Evangelicalism before the Fall: The Christian Herald and Signs of our Times

Abstract

“Evangelicalism Before the Fall” reveals the surprising and largely forgotten world of the premillennialist wing of late Victorian Evangelicalism through a close reading of its leading paper, The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. Organized around five thematic soundings (“worldly affairs”; “great questions”; “self and other”; “meeting modernity”; and “Evangelical culture”), the paper shows that premillennialism comported easily with socially elite status, liberal instincts, and irenic habits of mind not commonly associated with those holding similar beliefs in the decades after. Although the primary goal of the article is to recover an overlooked moment in Evangelical history, it secondarily contributes to a historiographical debate in the field of Fundamentalism studies, where revisionists have challenged the “fall” narrative of an earlier cohort of scholars, such as George Marsden and Joel Carpenter, who documented a decline in social standing and influence for the movement relative to the late nineteenth century. The article lends support to the fall narrative, properly understood as a change in social and cultural status.

1. Introduction

Leafing through the pages of a nineteenth-century paper is always a voyage of discovery, but the effect is heightened in the case of The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times (1878–1901). There, more than mere discovery, one finds the surprise of a past world whose existence is rather hard to imagine. The story begins in the autumn of 1878, the same season an elite group of American scholars hosted an international conference in Midtown Manhattan. Their field had been electrified in recent years by breakthrough discoveries in the UK, where counterparts had applied inductive methodology to painstakingly assemble, classify, and synthesize widely scattered data into a new paradigm of exceptional coherence and explanatory force. Their field? Biblical prophecy. The revolutionary paradigm? “Dispensational premillennialism”, which construed human history within a flow of successive “dispensations”, or epochs, each governed by the terms and conditions of its own distinct covenant with God. All of Christian history, they found, fell within a “Gentile Dispensation” or “Church Age” that would end with the saints being caught up (“raptured”) into the heavenlies just prior to a seven-year period of tribulation. Only then would the millennium—the thousand-year period of peace and righteousness foretold by Scripture—unfold.1

The conference these scholars convened, at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on 42nd and Madison, is now recognized as a seminal event in the sweep of dispensationalism across American Evangelicalism,2 with the expectation of an imminent premillennial rapture soon internalized as a matter of mere common sense for millions. The spread of the new frame, however, did not occur in a vacuum. Most leading advocates also participated in a broader current of renewal known as the “Higher Life” or Holiness movement, whose members sought special empowerment to live sanctified lives, recapitulate early Christian wonders, and win the world for Christ. Dispensationalism coalesced with these themes in a four-fold Gospel aptly captured in the motto that evangelist Albert Benjamin Simpson adopted for his Christian and Missionary Alliance: “Christ our Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King”.3

While the limelight rested on the scholars in Midtown, a separate development, timed to coincide with the conference, transpired some 30 blocks to the south at the Bible House in Lower Manhattan: the launch of the Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. The new paper promised “to make known the way of salvation, and to keep alive the expectation of our Lord’s return to the earth”, and set to work by serializing addresses delivered at the conference. Within scarcely a decade, it had become fin-de-siècle America’s leading religious periodical and the flagship organ of American Evangelicalism.4

These events took place at a critical juncture in Evangelical history. By 1860, Evangelicals had attained a position of social preeminence fueled by over a century of explosive growth (and a subsequent rise to respectability) among revivalistic groups like the Methodists, Baptists, “Christians”, and New School Presbyterians. Eighty-five percent of U.S. congregations at the time were Evangelical.5 The postbellum years, however, brought innumerable dislocations, prompting an anxious “Search for Order” that touched religion as it did all other facets of society. For many, dispensationalism ably met the challenge of those troubling times, forming a “carapace” that offered a “dawn-to-dark, cradle-to-grave means of finding coherence”.6

Notwithstanding the succor of a new paradigm, however, as the century dawned Evangelicals found their movement increasingly torn by competing factions within—revitalizing, reactionary, and modernist—and rival forces without, including rising secularism and waves of non-Protestant newcomers. The movement began to fracture and lose cultural influence. Over the transitional decades ahead, those trademark beliefs and practices expounded in Manhattan, proclaimed by evangelists like Simpson, and broadcast through the pages of the Christian Herald would be embraced most fervently and carried forward most effectively by Fundamentalism and the Holiness-Pentecostal trajectory, the chief exemplars of what Matthew Sutton has dubbed “radical apocalyptic evangelicalism”. These currents frequently adopted a militant, oppositional stance vis-à-vis mainstream American culture, stressing doctrinal purity, ethical rigorism, and separation from the world. Yet, they also grew more luxuriantly than any other sector of American religion, even as they either voluntarily (in the case of the anti-elitist Holiness-Pentecostal stream) or involuntarily (in the case of many Fundamentalists) suffered a “dramatic decline” in standing within “the centers of national life”, particularly after the late 1920s. By mid-century, this radical wing of the movement had come to define what “Evangelicalism” meant to most Americans and thus to fix the social and cultural coordinates of American premillennialism in the public mind.7

It is against that backdrop that the Christian Herald delivers its surprise, opening a window onto a largely forgotten way of being Evangelical, one that played the millenarian tune in a different key and merged Higher Life perspectives with a cultural style bordering on the genteel.

