Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows was a best seller in 1925 and 1926. It was a biography of Jesus, depicting Christ as the world’s greatest businessman. “He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world,” wrote Barton, a minister’s son and corporate public-relations specialist. The parables of Jesus were not only pearls of wisdom but also the “most powerful advertisements of all time.” Barton crudely expressed common views about the selling of religion, converting people to the faith—proselytization. Certainly the minister in the 1920s who advertised his weekly sermon with a sign for “Three-in-One Oil” as the image for the Holy Trinity understood that marketing ploys might entice converts, or at least inquiries.
Such religious advertising and recruiting—whether they come from Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Theosophist, Zoroastrian, or any other faith found (or founded) in the United States—were hardly new to the 1920s. Through much of American religious history, believers from diverse traditions have perfected techniques of aggressive salesmanship, active recruitment, niche marketing, and brand loyalty. To be sure, recruitment into religious groups does not amount simply to market competition. Religious conversion involves complicated human desires, not simply targeted pitches. Yet the market analogy provides one useful way to understand how faiths solicit, recruit, and hold members.
Proselytizing innovators have adapted religious traditions to the American free market of conversion. Obviously, this is true of evangelical groups, who are proselytizers by definition. To a remarkable extent, it is true also of Jews, Catholics, Asian religious groupings, and others. For one seeking to understand the spread of the evangelical model of proselytization in American history, a number of questions immediately arise. What are the motivations of the proselytizers and the proselytes—that is, the converts? Where does persuasion end and coercion begin? Does proselytization come down (in the cynical interpretation) to the creation and marketing of a brand name? Is the concept of proselytization itself based on a model of conversion that simply ill fits groups other than the self-consciously evangelical ones? To what extent, for example, can ethnically based religious groups (the German Lutherans, Pennsylvania Dutch, East Indian Sikhs, Acoma Pueblo, or African American Nation of Islam) be said to proselytize? What about Judaism and other religions into which adherents are normally born, rather than “born again”?
The free market of religion in America, protected by the Constitution and practiced in the daily spiritual quests of Americans, means that groups use persuasion to attract and hold converts. And the reality of the free market means that the winners (who for much of American history have been Protestants, especially of the evangelical variety) have written their own histories in triumphalist terms—as if those who have the most souls win. But proselytizers come in all shapes and sizes. They come with all sorts of motivations, too. Proselytizers generally see themselves as genuine and altruistic persuaders, as carriers of a message that may transform individual lives and perhaps even rectify injustices in the social order. Critics often see them as naïve cultural imperialists, as brainwashers, or as accomplices to one or another project of political or psychological coercion. Discerning the “true” motivation is difficult, perhaps impossible; altruistic persuasion and cultural imperialism, for example, may often be two sides of the same coin. The methods and effects of proselytization are easier to assess. The evangelical model has been adapted by various traditions to suit their own purposes, whether New York City Presbyterians, the League of the Iroquois, slave preachers, Reform Jews, or American Zen Buddhists.
Proselytizers are persuaders. Yet in terms of the spread of religious doctrine within the context of colonization, for example, and of white supremacy, persuasion and coercion can involve a fatal attraction. This may be seen most poignantly in the California missions from 1769 to the 1830s. Founded by Father Junípero Serra, the idea of the missions—Spanish-style compounds built from San Diego to San Francisco—was to take California Indians, the neophytes, and gradually civilize them, which necessarily meant Christianizing them. As with the Francis- cans in New Mexico, the proselytizing padres used material enticement to attract Indians (especially younger men) into the fold, and then worked them and disciplined them harshly for their “barbarism.” Serra readily admitted that the California padres whipped their Indian children, assuming this aided them spiritually. By the end of the missions period, the 1830s and 1840s, the padres had overseen the near-total extinction of the California Natives, through the breakdown of tribal ways, and the spread of disease, alcohol, and warfare. In this case, proselytization was the means to a “final solution” of the Indian question in California.
In New England, the Puritans, who began arriving in large numbers in the 1630s, also proselytized among Native populations, in fits and starts. John Eliot, the New England “Apostle to the Indians,” translated the Bible into the language of the Massachusett Indians, intending to teach them the Word and train up their own ministers. “Some of them began to be seriously affected, and to understand the things of God,” wrote Puritan leader John Winthrop in his journal, describing the effect of Eliot’s preaching, “and they were generally ready to reform whatsoever they were told be against the word of God, as their sorcery (which they call powwowing,) their whoredomes, etc., idleness, etc.” Eliot’s well-intentioned endeavor could not prevent King Philip’s War of the 1670s, an East Coast debacle of destruction that paralleled the contemporaneous Pueblo Revolt in northern New Mexico. During the war, Eliot’s “Praying Indians” huddled on Deer Island, suffering desperately for lack of food, clothing, and fuel. But by that time, few New Englanders cared to distinguish any longer between Praying Indians and preying savages. The preeminent Puritan minister of the late seventeenth century, Cotton Mather, rejoiced at the victories of white New Englanders, convinced that God’s plan called for less proselytization and more subjugation.
