What Would Jesus Read?

Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America

Erin A. Smith

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469621333
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Literatura y artes en el cristianismo

Since the late nineteenth century, religiously themed books in America have been commercially popular yet scorned by critics. Working at the intersection of literary history, lived religion, and consumer culture, Erin A. Smith considers the largely unexplored world of popular religious books, examining the apparent tension between economic and religious imperatives for authors, publishers, and readers. Smith argues that this literature served as a form of extra-ecclesiastical ministry and credits the popularity and longevity of religious books to their day-to-day usefulness rather than their theological correctness or aesthetic quality. Drawing on publishers' records, letters by readers to authors, promotional materials, and interviews with contemporary religious-reading groups, Smith offers a comprehensive study that finds surprising overlap across the religious spectrum--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, liberal and conservative. Smith tells the story of how authors, publishers, and readers reconciled these books' dual function as best-selling consumer goods and spiritually edifying literature. What Would Jesus Read? will be of interest to literary and cultural historians, students in the field of print culture, and scholars of religious studies.

Part I: The Social Gospel and the Literary Marketplace

One: What Would Jesus Do?

Reading and Social Action

This library is my church, and men and women of all creeds come here by the thousands.

—Inside of the Cup (1913)

Hegemonizing is hard work.

—STUART HALL

Frank Luther Mott, esteemed scholar of bestsellers in America, argues that “one cannot dip into the popular literature of the first two decades of the twentieth century without being impressed by the emphasis on the church and its problems.”¹ Much of this literature was part of the Social Gospel, an ecumenical Protestant movement in North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seeking to transform social institutions according to Christian principles. Sometimes called the “Third Great Awakening,” the Social Gospel was a response by liberal Protestants to the problems caused by industrialization, massive immigration, and urbanization. The religious expression of the Progressive movement, the Social Gospel had a major influence on the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, advocating for workers’ rights to collective bargaining; federal regulation of wages, hours, and working conditions; protective labor legislation for women and children; and the formation of a welfare state to mitigate the negative effects of unbridled capitalism. In part, Social Gospel leaders wished to bring working men and women into the church, but they also intended to bring about the kingdom of God (that is, a just social order) here on earth.²

Although the Social Gospel is usually discussed through the nonfiction writings of its most prominent leaders, liberal Protestant ministers Washington Gladden, Richard Ely, and Walter Rauschenbusch, there is a sizable body of Social Gospel fiction that popularized the doctrines of these more learned writers. About one hundred Social Gospel novels were published around the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1886 and 1914, roughly three or four Social Gospel novels appeared every year.³ The most popular American novels include Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1897), Harold Bell Wright’s That Printer of Udell’s (1903), and Winston Churchill’s Inside of the Cup (1913). All of these novels are self-consciously about print culture, making clear that founding the kingdom of God here on earth depends on making appropriate use of books and literacy. These novels are rich resources, then, for uncovering the rules of reading and the networks of reading practices authors, ministers, and publishers urged on their Social Gospel readers in turn-of-the-century America. Moreover, the commentary and controversy they engendered offer testimony to some of the ways Social Gospel readers appropriated these texts as “equipment for living” their everyday lives.⁴

In these texts, appropriate use of books invariably moves readers to social action. That is, one reads not in order to contemplate abstract ideas or to improve oneself, but in order to change the world. In Social Gospel fiction, poverty, drunkenness, crime, and urban blight are no match for the right kind of books in the hands and minds of the right kind of readers. Although many popular Social Gospel novels engage deeply with the theological divisions of their day—embracing modern biblical criticism and the extensive reading of new books bringing faith to bear on the problems of contemporary life—perhaps the best-known Social Gospel novel, Sheldon’s In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, sidesteps theological controversy and critiques the modern, mass-literary marketplace. Although Sheldon’s book is also self-consciously engaged with questions about reading, writing, and social action, his brand of “untheological Christianity” makes his work appropriable to new generations of believers in ways most Social Gospel novels are not.⁵

