My research investigates the emergence of a religious middlebrow in America by examining the content, marketing, readership, and distribution of mass-market religious non-fiction in the period 1920-1960. The focus on religious books as commodities offers a chance to examine what historian David Hall refers to as “lived religion,” religious life not confined to the rituals and teachings of religious institutions. The term “middlebrow” has been employed by scholars in American cultural history to describe the new cultural forms that emerged when “high culture” was marketed to a growing, socially-anxious American middle-class seeking to “better” itself. I find the term useful in describing a similar process in American religious life. I am particularly concerned with exploring the ways this religious middlebrow culture contributed to a rift in American religious life between personal spirituality and religious institutions, a rift captured in the often-heard phrase “spiritual but not religious.”

I have limited my research, with a few exceptions, to books that reached bestsellers status, and yet, given this stipulation, I have been able to examine scores of books from a wide range of authors. Not surprisingly, Protestant writers produced most of the religious bestsellers in the period, but important Catholic and Jewish writers, such as Thomas Merton and Joshua Loth Liebman, were able to reach the mass-market as well. This first section of the dissertation engages in a textual analysis of these critical texts, and proceeds chronologically within the themes of psychology, New Thought, and mysticism. Section II explores the marketing, distribution, and, as possible, reception of religious bestsellers through a study of the Religious Book Club and archival work in authors’ papers. Reviews, fan mail, advertising, and business records have been critical to this phase of the project.

Middlebrow religious culture, I argue, shaped American religious life in two important and inter-related ways. First, it had profound consequences for institutional religion. In short, middlebrow reading, rooted in liberal Protestantism, contributed to ecumenism, eclecticism, and the consequent “restructuring” of institutional liberal Protestantism. But the mid-century marketplace for religious books transformed not just religious structures; it also informed the substance of a broader American spirituality. The emerging religious middlebrow of the second quarter of the 20th century mediated previously marginal ideas—in particular, modern psychology, New Thought religion, and Christian mysticism—into the wider, middle-class reading culture, and thereby shaped later-twentieth-century spirituality. A trip to the “spirituality” section of any contemporary bookstore reveals the continuing hold of these ideas.