“Heavens” and “Firmament”: Popular Science and “Declaring the Glory of the Lord” in Christian Periodicals in the Early American Republic

In the early American republic, Christian readers could access an ever-broadening market of devotional periodicals. Part of a larger boom in American print culture, denominational and ecumenical magazines spread across the United States. These magazines offered lay readers a theological lens for understanding the world around them—one increasingly defined through observation and scientific experimentation. In addition to a boom in print culture, Americans experienced both a growing evangelical emphasis on personal relationship with God, and the popularization of the natural sciences brought on by new educational opportunities for citizens of the young republic. In the wake of the Revolution, popular culture celebrated a scientific approach to the “book of nature,” using the natural sciences of the age—astronomy, geology, mineralogy, and natural history—to understand God’s created world.

Inspired by the rhetoric of scientific popularizers, authors and publishers of Christian magazines embraced the popular view of science as a sacred book of nature, which offered insight into God and creation. Yet, by the 1820s, deists' and scriptural geologists' readings of astronomy and geology offered very real challenges to this approach. Despite the dangers—recognized by theologians and "scientists” alike— most Christian periodicals remained steadfast in their support of science as an avenue to knowledge of God through the 1840s.

Drawn from the pages of Christian periodicals between the 1770s and 1840s, this paper will explore how Second Great Awakening evangelicalism and the simultaneous popularization of Enlightenment science transformed the way Christian authors defined man’s relationship to God, and God’s role on earth. It will also look at how the growing challenges of science forced authors and editors of Christian periodicals to adjust (or defend) their support of popular science for faithful readers.