2. The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times

The Christian Herald hit New York City as a sixteen-page weekly with florid masthead and expert cover lithographs. Sheltered within the “C” of the paper’s title rested its logo: an angel blowing a trumpet, evoking Chapter 8 of Revelation. Its standard fare included articles on prophecy, biographical sketches, religious news and more, but sermons from London Baptist Charles Hadden Spurgeon and New York Presbyterian Thomas DeWitt Talmage, the two great pulpit orators of their day, formed its central pillars.8 On the strength of its content and connections, the Herald quickly gained a circulation that equaled that of the largest secular papers.9

In 1889, Louis Klopsch, enterprising publisher and close Talmage associate, purchased the American edition and promptly installed Talmage as editor-in-chief. Thereafter, the paper modulated into a distinctly American and decidedly entrepreneurial key. The most noticeable change involved a steady augmentation of the paper’s visual appeal, as Klopsch spiced the columns with lithographs and florid calligraphy until virtually every page sparkled with artistry. Despite shifts in style, however, the basic menu remained surprisingly consistent. Each week, the chords of Higher Life Evangelicalism resounded, including a “prophetic article” touching on some facet of dispensationalism. The saints were keen to contemplate (and prognosticate) the “personal pre-Millennial advent” of Christ, guided by scholar-gnostics who cross-referenced the Bible with daily news to fix the coordinates of recently occurred but long-prophesied events and thus project the location of that great event yet to come. The Herald recorded predictions of the rapture, often down to the very day, at least ten times in its first fifteen years.10

The late hour lent urgency to another of the paper’s cornerstones: evangelism. Dwight Moody towered over the field in this respect, but virtually every major name in Anglo-American evangelism found the paper’s spotlight, from J. Hudson Taylor and Gypsy Smith to Sam Jones, J. Wilbur Chapman, and Beverly Fay Mills. The future co-editors of “The Fundamentals”, A. C. Dixon and Reuben Torrey, made calls as well.

Like the soul, the body, too, needed a Great Physician, and “faith” or “divine” healing ranked high on the Herald agenda. At first routinized in weekly reports from the Bethshan Healing Home (led by William E. Boardman and Elizabeth Baxter), the theme surfaced in biographical portraits, religious news, and readers’ accounts of “Remarkable Faith Cures”.11 Among healing evangelists, top billing went to the top acts, like Charles Cullis, A. B. Simpson, and Carrie Judd (later Judd Montgomery), but lesser names and even controversial figures like John Alexander Dowie also appeared. The Herald promoted all of the major campmeetings and conferences as well, most notably Ocean Grove, Old Orchard, and Northfield.

Roundly orthodox biblical exposition formed a fourth cornerstone. Talmage and Spurgeon were the mainstays (with Spurgeon’s columns, after his death in 1892, often filled by A. J. Gordon and Robert Stuart MacArthur), but readers met a long procession of other leading parsons, including celebrities like Charles Sheldon and Russell Conwell.

Thus far, I have described a paper that comports easily with the common conception of Fundamentalism and modern Evangelicalism. The Herald, though, enclosed far more. It presumed a readership of worldly wise and earthly minded Victorians curious about the world they were bent on saving, certain that world news was their news and that all that had to do with civilization had to do with them. To serve such a readership, the Herald offered an equivalent of the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Christianity Today, and National Geographic rolled into one.

It takes a wide perimeter, therefore, to circumscribe the imagined community projected through the Herald’s pages (Figure 1).12 Below, I profile that imagined community with an eye to those measures that best reflect its intellectual habits, social coordinates, and cultural frame. In particular, I explore how the paper situated Evangelicals in relation to five overlapping concerns: “worldly affairs”; “great questions”; “self and other”; “meeting modernity”; and “Evangelical culture”. The result is a portrait of Evangelicalism at its pinnacle of class, commerce, and culture, revealing a community that held the core beliefs of Evangelicalism with an accommodating temperament more akin to that of David Hollinger’s “Ecumenical Protestants” than to that commonly associated with Evangelicals of a later era.13

2.1. Worldly Affairs

The Christian Herald began, in part, as a true newspaper, delivering stories that might populate any secular counterpart, including reports on political and economic developments, major world events, and high society.14 World’s fairs were a special favorite, and the emphasis placed on them reveals much about the Herald’s social location and cultural assumptions. From the Paris Exposition of 1878 to the Paris Exposition of 1900—with Chicago and Atlanta between and Buffalo after—the Herald escorted readers through exhibition halls and along promenades, rendering them virtual spectators at these lavishly orchestrated events where Western civilization put itself on display and—to cast its own excellence in sharper relief—set out stylized representations of non-Western others.15

The most striking aspect of Herald journalism to the contemporary reader, however, might be its weakness for celebrity. Almost every issue reveled in the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and above all of the great royal families. Far from a British carryover, the fetish continued unabated after the Klopsch takeover. Year by year, an august parade of aristocrats marched across the pages: The Czar and Czarina of Russia, King Christian IX of Denmark, the King and Queen of Spain, the Crown Prince of Germany, and more. Should one or two aristocrats not suffice, a blue-blood binge might grant readers an audience before “Ten Illustrious Occupants of European Thrones” or offer behind-the-scenes “Glimpses of Royalty Off Duty”(Figure 2).16

Royalty did not corner the celebrity market, however. Religious luminaries were to be expected, of course, but alongside them marched the preeminent figures of society, commerce, politics, adventure, and war. Presidents, lord mayors, military heroes, titans of industry, famed explorers, and inventors were all there, especially when a religious angle lent celebrity a double purpose, as with Cornelius Vanderbilt, president of the New York Central branch of the Railroad YMCA.17 The world of celebrity, then as now, had its own hierarchy. For the Herald, the chief eminences were Queen Victoria, who cast a benign light over the periodical from its inception, and William McKinley, who upon his election to the U.S. presidency emerged as a benevolent American counterpart, at the helm of his own country’s rise to empire.18

One may easily recognize this cult of celebrity as an implicit paean to wealth, power, and status, but its deeper implications should not go unremarked: Here, an imagined community imported the world’s leading figures into a unified field of vision wherein Evangelicals stood at the center of a Christian universe. To high-brow Evangelicals of the day, it did not seem an unreasonable vision.

The affinity for celebrity reflected a view cast from the promontory held by movers and shakers and presumed a constituency that was engaged in and wished to stay abreast of political affairs. The Herald’s political coverage, however, remained issue-oriented and objective. Political engagement was encouraged—Talmage thought religion had an ennobling effect on politics—but on a nonpartisan basis marked by Christian charity and absent personal attacks. “You have a right to contest a man’s political sentiments”, he allowed, but not “to assail his private moral character”.19

Though politically active, the Herald tried to honor the principle of separation as well. When a reader asked, “How should a man vote, who wants to honor God and his cause?” the paper demurred. “You must make your vote a matter of conscience and prayer”, the editors replied. “Beyond this, we are unable to advise”.20 The Herald marked the line of separation, then, by endorsing involvement in general while letting conscience manage the particulars.

