Erin A. Smith. What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America.

Extract

In this interesting book Erin A. Smith analyzes popular religious books since the late nineteenth century with an eye toward understanding why—despite the scorn heaped on them by intellectuals—they have been so beloved by their readers. Rather than being a comprehensive survey, What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America consists of five case studies: the Social Gospel novels (1880s–1910s), Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925), post–World War II religious self-help books, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), and books for “the seeker” from the past twenty-five years. Smith focuses on white Protestant readers; working against the overworked liberal-conservative binary, she argues that these readers, who are “believed to be at opposite ends of the religious and political spectrum,” actually “share a culture of religious reading” (301–302) because what really matters for them is “if these texts worked—that is, made them better people, managed their fears and anxieties, and made them feel as if their lives mattered” (7).