A more storied part of American religious history involves persuasive proselytization, seen most especially in the First and Second Great Awakenings. As a cultural force, American evangelicalism took off with a series of revivals in the American colonies in the eighteenth century, collectively known as the Great Awakening. Appearing sporadically from New England and the Middle Colonies in the 1740s to the Chesapeake and coastal lowland South in the 1760s, the Great
Awakening featured new styles of popular public evangelicalism. Challenging the authority of older established ministers, the so-called New Lights convicted the seemingly pious of sin and brought a new message of born-again Christian- ity. The theologian of the Awakening, Jonathan Edwards, provided a substantial intellectual framework for new modes of evangelization. He outlined a philoso- phy for and psychology of the conversion experience, in terms made familiar by John Locke and other leading philosophers of the time (for more explanations of this point, see Mark Noll, “Theology”). Revivalists during the Great Awakening attacked “dead” (unconverted) ministers and established churches. August divines such as the Bostonian Charles Chauncy fumed that preaching the Word could not be entrusted to roving packs of untested and theologically naïve proselytizers. “What is the Tendency of the Practice, but Confusion and Disorder,” he asked. “If one Pastor may neglect his own People to take Care of others, who are already taken care of; . . . why not another, and another still, and so on, ’till there is no such Thing as Social Order in the Land.” Despite fears of religious anarchy, there would be no turning back from the democratization of proselytization.
The eighteenth-century revivals were a transatlantic phenomenon, a fact exemplified in the life of George Whitefield. Born into a devout Anglican fam- ily, Whitefield attended Oxford as a servitor, a gopher boy for sons of the gentry. While there, he fell under the sway of John Wesley, who had begun an informal fellowship of pietists later pejoratively dubbed the “Methodists,” referring to their emphasis on cultivating a method for spiritual practice. In 1740 and 1741, White- field preached in the northern colonies. Americans responded enthusiastically to his thunderous appeals. His journals were widely read in England and the colo- nies, turning him into one of America’s first celebrities. Whitefield pleaded for reconciliation between the warring Old Lights and New Lights, aiming to make America safe for evangelical democracy. As the years progressed, Whitefield’s public presence, adroit use of theatrical tactics, and unctuousness turned him into a kind of colonial Billy Graham, a unifying presence wholly unthreatening to authorities. He developed a friendship with Benjamin Franklin, whose sardonic as well as serious writings were, like Whitefield’s sermons, classics of eighteenth- century American expression. In their own very different ways, the two famous Americans proposed that the wisdom of common men should form the basis of authority. These evangelists for common-sense enlightened rationalism (Frank- lin) and evangelical fire (Whitefield) both pointed to the coming revolutions in politics and religion.
Recently, scholars have even begun to speak of an “Indian Great Awakening” in the eighteenth century, a Native (and Nativist) pan-Indian response to the spread of the colonizing powers. Native American leaders used religious awakenings to revitalize their beleaguered communities. One Indian religious seer, an Iroquois from New York named Handsome Lake, went through a series of visionary journeys in the late eighteenth century, a time when the historical dominance of the Iroquois nations in the region fell prey to a rapidly advancing American civilization. Handsome Lake’s original message melded Iroquois lore and Christian beliefs learned from Quaker missionaries. “Our lands are decaying because we do not think on the Great Spirit,” Handsome Lake had written to President Thomas Jefferson, “but we are now going to renew our Minds and think on the great Being who made us all, that when we put our seeds in the Earth they may grow and increase like the leaves on our Trees.” Originally consumed with apocalyptic visions of Iroquois destiny, in later years Handsome Lake turned to a gospel of sobriety and industry among Indians, peace with whites, and preservation of Iroquois lands. In the religion of Handsome Lake, salvation came through following the code of Gaiwiio, with a mixture of Iroquois practices (including a traditional ceremonial calendar and a mythology consonant with older beliefs) and Christian influences (temperance, confession, and a notion of conversion to a new religion). Handsome Lake presented himself originally as a messenger of the new code, a preacher, but later claimed special supernatural revelations and divine powers.
