks to his Spirit. The Spirit speaks to your spirit. Your spirit speaks to your mind. Your mind speaks to your mouth. Your mouth speaks to the created universe around you. So you speak to devils. You speak to disease. You speak to poverty. You speak to famine. You speak to storms. You speak in the name of the Lord. But it comes by having the Word of God energized in your mouth. Because you’ve been in His presence and you’ve beheld His glory. You’ve listened to His voice. And you’re speaking the word that He says.

FIGURE 26

“Exodus 14:14,” bumper sticker, Ghana, 2013. Courtesy of Jeff Korum.

Robertson described a chain of transmission that conducts the power of God’s spirit from the pure thought of the divine mind to the phenomenal world along a pathway of speech. Words are the medium of power, spoken to demonic powers and to any condition or circumstance of affliction. Words form a kind of network of translations through which the power of God passes without being lost or diminished.

From Luther to Robertson, we see that the Protestant experience of divine power is invested in speech. But the speech of God’s word needs a matrix to be heard—air, spaces, bodies, images, texts, pages, printing presses—the material networks that Robertson’s explanation begins to unpack. The history of Protestant print culture since the Reformation bears a vital history, one worth scrutiny: this is the history of the enchantment of words as things, as social agencies, as forces that move through bodies and images and books and objects, from the mind of God to the heart of human beings and back again. This is the history of Protestant mediation. Sorting out the complex interweaving of features that comprises this history is the task of this chapter.

An entire apparatus of social circumstances, historical tendencies, and ideological formations have combined over a long period to make sacred print what it is to Evangelical Protestants: a social force doing the work of God at a particular moment in human history. For Evangelicals, the Bible is an object or a medium that acts. It reveals, shows, demonstrates, proves, approves, reproves, denounces, proclaims. The Bible and its shorter iterations such as tracts, psalters, and gospels constitute one book by one author who actively touched the world through the medium of the book’s words. Bibles and tracts are reputed to preach and convert by themselves, even without evangelists or ministers to declaim or interpret them. We are perhaps inclined to miss the fact that such printed works are what anthropologists call “power objects.” But when the Bible or a portion of it reproduced in a tract or sermon is said to speak to, convince, or convert someone, scholars need to hear the depth of the claim: a cultural object is said to act on behalf of an animating spirit, a deity who interfaces with human affairs and shapes the world of events through interaction with this print artifact.

The authority of Holy Writ is the subject of the frontispiece of a 1741 edition of Luther’s translation of the Bible that featured Hebrew and Greek on the facing pages of each testament (figure 27). At the top of the page, light radiates from a triangle containing three Hebrew yods, the letter that begins both the tetragrammaton’s abbreviation (YHWH) of God’s name, Yahweh, and the Hebrew spelling of Jesus’s name; the symbol of three yods was a common convention used by artists and illustrators to refer to the members of the Trinity.9 The use of the Hebrew character is significant since it refers not only to the name of God, but to his speech, the original form of the divine word spoken both at creation and with Moses, and the language from which the German translation of the Old Testament was made. The light rays then pass through portrait medallions of the biblical authors in several groups: six Old Testament figures, from Moses to Solomon on the top level; followed by the four major prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel); twelve minor prophets; the four evangelists; and the four authors of the New Testament epistles. Below them, a group of German Reformers appears around a table: they are Martin Luther’s translation team at Wittenberg, gathered before biblical codices in various languages.¹⁰ In addition to assuring the reliable rendering of God’s Hebrew into Luther’s German, the image is a robust affirmation of the latter-day technology of the printed codex. The biblical authors wrote their texts on rolled papyrus or vellum, not in codex form. Yet in figure 27, the biblical authors each appear in their medallions with their respective codices because these correspond to the biblical codex that the modern translators busily manufacture at their worktable below. The visual continuity of the medium underscores the continuity of the content it conveys.

FIGURE 27

J. M. Bernigerroth, engraver, In Your Light We See Light, frontispiece of Evangelische Deutsche Original-Bibel (Züllichau: Verleugnung des Waysenhauses, by Gottlob Benjamin Fromman, 1741). Photo by author.

The motif of Reformers around the table is almost certainly borrowed from a mid-seventeenth-century Dutch print that circulated widely, which shows an even larger group, including biblical translators as well as preachers and theologians, gathered about Luther, before whom burns a single candle.11 But whereas that image was intended to hail the Reformation and its ongoing diffusion (the pope is shown vainly trying to blow out the candle), figure 27 addresses a more particular issue: the authority of the Bible as a faithful transmission of God’s word. The banderoles interpose text from within Psalm 36 (verse 10 in Luther’s translation; verse 9 in the Revised Standard Version) to read:

In your light

divine and original

we see/humanly but eastward/the light.

The light from the triangular symbol of the Trinity streams through each author, making them into what might be called Protestant icons, that is, images transparent to the divine word, which is deposited in the texts spread on the table before the Reformers, whose work it is to translate them in order to assemble the German Bible. Yet for Lutherans, it was Luther who was the primary agent of the process of translation. A preface to the edition, written by a superintendent of Saxon clergy, also quotes Psalm 36:10 and may have provided the theme for the engraving. The clergyman opens his preface by situating Luther in a key position in the divine motif of light: “The ascent from on high, which so powerfully drove out the darkness, performs many great wonders through the light of his truth. Luther, chosen by God to be a great beacon for the church and for this reason illuminated, served as a burning and effulgent light.”¹² The image does not conceal the human means of producing a modern Bible in the vernacular, but wishes to argue for its fidelity by pairing the biblical authors above with their modern, scholarly counterparts below. They are human, but they look to the light streaming from above and visible in the original scriptural text. The engraving’s scheme affirms the reality of the Bible’s individual authors, but regards this as no loss of divine authority and truth. Indeed, applying the Psalm text to the work of the Reformers would suggest that they, the modern biblical scholars, relied on divine light to discern the truth borne by the historical mediation of translator and editor to produce the Luther Bible.¹³

For modern Fundamentalists however, the Bible, in particular the King James version, is not a collection composed of work by unified ancient authors but a uniquely authoritative, single-authored text. The postcard reproduced here captures this conception by showing the volume itself, rather than its translators and authors, as illuminated or light-emitting (figure 28). Where the previous image shows the authors infused by the divine light of inspiration, this image ascribes a power to the book itself, and privileges it above all other translations as singularly authoritative by asserting its historical priority. Although the image does not convey the historical complexity that the 1741 image acknowledges, it certainly affirms Luther’s idea that the word of God acts. Where Tridentine Catholics would have prayed to a saint for intercession on the imperiled ship’s behalf, the Protestant ideal is to regard the word of God as a life-saving beacon.

FIGURE 28

Postcard promoting King James version of the Bible, mid-twentieth century. Photo by author.

But how do we proceed from the Reformation to the twentieth-century Fundamentalist view described by this postcard or by Pat Robertson’s sermon of miracles? The intervening global history of print culture that can help us understand the transition. The span of five centuries is occupied by a vast network of print production, circulation, and reception that enhanced the agency of print, making Bibles and tracts into power objects. The question to pose throughout is one that decenters inquiry from the conventional matter of decoding writing to a scrutiny of the power of sacred print as a thing that acts: how is it that paper comes to talk? In order to understand how Protestant print works among and on its believers, one must discern the history of its politics, its social organization, its deployment in global colonialism, its technology, its theological and ritual setting, and its deployment in revivalism and the encounter of rival religions. Each of these conditions helped shape a series of causal factors and ideological formations that in turn influenced the uses and forms of print. I will sketch the emergence of these conditions and their engagement in the Evangelical enterprise in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in a story that turns on the Protestant understanding of the power of print as a social agent. I will argue that without a sense of this experience, we will not have a robust understanding of the sacred economy of Evangelicalism circa 1800, which is to say, its social career as one important contributor to the formation of modernity around the world .

