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Sonia Hazard, "Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media" (Oxford UP, 2025)
00:47:26
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Jacob Barrett, and today I am thrilled to be joined by Dr. Sonja Hazard, whose new book, Empire of Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, was published just a few months ago with Oxford University Press. Thank you so much for joining me, Sonia.
- [01:26]
C
Well, thank you, Jacob, for this opportunity to talk about my book. And also thank you for platforming American religion scholarship through New Books Network.
- [01:34]
B
Yeah, it's one of my favorite. Obviously, I work in that world, so I'm always happy to talk with people about the new exciting books coming out in American religion. I want to start with kind of the basics of the book for people who haven't read it yet or who are stumbling across it for the first time in this conversation. What is this book and what's the central argument you're making in it?
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C
The book is Empire of Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, and it's about how evangelical evangelicals leveraged the medium of mass print during a time of US Expansion in the early national period. That's a time of evangelical ascendance in the United States, and the goal was to make the US More Christian. I look specifically to the Media Corporation, the American Track Society. That's the ats. It's a massive publisher it was one of the largest publishers in the world at the time between its Founding in 1825 in New York and the eve of the Civil War. That's when the study ends. It published over 5.6 billion pages of print. That's an astonishing number in the book. I try to make some comparisons that if you were to put every single page on its end, it would reach the moon and then halfway back to Earth. I focus mostly on the Track Society's tracts and books. They also publish newspapers and magazines. My argument is that evangelical power in this period not only stemmed from the quantity or ubiquity of those media objects, you know, however astonishing that quantity was, and also not from the content of the messages, but it was dependent on what I'm calling media infrastructure. And that infrastructure was a pervasive but underappreciated style of evangelical power in the 19th century. Media infrastructure refers to those clunky apparatuses, all of that work done behind the scenes that makes possible the delivery and beholding of media content. So as an example, you know, in our own time, television sets and cables, for instance, that's the infrastructural underside of the sounds and images that they usher about, you know, so the show is the media content, but all of this other stuff is behind it. And in the book, I show that the evangelical leaders of the ATS engineered print infrastructure very, very carefully in order to ensure that their readers would accept the publications and actually read them. Because just accepting a publication doesn't necessarily mean that you'll read it and then experience the messages printed in them as urgent and true and ultimately to convert or get serious about their religion. So ATS leaders saw infrastructure as a site for guiding reader reception.
- [04:21]
B
Yeah, there are so many rich examples and rich stories that you're telling throughout this book. And one of the things that, that I find very interesting is how you're working with, you know, in the subtitle of your book is the word power, evangelical power, and how you're thinking about the, you know, power of infrastructure, the work that infrastructure is doing. One of the things that you say is that infrastructure prompts rather than compels readers, which I think is really interesting, and thinking about how it doesn't force conversion, but creates the conditions that make certain responses more likely. Um, so can you maybe give us some. A concrete example of how this worked? Maybe something about, you know, how the physical tracks were designed, like what you were talking about, about how the infrastructure is more about the material versus necessarily the content and, you know, how the people who were trained to distribute these were trained to distribute them. You know, how they were trained to approach the readers.
