The Lure of Images

A history of religion and visual media in America

David Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000158304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

This is the history of the relationship between mass produced visual media and religion in the United States. It is a journey from the 1780s to the present - from early evangelical tracts to teenage witches and televangelists, and from illustrated books to contemporary cinema.

David Morgan explores the cultural marketplace of public representation, showing how American religionists have made special use of visual media to instruct the public, to practice devotion and ritual, and to form children and converts. Examples include:

• studying Jesus as an American idol
• Jewish kitchens and Christian Parlors
• Billy Sunday and Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Uncle Tom's Cabin and the anti-slavery movement.

This unique perspective reveals the importance of visual media to the construction and practice of sectarian and national community in a nation of immigrants old and new, and the tensions between the assimilation and the preservation of ethnic and racial identities. As well as the contribution of visual media to the religious life of Christians and Jews, Morgan shows how images have informed the perceptions and practices of other religions in America, including New Age, Buddhist and Hindu spirituality, and Mormonism, Native American Religions and the Occult.

Part I
Print media in antebellum America

Chapter I
The aura of print

As the American Revolutionary War drew to a close with the Battle of Yorktown in the autumn of 1781, the young Noah Webster was teaching school in Sharon, Connecticut. The recent Yale graduate was appalled at the gross variations in spoken English among his pupils and had become convinced that the success of the emerging nation depended on fixing the proper rules of spelling and speaking American English. Much would depend, he insisted, on securing the practice of what he called a “federal language,” which meant teaching children to read, write, and spell a version of English that was both purged of regional differences and distinct from its British origin. And so he set about producing an “American Speller,” which first appeared in 1783.¹ Language would serve as the savior, not saviour, of the national soul.² The genius of a people was invested in its language and bequeathed to the future through the proper education of the young. This held with particular force, according to Webster and his contemporaries, for the new republic, a polity whose power to cohere depended on good will, on a shared national vision, on electoral good sense, and therefore on a degree of public literacy that could not be left to cultivate itself.

Common or public schools were an indispensable institution for promoting public good through the acquisition of cultural no less than academic literacy. And Webster, whose livelihood was producing school books and dictionaries, never ceased insisting that Americans needed to speak, read, and write as Americans, which they were to learn by reading his books in school. A print culture that would educate and inform students and the broader public to that end was essential. Certainly this was the view of another early vendor of popular print, the Rev. Mason Locke Weems, an Episcopal clergyman best remembered for his biography and apocrypha of George Washington. But Weems spent much of his time hawking books as the agent for Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey. In 1811, Weems shared with his employer and investor a publication project, which, like many of his ventures, was never realized. But the project registers the Republican ideology of Federalists and later Whigs as they regarded the nation and devised ways to bind it up in a unity, which they faulted the vices of aristocratic luxury and the teeming mob alike for resisting. For Weems, as for others, the term “Christian” was synonymous with “Republican.”³ After spending years planning many bible editions with Carey, and then selling them throughout the North and South, Weems urged upon him a tract that might be inserted in the bibles that Weems sold for Carey:

I contemplate a noble addition to the Bible. Kingly governments you know are the curse of the Human Race. The Bible, you also know, is point blank against Kingly governments. The People of America enjoy a REPUBLIC, which, next to a Theocracy, must be the most perfect form that can be. But they don’t know its value. And therefore like Esau they may sell it for a song. To set their own form of Government before them in all its Amplitude & brightness of Blessings must in my opinion at least be one of the most patriotic services that any man can do to this Country. Now what book so proper as a vehicle (to print it in) as the book which in consequence of the universal veneration attached to it, finds a ready admission into every house?⁴

The significance of literacy and print had been recognized and celebrated by Protestants in colonial America since the early seventeenth century. Puritans and Pilgrims both stressed the reading of the bible and provided for the education of the young no less than the preparation of young men for teaching and the pulpit. The size and number of personal libraries in colonial America is striking. Literacy rates in colonial America generally exceeded contemporary rates in England and Europe. Yet book production was considerably less, long yoked to London. The first bible published in America did not appear until 1777.⁵ The largest-selling books published after the founding of the new nation were not, however, religious in the institutional sense. Webster and his competitors in the textbook trade issued spellers and readers that went through multiple editions and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. But if they were not religious in a narrowly sectarian sense, books such as Webster’s American Speller and Caleb Bingham’s American Preceptor (1794) and Columbian Orator (1797) did promote a piety of the republic, a civil religion that was unmistakably Christian. Bingham stocked the Columbian Orator, a collection of passages for learning eloquence, with texts that promoted the importance of religion for the success of republicanism, including poetic passages that were explicitly Christian. Although a Jeffersonian rather than a Federalist like Webster, Bingham nevertheless believed that the American republic required the Christian practice of virtue in order to resist the corruptions of luxury and wealth that led to tyranny. Webster and Bingham made sure they included texts promoting the value of religion in American society because they believed it was the most powerful avenue for the inculcation of virtue. And the religion was Protestant Christianity. The unity of religion and republic was considered fundamental. Religion and eloquence each kept vice in check – the one by instilling the practice of virtue, the other by championing liberty in the public life of government, press, and law.