This chapter looks closely at three of the most popular Social Gospel novels, Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), Sheldon’s In His Steps, and Winston Churchill’s Inside of the Cup, all of which self-consciously represent different models of reading and writing in order to demonstrate the porousness of the boundaries between literature and life for good Christian readers. Although the hundred or so Social Gospel novels can by no means be reduced to a single formula or plot, I chose to investigate these novels specifically for four reasons. First, they were bestsellers, suggesting that the particular version of social salvation through Christian action these novels offered was especially compelling to ordinary readers. Second, the public attention and controversy they generated created a paper trail of testimony about what ministers, reviewers, and other social commentators thought religious books ought to do. Third, the texts themselves deliberately consider different ways of reading to an extraordinary degree. Fourth, in the scholarly discussions about Social Gospel fiction, these novels are often granted emblematic status.⁶

I am concerned not only with representations of reading and writing in the novels, but also with Social Gospel readers. Sheldon wrote about himself as a reader in his 1925 autobiography, and these books motivated many ordinary readers to take social action. The interplay between Social Gospel literature and life is striking. Sheldon was inspired to dress up as a tramp and inhabit the underworld of his own city of Topeka, Kansas by reading Ward’s Robert Elsmere, and his tramping, in turn, inspired him to write In His Steps. The representation of a Christian daily newspaper in In His Steps motivated one Kansas editor to make his own periodical a Christian newspaper for one week in 1900. That newspaper offered specific recommendations on the social action Christian readers should take after perusing the news. Literature in Social Gospel novels is not a self-contained, intertextual world of ideas, but a series of concrete transactions with the material world undertaken by readers who understand books and literacy differently than contemporary scholars do.

The Library as Savior: Robert Elsmere and Inside of the Cup

Henry James hailed the 1888 publication of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere as a “momentous public event.” Called “the publishing sensation of the century,” it was an immediate and enduring bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, selling over 40,000 copies in the United Kingdom and over 200,000 (mostly in pirated editions) in the United States in its first year. One American distributor gave away a free copy of the novel with each purchase of a bar of Balsam Fir Soap. Its phenomenal American sales hastened the passage of the 1891 International Copyright Act. In June 1899, the Ladies’ Home Journal books columnist complained about the novel’s ubiquity: “Everybody from the silliest miss to the learned Divine has something to say of it, until the subject has been worn thread-bare.”⁷

The novel narrates a young Oxford-educated minister’s loss of faith caused by reading historical biblical criticism and his rebirth as a settlement house worker in London. Once Elsmere takes up residence in his rural parish with his devout, evangelical wife, he struggles to finish the book he is writing in the absence of intellectual companionship. He strikes up a friendship with an infamous squire whose legendary library is described at length. Reading and discussion with the squire make Elsmere’s orthodox faith seem untenable. He resigns his pastorate and takes up social settlement work in the slums of London, struggling to live peaceably with his devout—but closed-mindedly orthodox—wife. The books in the squire’s library drive the action of the novel and profoundly reshape the characters’ relationships to each other. Orthodoxy has been replaced at the close by a celebration of the power of stories (true and untrue)—from across history and throughout the world—to move the human heart.

Ward offers several different models of the scholar/intellectual in Robert Elsmere, so as to more clearly illustrate the appropriate uses of reading and writing. Elsmere has two formative influences at Oxford: Edward Langham (his tutor) and Mr. Grey (a mentor). Langham is a brilliant scholar, and he instills intellectual discipline in the flighty Elsmere, but Ward clearly condemns Langham’s uses of literacy. Although he wrote some passionate position pieces in his early career, alienating him from his family and his conservative Oxford College, he has long since sunk into melancholy and intellectual inertia. “So he wrote no more, he quarreled no more, he meddled with the great passionate things of life and expression no more,” Ward explains.⁸ Although offered a prestigious chair at a university in Scotland, Langham declines, imagining only more failure. He falls in love with Elsmere’s sister-in-law but ultimately reneges on his pledge of love and marriage, since he believes himself incapable of abandoning his soul-deadening scholarly routines to rejoin the living.