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C
So in my book, media infrastructure is a form of power, and it refers to two things. The first is media format, by which I mean the material qualities of media objects. And media format is really all about. I mean, for the ats, it was about how do you create an object that encourages certain kinds of behaviors? And in the 19th century, publishers were really highly attuned to this question. So, you know, it's intuitive kind of at some level, you know, if you're creating a big Victorian family Bible with tons of images that's very heavy, with a thick binding, thick leather binding that is going in your parlor. It's going to be displayed on a mantel or on a center table. It's meant to endure across generations. You know, people are meant to go to it. It does not, you know, go out to the people. You don't, you know, drag it around, you know, you wouldn't drag it into the fields with you to consult, you know, in a break from your. From your chores. The tract was the opposite of that. So I'm using the word tract more or less interchangeably with pamphlet. It means a thin booklet, typically cheaply produced and without a binding. And that lack of binding is. Is. Was really key for the ats, and it's what distinguishes a tract from a book. The ATS's designers thought that they had engineered the perfect media format that would get people to convert, that would prompt them to convert, for example, because it lacked a binding, tracks had their titles and often illustrations right on their faces. And the idea was that these visual elements would catch the eye of potential readers and bid them to open the pages and read. The ATS published scores of anecdotes to this effect. They loved anecdotes. And a lot of them say something like this, a wicked and listless farmer, you know, who is much inimical to the tract cause was arrested when his eye happened to fall upon a tract. On its face were the words, are you saved? And they could not escape his attention. Every time he glanced in the tract's direction, those words filled his vision. Da, da, da, da, da. He is now a member of an evangelical church, and so is his family. You know, so this media format was intended to encourage the track circulation as well, not just its kind of ease of uptake and reading. Unlike that family Bible, which was intended to sit on a shelf over generations, the thinness, lightness, and cheapness of tracts was seen as A boon. It was seen as encouraging the tract to move from hand to hand. You know, you could tuck it into a letter, you could, you know, arrange it on your center table where visitors would see it. Sometimes furtive tract distributors would even stick a tract under a tray at a pub or something like that, so that when the tray was removed, you know, somebody who was drunk might see the tract and then, you know, it would bore into their soul. So through media format, there's this whole intended script of reception and circulation that was built into that object itself. And for me, you know, as you say, material format is not force. It's not a violence backed power. You know, it's not like a policeman slapping on cuffs. And it's also not disciplinary power in that grand Foucaultian or Assadian sense either. You know, that was a really important kind of way of understanding power, especially as I was in graduate school. Here we've got a subject who's just glancing at attract. She's not becoming gradually subjectivated in the way that she would be in the disciplinary regime of an asylum or a monastery, you know, to use Foucault and Asad's examples. But the work that tracks format is not nothing either. It's that muddy middle between force or discipline on the one hand, and nothing that interests me and that I wanted to better figure out in the book. The other example you suggested was about colportage.
- [09:28]
B
Thank you for saying that word, because as I was asking my question, I realized I've only read that word. So I was like, oh no, how does it pronounce? So, yeah, please.
- [09:36]
C
So it comes from the French, but anglicized by the ats. So I think we can say colportage. If one form of infrastructure is about media format, how a tract looks, its typography, illustration, size, heft, and so on. Another equally important form is about the ways in which media objects were distributed. The ATS thought that the ways in which you received a tract or a book would have a demonstrable impact on its future career with you. Cole Portage is a great example of that. So a note on terminology. Cole porter was the ATS's name for an itinerant distributor and typically of religious books, not tracts. My book goes into how soon after it's found in, the ats realized that actually lots of people didn't want tracts. They thought they were flimsy and cheap and not appropriate for middle class readers. So they got into the book business fairly early. And the ATS really becomes as much of a book Publisher, as a tract publisher, as you mentioned, the institution, you know, eventually hired hundreds of these men who were salaried, intended to work full time, and they visited readers at the doors of their homes, trying to sell the ATS's religious books. The goal is to canvas the entire nation of settlers in this way, visiting every house. It comes from Cole Porter, colportage, you know, from the French. But the ATS kind of borrows this term in some ways, misunderstands it, and popularizes it in English, such that by the end of the 19th century, Cole Porter really becomes the name for a literature peddler in general. But they really meant it as like a distributor of pious literature, which was not how French people meant it. But in any case, essentially, colportage encounters were the site where the institution of the ATS actually physically got into the proximity of a real reader. And the ATS did not waste that opportunity. The colporter was to spend about a half an hour at a house and knock at the door, invite himself inside. And in that narrow opening, the goal was to interview the inhabitants, you know, starting kind of in a quiet, easy way and then escalating in intensity, eventually getting to the state of their soul. All of this inquisition was meant to get that person, the target of the colporter's attentions, to break down in tears, crying. And it was only in the midst of that very weeping moment that the colporter was to offer the Christian book to the reader. It was really essential that the book kind of come enveloped in this really intense emotional moment that was generated by the Cole Porter. The ATS was really explicit that forever after, the book would be marked by the memory of this encounter, and that it was that encounter that would encourage reading. Whereas if the Cole Porter just sold books or, you know, left tracks at the door and didn't actually have this intense encounter, they were much less likely to be. To be read and would wage much less power. So there's another example of a form of infrastructure that does not coerce. In fact, the ATS didn't want to coerce people. You know, they thought that ultimately the decision. They were Calvinists, and they thought that the. The process of growing in grace would take a long time. But it was more like the book or the tract was supposed to prompt the reader. It was supposed to be the kind of first moment, the spark to the flame, and then it would be a much slower process later that would lead into a conversion. But the ATS saw itself as that which prompted, did not force.
