The recent success of the Left Behind book series, which sold over
50 million books, points to an enormous readership of evangelical
Christian literature that has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream
publishing world. But this is not a recent phenomenon; the
evangelical publishing community has been growing for more than two
hundred years. Candy Gunther Brown explores the roots of this
far-flung conglomeration of writers, publishers, and readers, from
the founding of the Methodist Book Concern in 1789 to the 1880
publication of the runaway best-seller
Ben-Hur. Brown shows
how this distinct print community used the Word of the Bible and
printed words of their own to pursue a paradoxical mission: purity
from and a transformative presence in the secular world.
Although scholars usually claim that religious publishing fell prey
to the secularizing engines of commodification, Brown argues that
evangelicals knew what they were doing by adopting a range of
strategies, including the use of popular narratives and beautiful
packaging. An informal canon of texts emerged in the nineteenth
century, consisting of sermons, histories, memoirs, novels, gift
books, Sunday school libraries, periodicals, and hymnals.
Looking beyond the uses of texts in religious conversion, Brown
examines how textual practices have transmitted cultural values
both within evangelical communities and across a larger American
cultural milieu. An epilogue conveys crucial insights into
twenty-first-century ties between religion and the media.