THE SOUND OF PAPER TALKING

John Calvin opened his monumental systematic theology with the argument that the existence of a deity is apparent to human beings by virtue of the very experience of human ignorance, frailty, and need. Human depravity itself teaches people that God exists and is the only source of goodness.14 Even the rampant and universal practice of idolatry shows that humans recognize the existence of a deity, which Calvin treated not as a rational induction in humans, but a “natural instinct.”15 Yet God is also apparent in nature, and in more than a merely symbolic manner. Calvin the iconophobe could speak in remarkably visualist terms about the revelation of God in nature. Not only does God “deposit in our minds that seed of religion” that Calvin called instinctive, the deity also makes “manifest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe, and daily place[s] himself in our view, that we cannot open our eyes without being compelled to behold him. His essence, indeed, is incomprehensible, utterly transcending all human thought; but on each of his works his glory is engraven in characters so bright, so distinct, and so illustrious, that none, however dull and illiterate, can plead ignorance as their excuse.”¹⁶ Beholding this glory is not a matter of cultural decoding. It is effulgent, radiating from the heavens. Bright as God’s works are, however, Calvin contended that human stupidity is too great for human beings to derive benefit from merely beholding the natural world. “Every individual mind being a kind of labyrinth, it is not wonderful, not only that each nation has adopted a variety of fictions, but that almost every man has had his own god.”¹⁷ Driven by vanity, selfishness, fear, and ignorance, human minds replace the real God with endless deities. Human imagination replaces God with one more suited to the misperceptions and contorting needs of the individual: “For no sooner do we, from a survey of the world, obtain some slight knowledge of Deity, than we pass by the true God, and set up in his stead the dream and phantom of our own brain.”¹⁸ This is the “forge of idols” that Calvin reviles later in the same book.

Calvin framed his enterprise in this way in order to foreground human depravity, which the natural revelation of God underscored. He diagnosed something fundamental to the human mind as falling short and plunging humankind into corruption. The brain was a fickle thing, given to be buffeted by the passions, by an unruly immoral nature, and by the deceptions of imagination, a faculty in service to selfishness and pride. God’s plan was to select a special people and enclose them in a rigid structure that fortified the glory naturally revealed: “For, seeing how the minds of men were carried to and fro, and found no certain resting-place, [God] chose the Jews for a peculiar people, and then hedged them in that they might not, like others, go astray.”¹⁹ Law and providence organized Jewish life to set it apart, bridling the human mind in order to sustain divine revelation and therefore divine presence as apprehensible. Calvin then asserted that God used the same means to “retain [all humankind] in his knowledge,” namely, providing scripture, which is nothing less than God opening “his own sacred mouth”: in scripture, God “manifests himself.”²⁰ Calvin concluded, therefore, that God had foreseen “the inefficiency of his image imprinted on the fair form of the universe” and therefore “has given the assistance of his Word.” With this, Calvin raised the new media hierarchy of the Protestant sacred economy: “While it becomes man seriously to employ his eyes in considering the works of God, since a place has been assigned him in this most glorious theatre that he may be a spectator of them, his special duty is to give ear to the word that he may the better profit.” It is the word of God, God’s own utterance seamlessly recorded in Scripture, that offers what Calvin called “a genuine contemplation of God.”21 Those who long to see God, must instead hear him, which means they must read him: “We must go, I say, to the Word, where the character of God, drawn from his works, is described accurately and to the life.”

The Bible thus is the definitive, stable, unshakable revelation of God, what Calvin characterized as the thread that guides our way through that other labyrinth, “the brightness of the Divine countenance.”²² Humans are like God, are his image. And Calvin insisted that to study the one meant to study the other.²³ But seeing is hopeless in the confusing labyrinth of human nature, no less than in that of the divine. The divine labyrinth is too bright; the human labyrinth too dark. The scriptures are the key to unlocking the maze and finding one’s way out, to capturing a truly revelatory glimpse of the divine face.

Why words and not images? Because images are the medium of human thought as well as of divine activity. The human mind and God himself both generate images of themselves, but these are dissimilar: the human mind, under the faculty of imagination, produces images that replace the thing they claim to represent. Not only are images fake, they are simulacra, eclipsing what they pretend to portray. Words, by contrast, elude the register of visibility, which is limited by extreme brightness or darkness. Word meant sound in the first instance, but what it really meant is sacred writ, the covenant of divine authorship, a new and fully efficacious revelation that completes the inefficiency of the first, visual, revelation, which is limited by human failure. Words establish a contract in a medium that Calvin considered more stable than images because discursive reason trumps imagination. One could argue with reason in the court of scholarly discourse, and theological disquisition could determine truth by adequate interpretation, while images operate in a different, nondialectical register. Scripture does not gain its authority from the judgment of the church, according to Calvin, but “bears upon the face of it as clear evidence of its truth, as white and black do of their color, sweet and bitter of their taste.”²⁴ The proof is in the pudding because the pudding contains the very thing that proved the scripture’s authenticity: “The highest proof of Scripture is uniformly taken from the character of him whose word it is.” Words are icons, the medium that conveys the very truth to which it refers. Hearing thus becomes a kind of seeing, perhaps because reading the word of God is optical: “If we look at it with clear eyes and unbiased judgment, it will forthwith present itself with a divine majesty which will subdue our presumptuous opposition, and force us to do it homage.”²⁵

But how does one know? The surest proof is the “secret testimony of the Spirit.” For Calvin the real medium was the spirit, intermixed with the breath of ancient prophets and apostles: “The same Spirit, therefore, who spoke by the mouth of the prophets, must penetrate our hearts, in order to convince us that they faithfully delivered the message with which they are divinely entrusted.” Those taught inwardly by the Holy Spirit know “that Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to the testimony of the Spirit.”²⁶ Words are the privileged medium for Calvin, and for Protestants generally, because they are the medium of original revelation in which the divine spirit intermingled with the utterance of prophetic discourse without undergoing translation into another medium, and therefore remain there at work in the written records of that discourse. Any image, by contrast, is a human rendition of a previous medium, its message transformed by the matrix of imagination. Words keep the Spirit of God pure. He dwells there, uncorrupted by human imagination. One does not require proof that a given text is truly divine scripture if the spirit has moved the believer in faith to apprehend the text as such. We have, Calvin wrote, “a thorough conviction that in holding it [the Scriptures], we hold unassailable truth . . . because we feel a divine energy living and breathing in it—an energy by which we are drawn and animated to obey it.”27

PLATE 1

Jan Gossaert, Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin and Child, 1520–25, oil on oakwood. Courtesy of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 2

El Greco, Burial of Count Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Scala / Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 3

Nathaniel Currier, Pray “God Bless Papa and Mama,” circa 1838–56, hand-tinted lithograph. Courtesy of Billy Graham Center.

PLATE 4

Master Bertram, Sacrifice of Isaac, panel from the Grabow Altarpiece, St. Petri Church, Hamburg, 1379–1383, oil tempera on wood. Courtesy of BPK, Berlin / Hamburger Kunsthalle / Elke Walford/ Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 5

The Pilgrim’s Progress, Or Christians journey from the City of Destruction in this evil World to the Celestial City in the World that is to Come, broadside (London: J. Pitts, 1813). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

PLATE 6

Jean Périssin, Sermon in the Reformed Church in Lyon, called “The Paradise,” 1564, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 7

William Blake, “His Spectre driv’n . . .” plate 6 from Jerusalem, 1804–22, relief etching. Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

PLATE 8

Jon McNaughton, One Nation under God, 2009, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 9

Rembrandt van Rijn, Head of Christ, circa 1648–52, oil on oak panel. © Harvard Art Museum / Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 10

Caspar David Friedrich, Cross in the Mountains, 1807–8, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 11

Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 26 (Rowing), 1912, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Munich, Städtische Galerie, Lenbachaus, Germany.

PLATE 12

Bill Viola, Ocean without a Shore, 2007, production still, high definition video triptych, two 65″ plasma screens, one 103″ screen mounted vertically, six loudspeakers (three pairs, stereo sound). Room dimensions variable. Performer: Weba Garretson. Photo by Kira Perov.