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B
That's so interesting to me in. In comparison to how other sort of, you know, missionary style or, like, you know, door knocking style groups work, like, especially in contemporary, you know, spaces and moments where it's so much about, oh, hi, like, we're here. Like, do you want to come to our church? Will you? You know, like, it's very much about that sort of evangelizing process, and this shift to kind of prompting is different, and I think it's doing something interesting. You, obviously, we've talked a little bit about this. The. The title of your book is Empire of Print. And your main analytical concept that you're using is what you call media infrastructure. So I wanted to just, you know, drill in and have you unpack these terms a little bit for us and what they're doing for you. Particularly, I'm interested in why you chose the word empire in the title of your book and why infrastructure becomes, you know, the lens for you for understanding how the ATS wields their power across such vast distances. I was really impressed in the book at how, you know, you really are looking at kind of across the country and lots of different regions and how this is spreading. So, yeah, kind of that. That combination of, you know, what work empire is doing for you, and then how media infrastructure helps you make sense of the work that the ATS is doing.
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C
I'll start with Empire. Empire captures the fact that the United States in this period was an imperialist, expansionist state, rapidly expanding in its square footage, you know, by stealing the lands of indigenous people, and also through expansionist wars like the war with Mexico. It was the main problem that leaders of the ATS had to confront. Basically, we want to evangelize the American people, but the land of America keeps rapidly swelling in size, and the people in it are moving into its new reaches and becoming more and more difficult to access. The challenge for this publisher was how to reach these people in these spatial conditions of an empire. This was a problem that all imperial projects have to confront. You know, how to manage the periphery from the faraway metropole. Infrastructure is so useful because it's a way of talking about material apparatuses and spatial arrangements that traverse space, even vast distances. You know, if you think about, you know, the more common reference of infrastructure, like a sewer system or an electrical grid, it moves across space. And the ATS was like that in its powers were more like a sewer system and less like a discrete space, like an asylum. Infrastructure also invites a mode of analysis that is pretty technical. As a scholar, I've always been interested in Nitty gritty questions of mechanics. Always asking questions like, how do things happen? What are the steps that lead to someone's conversion in the mission encounter? What was said and done and when was it said and done that made this whole thing compelling and not a total farce in our case. How exactly did a publisher manage to change a person's mind through the medium of these pretty humble printed papers in a massive and expanding nation? It seems unlikely to me. And infrastructure is a way of naming those nitty gritty details that get at how power moves across vast distances.
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B
Yeah. One of the other things that I was curious about and I wanted to hear you talk about was the structure of the book. I'm, you know, big into thinking about how form and structure is part of the argument. Um, and so, you know, you organized the book around three modalities at infrastructure, production, circulation, and reception. So can you walk us through how these three parts work together? What does it mean that you organize the book around the movement of media rather than, you know, there were any other number of ways the book could have been organized? It could have been chronological, it could have been around the content of the tracks or, you know, any other structure and organization, but what does it mean that it's structured around kind of how this media is moving?