Yet, that caveat merits a caveat of its own. One might honor the separation of church and state without once doubting America’s status as a Christian nation. In 1893, with the country reeling from a financial panic, Talmage recounted the many trials through which the nation had safely passed. There could be but one conclusion: “our national affairs are under divine management”. American history, moreover, was not just providential, but exceptional: “Among other nations there have been no such frequent and mighty deliverances”.21 Years later, with the crisis past and saintly McKinley in office, the Herald felt compelled to answer certain “sceptics, atheists, and agnostics” who rejected the proposition that America should be denominated “a Christian nation”. Its rebuttal took the form of a print symposium in which prominent figures replied to the following questions:

I. Are you a friend of Christianity? II. Do you believe that Christianity is the friend of mankind? III. Does your belief extend to the recognition of a Supreme Being, to the Divinity of Christ, to the surpassing potency of Christianity as a civilizing influence?

Responses arrived from all quarters, with the featured response from the president himself: “My belief embraces the Divinity of Christ”, McKinley declared, “and a recognition of Christianity as the mightiest factor in the world’s civilization”.22

On closer examination, however, the rebuttal proves both less emphatic and more revealing than it first appears. The editors had issued a nuanced set of questions that left room to maneuver. No one had to directly pronounce the United States to be “a Christian nation”. Moreover, liberals like William Rainey Harper and Jacob Gould Shurman appeared among the respondents, attesting to the Herald’s latitudinarian view of the boundaries of Christianity in civic matters. This was, in essence, a negotiated claim. The Herald would have its “Christian” America partly by inference and partly by allowing the term to be broadly defined.

2.2. Great Questions

As with politics, the Herald approached the great social questions of the day on terms that were heavily freighted with class indicators, one of which had genuine virtues to commend it: In the best spirit of Victorian refinement, the Herald instinctively sought the golden mean, the point of equilibrium between uncivil extremes. On war and peace, for example, the Herald stood firmly for peace but stopped well short of pacifism. Like many idealists of the day, it hoped warfare might soon be rendered obsolete and saw international arbitration as just the tool to end it. Indeed, one of the Herald’s most concerted efforts to mobilize readers for political action came on behalf of the General Arbitration Treaty, which supporters viewed as a path-breaking step toward resolving all disputes through arbitration. When Talmage learned that “enemies of international peace” had it bottled up in the Senate, he declared it the “imperative duty” of every Christian to prevent the treaty’s defeat. Posting the address of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in a well-marked box, he implored readers to write immediately, “urging the approval of the Treaty”.23 It was not enough. The treaty failed, but arbitration continued to rank among the chief causes promoted by the Herald.

Another test of principle came with the buildup to the Spanish-American War. There, the Herald steered between imperialistic belligerence and antiimperialist indignation, offering passionate support for Cuban revolutionaries while staunchly opposing military intervention on their behalf. As war neared, expressions of outrage at the unjust treatment of suffering Cubans intensified. Yet, unlike the New York Journal and New York World, the Christian Herald portrayed war as a recipe for disaster, ruinous to all involved. Even after the USS Maine incident, it continued to beat the drums of peace. As Heather Curtis has shown, its anti-war position partly reflected a pragmatic concern to protect its philanthropic investments in Cuba, and a role might be added for elitist assumptions as well: The Herald presumed a high code of honor among Western leaders and was inclined to believe the Spanish ambassador when he protested that Spain had placed no mines in Havana Harbor. “We cannot conceive of such a statement being made by the representative of a civilized government”, an editorial opined, “if it were false”. That said, the Herald’s resistance primarily rested on principle, recalling a longstanding record of peace advocacy, and it continued to hope for “an honorable and lasting peace” to the very brink of hostilities.24 Only after a formal declaration of war had been rendered did the paper lend its imprimatur to the sword. The reversal that followed, on the other hand, was complete. War with Spain became the “Good Samaritan” war, waged as a last resort in the cause of humanity.25

Despite its support for that particular war, the Herald continued to champion the general cause of peace. It cheered the 1899 conference at The Hague, urging readers to write in support of U.S. participation, and when Hudson Maxim—explosives expert and brother of the inventor of the eponymous gun—defended war as a positive good, Talmage contradicted him, calling it “the worst curse that ever smote the nations”. A consummate hedger, however, Talmage had more to add, or perhaps subtract. He fully expected to see “the last canon spiked” within his lifetime, but the end of war, though near, was not yet, hence the evil remained a necessary one for the while. “Might a Christian Make or Sell Fire-Arms?” Yes, the manufacture of armaments, Talmage conceded, remained “lawful and righteous” under the present imperfect conditions.26 There in war’s twilight, Talmage struck the perfect equipoise, denouncing Maxim while exculpating parishioners for investments in, or manufacture of, the Maxim gun.

A search for the respectable middle ground also guided the Herald’s position on labor, yielding a compassionate conservatism that opposed socialism but endorsed the social gospel. The paper showed genuine sympathy for the plight of the working class and promoted journalism devoted to it, carrying ads for Edward Bellamy’s seminal Looking Backward and publishing a biographical note on Bellamy himself. It also highlighted Jacob Riis’s stirring exposé How the Other Half Lives and published heart-wrenching features on life in tenement slums. Moreover, the Herald covered major strikes with surprising balance, urging sympathy when labor protested “clear wrongs” in an “honorable way”.27

Such views sprang from a larger ethic that rejected laissez-faire economics in favor of a moral economy. When asked if a Christian employer might pay the market wage even though it fell short of the cost of living, the editors gave a resounding “No”. True Christians must reject “an oppressive wage-market”. On the question of profit-sharing, the editors held that employees who increase a company’s profits “are honestly entitled to a share of them”.28 Talmage, as was his habit, condemned the extremes on each side of the equation—anarchist agitation and heartless monopoly—but reserved the sharpest blows for systemic evil, the double standard that squeezed the poor and freed the rich:

Crime in this country is apt to be excused in proportion as it is great. The poor waif of the street steals a smoked beef from the corner grocery and the police turn out in full force … But if a man steal enough we are disposed to let him off.29

The full measure of an Evangelical moral economy, however, only emerged when Talmage addressed his wealthy parishioners. Christian employers should consider the “entire welfare of their subordinates”, he declared in a 1900 sermon, advising a benevolent paternalism that extended beyond fair pay to social and recreational services, pensions for retirement, care for the physical health of workers, and good working conditions, including reasonable hours.30

That moral economy had a dark side, not least being a callous disregard for those poor deemed “unworthy”, but on the whole it reflected a genteel consensus that sought to reconcile capital and labor in pursuit of justice and the common good.31 A truly Evangelical economy would be guided by Christian ethics, not the iron laws of nature or the market’s silent hand.

