Religion, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Culture Industry in Antebellum America

Abstract

IN 1871 MARK TWAIN NOTED THAT THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST CAME FILTERED down to nineteenth-century Americans through stage plays and through the despised novel and Christmas story, rather than from the drowsy pulpit.' Twain was not the first or the last observer to express bemusement at what he regarded as the commercialized superficiality of American religious sensibilities. However, the transformations that he saw as having moved religion outside of churches into the realm of commercial culture merit nonjudgmental scrutiny by historians. Should we read those transformations as proof of a modem trend toward secularization or, rather, as evidence that religion was tightening its grip on the American people? The question is a perplexing one. Antebellum Protestant clerics, perhaps unwittingly, have given historians plenty of evidence to support the secularization hypothesis. An unenthusiastic American visitor, Charles Dickens, noted the obsessive denunciations which ministers made of all innocent and rational amusements. Any excitement outside the church, the chapel, and the lecture room, was condemned as secular or worldly.2 If clerical formulas distinguishing the religious from the secular made cultural sense, religion was certainly in trouble. The condemned amusements multiplied apace.