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C
Thanks. So the honest answer is that the structure of the book was not deliberate. It was not a carefully laid plan. But it emerged slowly over a period of years and through many, many redraftings and restructurings. In that my process was kind of like the process of the ats. And then it's kind of. It's making a mess of things and looking at it and saying, oh, this isn't going to work at all. Back to the drawing board. In her famous book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, have you ever read that Sick about writing manual? So she says that there's something mysterious about writing, that sometimes she feels as if she's not the one who writes so much as facilitating writing. Speaking of Calvinism, Lamotte is a Calvinist, as I understand, and she basically attributes this mysterious force to grace. I am not a Calvinist, but I identify with the experience of the book itself, wanting to be shaped in a certain way. You know, you get your archival artifacts and your textual sources and you have your writings of other scholars. And I get all my notes together and my draft writing and throw it on the page, and it starts taking shape, and there's something about it that starts to get a mind of its own and starts to tell me where things need to go. And that's what happened with the structure of the book. It emerged organically from the materials and from my ongoing revision. And it was somewhat of a tortured process. I had times where I tried to make it more chronological. There's a penultimate version in which I had five chapters and each was arranged around a keyword that wasn't really working. And then things, as I kind of organized my materials, things started to move into this more classic media studies triad of production, distribution and reception. And that's ultimately how it ended up. There's also an element of how the book needs to come out. The music stops at some point. It's like, okay, we're going with this retrospectively. It's more clear to me that production, distribution and reception is the thematic order in which the bureaucrats at the ATS address the problems before them. There's a way in which the ATS at first is really, really confident that its production of the media formats of media objects is going to serve its needs. If we just produce tracks in this way, they are almost going to be like these little self propelling machines. And because of their thinness and lightness and cheapness and so on, they will spontaneously be distributed through American space. That's why tracts were superior to books. Books were full of inertia. But the tract, you know, the track could go anywhere. You know, you could put it in your pocket, you could hand it to a friend, you could tuck it in a letter, all this stuff. They soon began to realize that that vision of distribution as inbuilt or embedded in the object itself didn't work. And they had to actually come up with real distribution apparatuses. So in some, you know, distribution comes along chronologically a little later. Once they have the distribution systems in place, that's when they realize again, you know, here's another way for us to exploit infrastructure in order to maximize the potential of conversion. So that's when they say, when they see things like with colporters who are at the doors of people's homes, oh, here's an opportunity for us to really shape reception at close range. So then they start thinking about how to shape reception. So there is a kind of logic in the temporality of production, distribution and reception. And that is the order in which the ATS was plotting.
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B
And it's, I think it works so effectively as the structure of the book because of that, you know, because it's how your argument's unfolding. And also the, the same way that the ATS kind of, you know, moved through Their process is really interesting, and it's encouraging, as someone writing a dissertation, to hear, you know, that sometimes the process or the organization, what the final product looks like is a little muddier of a process. It doesn't look necessarily like the chapter outline that I wrote in my prospectus, however long ago.
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C
Yeah. And some people, you know, I think. I think some people do have a good outline and they follow it, and I admire those people. Good. You know, Good for them.
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B
Yeah. I wanted to ask about specific. Well, how you open the book. You open the book with this really interesting story that jumped out at me. You describe the scene where a tract distributor named Micah Croswell approaches a house in South Carolina. When he approaches the house, an enslaved woman answers the door and refuses him entry on behalf of her mistress. And it struck me, you know, Croswell never considered that the woman answering the door might want access to the tracts or the materials that he's giving out. It was very much about, you know, the mistress of the house. So I think this raises an interesting moment and prompts questions about race and whiteness and how those conversations are related to the argument that you're making. So how did the ATS's decision about race and citizenship shape where their infrastructure extended and where it deliberately didn't reach?
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C
Two points on that. Both took me a really long time to figure out, like, almost an embarrassingly long time. For one thing, the ATS really cared the most about converting people who were citizens or had citizenship potential. Citizens were the prize for the ATS because they were the ones who had the power to change the character of the nation through their enactment of their rights. Rights like property ownership, participation in civil society, occupying public offices, and so on and so forth. They were the ones, again, in the imagination of the ats, who had the power to make America a Christian nation. They were also the ones with the power to drag it down and make it capturable by the Antichrist. Those were the world historical stakes that the ats, that the ATS saw itself as. As poised within. The ATS saw itself as fulfilling salvation history by making America Christian, by winning the souls of citizens in this way. Okay? And in this period, the only people who unambiguously possessed citizenship were white. So this is why, you know, as you say, this is the opening vignette of the book, is that this distributor goes to this fancy neighborhood in South Carolina, and he knocks on the door, and the lady of the house, the white lady who owns the house, is eyeing him from the chamber window, and he's like, oh, no, this isn't gonna be good. And then a few minutes later, you know, in Croswell's antebellum vocabulary, a servant, which is enslaved person, makes her appearance and says, you know, please go away. We don't want your tracks here at this house. Creswell is really crestfallen. He turns away. He kind of slinks away, and he never thinks, even for a second, that actually, maybe I should talk to this person who's standing in front of me. He sees it just as a rejection. And the reason he does that is because he's mostly interested in the white citizen with the power behind the door. The reason