2.3. Self and Other

In its representations of self and other, the Christian Herald embodied the easy presumption of Anglo-European cultural superiority that passed as common sense within trans-Atlantic White society. For Evangelicals, racialist views and assertions of White privilege were rendered palatable—sublimated and sanctified, as it were—by refraction through the lens of noblesse oblige, a perspective on full display in the paper’s treatment of non-Whites in the United States.

African American evangelists and social reformers, for example, drew avid coverage, and there is little cause to doubt the Herald’s sincerity on this point. It tracked institutions like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Tuskegee Institute, and Wilberforce College and paid special attention to Black celebrities. Frederick Douglass was honored in life and mourned in death, and the paper kept a close, admiring eye on favorites like Holiness evangelist Amanda Berry Smith and Booker T. Washington. In addition to news coverage, the Herald provided material support, as when it promoted the publications of Black figures or raised funds to support African American ministers in the South.32 Yet, for all its affirmatives, the paper failed to transcend the paradigm of cultural uplift and trafficked in “benign” stereotypes that are jarring to readers today: The 1898 Farmer’s Conference at Tuskegee constituted “A Noble Effort to Elevate the Negro and Make Him Practical and Self-Supporting”, while child evangelist Claretta Nora Avery won praise as “the Wonderful Pickaninny Preacher”.33

Among domestic non-Whites, Native Americans held a unique place: indigenous yet foreign, birthright inhabitants whose portrayal in the Herald, notwithstanding a stray touch of frontier romanticism, generally mirrored that of tribal peoples on the foreign fields. Front and center stood the dual mission to civilize and save, with the residential school as the agency of choice. Before-and-after pictures taken at places like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, “Uncle Sam’s famous Indian school civilizing the savage”, were a favored device for illustrating their efficacy. Here, pictures of students in native dress at induction were juxtaposed alongside their portraits in Western apparel, freshly coiffured, showing readers “How Christianity and Culture Efface all Traces of Vice and Ignorance in Young Features” (Figure 3).34 The other might not be embraced as other, but a costly path remained open whereby other might be transformed into self.

The coincidence of Christian benevolence and a desire to be fair-minded did sometimes check the worst excesses of cultural imperialism. For example, the Herald’s initial coverage of the Ghost Dance disturbances and the subsequent massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, reflected disdain for un-Christianized Native peoples. The first headline from Wounded Knee blared, “Indian Treachery”. As more information emerged, however, the Herald began to change its tune. Within weeks of the massacre, it shifted blame from Native Americans to “dishonest agents and the rum bottle”. Then, following a Sioux delegation to Washington, D.C., it moved toward full sympathy: “If their account is true”, the paper wrote, “the battle at Wounded Knee was a disgraceful outrage—a massacre, not a battle”. The article closed by calling for a presidential investigation.35

The Herald’s stance on immigration reflected a similar convergence of fairmindedness, benevolence, and elitism. Nationalist but not nativist, it largely resisted the anti-immigrant fevers that inflamed many old-stock Protestants at the time. When the flow of immigration through Ellis Island surged in the late 1890s, the Herald gave the influx a positive spin. Features like “At Freedom’s Gate” and “Across the Seas to Freedom” acknowledged the presence of a “criminal class” among the newcomers but stressed the orderly and beneficial nature of immigration as a whole.36

After the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, the mood darkened. Many “Gems from the World’s Pulpits” thundered against anarchism, and some devolved into anti-immigrant diatribes: “America is becoming … the dumping ground of the vilest offscourings of Russia, Italy and Poland”, fumed the Reverend Dr. Stephen A. Northrop, and the “conglomeration of anarchy” it deposited fell beyond assimilation: “You may make men out of monkeys by the laws of Darwin”, he warned, “but you cannot make Anarchists into law-abiding, liberty-loving citizens”. Yet, the week following Northrop’s screed, the Herald undercut his message with a sympathetic photomontage featuring an immigrant mother and her three children. The accompanying article adopted a matter-of-fact tone and, as usual, sought middle ground. The Herald approved of legislation to weed out those opposed to “the principles of American government” but cautioned against extremes. Past experience had shown that the great majority of immigrants “become good citizens and staunch supporters of the Republic”.37 The Herald did not wish to see the many punished for the sins of the few.

In at least one instance, the issue of immigration merged with American exceptionalism to underwrite a restorationist anthropology with truly radical implications, one that implicitly subverted the myth of Anglo-European superiority. Though present throughout the Talmage-Klopsch years, professions of American exceptionalism peaked in the flush of messianic nationalism following the Spanish-American war. There, in a master stroke of civil religion, the Herald merged secular and sacred history into a portrait of the Righteous Nation, with 1898 recalling 1588 and the providential sinking of the Spanish Armada, and Commodore Dewey recapitulating Lexington with a shot heard round the world. These events were said to trace the march of progressive revelation: “Spain represents the civilization of the Middle Ages. We represent the civilization of His kingdom” under which nations would “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks”. The signal events of 1898, in short, confirmed America as God’s new Chosen People, “with a role among the nations like that of the Jews among the nations” of ancient times.38

Talmage carried this logic still further, however. Where “the cradle of the human race was the Tigro-Euphrates basin”, he divined, “the cradle of its regeneration will be this continent”. Here, reversing humanity’s disintegration since the Fall, the “commingling … of all nationalities under the blessing of God” would produce “the most magnificent style of man and woman” ever seen. This was not the Anglo-Saxon-based paradigm of Albert Beveridge but the older, millenarian conception of John L. O’Sullivan, with an echo of Talmage’s contemporary, John Alexander Dowie, who prescribed racial miscegenation to restore the potency of “primitive man”.39 The New Israel called for a New Adam, in a New Eden, with immigration as the key to America’s Manifest Destiny.

