The Tie That Binds: Print in Seventh-Day Adventism

In The Word in the World, Candy Gunther Brown explores the role of print for nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism, defining “evangelical” in terms of participation in a “textual community” where texts “functioned as converting instruments” while also “sustaining and transmitting evangelical culture among the already converted.”¹ Religious publications of all sorts, from periodicals and tracts to hymnals and novels, provided a potent mechanism by which believers participated in, created, and were shaped by a religious culture focused on conversion of unbelievers and transformation of the world. Her analysis of the interactions between readers, writers, and publishers in the history of American religion, in contrast to the sermons of well-known preachers, as a key mechanism in the development of an evangelical “imagined community,” creates a potent framework for further exploring particular groups at particular points in time through their print record.²

While often cited as an example of the embrace of print by emerging religious groups in the nineteenth century, the role of print in the development of Seventh-day Adventism has been under theorized and only superficially explored. Using Brown’s work to frame SDA publishing as devotional practice, this poster will present my research into the print networks of the denomination and the ways the embrace of print made possible the formation of the denomination out of the dispersed community of Millerites in the years following 1844. My research also explores the ways that SDA uses of print contributed to the development of a religious culture that, while patriarchal in structure, provided more formal and informal opportunities for women than was typically found in nineteenth-century Protestant denominations.

The print culture of Seventh-day Adventism also presents a unique opportunity to create what Katherine Bode refers to as a “scholarly edition of a literary tradition.”³ The ongoing commitment within the denomination to the circulation of their historical materials in digital formats makes possible bringing together a collection of digital texts for computational analysis. Concurrently, the centrality of print in the development of the denomination makes their printed materials an appropriate source for cultural analysis, as it was through printed words that the denomination developed its unique beliefs and practices.

This poster will introduce the Seventh-day Adventist publication networks and provide an overview of their historical development as part of the apparatus of a scholarly edition. This will include maps, charts, and examples of the types of content produced and circulated by the denomination, as well as narrative elements explaining the significance of the different elements and their role in the development of the denomination over time. As part of a scholarly edition of the SDA print record suitable for computational analysis and as a contribution to the study of religion in American history, this work expands our understanding of publishing in nineteenth-century religious movements and paves the way for future work exploring how the medium of print shaped the development of the particular religious culture of Seventh-day Adventism.

1. Brown (2004), p. 9.

2. Anderson (1983).

3. Bode (2018), p. 4.