What does all this mean for Protestant experience? Put simply, the words of the Bible are, in this conception, infused with divine presence. One speaks them, reads them, writes them, sings them, chants them, studies them, and paints them in order to tap their power. For Calvin, spiritual illumination assured the Christian beyond the limits of human reason that “the Scriptures are from God.” The sense of the scriptural word’s authenticity was as certain “as if we beheld the divine image visibly impressed on it.”²⁸ The true icon of God for Calvin was the word of God. The faithful did not need images or things because they had the reliable equivalent in the words that God spoke. Calvin therefore dismissed the Catholic tradition’s emphasis on relics of Jesus as a material basis for devotion to the savior: “Instead of discerning Jesus Christ in his Word, his Sacraments, and his Spiritual Graces, the world has, according to its custom, amused itself with his clothes, shirts, and sheets.”²⁹ Calvin contended that Jesus was no longer a material presence, but a spiritual reality. Spirit and matter were as different as past and present, Old Testament and New, earth and heaven. Relics as material traces could not reveal spiritual power and authority. Therefore, “all that is carnal in Jesus Christ must be forgotten and put aside.” Christians should instead “direct our whole affections to seek and possess him according to the spirit.”³⁰ Because this spirit rested in the words of Holy Writ, they were the only proper revelation of Jesus.

Luther parted company with other reformers on the carnality of Jesus, especially in his understanding of the rite of Holy Communion, but he grounded the written scriptures in the spoken utterances of Jesus and the apostles.³¹ He urged his contemporaries not to reduce the gospel to a set of inscribed rules, but to think of it as spoken good news: “The gospel should really not be something written, but a spoken word which brought forth Scriptures, as Christ and the apostles have done. This is why Christ himself did not write anything but only spoke. He called his teaching not Scripture but gospel, meaning good news or a proclamation that is spread not by pen but by word of mouth.”³² Luther clearly stressed gospel as a mode of address, but he did so by tying speech and writing to one another, as Cranach’s painting of him preaching suggests (see figure 10). We can see the power of Christ’s speech put to textual work in another Lutheran print, this one by Hans Sebald Behem from 1525 called The Fall of the Papacy (figure 29). Stationed in the upper left, Jesus breathes out his word, which transforms into arrows carrying Bible verses, directed at the Catholic party. The papal force falters beneath the barrage of scriptural missiles. Most of the verse-arrows cite biblical passages referring to the Antichrist, and so find their target in the pope, the object of Protestant scorn, identified as the apocalyptic force of evil. Luther is visible in the far left, holding a cross and leading the party labeled “Christendom.” A preacher in the front of this group gestures sermonically with a pointing finger, suggesting that the missiles Christ launches were activated by the Lutheran party preaching the word against the Antichrist. At the center of the image stands a prince, identified by R.W. Scribner as Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who vainly supports the falling pope with the help of a kneeling bishop at his side.33 Missiles of the word abound, battering the Catholic hierarchy, the princes, and the crumbling church.

FIGURE 29

Hans Sebald Beham, The Papal Throne torn down with ropes by the Protestant corporations, circa 1544, woodcut. Courtesy of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany / Art Resource, NY.

Protestants by no means invented this focus on the word. Christian speech-acts such as the consecration of holy water, the Eucharist, baptism, marriage, exorcism, and all manner of incantatory word magic were widely practiced long before the sixteenth century. Protestantism directed its valorization of the word qua scripture against the sacred economy of late medieval Catholicism in order to develop an alternative economy of the sacred, as I have described it in the previous chapter. Moreover, Protestants have used images in tandem with scripture in a variety of ways. For instance, Protestant churches in sixteenth-century Germany, France, Switzerland, and other northern countries made use of mottoes, plaques, and epitaphs to visually present scriptural passages. Images were avoided in Calvinist churches, but plaques enumerating the Ten Commandments and other scriptural texts were not uncommon.34 A painting by Jean Périssin of the interior of the short-lived Huguenot church in Lyon, France, the Temple de Paradis, completed in 1564 and destroyed three years later, includes two classical pedestals on the upper tier that bear the abbreviated French text of Jesus’s two summaries of the law recorded in Matthew 22:37 and 39: “You will love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind,” and “You will love your neighbor as yourself” (plate 6).³⁵ Commenting on the Two Tables of the Law, Calvin points out that Jesus “summed up the whole Law in two heads” in the Matthew text. The painting clearly shows the two verses presented on a pair of stone tables, to make a reference to the stone tablets of Mosaic law and to follow Calvin’s explicit teaching regarding the necessity of both the divine and the human aspects of the law: “God thus divided his Law into two parts, containing a complete rule of righteousness that he might assign the first place to the duties of religion which relate especially to His worship, and the second to the duties of charity which have respect to man.”³⁶

The interior space of the temple shows the impact of Protestantism on architecture. A paradigm of clarity, simplicity, and order, the church interior reveals what the Reformed community of Lyon wished to convey to the city about their movement. The interior was a material communication of respectability, propriety, and stability in a moment of civil unrest and armed Reformed zeal that even elicited Calvin’s reproach. Huguenots throughout France needed buildings to house their growing numbers, but also to convey the clear signal that they pursued a new dedication to the “Parole de Dieu” and that they were not a subversive sect. They had written to the king of France, in 1561, insisting on their loyalty to the crown as subjects and rejecting claims that they were seditious and heretical. They requested the king’s permission to assemble “to hear the pure preaching of the gospel from the mouths of ministers whom God has sent us in order to teach us, so that by these means we might be instructed more and more in the knowledge of our duty to God as well as to Your Majesty, and so that we might gather to beseech God incessantly for the preservation of Your Majesty, and for the repose of the entire kingdom.” To this end, and that complaints about their “secret assemblies” might be put to rest, Louis de Bourbon Condé, speaking for the scattered congregations of the Huguenots, asked the king to grant them temples “or other public places, built or to build at our expense” since their “great multitude” could not be housed in private homes.³⁷ The open, ordered, and clear space pictured in the painting of 1564 was also designed to convey the orderly, civil, and genteel nature of their gatherings.

Organized for auditory advantages, the church was built in the round, designed as a large drum or cylinder in which seating radiated in arcs from the pulpit. The space no longer foregrounds surfaces for sculptures, paintings, or devotional imagery, nor for the adoration of the host—there is not even an altar. This is a spaced dedicated to the sound of words. Sight lines are opened up and converge on the speaker in the pulpit. Speaking is the source of power in this interior, and it is striking that the nobility sit close to the speaker in what appear to be much more comfortable pews. The display of their station is visual, but the spatial proximity that anchored status was to sound. This serves to remind us that speaking, hearing, seeing, and touching were not appreciated as isolated sensory modes, but enfolded into one another in order to structure the life-world.

The only imagery appearing in the interior are heraldic emblems and coats of arms, set in wall medallions and in the upper story windows. The city’s municipal coat of arms appears in the brightest window illuminating the interior, seen in the upper left. To either side of scripture-bearing tablets above the pulpit are two windows composed of what appears to be the French royal coat of arms, bearing fleurs-de-lis on a blue shield, surmounted by a gold crown. Their purpose was to declare the patriotism of Lyon’s leading Protestant families, who included Huguenot burgers who had assumed control of the city in a brief moment of Reformed success. Their genteel status is evident in the finely dressed citizens who appear in the sanctuary. The best seating, to either side of the pulpit on the main floor, seems to be reserved for highly stationed families, and features a blue tapestry with golden fleurs-de-lis, referring both to the Lyonnais and the royal coats of arms. Above the pulpit, flanking a central coat of arms, appear two classical tablets inscribed with the scripture passages we have already examined. These inscriptions visually limn “la pureté de la Parole de Dieu” cited in Condé’s petition to the king as the reason why the Huguenots had suffered “extreme calamities.”38

The people in the painting perform what the 1561 petition to the king requests: they listen to a minister preach the pure gospel.³⁹ In 1567 the church was destroyed during the second wave of religious civil war, undertaken by Catholics who resented the terms of the Edict of Amboise (1563), which had endorsed freedom of conscience in religious worship, suggesting a Catholic act of iconoclasm that underscores the political nature of ritual destruction.

