The Press, Pulpit and Public Opinion: The Clergy's Conferral of Power and the Concomitant Call for a Journalism of Advocacy in an Age of Reform

Abstract

This study of the discourse that appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in books, the newspaper trade journals, and periodicals—both secular and religious—reveals the pulpit's publicly stated conferral of its role of agent of education and moral uplift to the press as the moral agent for change in an age of reform and demographic upheaval. The pulpit's acknowledgment of the subsidence of the church's primacy in the area of public opinion and the enlargement of the perceived role of the press in society came with a call, however, for a journalism of advocacy that rejected the objective mode of journalism in order to battle for reform and moral uplift.

Notes

¹This was accessed through the American Periodical Series Online, 1741–1900, a collection of unnumbered digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals beginning in 1741. Citations from this source will abbreviate this APS Online.

²Schmalzbauer (p. 7) also notes that “such providentialism gave way to literary realism and an emphasis on empirical facts.”

³Chalmers observed in 1820 that “it is true that the newspaper, the library, the lecture, the reading-room, and the club have absorbed much of the intellectual life, and that the pulpit no longer has that monopoly of attention and that singular authority which it once enjoyed. The spiritual interests of society are more varied and divided than in any former age. We must also make allowance for the facts of skepticism, anti-clerical feeling, and a lower estimate of the saving efficacy of rites and ceremonies.”