Grey captivates Elsmere from the first words of a lay sermon he preaches on some select words of St. Paul. Much of the address is cast in metaphysical terms that are intellectually beyond the young Elsmere, but he is bewitched by the passion of the speaker and by the occasional passage addressing the practical, spiritual needs of his listeners: “He put before them the claims and conditions of the higher life with a pregnant simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase.”⁹ Grey becomes Elsmere’s longtime friend and mentor, instilling in him a love of both scholarship and practical, life-affirming work on behalf of others. When Elsmere goes to take up his ministry in rural Surrey, Grey urges him to continue cultivating a life of the mind (writing a book about the making of France), dedicating half his day to the service of society and half his day to scholarship. Elsmere quotes his mentor: “The decisive events of the world take place in the intellect. It is the mission of books that they help one to remember it.”¹⁰ Elsmere was particularly impressed by these words because they came from Grey, who was also passionately engaged with practical work.

Elsmere’s intellectual interlocutor in Surrey is the neighboring squire Roger Wendover, a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin and a celebrated hermit who has been at work for over thirty years on a magnum opus about Christian witnessing throughout history. In the interim, he has published two books that scandalized conventionally religious English readers. Although it is Wendover’s books and his relentlessly brilliant arguments that precipitate the loss of Elsmere’s orthodox faith, the squire is devastated by Elsmere’s determination to leave the ministry because he cannot stand the hypocrisy of preaching what he no longer believes.

After the clearly suffering Elsmere takes his leave, the squire sits in his magnificent library, dumbfounded: “So Elsmere was going! In a few weeks the rectory would be once more tenanted by one of those nonentities the squire had either patronized or scorned all his life. The park, the lanes, the room in which he sits, will know that spare young figure, that animated voice, no more. The outlet which had brought so much relief and stimulus to his own mental powers is closed; the friendship on which he had unconsciously come to depend so much is broken before it had well begun.”¹¹ This loss of his intellectual protégé awakens in the squire an awareness of all the other loving relationships he has sacrificed for his scholarship—the wife he did not marry, the children he never had. “He had never, like Augustine, ‘loved to love’ he had only loved to know,” Ward explains.¹² Nevertheless, the squire had begun to feel he possessed a spiritual son in the attentive, intelligent Elsmere, but this relationship, too, is a casualty of his scholarship. The suffering etched into Elsmere’s face brings the squire to an epiphany about the real human consequences of intellectual gamesmanship, however brilliant: “He had been thinking and writing of religion, of the history of ideas, all his life. Had he ever yet grasped the meaning of religion to the religious man? God and faith—what have these venerable ideas ever mattered to him personally, except as the subject of the most ingenious analysis, the most dedicated historical inductions? Not only skeptical to the core, but constitutionally indifferent, the squire had always found enough to make life amply worth living in the mere dissection of other men’s beliefs.”¹³ Although an incontestable genius and an immensely learned man, the squire has clearly misused books and reading, to his own detriment and that of the world. Ward clearly thinks there are better uses for a magnificent library and a magnificent mind, uses that men like Grey might have made.

The ending to the novel bears this out. The squire comes to call on Elsmere, once Elsmere has become known for both his historical scholarship and his firsthand knowledge of the squalid social conditions that challenge urban missions. The squire is clearly in failing health and has abandoned his magnum opus two-thirds done. “If you had stayed, I should have finished it, I suppose,” the squire tells Elsmere, “but after a certain age the toil of spinning cobwebs entirely out of his brain becomes too much for a man.”¹⁴ Inspired by a recent article of Elsmere’s, the squire bequeaths him his unfinished manuscript. Their conflicting uses of literacy become clear when the squire castigates Elsmere for allowing his preaching and social work to impede his scholarly work. Elsmere explains: “There is the great difference between us, Squire. You look upon knowledge as an end in itself. It may be so. But to me knowledge has always been valuable first and foremost for its bearing on life.”¹⁵ Not long after, the squire succumbs to hereditary insanity and dies in his magnificent library.

That literacy and the library (appropriately put to use in the world) are the ultimate heroes of the book becomes additionally clear. Although Elsmere has lost his orthodox faith—he no longer believes in Jesus’ divini...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• What Would Jesus Read?
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Social Gospel and the Literary Marketplace
• Part II: The 1920s Religious Renaissance
• Part III: America’s God and Cold War Religious Reading
• Part IV: Reading the Apocalypse
• Part V: The Decade of the Soul
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Survey Materials for The Late Great Planet Earth Readers
• Appendix B: Questions to Frame Spiritual Autobiography Interviews
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index