This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Please check back later for the full article.
At the center of the long, intertwined history of religion and books in America from the early seventeenth century to the early twenty-first century is the dynamic interplay of Protestantism and print in American culture. The Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura energized the publication of Bibles in vernacular languages. The first large-scale publishing project in North America was John Eliot’s Algonquin Bible of 1663. From these beginnings, though the nineteenth-century Bible and tract societies, to the Christian Booksellers Association of the early twenty-first century, the story of Protestant community life and evangelism in America has been inseparable from the Protestant drive to control and disseminate print.
Protestantism shaped both American religious history and the history of American reading, as the drive for mass literacy in New England and the early public school movement were largely driven by the religious imperative to access the Word. Yet all along, print has also served as a site of religious conflict and a tool of religious innovation. These conflicts can be tracked through the writings of Thomas Paine, Joseph Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other religious dissenters and innovators, structured around four large themes: the relationship between scriptural and nonscriptural forms of print; the role of print in bolstering institutional authority on one hand and in undermining authority on the other; the gendered dimensions of reading, literacy, and authorship; and print as commodity and therefore as a site where market dynamics shape religion with particular potency.