TOWARD A MODERN PROTESTANT CHRISTENDOM

The conflict involving monarchy and the republican sentiments of Protestants alluded to in Périssin’s painting remained in place into the nineteenth century. In eighteenth-century England, Dissenting Protestants (largely Presbyterians, Independents or Congregationalists, and Particular or Calvinist Baptists) were as likely as Catholics to be the target of the Established (that is, Anglican) Church. This tension produced by the end of the century a new strategy among Dissenters. Committed to a Reformed view, the Dissenters conceived of a web of interrelated forces that would change modern Christianity: union, print media, missions and revivalism, discernment of providence, and the reconception of Western Christendom within an emerging global print network. The Protestant experience of sacred words as things, as agents exerting power, was configured and enabled by the reticulation of these conditions.

PAPER WARS AND POLITICS: ESTABLISHMENT VERSUS DISSENT

In conscious distinction to the hierarchical structure of the episcopacy of the Church of England, Dissenting Baptists and Independents had long practiced a congregational polity, which worked extremely well for a piety grounded in individual volition and discernment of vocation, for the experimental religion of the Puritan tradition, and for dissent from the establishment. The liability of this polity, on the other hand, was its capacity for spawning further dissent, which happened along a number of fault lines: to take just two examples, the hyper-Calvinist emphasis on divine sovereignty and predestination collided with its bitter opponent, Arminianism; and the Evangelical emphasis on experiential religion guided by a more or less literalist reading of the Bible was opposed by the Socinian or Unitarian insistence on rationality in biblical interpretation.

The paper wars that arose among these impassioned adversaries tutored a generation of Calvinist ministers born around 1750, all of whom had arrived in the pulpit just as the followers of Wesley and Whitefield raged over free will and divine sovereignty and as former Congregationalist clergyman Joseph Priestley publicly articulated his Unitarianism in a series of tracts, books, and sermons. One publication answered another for nearly two decades of sometimes urbane but often acrimonious debate, in what became rhetorically styled as a field of honor in which each side ritualistically expended the contents of its weaponry of print, creating a public sphere of dueling discourses. The controversies over Arminianism and Unitarianism began to die down just as the long struggle for civil liberty among Dissenters heated up once again in the late 1780s, when Evangelical and Unitarian Dissenters joined with Whigs in Parliament to seek the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, which had for over a century kept conscientious Dissenters and Catholics alike out of many public offices as well as banned them from admission to Oxford or Cambridge unless they consented to receive the Eucharist according to the Anglican rite.40

Opposing the repeal were the occupants of the Bishops Bench in Parliament, whose most outspoken member by 1790 was Samuel Horsley, bishop of Rochester and St. Asaph. Horsley had every intention of preserving the Establishment and took special delight in smearing Dissenters and especially Methodists with the odium of French infidelity, Masonic conspiracy, and revolutionary insurrection.⁴¹ Horsley’s underlying concern was the threat posed by the success of vernacular, itinerant preaching. Long smarting from the abuse of George Whitefield, whose popular homiletic style had gathered thousands of auditors out of doors when Established clergy had locked him out of their churches, the Established hierarchy was prepared to take a hard stand against the Dissenters, whom they viewed as arch rivals in the struggle for the soul of the British people. Most offensive to Horsley was the Dissenters’ use of extemporaneous preaching, in stark contrast to the carefully written discourses of Established clergy, which were read from the pulpit, to, it is important to add, dwindling numbers of congregants, particularly in the countryside, where the Evangelical preaching style and itinerant incursions successfully competed for listeners. The Evangelical proliferation of Sunday schools and villagep reaching stations and the rising flood of Evangelical print aimed at vernacular readership posed a clear and real menace to the Establishment. Checking this was the primary agenda in the fight to maintain the Corporation and Test Acts.

That all of this was unfolding in the moment of revolutionary France only intensified matters for both sides. Among the Dissenters, conservatives and progressives alike, many looked to Paris in 1789 as a rebirth of the hope signaled by the American Revolution. The Anglican Church, by contrast, saw the humiliation of the monarchy as utterly repugnant and sought only to tighten their hold on tradition as their institution defined it, arguing indefatigably for the necessity of the Establishment as bulwark for king and constitution. In the view of Horsley, Tory leader Lord Frederick North, and, with a bit more subtlety, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, the Dissenters simply could not be trusted.42 Horsley repeatedly claimed that the Dissenters would seek to establish themselves the moment they were allowed to occupy the privileged positions denied them by the Test Acts. It was their kind, he insisted, who had executed a British king in the last century and it was their kind who had burned London in the riots of 1780. And, Horsley boldly asserted in his “Charge of 1790” to the clergy of his diocese, it was naïve country Methodists who were being made the dupes of French agents and unwittingly spreading political disorder in England, from the rural scatter of what Horsley contemptuously called Methodist “conventicles.”⁴³

The response among conservative Dissenters was to erect a big tent for conservative Calvinists to occupy, under the public title of “Evangelical.” The immediate impetus for this shift in strategy was the failure to achieve complete civil liberty in repeated attempts to repeal the Test Acts—first in 1787; again in 1789, when it came only 20 votes from succeeding in the House of Commons; and 1790, when it failed by 189 votes after much more vigorous opposition from the Bishops Bench.⁴⁴ With the third successive failure, some conservative Dissenters decided to concentrate their hopes for Britain’s spiritual renewal on evangelical measures. In 1793, twenty-four Dissenting ministers formed the editorial board of a new journal called The Evangelical Magazine (figure 30). This publication came in very short order to serve as the clearinghouse for cooperation among Independents (Congregationalists), Presbyterians, Particular Baptists, Calvinist Methodists, and conservative Calvinist clergy in the Church of England in the cause of spreading the gospel. The magazine avoided political commentary, though some of its editors had very strong political sentiments. One of the leaders of the group, David Bogue, published a four-volume History of Dissenters between 1808 and 1812, in which he and his young coauthor, James Bennett, gave much space to the history of the Dissenters’ attempts to secure civil liberty, and repeatedly expressed disgust at Samuel Horsley and his party of heavy-handed “High Churchmen.”⁴⁵

FIGURE 30

Cover of Evangelical Magazine, 1805. Photo by author.

At the same time that the battle against the Established church was being redirected into a project of Evangelical union invested in expanding print networks, Dissenters defended themselves from another quarter—the attack from freethinkers such as Tom Paine and Ethan Allen. In a sermon delivered in England in 1796 and immediately printed in the United States, Baptist preacher and Evangelical Magazine editor Andrew Fuller lamented that Paine’s Age of Reason (1794) had exerted “great influence . . . upon men’s minds.”46 Fuller reputed the charges of irrationalism and superstition ascribed by Paine and Allen to biblical writers by insisting that “God, in all his works, has proceeded by system: there is a beautiful connexion and harmony in every thing which he has wrought . . . [and so] it may be expected that the scriptures, being a transcript of his mind, should contain a system.”47 Fuller offered a defense of the Bible’s systematicity in order to bring Evangelicalism into the paper wars of public discourse where it could compete successfully with any philosophy, rational analysis, or cultural critique. This meant textualizing the Bible: like nature, the Bible as a text was comparable to “one grand piece of machinery, each part of which has a dependence on the other, and altogether from one glorious whole.”⁴⁸ The result helped adapt the orality of Evangelicalism to a voluminously expanding print culture. In effect, Fuller crafted an important bridge between what he called “the oracles of God” and a textually grounded understanding of the Bible as exhibiting “systematical knowledge” or “systematical principles.” This rooted a faith traditionally centered in preaching even deeper into written discourse and the enterprise of print culture, and thereby intensified the power of printed words to do work previously performed orally.⁴⁹