The religious ferment of the new republic came to a head in the early nineteenth century. One scholar has written that this era witnessed the “democratization of American Christianity.” Other historians have referred to this time as the “Methodist century.” In “Evangelicals in American History,” Douglas A. Sweeney traces the explosive growth of evangelicals in this era. During the period from 1800 to 1850, church membership increased tenfold. In 1800, one out of every fifteen Americans was a Protestant church member; by 1850, that number was one in seven. The Methodists, a small sect in the late eighteenth century, numbered over 1 million by mid-century. With circuit-riding preachers combing the countryside on their horses, preaching to congregations throughout the newly settling areas, Methodists proved flexible enough to meet the need for religious organization on the frontier. Using their centralized church governance, Methodist leaders harnessed and controlled their expanding empire. Methodist theology, moreover, highlighted free will in accepting or rejecting God’s grace, ideal for a society in which men seemed to control their own destinies. In short, Methodists were perfect for this new religious environment of westward expansion and permanent religious competition.
Later in the nineteenth century, while Protestants devised new ways of responding to corporate capitalist America, Catholics, Jews, and others formulated similar programs of proselytization. Fervent revivalism, for example, a practice normally associated with evangelical Protestants, had a close corollary in the missions and special services conducted by several generations of Catholic priests. From 1850 to 1920, Catholic congregants as a percentage of total church adherents in the United States doubled, from 14 to 28 percent; the percentage of Catholics in the total population also rose, from 5 to 16 percent (the huge growth of Catholicism in the nineteenth century may be explored further in
Leslie Woodcock Tentler’s chapter “Catholicism in America”). This was no accident, nor was it a function only of Catholic immigration to the country from Ireland, Italy, eastern Europe, and Mexico. Certainly this immigration was part of the story, yet many of the immigrants were only nominally Catholics. Church leaders in America, recognizing the dangers to the “one true faith” from the myriad Protestant sects in the United States (as well as from indifference and traditional anticlerical attitudes), sponsored intense programs of parish missions, the Catholic counterparts to revivals. During one such revival in New York City in 1867, for example, a diarist reported that “one woman began to cry aloud; twenty others joined in as a chorus; and the whole congregation showed similar symptoms when the preacher said: ‘Don’t cry now but cry at your confession: then bewail your sins.’ ” Itinerant priests such as Francis Xavier Weninger served as the equivalent to the frontier exhorters of the Methodists, gathering in a harvest of souls to the faith. Weninger wrote, “I continually am giving Missions in the woods as well as in the metropolis going to every chapel, no matter how many families there are. In the course of the year I am preaching over 1,000 times.” Parochial schools planted throughout the country in the nineteenth century and staffed by religious women institutionalized devotional Catholicism as the faith of the sons and daughters of immigrants, especially in urban America. For many Catholic children, parochial-school education became a rite of passage, and the nun teachers stereotypically infamous for their frighteningly disciplinary rulers thwacking errant pupils. The schools reinforced the growing ties between ethnic neighborhood enclaves and local parishes.
Jews likewise joined in adapting to the free market of American proselytization. Reform Jews were not seeking converts from outside Judaism, but they were attempting to attract disaffected Jews to a faith that responded to the realities of living in American society. Reform Judaism itself, as pioneered by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in Cincinnati before the Civil War, was a recognition that Jews lived in an evangelical culture and would have to adapt accordingly. Reform Judaism thus jettisoned certain traditions viewed as archaic, modernized services, opened up seating to families (at about the same time that many conservative Protestants also did away with gender-segregated seating), and provided more open and inviting services. While Reform Jews in America (especially in areas of lesser Jewish con- centration, such as the South and Midwest) did their best to become American, many Conservative Jews pressed the cause of Zionism, the religion political platform that claimed that only a separate and independent Jewish homeland would save the race. In 1896, Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jewish intellectual, published The Jewish State, giving Zionism its manifesto for the next century. Conservative Judaism—whose members were not fully Orthodox but who objected to the complete set of innovations introduced by Reform Jews—were especially effective advocates for the Zionist program. Alan T. Levenson provides more in-depth discussion of these varieties in his piece, “American Judaism.”