This complex view of immigration, with its seed of self-contestation, meshed readily with another of the paper’s distinctive features: it’s journalistic embrace of the world and its many “others”. Herald readers were curious about the regions and peoples then falling under the hold of Anglo-American hegemony, and the paper slaked their thirst for knowledge and wonderment with a steady flow of travel journalism and exotica from abroad. Often bundled with missionary reports, war and relief coverage, or, quintessentially, round-the-world photojournalistic tours, these items collectively delivered a course in late Victorian social geography, weaving together the particular and the typological by drawing readers into the intimate small space of “A Pomegranate Seller in the Market of Jaffa, Palestine” or pulling back to survey the “Native Types in India”.40 This virtual tourism, rising from the intersection of pedagogy and leisure, filled the blank spaces in the mental maps of Herald readers, but it had a political side as well: the mental conquest, via taxonomy, of peoples and cultures then being annexed into a cosmos over which readers might imagine themselves to hold sway (Figure 4).

The “world” of the Christian Herald, then, opened out from the gaze of privilege—center viewing periphery, benefactor viewing beneficiary—and embraced many of the tainted tropes of orientalism. Nevertheless, the Herald’s gaze offered a truly global purview, one that elicited sincere affective connections, as seen in philanthropy and advocacy, and encouraged receptivity to foreigners newly arriving on America’s shores.

2.4. Meeting Modernity

The Christian Herald displayed a surprisingly irenic temperament vis-à-vis issues that would later carve the Fundamentalist-Modernist divide. Storm clouds were already brewing around science, hermeneutics, and the historical-critical method, but the paper hewed as best it could to a decreasingly happy medium, firing the stray polemical round at modernism but never really mustering a fighting spirit.41

Herald coverage of the Charles Briggs affair, for example, from the New York Presbytery’s 1891 vote to condemn Briggs for heresy to his excommunication from the Presbyterian Church in 1893, remained unfailingly even-handed. The affair was framed as a generational debate setting younger ministers, who largely rejected strict Calvinist orthodoxy and embraced the “higher criticism” of the Bible, against their elders, who mostly held fast to the Westminster Confession and affirmed biblical inerrancy, with the Herald seeking common ground and expressing some degree of agreement with each side. Like the orthodox party, it affirmed inerrancy, yet it shared the liberal wish to revise a creed that stated “the doctrines of predestination and election in terms so harsh as to offend” those who saw God as a being “of infinite love”. The Herald’s main concern was to promote tolerance and reconciliation. Both sides, it insisted, acted in good faith, and readers might “confidently leave the issue in God’s hands”.42

The same spirit guided the Herald on specific controversial issues, where it routinely sought rapprochement between science and Evangelical belief. Warming to theistic evolution, the editors promoted James McCosh’s Religious Aspects of Evolution in its “Gems from New Books” column, and when asked how to reconcile Scripture with modern geology, they noted that the Bible is not a textbook; it gives instruction on salvation, not “a complete history of the world”, and nowhere fixed “the date of creation”. That measured approach extended to the authorship of the Pentateuch and the nature of the Great Flood. Did Moses personally pen the five books? Not in their present form, since certain passages, such as the reference to kings in Genesis 36:31, could not have been written by him. In all likelihood, “Moses left records which, after his death, were woven into the continuous narrative we now possess”. Similarly, the Herald found it “extremely unlikely that the flood covered the whole earth”, adopting a hermeneutic posture that comported well with that of many Modernists: “Every part of the Bible conveys truth, but it cannot be claimed with reason that every part is to be understood literally”.43

This moderate perspective matched the Herald’s inclusive coverage of religious news, where it reported on liberal undertakings like William Rainey Harper’s American Institute of Sacred Literature and the Institute of Christian Sociology, founded by Washington Gladden and Richard T. Ely, and closely followed all the great congresses of religion, from Chicago in 1893 to Paris in 1900. There was something good in all religions, the Herald believed, though all but Christianity were incomplete.44

The Herald responded to shifting social and moral norms much as it did to religious modernism, by probing for the golden mean. On the role of women, for example, it triangulated between gender traditionalism and the “New-Fashioned Woman”, hoping to gather the best of both under the canopy of an enlightened version of Victorian domesticity. In that respect, the Herald was an agent for change that challenged traditional strictures and stereotypes. As early as 1880, the Herald endorsed women’s rights with a cover story on Margaret Newton Van Cott, the first woman licensed to preach by the Methodist Episcopal Church. Later, when asked if biblical texts such as 1 Corinthians 14:34 barred women from public ministry, the editors rejected the notion on historical-critical grounds, explaining that Paul had been responding to evils the modern church no longer faced. “Had he lived in our day”, they opined, “we do not think he would have written the passage to which you refer”.45

The Herald’s construction of gender, moreover, allowed flexibility to men as well as women. One of the paper’s more highly publicized stories was a commissioned piece from celebrated British émigré Amelia Barr. Entitled “The King’s Highway” and set amid the wealth and privilege of Wall Street, the tale revolved around interlocking families whose children were destined—after requisite turns of trial and refinement—for love, marriage, and deep Christian piety. Two sets of sibling-heirs, Steve and Alice Lloyd and John and Jessie MacAslin, were the protagonists, with Steve and Jessie at center stage. Theirs was a thoroughly modern relationship, marked by gender reversal:

It was Steve, however, who played the woman’s part in this love affair; his was the romance, the ideality, and the sweet unselfishness of the passion. Jessie was a girl of her era … She was in love as a man is in love.46

Jessie (Figure 5) would pay a price for her mannishness, and Steve would be forced to take a more assertive role, yet the gender-shifting manners were never effaced, as evident in a climactic scene where Steve—embarking on a worldwide tour of self-discovery and service—bids farewell to his brother-in-law and Christian mentor, John:

There were tears in both their eyes, and Steve passed his arm round John’s neck … and then broke quite down. “Oh, Steve! Steve!” he cried; “do not go away! … I cannot bear to lose you! …. Steve embraced him, and … said softly, “I am so glad to hear you speak thus, John. I knew you felt it, but oh, it is good to hear it said”.