EVANGELICAL UNION: THE COMMON WORK OF PRINT

Evangelical Magazine promoted several causes that were central to the expanding print culture of British Evangelicalism in the 1790s. First was the London Missionary Society (LMS), initially proposed in a letter by David Bogue that was printed in the magazine in 1794. When the LMS was formed the next year, thirteen of its twenty-five inaugural directors were also on the editorial board of the Evangelical Magazine. Bogue was among the speakers at the first meeting of the Society in 1795, where he proclaimed: “This is a new thing in the Christian church . . . here are Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Independents, all united in one society, all joining to form its laws, to regulate its institutions, and manage its various concerns. Behold us here assembled with one accord to attend the funeral of bigotry.”⁵⁰ He meant to herald an overcoming of sectarian strife in the unity of good will among Evangelicals from many sects, but also surely he intended a swipe at the partisan interests of the Church of England, whose Evangelical clergymen he welcomed to the collaborative venture. In any case, the magazine became the posting board for the LMS. The magazine added a regular feature called “Religious Intelligence” in which it broadcasted the latest news of LMS activities, published correspondence to and from the Society’s leadership, and carried the ever popular reports and journals of missionaries from such exotic places as the South Pacific islands (the Society’s first try at creating a foreign mission in 1796).⁵¹ Evangelical Magazine also became the medium for official correspondence between the LMS and such far-flung organizations as the Moravians on the Continent and Evangelicals throughout Europe and North America. Letters reprinted in the magazine regularly updated readers about the status of Evangelical revival and missions around the world, feeding a journalistic curiosity and fueling the millennial expectations of Evangelicals. As a posting board, the magazine served to create a kind of monitor on world events that possibly contained, encoded within them, just the sort of prophetic correlations that Evangelical ministers were fond of deciphering as harbingers of the millennium’s arrival.

In addition to celebrating the LMS, the editors of Evangelical Magazine promoted the practice of village preaching, that is, of preachers taking time away from their ordinary congregational posts to offer services to rural villages that had no local church, established or otherwise. Some of the magazine’s founding editors served as itinerant preachers, organized the village preaching effort, articulated and defended its aims, and produced dozens of printed sermons for use by ministers and lay preachers.52 The magazine also supported the formation of Sunday schools and circulated in its pages plans for establishing such schools. To support this effort as well as general evangelization, the magazine also urged its readers to form tract societies that might partner with a formally organized association, the Religious Tract Society (RTS), to provide tracts, pamphlets, and books for use in the classroom and home, and in public evangelization. Formed in 1799, the RTS offered in its first tract an address on the value and use of tracts, authored by none other than David Bogue. In this short and readable treatise, Bogue stressed the power of the ephemeral agency of print. He defined the religious tract as “a select portion of divine truth, designed and adapted to make the reader wise unto salvation.”⁵³ Tracts were sacred truth conveniently packaged for mass production and dissemination, the latter both in the conventional and in the metaphoric senses: Bogue and his colleagues believed that tracts could be cast wide like seeds to plant the Gospel where it might grow into conviction and conversion and lead eventually to evangelical new birth. Evangelicals placed enormous hope and expectations in tracts as a primary agency of spreading the word.

UNION, MILLENNIUM, PROVIDENCE

In the final decades of the eighteenth century in Great Britain, print media came to shape an international discourse that Evangelicals experienced as a medium of signs, what the directors of the LMS called “blessed symptoms that the spirit of God is moving upon the face of the troubled waters” of a turbulent Europe besieged by the high infidelity of the French Revolution and its aftermath.⁵⁴ The directors were deeply encouraged by mass print as a form of communication because it seemed to convey the benevolent acts of providence. Correspondence among widely spread Evangelicals and the constant stream of notices advertising international efforts in mission and revival were indications of a spiritual movement in which they took part, what they believed was a new dispensation that might hearken the millennial age. Evangelicals formed a media network, a global, diffused church, whose center was not composed of bricks and mortar, but of the printing press and publishing committee. Writing and reading were devotional exercises of communication and testimony of the new Christendom circa 1800.

Union meant a new age of Christian cooperation in the face of the global task. A report to the LMS in 1799 clearly articulated the ideal and its import: “The union among all real Christians, without distinction, which forms the distinguishing feature of your plan, attracts their peculiar admiration, and encourages the pleasing hope, that we shall soon approximate more universally towards each other, assume, as the body of Christ, greater visibility, and hold more general intercourse, for the purposes of promoting his spiritual kingdom.”55 This report conveys the ecclesiology, evangelism, and millennialism of the Evangelical union. The membership of the LMS and related societies such as the RTS was seeking to realize an Evangelical Christendom as the “real” church, and saw contemporary political events as symptomatic of providential opportunity. A German clergyman conveyed to the RTS in a letter of 1801 what the communication network meant to him: “To be sure, there is nothing which can afford nobler pleasure to a Christian mind than to be united with other vital Christians, and to be convinced that there really exists an invisible church of Christ, planted in the midst of the visible, and to enjoy a share in the communion of the saints on earth.”⁵⁶ It was not a new Reformation they sought, but a revitalized Christendom spread around the world. Print media were to play a key role in realizing this Evangelical Christendom because print—not sacrament or liturgy or traditional institutions—was the chief manifestation of the body of Christ, in the emerging visibility of the church as a global reality. The strategy was to build a canopy of print around the world to contain the real church, to make visible the true Christendom. The mediated body of Christ did not seek to separate itself or dominate the state, but to grow into greater influence and extent in order to hasten the second return of Christ.

ORALITY AND PRINT: THE INSTRUMENTATION OF SPEECH

David Bogue emphasized the power and convenience of the tract medium. It avoided the limits of face-to-face oral culture to deliver the same message, and could do so irrespective of the limits of time and place. Print had something that orality did not. As Bogue said of the tract: “It would require some time to deliver its contents, and they might slip out of the memory, and could not afterwards be recalled. But it is given away in an instant; it may be perused and reperused at pleasure; and the truth may thus flow through a great variety of channels, and profit even many years hence.”⁵⁷ Unlike the sermon, print was not limited to real-time effects. Stories soon circulated about the ability of tracts to plant the word without any contribution from a preacher. As bits of paper left along the way in everyday life, where they could be found by chance and read by those who had not encountered Evangelical truth, tracts assumed a providential stature: what might appear as happenstance to humans was in fact the operation of a higher agency making use of prosaic events.

Tracts also possessed very practical advantages, according to Bogue. They exerted a welcome social control that ought, he argued, to be applauded by Evangelicalism’s cultural despisers: “In the present state of society,” Bogue proclaimed, “when wickedness stalks abroad in every form with a brazen front, to take away from the mass of vice, though but a small portion, and to add to the sum of virtue but a single grain, will, by the philosopher and the moralist, be neither overlooked nor despised.”⁵⁸ The tract, in other words, was the Evangelical answer to the Establishment’s putative bolstering of British political institutions. If the Established church would secure Britain from above, the Evangelicals would do it from below. According to Bogue, tracts suppressed vice by virtue of their cheapness: because they were very inexpensive, tracts could compete very well in the commercial marketplace with profane literature. For this reason, the RTS followed the example of the tracts of Hannah More’s Cheap Repository by including wood engravings on the covers of many tracts (see figure 35). The RTS also engaged in aggressive competition. The minutes of the publication committee of the RTS demonstrate the organization’s careful attention to the forces of the market, in their efforts to undersell secular competitors by offering hawkers special discounts on religious tracts. An annual report of the RTS noted very clearly the intention behind lowering the cost of tracts for street hawkers, even to the point of suffering an annual loss of four hundred pounds in 1815: “It is hoped gradually and ultimately to suppress more effectually, the foolish and licentious ballads and papers which are displayed on walls, or otherwise offered for sale in various parts of the metropolis and of the country.”59 Bogue assured his readers that customers would be led from reading tracts to further evangelical literature, indicating that tracts were but the front end of an entire regimen of evangelical salesmanship. He urged distributors and writers of tracts to prefer or produce tracts that presented “pure truth” clearly and plainly stated, and were striking and entertaining, that is, capable of grasping the reader’s attention and holding it.⁶⁰ In a sermon, “The Diffusion of Truth,” preached in 1800 before a meeting of the RTS, Bogue compared speech and writing as equally authorized forms of communication; writing, he argued “can plead in its favour divine example and command. Man has a hand to write, as well as a tongue to speak; and God has employed the pen of the ready writer, as well as the tongue of the learned, to convey a word in season to him that is weary.”⁶¹ If there were any doubt about the authority of text, Bogue proclaimed that “God himself becomes the author of a short Religious Tract: with his own hands he wrote the Ten Commandments of the law.” Tracts were, therefore, in Bogue’s words, “a method of God’s own appointment.”⁶²

