The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society

Abstract

John Fea has written a lively and reasonably comprehensive bicentennial history of the American Bible Society (ABS) that should prove useful for institutional administrators and academic scholars. Historians who know the ABS primarily as an early nineteenth-century creation that constituted part of the “benevolent empire” of Bible, tract, and Sunday school organizations will be surprised at the extent of the institution's reach. The society's story seemingly intersected with every aspect of American culture over the past two centuries, from antebellum sectional tensions to late nineteenth-century global expansion through anticommunist crusades in the 1950s. Fea nicely contextualizes the ways this long-lived institution innovatively engaged with all of these issues, and he effectively elucidates the tension between Americanism and Christianity that remained at the core of the ABS's self-perception and image. He never loses sight of the religious aspect of the story. One particularly strong chapter concerns the ways this historically and occasionally nativist Protestant institution forged a complex relationship with the post–Vatican II Roman Catholic communion. Another insightful chapter charts the subtle tensions that developed during the 1980s and 1990s as evangelicals gradually replaced the mainline liberal Protestants who had provided institutional leadership for much of the twentieth century. As Fea demonstrates, the ABS never constituted a static and unchanging institution but rather regularly adapted its goals, strategies, and mission in the face of broad religious, social, and cultural forces.