Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America. By Daniel Vaca. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 336pp. $39.95.
2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jcs/csaa080
ISSN2040-4867
Autores Tópico(s)Religion and Society Interactions
ResumoAmerican evangelicals generally have prided themselves on their straightforward reliance on the Bible alone. Scripture, the assumption goes, is self-evidentiary enough not to require the mediating authority of tradition. The burden of interpretation thus tends to fall on the general reader, who can be forgiven for not always detecting an obvious Sunday School message. It makes sense, then, that American evangelicalism has spawned a profitable market for supplementary readings in book form. The result has been a vast network of evangelical book publishers and sellers, enduring from the age of Dwight Moody to the present. In his deeply researched history of the evangelical book industry, Daniel Vaca demonstrates the extent to which that industry is the very essence of modern American evangelicalism, “the commercial religion of our time” (p. 234). Evangelicals Incorporated offers an insightful dive into what were arguably the big three evangelical publishers of the twentieth century: Revell, Eerdmans, and Zondervan. Founded by the brother-in-law of evangelist Dwight Moody, Revell was able to “capitalize on the Moody market as well as reach beyond it” (p. 36). By the early twentieth century, it was a publishing force on par with its Fifth Avenue neighbors. Eerdmans became a force itself after expanding beyond its Dutch Reformed roots. By the 1940s, Eerdmans was fashioning a new form of postfundamentalist Christianity, using the term “evangelical” in a manner still recognizable half-a-century later. Eerdmans, Vaca writes, “cultivated a brand premised upon the notion that they served a Christian tradition within which Reformed Protestants and other antimodernist Protestants stood as allies” (p. 75).
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