By making speakers into writers, tract authorship was able to overcome the insufficient number of preachers. A tract operated in the place of a speaker: many of the hundreds of tracts eventually produced by the RTS addressed the reader in the first person. In the United States, where the RTS served as the template for the American Tract Society (ATS) and a large number of other tract-producing and distributing organizations, Evangelicals were counseled to produce tracts that spoke directly to the reader without high-blown language or sermonic condescension. In both Britain and America, tract distributors were urged to keep on hand a variety of different tracts that could be suited to the needs of individuals. The RTS and the ATS produced dozens of different categories of tracts—for infidels, drunkards, swearers, backsliders, errant servants, errant children, errant husbands, vain wives, dutiful mothers, Catholics, pensioners, managers, merchants, sailors, soldiers, and even those most in need of sacred truth, divinity professors.

The power of print culture as Evangelicals understood it was its translation of the oral culture of the preached word, with all the limitations of face-to-face, real-time social worlds, into the far more flexible medium of sacred information. Mass print could be inserted into the byways of every social milieu and disseminated over time and space without forfeiting the advantages of orality. Print captured the spiritual presence that animated speech and that was at the heart of scripture. Tracts remediated this presence, without, many Evangelicals believed, losing any of its charisma or aura. But this last question had to be worked out very deliberately, since preaching had been the privileged medium for Evangelicals. Indeed, since Whitefield and Wesley, the preferred mode of homiletic address among most English Dissenters was extemporaneous speaking. This is apparent in one of the countless engraved iterations of Nathaniel Hone’s painting of George Whitefield (figure 31). The engraving reproduced here shows the famous preacher in a lofty oratorical moment, arms raised high. The Bible rests in the pulpit before him, but the image is about the speaker, about the speech of his dramatic gesture, wig, and piercing gaze (the artist has corrected Whitefield’s crossed eyes). Scriptural truth is performed and performative. The spirit moves in the commanding speech of the orator, but voice here is part of an efficacious packaging. The bodily presence of the speaker linked eye and ear in a single moment of absorption, as one contemporary commented: “Every accent of his voice spoke to the ear, every feature of his face, every motion of his hands, and every gesture spoke to the eye; so that the most dissipated and thoughtless found their attention involuntarily fixed.”63 Evangelicals were moved by such oratory because its interpersonal directness and spiritual immediacy conveyed the urgency and deeply felt dedication that comported with “religion of the heart.” Moreover, this mode of discourse remediated their understanding of the Bible as writ transposing prophetic utterance, as spiritual discourse grounded in divine revelation. No less important, speaking extempore engaged lay listeners much more effectively than formal, written disquisitions read from the pulpit. The stodgy delivery of some Anglican clergy who read their sermons from prepared texts failed to inspire audiences in the way that the Evangelical improvisational style could.

FIGURE 31

Elisha Gallaudet, Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1774, engraving. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The task for print producers, therefore, was to pattern the new mode of discourse in tracts on the archetype of Evangelical oral culture. The result, at least in the ideology of Evangelical print culture, was a seamless join that made print capable of delivering Evangelical truth. Contrary to the widely accepted dogma of Walter Benjamin, aura loses nothing in mass production, indeed, is even enhanced by it.⁶⁴ The proponents of religious tracts were fond of calling them “little messengers” and a variety of other endearing, animating terms that underscore the power of print to preach.⁶⁵ Bogue urged writers of tracts to use stylistic means that would encourage readers to project themselves empathetically into the text: “Where narrative can be made the medium of conveying truth, it is eagerly to be embraced, as it not only engages the attention, but also assists the memory, and makes a deeper impression on the heart. Dialogue is another way of rendering a tract entertaining. The conversation draws the reader insensibly along. He is generally one of the speakers introduced: he finds his own sentiments and reasonings attacked and defended: he feels every argument that is adduced, and the subject fixes itself strongly and deeply in his mind.”⁶⁶ Readers were to find a close fit between the tract’s evocation of circumstances and their own. The RTS was so enamored of the power of this match as the means of affecting readers that it regularly reproduced anecdotes, eventually several volumes of them, as demonstrations of the reception of their tracts. Reception was enfolded into production as these letters from readers were issued as tracts themselves. In one characteristic account from 1808, a woman is given a tract written as a dialogue between a minister and a parishioner, which, according to the report, becomes a dialogue between herself and the minister and ends in her conversion. According to the anecdote, the entire process unfolded without the assistance of another actual human being, consisting only of the reader’s inward consumption of the tract.⁶⁷ The reader inserted herself into the dialogue and was transformed by it. The tract exercised the power to convert her. Just as Evangelicals commonly abhorred the power of the novel to lull the reader into dissipation, a wasting of will and energy in foolish, fanciful musing, they celebrated the power of pious print to bolster the will and rouse the conscience.⁶⁸ Texts had the power to help or hinder the cause of faith.

A CHRISTENDOM OF PRINT

The experience of ecclesia that British Evangelicals at the end of the eighteenth century sought to nurture in the ecumenical unity of para-church organizations like the LMS, the RTS, and the Evangelical Magazine relied fundamentally on print culture, that is, on a culture of reading, writing, and publication that brought its participants into an extended communitas by means of the circulation of texts. The print networks undertaken among Evangelicals were believed able to produce action at a distance. The cover of the Evangelical Magazine preached this intention (see figure 30): an allegorical figure standing in for the magazine, its editors, and its readers presents profits from the enterprise’s income to the veiled widow and children of Dissenting clergymen, an ongoing charitable effort that was documented to the last pence in the pages of the magazine each year. The message was simple: by subscribing to the magazine, readers contributed charity to widows and orphans whom they would never meet. The print network was more than a means of distributing information. It was a way of doing Christian good. More than communication, it was a formation of Evangelical community.

We learn something important about the stress that Evangelicals placed on print and unity by comparing the LMS and the RTS with one important source of their inspiration, the Moravian Brethren or Unitas Fratrum. In 1801, a brief account of the current state of Moravian missions around the world was printed in London. Its description of the role of writing among the Moravians in regard to missions is telling when compared with that among the British Evangelicals: “All Missionaries keep up a constant correspondence with this department, and also transmit to them copies of their Diaries and Journals. A Secretary is appointed to make extracts from them, of which manuscript copies are sent and read to all the congregations and Missions. By this a spirit of brotherly love and sympathy, and a near interest in the concerns of every Mission is preserved through out the whole Church, and constant prayers and supplications are offered up unto the Lord for the prosperity of his kingdom and the spreading of the Gospel.”69 This practice of correspondence and circulation was intended to emulate the early Church’s use of epistles. Why did the Moravians prefer manuscript to print? Perhaps it preserved a sense of immediate communication that they associated with the apostolic church. The Moravian identification with the primitive apostolic church encouraged an ecclesiology that the British in turn extrapolated for their own print culture and ecumenical associations. In both cases, the idea was that epistolary texts circulating among a network of congregations conveyed the unity-forming power of the apostolic church, provoking sympathy and cooperation, igniting concern and compassion, and providing the means for imagining the church as a far-flung, organically expanding life, a human register of the work of the Holy Spirit. Manuscript preserved the personal dimension. But British Dissenters, who were fond of comparing their efforts to those of the apostolic or early church, attempted a mass-culture version of the same. And they took the Unitas Fratrum as a model of unity to be emulated, though selectively. London was to be the Herrnhut of the new Evangelical communitas. Or on a broader historical scale, London was to be neither Rome nor Canterbury, but something more like Jerusalem—the launching point of a new Evangelical order that would configure Evangelicals everywhere in a bond characterized by purity and cooperation.