The gigantic foreign missionary enterprise conducted by American religious organizations during this era arose from a similar mixture of evangelical and socially progressive impulses. Today, American foreign mission efforts are dominated by conservative evangelical groups (the Southern Baptist Convention and the Assemblies of God being the two largest senders of career missionaries) and Mormons (by far the largest commissioner of non-career missionaries). In the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, however, it was mainstream Protestant denominations that led the way, sending thousands of men and women to China, Africa, Japan, India, Burma, and South America. Some of these were explicitly “heathen” (meaning non-Chris- tian) lands; others were Christian but considered so full of idolatrous Catholicism as to be equally pressing candidates for Christianization.
Foreign missions had begun in the early nineteenth century with the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In the late nineteenth century, as the non-Christian world seemed to be opening (due largely to the Western powers’ exercises in imperialism in Africa and Asia, where European nations wielded political authority), some American evangelicals and mainstream Protestants took up the mantle laid down by Robert Speer, a recruiter and publicist for the foreign missions effort, who spoke of the opportunity for the “evangelization of the world in this generation.” Although Speer and his colleagues were part of the “muscular Christianity” of their era, it was in reality women’s missionary societies that raised the bulk of the funds for the huge overseas proselytization effort. This “errand to the world” represented by the missionary enterprise showed Americans’ great faith in proselytization itself. Americans actually took the imperious slogan “the evangelization of the world in this generation” as a serious goal. By the 1930s, many missionaries, less naïve for their experiences, began to argue that American-style emotional persuasion was not easily translatable to other cultures. They pressed for more money and man- power in educational enterprises. Conservative evangelicals, however, insisted on spreading the gospel in print and by word of mouth, just as they always had done, trusting that God would work results in men’s hearts.
After World War II, Americans flocked to church in record numbers. More than 60 percent of Americans attended some religious service every week. Main- stream religious leaders eased Americans’ transitions to corporate capitalism and a therapeutic culture of self-realization and autonomy. Liberal Protestants, post– Vatican II Catholics, and Reform Jews carried their religion into corporate board- rooms and neighborhood barbecues. Proselytization itself, among respectable Protestants at least, fell into disrepute. Christian evangelicals, Mormon missionaries, and other sectarian groups held no such compunction: recruitment remained their stock-in-trade. Their efforts paid off.
The Southern Baptist Convention provides a case in point. Emerging from the ashes of the Civil War, this denomination of small farmers and plain towns- folk had become the largest denomination in the South by 1900. As southerners migrated northward and westward in the twentieth century, the Southern Baptist Convention soon became the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, numbering over 18 million adherents nationwide by the 1990s, with members spread all throughout the country. The First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, pastored by the irascible fundamentalist W. A. Criswell, was the nation’s single largest congregation. Southern Baptists perfected professionalized proselytization. A large denominational apparatus sent out thousands of home and foreign missionaries. The denomination’s Sunday School Board churned out millions of pages of edifying age-graded instructional material, hymnals, and worship aids. The convention’s church-building program lent start-up money for congregations establishing outposts in new communities. Southern Baptists, in short, advertised and expanded in ways akin to successful retail chains.
The recent growth of megachurches also suggests that entertainment and theater remain central to religious persuasion, as they have since the days of George Whitefield. Surveys have demonstrated that contemporary Americans distrust an excess of moral earnestness in preaching, and desire anonymity as passionately as they ostensibly seek community. In response, interdenominational chapels and fellowships bring together congregants in mall-like structures, generally in suburbs, and present a generically Christian pitch in the format of an hourlong live television show. Indeed, many of them are specifically made for television, with the studio audience serving as a backdrop. These religious theaters provide a familiar setting for a predominantly white, middle-class consumer shopping experience.
As the megachurch example suggests, proselytization often has come in the form of, and been most effectively practiced by, conservative religious traditions. Recently, in fact, in books such as Dean Kelley’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (1972), some scholars as well as evangelical propagandists have suggested that more narrowly defined conservative religions give participants an effective incentive, a psychological wage of sorts, precisely because they define themselves as countercultural and because adherents must sacrifice in order to get the benefit. By contrast, “liberal” versions of religious traditions, according to this view, implicitly devalue their spiritual benefit by making it too broadly and easily available. There is much to dispute in this argument, but it does call attention to the close connection in American history between proselytization, the use of media, and commercialism. Consistently through the history of Christianity in America, at least, it has been the evangelicals who have been the quickest to adopt the mechanisms of modernity (especially through the use of the most advanced media forms of any given time, from George White- field’s open-air theatrics to Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network) to advance their message warning against the perils of modernity and secularism. Evangelicals have brilliantly exploited popular culture, a point developed by Philip Goff in his chapter, “Religion and Popular Culture.”
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