Public Relations and Religion in American History: Evangelism, Temperance and Business
2015; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2161-430X
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Religion, Digital Communication
ResumoLamme, Margot Opdycke. Public Relations and Religion in American History: Evangelism, Temperance and Business. New York: Routledge, 2014, 205 pp. $145.In her new book, historian Margot Opdycke Lamme makes a compelling case that the roots of much of modern public relations in the United States can be traced to religious evangelicals who mobilized to save souls and to reform perceived defects in society. The book, which was selected as the American Journalism Historians Assocaition's book of the year, looks at how key individuals and groups organized and publicized their activities to reach their objectives. Lamme's analysis stays mostly at the strategic level. We learn what they did and why they wanted to do it more than we learn specifics about how they did it.Lamme starts her study during the First Great Awakening, focusing on the prolific English preacher George Whitefield, who took Colonial America by storm during seven well-publicized revivals between 1739 and 1770. She then moves to examine the most prominent figure in the book, Charles Grandison Finney, a New England preacher trained in the law whom she credits with professionalizing American evangelism and making itinerant preaching a widely accepted practice. Finney's career as a preacher had wide influence after he published a series of lectures he gave in 1834-35 that outlined his strategies for saving souls and holding effective revivals. Lamme looks in depth at the advice that Finney gave to other preachers in these lectures, creating a reference point for later analyses in the book.Finney's fame got him hired at Ohio's Oberlin Collegiate Institute as its first theology professor, which brings Lamme to study the roles Oberlin had in various reform movements of the era. Lamme focuses her study on temperance, something she has written about in various academic journals. The next two chapters rely on that previous research by delving deeply into the differing styles and impact of public campaigns against alcohol abuse that were organized by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League of America. The highlight of the book is her chapter on how the lessons learned from years of evangelism and moral reform influenced the career of Ivy Ledbetter Lee. She argues that Lee, whose father was a pastor, also was influenced by the philosophy of philanthropy exhorted by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. The Lee chapter enhances the relevancy of the book immensely by bringing her analysis to the person most textbooks consider to be one of the first major figures of modern public relations. …
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