The Evangelical conception of this rebirth of the apostolic age becomes clear in Samuel Greatheed’s work in Bedfordshire, where, in 1797, he organized an effort at union among diverse Protestant groups. In a sermon, Greatheed, who was both a founding editor of the Evangelical Magazine and an original director of the LMS, portrayed unity as the primary feature of an apostolic revival and looked to the Unitas Fratrum as inspiration for its possibility. The project’s plan stipulated that its “primary design is to restore the universal Church of Christ to some measure of its primitive harmony and unity; and thereby to remedy the positive and obvious evils, which have been produced by discord among Christians.”70 Evangelicals were exuberantly confident about the prospects of achieving the primitive harmony of the apostolic age. In fact, some felt they might outdo the apostles in missionary zeal. In his sermon before the first meeting of the LMS in 1795, Bogue wondered if, to meet the millennial calendar calculated by many of his colleagues, which placed the dawn of the millennium within their own lifetime, “the religion of Jesus must have more rapid success than it has ever had, since it was first preached in the world; more rapid success than it had under the ministry of the apostles themselves.”⁷¹ Bogue seemed to imply that the answer to critics of foreign missions, who asked, “Are we better than our fathers?” was “Yes.”

BEYOND EUROPE: IDOLATRY AND THE POWER OF PRINT

One of the most active agents at work on the experience of print in the colonial era was the non-Western mission enterprise of European and American Protestants. Missionaries and the enormous literature they and their sponsoring organizations generated often defined their purpose in terms of the encounter with idolatry, which became caught up in an extended network of representations, spaces, efforts, and institutions.⁷² The ideological work of the idol, or rather, of writing about images dubbed “idols,” is difficult to overestimate precisely because it is so deeply embedded in strata of contexts and uses. By enjoining idolatry, modern Protestants imagined themselves in the mantle of Hebrew prophets castigating ancient Israel’s neighbors and foes. Just as the rejection of idol worship had been deployed to delineate Israel as God’s chosen people, so did its extirpation by Western missionaries was intended to clarify the civilizing mission of modern Christianity in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. The battle was between word and idol. Images—both captured idols and printed illustrations in mission literature—served a fundamental role in the fight because the death of idols meant the life and victory of God’s word, the Bible. Protestants challenged idols as dead matter, as things with no soul, no speech, no senses to enable interaction—as the opposite of scripture as divine agency. Ironically, they sought to destroy these objects and to replace them with animated objects of their own: books and tracts that spoke God’s word, paper that talked. One animism was exchanged for another, under cover of the presumption that words don’t talk on paper, they signify. But we’ve seen that Calvinist theology itself was predicated on the animating power of God’s word set down in the words of scripture, an Evangelical animism that scholars have often ignored. Protestants animated their words within what came to be a global print network that deftly linked a missionary’s encounter with idolatry to daily life in London or Boston such that the end of idolatry over “there” was the victory of Christianity “here.” Print linked the kingdom of God everywhere. To celebrate the gospel, the “Good News,” it was necessary to get the news of its triumphs abroad, which returned to the British or American Evangelical as the marvelous working out of Providence.

My thesis is simply stated: killing images made paper come to life. Breaking images was an ancient ritualistic act, one with visceral connections. To break a habit means to free oneself from its grip. Violence of some sort, literal or symbolic, exerts control over the force that once controlled the habitué. For Protestants, those who venerated images were under the control of Satan or ignorance, that is, of moral or intellectual darkness. Knowledge was the key to spiritual liberation. The missionary’s effort to illuminate the state of heathen ignorance made use of a variety of means. For those convinced that ignorance was best matched with information, such as Adoniram Judson in Burma or William Carey in Calcutta, the preferred strategy was literacy, argumentation, and the printed text. Other missionaries sought to invalidate indigenous beliefs by the use of scientific devices. One Baptist missionary among the Burmese recalled that her husband had attempted to subvert a Buddhist priest’s legalistic insistence on the importance of avoiding the inadvertent killing of even an insect by placing a drop of water full of living creatures on the lens of a microscope to show that such avoidance was quite impossible.73

But for those less patient, or less committed to a pedagogy of proof or falsification, iconoclasm offered what they imagined would be a quicker, more decisive solution. The violation of cult images, which took a variety of forms, as we shall see, was intended to break the hold of such images on the imagination, to break the habit of dependence on them by reversing the relation of power. The idea was that what can be destroyed may not exert power over one. A British account from about 1816–17, republished for American Baptist consumption, related an incident involving a recent Chinese convert to Christianity in Java. The Chinese man was found in the garden of his home “beating to pieces with a hammer that idol he had recently worshipped as a god. On asking him what he was about, the awakened Asiatic exclaimed—‘I am destroying that idol which I falsely believed in, lest it may again tempt me to sin; if I threw it away, somebody might fall down before it as I have done. I will worship the only true God, who dwelleth in Heaven. I know that I dare not return to my own country, but God can see and bless me as well at Java as in China.’”⁷⁴ Whatever the veracity of the account may be, the story taught the lesson of iconoclasm in Protestant conversion: only by the physical violation of the image would the convert be freed of temptation and rescued from the life-world of idolatry, in this case, the man’s former home in China. Iconoclasm promised an abrupt and irreversible transformation, a radical departure from the culture of the unchristian and rebirth into the culture of Christianity—just the sort of conversion that Calvinist Evangelicals were looking for.

FIGURE 32

“The Idol Aesculapius: Scene in a Chinese Temple,” cover of Missionary Sketches, no. 137 (October 1852). Photo by author.

No less familiar a trope in nineteenth-century mission literature was the head-to-head encounter between Bible-toting missionary and an idol-worshipping priest at his shrine or altar. Figure 32 offers an example. Here we see the London Missionary Society evangelist and Bible translator Walter Medhurst engaged in debate around 1850 with a Taoist priest, in a temple said to be near the western gate of Shanghai. Medhurst spoke Mandarin, helped produce early translations of the Bible into Chinese, and founded the LMS Press in Shanghai. His reputation as a pugnacious man of the book is clearly portrayed in the illustration, which depicts him holding bibles tucked beneath one arm, extending the other in commanding oratory. According to a letter of 1852 by one his colleagues, who described his debate with the priest, and which Figure 32 was created to illustrate, Medhurst entered the temple, which was beside an apothecary’s shop, for the purpose of aggressive evangelism. His technique was to bait the locals with questions and then attack their responses by citing and refuting their own sacred texts. On “one cold morning in January,” we read, Medhurst accosted his interlocutors by dismissing the temple’s “idol of Aesculapius” as “a mere piece of wood, destitute of all the senses: why apply to it to cure disease?”75 The name of the Greek healing deity was used by the missionaries to name a Chinese healing figure. Visitors to the temple went next to the apothecary to purchase medicines for illnesses determined by divination. “Your money is thrown away,” Medhurst insisted to one devotee, “and all this burning incense, and asking information and aid from the idol is sin against God.” When the priest objected to the missionary distributing Bibles by citing the Kan Ying Pien (Book of Rewards and Punishments), a popular Taoist text, Medhurst responded by quoting it and arguing about its application to the worship of idols.76 At each attempt to secure the sovereignty of his own religion by showing its parallel to Christianity, book for book, god for god, the priest met ridicule and abrupt refutation from the missionary. This technique of evangelism turned on challenging the cultural authority of the priest in order to demonstrate to laity that an alternative model of healing and religion existed, one grounded in a book the missionary was delighted to distribute among them at no charge. The tactic of Protestant missionaries throughout Asia was to textualize indigenous religion, focusing discourse with adversaries and potential converts on their own texts in order to refute them. The resulting “textual imperialism,” as it has been called, favored the strong textual disposition of Medhurst’s Calvinist Protestantism by organizing encounters in terms of creedal assertion and syllogistic argumentation.⁷⁷

LMS literature offers fewer instances than one might expect of LMS missionaries in Asia directly undertaking the physical destruction of images. Although there is no shortage of evidence that missionaries assailed actual images with invective and sermons, preaching in front of them and publicly predicting their fall, and that they did bless their destruction, less space is given to description of LMS evangelists themselves smashing idols. Instead, as David Shaw King has documented, the process of conversion turned on the ritual and very public repudiation of cult imagery by converts, especially those of high rank, who would burn or hack the objects to pieces.⁷⁸ But it was also common for missionaries to gather discarded images or to purchase them as curiosities for themselves or for London, where a museum had been formed to display “trophies of Christianity.”⁷⁹ In other cases, particularly in the South Pacific islands, missionaries received images from new converts. All these stances toward idols—acquiring them, displaying them, analyzing their meanings, and sending them back home for the curious to examine—constitute forms of capture that defused the power of such images, and constituted what may be called “soft iconoclasm.”