it took me so long to realize this importance of American citizenship and its racialized implications is that leaders were rarely explicit about it. There are little hints of it here and there, but where it really comes out is in their actions. And once I figured this out, a lot of things that were puzzling to me about the ATS became more clear, like why the ATS barely ever thought of Mexico, even though they publish otherwise amply in Spanish for Spanish immigrants to the US and the fact that Mexico City was the most populous city in North America. You know, it also helped me make sense of why, while you've got this Cole Porter who's complaining about the many days that he spends traversing a Native American reservation, but never seems to think, oh, maybe I should stop here and save some souls where I'm at, instead he's trying really hard to get to the white settlement on the other side and says, oh, gosh, the conditions are so horrible, trying to traverse this reservation, things like that. A second thing to mention in regards to to black people in particular is that another reason the ATS ignored them, both enslaved and free, is that the ATS was on high alert to protect its relationship with white Southern evangelicals, who are a central constituency of the ATS as donors and buyers of publications. So the ATS is located in New York, but they really want to be a national institution. They really count on having these warm, fraternal relationships with white Southern elite Southern planters. And any whiff of black reading would send those people into orbit. So what happened is that the national ATS studiously avoided distributing its publications to black readers for most of the antebellum period. Things began to change in the 1850s. That's when anti slavery New Englanders had finally had enough. They began to threaten to withdraw from the organization. And at that point, the ATS made this huge about face and started to court black readers for the first time. But again, you know, the ats, they wrote these annual reports, and they are not forthcoming. They write in this corporate blather. And it took a long time of close reading of these reports and kind of pairing up kind of what they say they are doing with what they're actually doing. That took a long time for these elements about kind of race and citizenship.
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B
And.
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C
Relationships with white planters and so on to come into focus. None of that is made clear. None of it is on the marquee of the sources. I also found that despite the ATS's infrastructural neglect, Black and indigenous readers sought out ATS publications. Sometimes they did so quite systematically. Cherokee Nation, for example, after years of rarely being passed over by the ATS in the 1850s, decided to hire its own Cole Porters using national funds, actually given donations to the ATS in New York in order to fund these people to come to Cherokee Nation to canvas the nation with ATS materials, which is a really profound reversal of typical arrangements. Coal Portage was intended to be philanthropy, you know, not a service for hire. But instead, Cherokee Nation wants this for the nation, and they seek it out and they turn it into a service for hire, which also has the benefit to the Nation of allowing them to control the terms of the arrangement. So when the ATS runs afoul of them about 18 months into this, into their collaboration, they say, forget it, and they decide to pull the coal porters from the nation. And the nation's never canvassed with ATS materials again. This is something you see often happening at the infrastructural margins, where an underserved group will figure out their own ways of accessing those resources in unofficial ways.
- [29:10]
B
It's really interesting to me, the connection, these questions of race and citizenship. It becomes so much clearer about how this project was as much about evangelizing and converting and spreading the message and all of those things as it was a nation building project and an empire building project, which I think is something that you really successfully demonstrate through your argument. I admittedly didn't know much about the ATS before jumping into the book. And so I was, you know, the ATS was quite influential. It was at the, you know, height of its power in 1858, dispersing 9 million tracts annually and employing nearly 800 coal porters with revenue exceeding most state budgets, which is wild to me. But you trace how, by the Civil War, it began a long decline, which culminates in them finally closing their doors in 2012, which was interesting. To me. And so I wanted to know what the ATS's eventual closure or failure or their end teaches us about the fragility of infrastructural power, even when it seems so dominant.
- [30:31]
C
Thank you. One of the arguments of the brilliant late anthropologist David Graeber, which is really I'm taking to heart, especially in our times, is that he would always say other worlds are possible. His view was basically, look, systems and regimes collapse. New ways of organizing society come into being all the time. No one social arrangement or ideology is dominant forever, even though it may feel that way when you're inside it. And I think that thinking of power in terms of infrastructure highlights that mutability that Graeber talks about. Whatever the ATS was able to accomplish, it was propped up at every moment by an extraordinary amount of effort, you know, like sweat equity, a lot of really random contingency, and always, you know, in regional terms, an extremely fragile support of the entire south, where the south is threatening withdrawal from this so called national society almost at every point from its founding until the Civil War, when things do finally break apart. And all of the. And the other thing too is the ways in which the ATS was forced to be adaptable. I think infrastructural power also helps us really think about and understand how top down power, if it is to actually have effects, material effects. It's best when it's tensile and responsive to what's going on at the kind of individual capillary, bottom up level. This is what the ATS did that made it so powerful for so long, is they would do things like send these colporters out into the field. Then the colporters would write these elaborate reports and send them back up to the chain, back up chain to administrators in New York who would then change their strategies in order to better address the resistances that colporters encountered the next time. So colporters and various other distributors learned very quickly that middle class people don't want tracks. So what is the ATS going to do? It's going to start producing books. They quickly learned that coal portage is offensive to many people. So what do they do? They start embracing the commercial book market and do things that they never would have done in an earlier period, like place their books in, you know, store windows and advertise them in catalogs and embrace every mark of commercialism in order to get this kind of more well heeled reader. And the ATS would not have been successful if it wasn't constantly doing these adaptations. And Their downfall is that they kind of cease to stay ahead of the curve in that way. You know, they don't continue that.