Bingham’s Columbian Orator was dedicated to teaching American students the art of oratory. “Eloquence,” to quote the opening oration of the book’s selections, “can flourish only on the soil of liberty.”⁶ The book serves to remind us that the practice of public speaking not only remained a fundamental feature of political life during the early republic, but also was regarded as a cornerstone of education and an indispensable component of making American citizens. In fact, the character of print that Protestants developed in tracts and printed sermons was deeply shaped by the oral culture of early national life. The concept of the American republic in the early national period drew importantly from what might be called the oratorical imagination, that is, the power of eloquence to evoke an ideal communicative situation in which a republican speaker moved citizen-listeners with the sublimity of speech, persuading them to endorse the speaker’s point of view. The result was a public sphere in which republican justice prevailed. Print was the actual substitute for the forensic practice of oratory – print in the form of newspapers, books, and pamphlets, which constituted what Bingham, echoing an eighteenth-century tradition, proudly called the “republic of letters.”⁷

As the official oral culture of the day, oratory as Bingham presented it helped usher in a momentous shift toward imagery in print culture. In the introduction to his volume, Bingham framed his definition of eloquence with a theory of the passions, which understood language as their vehicle of expression. He asserted that the ancient orators of Greece and Rome “did not think language of itself sufficient to express the height of their passions, unless enforced by uncommon motions and gestures.”⁸ Bingham noted that authorities of eloquence were conflicted on the rank of speech and gesture, but for his part he believed gesture to work more directly on the mind of listeners since it operated by sight, which was “the quickest of all our senses.”⁹ The sublime style, which operated by sweeping listeners away with emotional gestures and powerful diction, relied less on abstraction and more on the appeal to feeling. As a result, its use of visual signifiers of feeling – gesture and facial expression – magnified the effect of words and fostered greater sympathy for the visuality of speech. This interdependence of word and image in oratory was paralleled in print by the growing use of illustrations. Oratorical practice argued that seeing and saying were importantly linked. It did not take textbook publishers long to agree.

The capacity of oratorical gesture to paint the passions had long been a vital interest among history painters in the European academic tradition, which provided the visual template for American painters who described the patriotic heroism of the Revolutionary War. In 1851, the Pennsylvania-born Peter Frederick Rothermel, who studied painting in Paris, produced his large canvas Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses, delivering the famous speech against the Stamp Act of 1765, in which he warned King George III of the republican lesson of an autocrat’s demise. Two years later an engraving offered a more widely available reproduction of Rothermel’s painting to Americans (Figure 1). Rothermel observed the physiognomy of the grand style, showing

Figure 1 Engraving after Peter Frederick Rothermel, Patrick Henry delivering his celebrated speech in the House of Burgesses, Virginia, AD 1765, for presentation to subscribers to the Art Union of Philadelphia for 1852, 1853. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

the animated speaker gesturing dramatically, which is echoed in a forceful diagonal that moves upward through the audience, visualizing the effect of his speech. In the balcony above, women seem to flee the thrust of his diction; below them a British officer rises to unsheathe his sword, as if to defend England against the orator’s treasonous attack. Tories and Loyalists in the audience grimace at the effect of Henry’s words. As an early moment in the sacred narrative of American nationhood, the scene seems to ground the genesis of national consciousness in the daring act of speech. The power of the speaker is registered everywhere in this iconic moment of incipient democratic spirit.¹⁰

The cooperation of word and image was a lesson not lost on Evangelical publishers. The need to develop persuasive oratory during the early republic was intensified for Evangelical Christians by the new political culture of democracy, particularly democracy in which state religion was eliminated. Tract societies conceived of an ideal homiletic situation that bore close resemblance to the practice of eloquence. An illustration by Alexander Anderson on the cover of the American Tract Society’s Christian Almanac from 1836 (Figure 2) models the ultimate form of evangelism: a preacher commanding the rapt attention of the world’s populace as he announced the Word of God. In the same way that Rothermel would use gesture to demonstrate the homology of seeing and saying, Anderson uses the body to deliver the message of the preacher’s words. The gesture of his hand visualizes the spoken word and deftly converts the printed word of scripture into spoken as well as visual language. An image like this – and there were many in Evangelical tracts, almanacs, and magazines – visualized the transparency of scripture and the authority of the text it adorned, fashioning it as the printed version of what the preacher proclaimed. Such images helped craft a transition from the oratorical tradition of preaching to the illustrated print culture of the nineteenth century, tutoring Americans to regard print as a faithful conveyance of scriptural truth and illustrations as an affirmation of the authority and reliability of print. Illustrations endorsed the iconicity of texts by showing the object of the preacher’s speech, authorizing tracts and other print as equal to preaching or an even more effective means of disseminating scripture. Illustrations like Figure 2 assured Protestants that printed texts worked like spoken discourse, encouraging them to imagine everyone in the nation as an extended gathering waiting to “hear” the message of Christianity.

If a republican understanding of oratory stressed the importance of public speaking and the cooperation of seeing and speech in the creation of an ideal form of discourse, the disestablishment of religion created a new condition for the relevance of imagery, particularly illustrations that accompanied texts. Protestants had made use of print imagery from the very beginning of the Reformation. Even the most stringently iconophobic Puritans in England found certain kinds of illustrative imagery acceptable. American Protestants illustrated versions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, broadsides, New England primers, and almanacs among other standard texts. Bibles even appeared in the

Figure 2 Alexander Anderson, engraver, Missionary preaching, Christian Almanac for 1836. New York: American Tract Society, 1835. Photo author.

later part of the eighteenth century with a scattering of engraved plates. But the new nation consisted of many audiences for whose attention zealous Protestants competed: unchurched immigrants, growing urban neighborhoods of laborers, passengers aboard steam ships and railroads, passersby in the street, and most especially, the children of frontier towns and eastern cities. Conservative Protestants found it necessary to enhance the appearance of their religion and to teach its precepts to consumers whose loyalties were increasingly drawn toward secular print and its sometimes lurid forms of entertainment. Accordingly, the purveyors of Protestant print had remarkably little difficulty recognizing the desirability of illustrated publications and often spared little...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series editors' preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Print media in antebellum America
• PART II New visual media and the marketplace
• PART III The power and menace of images
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index