But this is not to ignore instances of missionaries orchestrating the outright destruction of images. In 1817, Joseph Kam, LMS missionary on the Indonesian island of Amobyna, gave the following account of his role in an entire community’s ritual act of iconoclasm:

When I lately arrived at a large Negery, or Village, the name of which is Lileboi, north-west from Amboyna, upward of 800 persons, in order to convince me of the reality of their faith in the only true and living God, brought all their idols before me, and acknowledged their foolishness. I advised them to pack them all up in a large box (into which they formerly used to be put for their night’s rest), and to place a heavy load of stones upon them, and to drown them in the depth of the sea, in my presence. They all agreed to follow my advice: a boat was made ready for the purpose; and with a great shout, they were carried out of the Negery, and launched into the bosom of the deep. After this business was over, we sang the first four verses of the 136^th Psalm. This is the fruit of the Gospel of Christ.80

The psychology of the ritualistic act that Kam urged the community of converts to perform was quite shrewd: by sinking the idols in a boat made for the purpose, the gods were drowned, killed en masse by the village gathered together for the purpose of a collective act of transformation. The selection of the first verses of Psalm 136 reinforced the intention behind Kam’s instructions for the rite of iconoclasm. Its second verse reads: “O give thanks to the God of gods, for his steadfast love endures forever.” The act of launching the boatload of older gods into the sea, where they sank to the bottom and drowned was intended to assert their inferiority to the God of the Bible. Conversion in this schema did not mean, at least not immediately, demythologizing the indigenous deities as errors of thought or delusions enforced by fear. Instead, the strategy was to convince the people of their gods’ submission to the Christian deity. It was an approach adapted to the situation of many indigenous peoples. And conversion was an event conducted publicly and collectively. The entire community participated because the gods being replaced were community gods, constituting the social structure of the village’s life. To replace them was a traumatic event, one that had to address the community as a group and to offer a direct substitute. Iconoclasm was not a destruction of gods who were empty or nonexistent, but of gods who were no longer powerful. The way to remove them was to execute them at the hand of the new and more powerful deity.

This nuanced engagement with the cultures they encountered was not a subtlety that the directors of the LMS held up for public scrutiny back home. In their annual report for 1820, they summarized the “entire abolition of idolatry” as motivated by “the influence of Christianity.” Of greater interest to readers in London was the bloody revolt being carried out on Indonesian islands in 1817 against the Dutch colonial authority.⁸¹ But Kam’s understanding of iconoclasm was shared by many missionaries at work in island cultures in the South Pacific and was put into practice there much more commonly than among Indian and Chinese religionists encountered by Western missionaries. Widespread destruction of temples and cult figures in the islands of the South Pacific took place from 1815 to 1830—in the Tahitian Islands (1815), the Georgian and Society Islands, the Hawaiian Islands (1819), and the Cook Islands (1830).⁸² At Tahiti, rival groups fought over the issue of dominance and split along lines of adherence to the traditional deities, under the leadership of a chief named Papara, and adherence to the new religion of Christianity, under the celebrated leadership of Pomare, the king of Tahiti. When Papara was killed in battle, Pomare ordered that his followers not be harmed. As a result, the missionary account relates, the party of “idolators” relented and “unanimously declared that they would trust the gods no longer; that they [the gods] had deceived them, and sought their ruin; that henceforward they would cast them away entirely, and embrace this new religion, which is so distinguished by its mildness, goodness, and forbearance.”⁸³

The result was the destruction of cult images and of the marae, or sacred grounds, where the images had lived. In these instances, the destruction of images was conducted by the indigenous population, not by Western missionaries, whose position was often precarious when they were present. An important role was frequently played by native converts from other islands, who instructed converts and prompted the destruction of images. But image destruction was nothing new to Polynesian culture. The cult images of an enemy party had always been a highly symbolic target in rivalries and wars. To destroy a foe’s images was to claim power over him or her. Christian iconoclasm mapped itself over pre-Christian forms of visual violence, and did so with an eye trained carefully on the dynamics of images as powerful objects.

As missionaries in the South Pacific collected images of fallen gods, they announced the need for books and proclaimed the necessity that converts learn to read. Evangelicals replaced indigenous gods with a profusion of paper. Johann Supper, working in Batavia, distributed Chinese-language scriptures and reported that some Chinese inhabitants who read them “were induced to tear down from the walls of their houses those painted paper idols to which they had been accustomed to pay religious honours.”84 The act recalls the RTS campaign in London to replace secular paper bills posted in public establishments and in private homes with handbills it printed and provided to hawkers at reduced rates.⁸⁵ It also brings to mind the image limned in an annual report of the RTS, of a tract distributor handing out tracts among a group of card players, whose game is disrupted by their examination of the text. Poised with tracts in one hand and cards in the other, the players eventually capitulate, the tracts, we are told, having proved “victorious.”⁸⁶ The work of tracts to rouse or strike the conscience, arrest cursing and drinking, and reprove vice and folly was hailed in stories recounted again and again in missionary society literature. Tracts were acclaimed as “silent, yet powerful monitors,” “silent messengers of Grace,” and “silent preachers of righteousness.” They were “channels of communicating Divine Truth” and they fought head to head “to counteract the pernicious tendency of ballads, and other licentious and foolish publications.”⁸⁷

Though missionaries sometimes despaired at the thought that there were so few workers to gather in the harvest, they consoled themselves with the power of tracts to make the most of chance as the mask used by Providence. Unable to reach the twenty thousand Chinese living inland on Borneo, whose coast he visited briefly in 1819, LMS missionary John Slater sent in his stead “some Tracts and Catechisms; and hope that the seed sown will be as bread cast upon the waters, to be found after many days.”⁸⁸ The reference was to Ecclesiastes 11:1, and was meant to convey that the diligence of the missionary who invested the tracts would return a profit even though, as William Milne, LMS missionary to China, reminded his readers back home, “to plough and sow are the labour of this age; to reap abundantly, that of future times.”⁸⁹ His agrarian trope was not so picturesque as to conceal the Protestant economy it surely endorsed. The return on missionary investment sometimes seemed hopelessly slow, but the economy at work was finally anchored in divine bounty. Tempted by despair when he considered the intransigence of Hindu castes to join in fellowship, another LMS missionary, Wilhelm Ringeltaube, reminded himself that the Lord alone was able “to open the book of Providence closed with seven seals.”90

The missionary was not without books that he could open, and in which he took much comfort. On days when his labor seemed futile, Ringeltaube retreated to letters and missionary publications, devouring them with devotion. The books and letters offered the soothing presence of their authors: “Father Van der Kemp’s Diary always has a most blessed effect on my mind,” he recorded in his journal. “When those around grieve me, my distant friends and brethren, through a kind of Providence often experienced, come to console me.”⁹¹ The material presence of Evangelical print answered in some respect to the emotional attachments that others formed to cult images. Paper bore the breath of God and the warm presence of a far-flung community of saints.