As the curtain falls, the two men simultaneously recall the words of a well-known poem, which they recite “softly together”: “O God! That men would draw a little nearer/To one another! They’d be nearer thee;/And understood”.47

Talmage, with his unparalleled ability to strike both ends and the middle, sought to gather the disparate strands of these transitional times into a coherent social ethic. His 1895 sermon, “Woman’s Opportunity”, opened with a stark affirmation of the separate spheres: God had marked the boundary between them, “man to be regnant in his realm; woman to be dominant in hers”, as clearly as that “between England and Scotland”. Before that unequivocal pronouncement could fully register, however, Talmage tacked sharply, equivocating. Neither sex held superiority in any particular faculty, he cautioned, and those “thoroughly marked” boundaries were, in point of fact, ineffable: “No human phraseology will ever define the spheres”. Lest any traditionalist remain undiscomfited, he drove the message home:

[I]f a woman wants to vote, she ought to vote, and … if a man wants to embroider and keep house, he ought to be allowed to embroider and keep house. There are masculine women and there are effeminate men.

With respect to women specifically, what held for politics held for work and religion, too:

When a woman is prepared to preach, she will preach, and neither Conference nor Presbytery can hinder her. When a woman is prepared to move in highest commercial spheres, she will have great influence … and no boards of trade can hinder her.

Having reached the apogee of its gender-bending orbit, the homily circled back to the language of the spheres. Talmage had observed women’s suffrage in New Zealand and found it good, but nothing new. Women had always “voted” by nurturing and directing their children, their husbands, their homes, and thus their societies. In a trademark flourish, he spun a paean to the grandeur of woman’s role as matriarch and maker of the home, semi-divine in a sphere far above the casting of stained ballots for “aldermen and common councilmen … mayors, and presidents”. Why, indeed, would a “queen in such a realm” voluntarily stoop to such a low estate? For Talmage, the answer was clear: “Your dominion is home, O woman!”.48

Like a classical symphony, the oration had taken a wide journey only to return to the home chord. Yet, concessions had been made along the way. In an era of changing roles and rising aspirations, Talmage had allowed that all things are permissible. He might hope for the gravitational pull and symbolic compensations of the cult of true womanhood to hold most women in their traditional place, but, like the Herald generally, he had sanctioned alternate ways of being both masculine and feminine in the “modern” day.

2.5. Evangelical Culture

The Christian Herald did not rest content merely to shape and reflect the values of the community it served. Rather, it sought to foster a comprehensive Evangelical culture, a refined way of life that modeled Godly prosperity. Parallel to the Herald’s many humanitarian efforts to uplift domestic and foreign subalterns, then, ran another project: the cultural uplift of American Evangelicals.

This project appeared, first of all, in the paper’s cultivation of the artistic and literary sensibilities of its readers. Through reprints of European artists like Eduard von Gebhardt, original art from its own stable of celebrity illustrators—including Napoleon Sarony, Albert Hencke, and Charles Warde Traver—and literature contributed by “the most brilliant army of literary talent ever assembled by any journal on this continent”, the paper sought to elicit and reinforce cultural taste. The United States had no great center of art as yet, Talmage conceded, but its day would come, and the Herald, sparkling with “the Choicest Literary and Artistic Attractions of the Day”, would hasten its arrival.49

One medium of refinement arrived in weekly installments as serialized stories “of thrilling interest”. Often commissioned exclusively for the Herald, these came from the pens of such renowned authors as Hesba Stretton (Sarah Smith), J. Jackson Wray, Amelia Barr, Julia McNair Wright, and Gabrielle Emilie Jackson. The genres ranged widely, from rollicking adventures to, particularly as the turn of the century approached, novels of manners and sentimental romances.50 In addition, the Herald carried articles on a wide array of famous literary figures, from European greats like Samuel Johnson, Victor Hugo, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Americans like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman.51

Though expected to match the highest standards of merit, the visual and literary art found in the Herald was not mere art for art’s sake. Rather, it operated within a framework of didactic moralism drawn broadly enough to encompass habits, manners, and style, and thus served as a mode of cultural formation. This instrumentalism, activated by graphic and literary portrayals of an idealized culture to which Evangelicals might aspire, merged easily into the commodification of culture. Herald readers were expected to be “earnest improvers”, self-made saints, and the commercial demand created by this quest for self-improvement was amply met in the bustling marketplace of the back pages, where vendors—including the Herald itself—placed on offer every implement an aspiring Evangelical might need to acquire a patina of “culture”, not only in the arts but in the cognitive sense of encountering “the best which has been thought and said in the world”, as determined by elites like Matthew Arnold.52

The merchandise of cultural uplift presupposed a desire for a liberal arts education encompassing secular as well as religious knowledge and thus mirrored the aims of the Chautauqua movement (whose correspondence courses were often on display). Collected editions suited for self-education were favored, such as the “Works of Charles Dickens”, “The Waverly Novels” of Sir Walter Scott, or “Masterpieces of American Eloquence”, featuring Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, and Philip Brooks. Readers were but a postcard away from an eight-volume set of the “World’s Best Music”, the “Oxford Miniature Shakespeare”, or an annotated portfolio of “Masterpieces of American Art” that doubled as “An Art Educator”. More comprehensive yet were encyclopedias that placed “A Liberal Education Now within Easy Reach of Even the Poorest”. Such products naturally brought to mind that desideratum of every refined home, the home library, which might be purchased in prefabricated segments (e.g., the “Stedman-Hutchinson Library of American Literature”) or built piecemeal following such expert advice as “5000 Books: An Easy Guide to the Best Books”.53

