The religious culture of late nineteenth-century America involves a curious combination of theological debate and popular social reform rhetoric. A battle for cultural authority emerges in print culture between church leaders and social reform writers, particularly domestic novelists. This discourse is exhibited in the proliferation of religious biographies, which were profoundly influenced in American popular culture by Congregationalist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, who published The Life of Jesus, the Christ in 1871. This genre was quickly appropriated by popular novelists, and read in tandem, these biographies allow us to view a discourse that represents a shifting of power in the mediation of social reform rhetoric that ultimately materializes in the social gospel movement, a reform platform that marries Christian ethics with modern cultural concerns that are largely related to the Industrial Age. While American Protestantism in the nineteenth century, particularly in the Northeast, seemed to be moving away from its Calvinist roots and arguably toward an ecumenical Christianity, or at a least nondenominational Protestantism, Calvinist clergy nevertheless played a key role in the negotiation of both religious and social liberal reform. Because of increased access to the written word, the impact of such reform efforts affected national audiences with farreaching results. Popular preachers coming out of various Calvinist creeds, such as Presbyterian Thomas De Witt Talmage and Congregationalists Henry Ward Beecher and Charles Sheldon, relied on the printed word to reach audiences of thousands although each was equally skilled in oratory, drawing in huge crowds to their affiliated churches. These three prominent figures, along with several other popular literary figures, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mary Austin, experimented with a variety of literary forms including sermons, religious tracts, fiction, and even religious biography in their reconsideration of biblical authority in relation to contemporary moral ethics.
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