Colleen McDannell’s book takes a look at, as the title suggests, materialism in Christianity. McDannell discusses the importance of imagery in various cultural aspects of the Christian religion. She notes in the first chapter that this subject is often not touched upon but should be discussed more thoroughly due to the insights that material culture can give to the lifestyle of these individuals. McDannell states that “as scholars have acknowledged the ability of average people to resist, define and express themselves through “popular” culture, they have also re-evaluated the ways Christians have used images, objects, and spaces.” Thus, McDannell examines the way in which materialism gives a glance into the lives of Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
In Chapter 3 McDannell discuss the importance of the Bible to the Victorian home. More specifically she sets out to describe the fact that the Bible served many sentimental purposes for Victorian Americans aside from the textual importance. The Bible served as a nostalgic reminder of familial life for many Victorian Americans. The image of the family Bible was to conjure up memories of family gatherings and readings of the scripture as a group effort. Early on in the discussion McDannell describes this activity as a re-enforcement of patriarchal hierarchy as the family would gather around and the father would read select passages from the book. Later this shifted to a more personal experience with the mother leading the discussion one on one with one of her children, which was to parallel the intimate relationship of Madonna and child.
The commercialization of the Bible is also a topic in this chapter where at first Bible societies are formed centered around distribution of the Bible. Later large publishing companies take over the printing of the Bible, which leads to mass distribution of the book. As the commercialization grew the Bible went through some transformations as each book became more individualized. One person could get their own unique Bible with various pictures and other features aimed at a unique experience. This commercialization of the Bible leads to my first question;
Questions:
1) Throughout the book McDannell frequently mentions the tension between imagery and iconoclasm. Could the individual Bibles described in Chapter 3, designed for one person and serving multiple purposes cross the line? There seems to be a lack of discussion concerning whether or not these non-religious uses of the Bible were religiously acceptable. What might the more fundamentalist Christians think of these Bibles?
2) McDannell also mentions the fact that originally the family Bible and the reading of scripture as a group re-enforced the male hierarchy of the family, as all gathered around while the father read select passages. Later this shifted to be a more intimate experience between a mother and her children. What do you think accounted for the shift? Why?
Interesting question you raised in that first question. You asked: “What might the more fundamentalist Christians think of these Bibles?” My response to this question is that these fundamentalists would have viewed these Bibles as nuisances, maybe even “heresies.” These fundamentalists ascribed to a more collective religious approach to Christianity, rather than an individualistic approach. These fundamentalist Christian communities oriented themselves to a strict interpretation of Biblical scripture; therefore, any alteration from their orthodox view would have been summarily condemned. The individual-centered Bibles, described so vividly in Chapter 3 in “Material Christianity,” stand in stark contrast to the mainstream, collective interpretation of the fundamentalist’s Bible. For example, would these Bibles, as described in chapter 3, provide a Christian with the same view of creationism as a fundamentalist? Perhaps so or perhaps not, however, the fact that perhaps it is so provides a distinct observation as to how fundamentalists would have viewed these Bibles.
Thomas_Cogliano
November 3rd, 2007
Another aspect of the use of the family Bible as a center of religious home life, and home life in general which, as both McDannell and Orsi make clear, can be imbued in almost any aspect with religious meaning, is as a repository for family history. In one of the supplemental pages of her family Bible (which I now possess), my paternal grandmother listed the genealogical data of the family in both directions from herself, her spouse, children and grandchildren and their spouses, and hers and her husband’s parents and grandparents, with respective dates of birth, marriage and death. Likewise my mother, who was not particularly “religious” in a traditional sense, kept locks of each of her babies’ hair between the pages of our family Bible. These actions tie in the Bible as an important family religious object, even among people who spend little time reading it.
Thomas_Ehrenzeller
November 5th, 2007
In response to your first question, I think that fundamentalist Christians would not have a problem with mass produced Bibles for individual use described in Chapter 3 as long as these Bibles did not become objects of worship. McDannell describes material Christianity as “a means by which both elite and non-elite Christians express their relationship to God and the supernatural, articulate ideas life after death, and form religious communities”. (13). A foundational tenet of fundamentalist Christianity is the inerrancy of scripture and the ability of every individual to discover its “common sense” meaning and apply it personally rather than collectively to their lives. Thus, Bibles, mass produced for individual use, are a material representation of that belief. Most fundamentalist Christians and probably most Protestant Christians have their own Bible (some have more than one). Often, as McDannell recognizes, people receive their own personal Bible to mark an important point in their religious experience. Many children receive their first Bible on their baptism, or as a marker of other important religious occasions. I think that the fundamentalists would have a problem only if the material representation of their faith (the individual Bible) became an object of their faith in and of itself. The interesting tension here is when does a material representation of faith become itself an object of worship? For example, McDannell recounts the recollection of Anne Ellis regarding the family Bible. Ellis and her family did not attend church and rarely read the Bible itself but regarded the book as a “revered object”. (67). Actually, I think that fundamentalists might have a bigger problem with the “Family Bible” in this case because as a repository of family history it becomes more an object of worship than would an individual Bible.
Donna Cywinski
November 5th, 2007
One oddity in McDannell’s approach is that she seemed to assume that the readership of her book would envision Catholics as leading a rich sacramental life, and Protestants as having to make do with a spiritual universe which was impoverished by contrast. With this assumption, she then portrayed the Protestants as consolidating, in their devotion to the Bible, counterparts to all the Catholic accessories of spirituality of which they had been deprived. She seemed to be saying that people, even when they are technically forbidden to have sacred objects and images with an “affective presence”, will find a way to develop these objects nonetheless. The Bible did seem to fulfill many purposes for nineteenth-century Protestants, but I am not sure if I would go so far as seeing it as a kind of spiritual catch-all.
McDannell seems perennially concerned by the role of power in controlling the distribution and use of sacred objects. She touches on the theme in the chapter on the Bible and in the chapter on Lourdes water. Sometimes it is unclear whether an object was perceived as sacred simply in itself, or because institutional religion had declared it so, but in the case of the father of the family reading the Bible it seems that the action is simply a reflection of the Reformation-era view of the Bible as the proper recourse for intelligent and devout men. Perhaps because by the nineteenth century the Bible had already been identified with Protestantism for so long, Christians were comfortable assigning it new meanings, trusting that it had already been accepted in America as a foundation of belief.
Patricia_Murphy
November 5th, 2007