- [33:29]
A
They.
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C
Don'T continue that, they become less savvy at adapting to what the base wants and eventually settle into this long decline. So all of that provides a lesson, I think, about power that it's not like, even though it can kind of feel like there's this strong ideology that one can't see outside of it, it's actual real people who are making these decisions, who are propping up the systems that feel inevitable with a great amount of effort, that are always adapting to circumstances and that a few missteps and things can fall down and go the other way.
- [34:07]
B
Yeah. One of the things that I like talking to authors about is where the project came out of and kind of the more meta scholarly interventions that they're trying to make or the gap that they were trying to address. And you talk about how you came to this project with a sense that existing scholarship wasn't quite capturing something important about how evangelicalism worked in the 19th century. What weren't you seeing in that historiography and what made you think that we needed a new analytical framework to understand evangelical power? Obviously you put forward infrastructure and media infrastructure as, you know, a new framework to apply to this history that we can get something new out of to understand evangelical power. So what wasn't happening in the historiography that you were seeing and what made you think, you know, this framework we really need to take seriously?
- [35:03]
C
The historiography of evangelicalism in this period is all about power, in my view, and the two main narratives about it. And there's more than that. But just for simplicity's sake, the kind of two dominant narratives about it are completely contradictory. And anywhere where there is that much fundamental disagreement is an interesting zone to be in. So on the one hand, the first historians of this period were known as the purveyors of the social control thesis, the so called social control thesis. These were people like Charles Foster and Clifford Griffin and. And they basically emphasized that these huge elite evangelical societies like the ats, they were seizing power in the wake of religion's disestablishment, in the wake of revolution. So these were elites who, even though religion was disestablished at the federal level, they believed that the need for America to have a Christian character was as important as ever. So they became these self appointed moral stewards of the republic that in many instances saw themselves as almost an auxiliary department of state, or historians have called them kind of part of a quasi establishment or a pseudo establishment of religion. So Foster and Griffin, this was a really powerful thesis, very strong for a long time. And they pointed to things like you say the ATS had a bigger budget than many states. It was powered by these elite evangelical men who had connections in Congress and civil society and all of this. So that's the one hand. On the other hand, when I was in graduate school, these were the high water mark days of caring about the agency of individuals. And after people like Nathan Hatch and after he published Democratization of American Christianity, the sensibility really, really shifted. Where these scholars come to the exact opposite conclusion, which is that the days after the revolution, while these elites tried to wage power, in fact they were the early republic's losers. And that the winners of the early republic were individuals who used things like the religious press to develop a democratic public sphere. To develop, yeah, basically a way in which religion could participate in the democratic project. And that it was the individual who was newly empowered by religious options that were offered by things like print media who is really calling the shots. And if evangelicals were ascendant in the period which all of these historians agree with, it's not because elites seized power, it's because people voluntarily chose evangelicalism. Okay, so that I think there's problems with the first group of folks. The second group of folks really, oh, they gave me a lot of dissatisfaction. I was very dissatisfied by that. On the other hand, I think that there's ways in which both were telling a certain part of the story. And what we needed was a different vocabulary to talk about power working, that recognized the fact that individuals were making choices in the way that the kind of hatchet cetera school said they were. But that also acknowledged the real, frankly acknowledge the institutional power that evangelical elites really wielded, but that understood how those things worked together and also how they had to work together over distance and infrastructure became that vocabulary. To me, it was a vocabulary that recognized that there was this large scale development of material apparatuses in the form of things like print media and their avenues for distribution that were intended to guide reader response and successfully did so, but did so short of coercion. You know, it's not like a culture industry. It's not this kind of strong armed form of subjectivation. You know, it's not like that tree tied to a pole in that amazing image and discipline and punish. Rather it's these fleeting encounters with print media. And those fleeting encounters do wage a power, but it's a, it's an infrastructural power. It's a prompting power, not a coercive one. So I really felt like this historiography was ripe for different sorts of ways of modeling how this works, which kind.