Cultural uplift merged seamlessly into another form of tutelage wherein advertising joined with the Herald’s stories, illustrations, and journalistic features to instruct readers in the material accoutrements of a cultivated life. As noted, the Herald had a predilection for celebrity, and serialized stories were commonly set against a backdrop of privilege, so descriptive scenes and graphic illustrations alike often depicted the dress, decor, and appurtenances of abundance. Together, these informed an Evangelical imaginary of material culture. The back pages, in turn, offered the prospect of making that imaginary real. There, readers cum shoppers browsed ads for wallpaper, furniture, bric-a-brac and more for the physical interior, and for the auditory interior, that centerpiece of an ideal Victorian home—the piano—along with organs, autoharps and other musical instruments, or Gram-o-phones for imported sounds. For the inmates, a wide array of attire offered to compose a well-dressed man, woman, or child. For exteriors, vendors hawked grass seed for “a beautiful lawn”, fruit trees, flowers, and more.54

Beyond the home, the imaginary presumed, among one’s middle-class attributes, a pool of leisure to be monetized through the rental of a summer home in Vermont or the purchase of a bicycle (or tricycle for petticoated women) or newfangled instant camera with which to while away an idle hour. This implied surplus wealth as well as surplus time, which advertisers sought for mortgage bonds, saving accounts, life insurance policies, and real estate schemes like Griffith, Indiana, where “Ten Lots Will Make You Rich”. The socially conscious reader might unite moral and financial interests in a single venture by purchasing stock in the “Woman’s Baking Company”—where workers and investors alike were women—or lots in Harvey, Illinois, “The most successful Temperance Manufacturing Town in the World”. Naturally, pious readers understood that all treasures but the heavenly were perishable; yet, a good steward might still wish to secure them temporarily in a “Fireproof and Burglar Proof” safe.55

Advertisements such as these were not adventitious to the Herald’s religious mission. Rather, they buttressed Victorian Evangelicalism’s version of a prosperity gospel by which Christianity might sweep the world. “The Puerto Rican and the Filipino will come out from his … low-roofed … kennel”, wrote Talmage in the afterglow of the Spanish-American War, “and say to his neighbor of beautiful household: ‘Why cannot I have things as you have them?’” The allure of these perishable treasures, on conspicuous display, might point the unsaved to those better treasures in heaven.56

Material culture also included the ideal of a healthy body, and where the front pages promoted the agencies of prayer, healing homes, and evangelists for the physically infirm, the back offered remedies of a medicinal sort, regular and otherwise. Help for the afflicted might be found, for example, in a secular analogy to the healing home, the sanatorium (or “sanitarium”).57 For those who preferred quicker, less costly relief, the shelves teemed with nostrums promising relief from a panoply of ailments so vast as to boggle the mind. Many were not mere nostrums, but scientific nostrums, concocted in labs, attested by doctors, and based on impressive-sounding theories, thus catering to a readership whose anxiety about health and the body merged with hopes raised by recent technological and scientific advances.58

Bodily concern, moreover, extended beyond healing to hygiene, fitness, and beauty: the body as an object of performance and display. Here, anxious saints found products to help them care for their teeth, eliminate body odor or dandruff, stop hair loss for men, remove unwanted hair for women, or beautify their complexion, thus rendering the body presentable within a culture attentive to manners and social regard.59 As standards of bodily presentation moved beyond surface-level sights and smells to “physical culture”—the human form as shaped by rigorous exercise—new products (and new pitches for old ones) targeted body-conscious Evangelicals. Ivory soap instructed men at the gym on how to get the best cleansing results after a workout. “Samson’s Strength” offered a simple, scientific apparatus to enlarge and strengthen one’s muscles “to twice their present capacity”, while the Swoboda method (Figure 6) promised more benefit from ten minutes of exercise than others produced in two hours.60

The late Victorian aesthetic of physical culture applied to women as well as men. Ivory Soap, perhaps with Jeannie Mallary’s “New-Fashioned Woman” or Amelia Barr’s “Jessie” in mind, depicted a young woman lifting dumbbells who, “With nerves braced and muscles hardened … feels that she is indeed a new woman”. Some took this theme a step further, as when the young woman lifting dumbbells wore a Ferris’ Good Sense Corset Waist, illustrating “The Girl Who Loves Good Health as well as physical perfection” (Figure 7). The depiction of that Ferris model with her “physical perfection”, moreover, covertly addressed yet another dimension of the embodied saint. If the front pages ministered to mind and spirit, the back—with their furtive glimpses of shirtless male models and bare-armed beauties posing seductively in corsets (Figure 8)—smuggled in ministrations for the carnal id.61

The advertising sections of the Christian Herald reveal the degree to which American Evangelicals were fully integrated into the culture of their times, exhibiting the same dense blending of flesh and spirit, body and soul, principle and profit that characterized their non-Evangelical peers. If market and ministry clashed at times in their messaging, their interests more often converged, sometimes quite literally. One example of such convergence—product endorsement—amply attests to the stature of mainstream Evangelicals in the Gilded Age. Leading figures were eagerly courted by advertisers, producing the curious effect of back-page ads reprising the names met earlier in the Herald, now in a commercial key: Talmage pitching miscellany boxes from J. D. Larkin or endorsing the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York; Marion Harland vouching for Cleveland’s Baking Powder; Charles Spurgeon, even years after his death, touting the curative powers of Congreve’s Balsamic Elixir.62

As one might guess, the Herald’s advertisements largely mirrored those found in other illustrated weeklies or even, in more staid and compressed form, the New York Times, a fact that further reveals the ease with which late Victorian Evangelicals fit into the mainstream of their society. That mainstream was a mixed multitude, an untidy confluence of disparate parts, and so the Evangelical stance within it reveals much about the movement’s character. Here was a movement with zeal and marked boundaries, yes, but absent rigidity, a commonsense movement willing to make allowances for the exigencies and opportunities of daily life and deeply invested in a larger society within which it held a secure place and whose fabric it did not wish to rend. Perhaps that sense of security is precisely what allowed Evangelicals to afford the luxury of liberality. Regardless, they could not have had the one without the other.

