5.6 Billion Pages and a Bulletproof Charm: What 19th Century America Built That Still Runs the World

New York, MMN Correspondent: What if the 19th century was not a dusty prelude to modern America but the actual laboratory where our present was engineered? Three new books argue exactly that, and the evidence is as tangible as a printed page or a bulletproof charm.

Consider this: before the Civil War, one organization printed over 5.6 billion pages of material. That is enough paper to wrap the Earth more than 200 times. The American Tract Society did not just distribute religious pamphlets. It built a media machine so vast and so physically precise that every font, every illustration, every texture of paper was designed to guide human behavior. Scholar Sonia Hazard calls this media infrastructure. The tract was not passive content. It was an active agent with what she describes as inbuilt locomotive power. It moved through shipping networks and printing presses, engineered to capture attention and bypass resistance.

This changes how we understand power. Power was not just in ideas. It was in the mechanical systems that made those ideas feel inevitable. And here is where it gets curious. The same white Protestant elites who built this infrastructure claimed to uphold secular rationality. They collected relics of the preacher George Whitefield, revered his clothes, treated them as sacred. Yet they condemned similar practices among Indigenous, African, and Asian communities as superstition. The contradiction reveals something important about early American secularism. It was never neutral. It was a system that defined what counted as legitimate belief and what did not.

Jeffrey Wheatley takes this further by tracing the word fanaticism. In the early 1800s, it referred to emotional excess in evangelical worship. But as white evangelicalism gained dominance, the term was flipped. Legitimate devotion became enthusiasm. Dissenting groups enslaved people, Native Americans, later Filipinos were labeled fanatics. This was not just rhetoric. It justified violence. Wheatley documents how U.S. military officials in the Philippines used the idea of religious fanaticism to dehumanize resistance. They described Filipinos as delusional because they wore protective charms called anting-anting. Yet American soldiers collected those same charms as war trophies, acknowledging their perceived power. The term fanaticism was not about ideas. It was about governance, about managing populations, about deciding who deserved life and who did not.

Tisa Wenger confronts the foundational myth of American religious freedom. She traces its origins to settler colonialism and coins the term settler secularism. This is a form of secular governance that depends on erasing Indigenous presence. Her narrative begins with William Henry Harrison and the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa at Prophetstown, Indiana. Harrison invoked liberal ideals of free conscience to silence Tenskwatawa’s visions. He framed them as dangerous interference. This was not about protecting freedom. It was about suppressing alternative worldviews to consolidate U.S. authority.

Missionaries followed Indian removals westward, imposing Christian doctrine on Native communities. Many Anishinaabe, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe people adopted Christianity not out of surrender but as strategic adaptation. They also began conceptualizing their own traditions as religion, a category imposed by the colonizer but reshaped by the colonized. Through objects like doodem drawings clan symbols linked to animals, land, and water they asserted kinship with the natural world. These objects were not mere artifacts. They were living expressions of identity and resistance.

What unites all three books is a radical rethinking of how meaning is produced. It is not just through words or beliefs. It is through physical systems printing presses, bulletproof charms, church buildings, land surveys. Power resides in the very architecture of daily life. And secularism, as Wenger describes it, is not inherently progressive. Settler secularism is a tool of erasure. By defining religion as a private, spiritual sphere, it marginalizes Indigenous cosmologies that see land, water, and animals as kin. It privileges Christianity not because of its truth but because of its institutional dominance seen in church placement on town greens, legal protections under the First Amendment, and the way courts define what counts as religion.

These books also highlight the importance of failure. Telegraph lines broke constantly in the 19th century. Religious campaigns failed. Not every tract converted someone. Not every charm stopped a bullet. These moments of collapse reveal the limits of power and the resilience of human agency. They remind us that empire is never fully consolidated.

Together, these works offer a bold new framework for understanding American religious studies. They prove that the 19th century is not obsolete. It is essential. It is here that the roots of modern concepts like religious freedom, secular governance, racialization, and nationhood were laid down through material encounters, infrastructural projects, and imperial violence. The future of religious studies lies not in abstract theories but in confronting how power was built one tract, one charm, one deed at a time.