- [39:45]
B
Of takes me to the last question I wanted to ask. In the epilogue of the book, you give this really rich example of contemporary tract distribution. You talk about tracts sealed in plastic bags tied to tree branches in Boston Common that, you know, become visible once the leaves drop, you know, in the fall. And you talk throughout the book, you note parallels to how we experience media today. You know, because maybe I was thinking, I don't know, maybe like zines would be the contemporary example that people might, you know, that the kids might understand as like, what encountering media in this way would be. But even that it's more, you know, it's less widely available or it's less influential and carrying less power. So you say that, you know, scrolling through our phones maybe is the way that it feels almost irresistible but not quite coercive, you know, might mirror that. So what can your work and, and the 19th century evangelical publishing Society, your analysis of them, what can it teach us about how contemporary media infrastructure works on us? Because even though the track society is gone, I think a lot of the dynamics and the process and the theorization around media infrastructure is still so pervasive and so important. So how would you understand how your argument and the work that you're doing helps us understand maybe our current moment?
- [41:21]
C
Of course, I'm so much more comfortable in the 19th century. There's a reason why I chose the 19th century. I don't think that print media today has quite the same ability to catch our eye, to grip us that it did when mass printing was new and available to non elites for the first time, circa 1825, like in the ATS's glory days. Even though the Boston Comet Evangelist was wagering on this surprise of the placement of those tracks, was doing just that in the 21st century. This was an amazing example shared with me by my friend Jessica Linker, who lives in Boston, who noticed that. Yeah, so she's in Boston Common and somebody had put these 21st century gossy tracks in these little plastic baggies and then tied them to trees in Boston Common earlier in the fall. And the idea was that several months later the leaves would fall and these tracks would be revealed and would, would, would be in their plastic baggies. So they would have been preserved through, through this, and that this kind of revelation would have caught people's eye and kind of brought Them to open the tract and read it, which is a very, very 19th century sort of strategy. You know, as. As I've done this book, I've also. I've been alert to the tracks in my vicinity, and they really are around. You know, you see them in a bathroom stall at the airport and, you know, I've seen them on campus, you know, stuck in the corner, this sort of thing. I end the book with a provocation about why understanding media infrastructure might be important to us today. And on this podcast, I think I'm prepared only to repeat the provocation, which is that in the 19th century, like in the 19th century, we live in a time now with media all around, and it's produced by media corporations that are actively scheming to produce a product and distribute it in such a way as to attract our attentions and keep them. In some ways. What am I saying? In some ways, in almost every way, they're much more sophisticated than they were in the 19th century, and that should be cause for alarm. In other words, media corporations today are also producing infrastructure, and that infrastructure is intended to pattern our reception. I think there's also interesting debates about what digital media means that remind me a lot of the 19th century. You know, is it that this is, you know, empowering the people with the means of production that results in things like the Arab Spring? I think maybe that felt true, you know, several years ago. And we're starting to see the consensus is starting to turn towards really the ways in which these things kind of keep us, keep us in their grip. And I think infrastructure continues to offer us a vocabulary for why that is true. Maybe one that relies more heavily on our brain chemistry and dopamine hit did in the 19th century, but the general structure is much the same.
- [44:30]
B
Yeah, well, thank you so much, Sonia. This has been such a wonderful conversation and I so thoroughly enjoyed the book. It was, you know, I don't find myself identifying as a historian and, you know, find, you know, find typical, you know, history works to be sometimes a slog to get through. And your book was anything but that. It was an interesting history marked by interesting theory and really doing, you know, important work bringing new new vocabularies and frameworks to American religion. So I really appreciate your work and I've loved talking with you today. Thank you for being here.
- [45:11]
C
Thank you so much, Jacob. And really, that's all I want, especially if graduate students read it and find something interesting in it. I think that's the highest praise and I really appreciate you taking the time and I look forward to. I love reading, listening to the new Books Network podcast that you do and please keep continuing to do them. It's a real public service to our field.
- [45:31]
B
Thank you.