2.6. A New Century, a New Brand, and a Movement in Crisis

In January of 1901, Queen Victoria died. The Herald, America’s quintessential Victorian paper, mourned her death as it had no other. Months later, William McKinley fell to an assassin’s bullet.63 Their deaths compose a fitting analogue to the last days of this iteration of the periodical, for 1901 would also be the final year for the Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times, proper, and for the vision of an Evangelical paper comprehensive enough to envelop the whole of newsworthy life, secular and religious. The year had begun with a wide-angle lens on the world, asking “What Should The New Century Do for Humanity?” Answers came from Andrew Carnegie, William Jennings Bryan, and others, while elsewhere in the issue, poet Edwin Markham discussed “Labor’s Outlook in the New Century”, Booker T. Washington revealed “The Paramount Hope of the Negro”, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton demanded, “Give Woman Her Rightful Place”. By year’s end, however, a narrowing of scope long underway had been made explicit when, on November 27, 1901, the Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times became The Christian Herald: An Illustrated Family Magazine. Less than five months later, Talmage also passed away.64

The Herald’s rebranding capped a slow retreat that reached back to the mid-1890s. Year by year, the focus had subtly tightened as secular news and current events increasingly deferred to items of specifically religious interest. Meanwhile, the ethos of the paper shifted toward pious sentimentality and the focus toward domestic life. The paper’s visual imagery followed suit, completing a long transition from almost exclusively male portraits to florid covers frequented by women, children, and the Herald’s iconic angels (Figure 9). This makeover reflected changes in American culture, true, but especially in the publishing world, where a vast expansion of secular newspapers pushed the Herald toward a niche market.65

Meanwhile, as the new century approached, topics like premillennialism and divine healing receded, not discarded but deemphasized as the Herald highlighted enterprises still capable of uniting diverse parties within an increasingly divided movement, such as philanthropy and missions.66 This theological repositioning might read like an effort to hold a seat at the table of elites even as new and disreputable views like dispensationalism loosened the Evangelical grip. The reality was far more complex. Dispensationalism was nothing new for the Herald, and though shifting norms regarding the ideas deemed credible and behaviors deemed admissible in polite society may have played a role, a closer look reveals the greater relative importance of intra-Evangelical dynamics.

By the late nineteenth century, Evangelicalism was already being torn from within, having attempted a reach too wide to hold.67 In hindsight, we can recognize the first full breach in a steady stream of defections throughout the 1880s and 1890s as Holiness “comeouters” forsook established denominations for a network of independent churches and associations. Cultural impulses deeper than doctrine played an outsized role in this schism, as plainfolk militants, agents in an anti-elitist revitalization movement that harked back to the “democratic” revivalism of a prior era, seized the banner of “Pentecostal” religion and lampooned the bourgeois strains of piety found in places like the Christian Herald as the “polar snow fields of tame holiness”.68 Their actions provoked an opposite if not quite equal reaction among Evangelical moderates. For example, their bumptious embrace of premillennialism brought pressure on the Herald to retreat from it. The situation had deteriorated so badly by 1897 that a reader could ask, “Are there any men of common sense not fanatics” who believe in the rapture and the premillennial return of Christ? The editor, defending the doctrines, pointed to Moody and a set of eminent divines who perfectly embodied the middle-class Holiness scorned by comeouters.69

The radical Holiness exodus was followed in the 1920s and 1930s by departures of a different cultural tone, if not temperament, when cadres of Fundamentalists—largely from the Reformed tradition and including many former elites—lost their hold on leading Protestant institutions and left to form their own. The hosts of Holiness, Pentecostal, and Fundamentalist faith would bear the ark of dispensationalism into the new century, shielding it beneath a canopy of overlapping subcultures.70 Among those left behind, the more progressive flowed into the modernist wing of a future Protestant establishment. The rest helped populate that establishment’s conservative and moderate ranks. In that respect, Evangelicals did hold a place in the mainstream, but by then both the terminology and the constituencies were changing, and Evangelicals, as Evangelicals, would never be quite at the center again.71

Recently, revisionists have challenged this narrative of post-nineteenth-century Evangelical decline, citing selective examples of “cultural engagement rather than sectarian isolation” to contradict the “rise-fall-rebirth narrative” of scholars like George Marsden and Joel Carpenter. Much evidence can be raised against the revisionists, who seem to confuse cultural engagement with social rank or imagine that political agitation is somehow incompatible with marginality and sectarian standing.72 Yet, no greater endorsement of the traditional historiography is likely to be found than the simple existence of the Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times.73

3. Conclusions

This excursion into the Christian Herald has surveyed the tenor and texture of its imagined community from five vistas: worldly affairs, great questions, self and other, modernity, and Evangelical culture. It found seminal figures and very near the complete intellectual architecture of radical apocalyptic Evangelicalism comfortably ensconced among cosmopolitan elites, immersed in the transformational currents of their day and the grand adventure of an expanding Anglo-American empire. Certainly, the class pretentions of that community are off-putting, and it seemed overly solicitous of status. Yet, that latter vice came bundled with corresponding virtues, including civility and what the Founders called “a decent respect to the opinions of [hu]mankind”. While seeking to influence others, therefore, they were themselves subject to influence, hoping to be seen as they saw themselves—as people of reason, empathy, and common sense. Additionally, for all their cultural prejudice, they were at root large-hearted globalists, ever on lookout for a wrong to be righted, a need to be met, a wound to be closed and tended at home or abroad.

Although these Evangelicals affirmed virtually the same beliefs and practices that would distinguish their heirs, they lived that faith in a different tone and with starkly different habits of mind, as devout millenarians who tempered their zeal with moderation and held their eschatological views as a shaping perspective, not an “organizing principle” or “controlling interest”.74 The perimeter of fellowship, therefore, was marked off by the classic benchmarks of Evangelicalism, not dispensationalist shibboleths. Indeed, Talmage himself stands as a case in point. His practical, inspirational preaching rarely if ever touched on premillennial doctrine, and one would be hard pressed to determine his views from a reading of his sermons. If anything, his overweening optimism might flag him as a postmillennialist. Yet, from the very beginning, there Talmage stood, the exemplar of Evangelical faith and culture for the Herald’s imagined community. These discoveries call into question assumptions about any necessary correlation between trademark Evangelical beliefs and the particular social and cultural modes through which they might be expressed at a given place and time. In so doing, they refresh the historian’s faith in the past as a wellspring of useful correctives and of endless surprise.