"Peter J. Wosh weaves a richly detailed narrative that places the Society's transformation within the cultural, racial, and religious landscape of its times. In the process, he offers keen insight into the processes of institutionalization, bureaucratization, professionalization, and community-building. Spreading the Word is also the story of people - from patrician New Yorkers who sat on the ABS governing board to shrewd young men-on-the-rise who served as Bible agents, from wealthy Quaker philanthropist Thomas Eddy, who conceived the ABS as part of a larger network of savings banks, penitentiaries, and other urban reforms, to poverty-stricken New Englander Simeon Calhoun, who discovered his mission in life selling Bibles and preaching salvation throughout Turkey and Lebanon. As Wosh journeys through venues as diverse as a clapboard Primitive Baptist meetinghouse in Kentucky and the spectacular five-story Bible House in New York City, he overturns traditional views of benevolence and reform. Drawing on the Society's previously unexplored archives and on other contemporary accounts, Wosh conveys the flavor - and the ironies - of organizational life. He illustrates how the ABS adapted its fund-raising strategies, financial structure, corporate organization, and technological infrastructure to meet rapidly changing national conditions, and he raises important questions about the nature of religion and reform in a market-oriented society."--BOOK JACKET.

Between 1776 and 1850, the people, politicians, and clergy of New England transformed the relationship between church and state. They did not simply replace their religious establishments with voluntary churches and organizations. Instead, as they collided over disestablishment, Sunday laws, and antislavery, they built the foundation of what the author describes as a religion-supported state. Religious tolerance and pluralism coexisted in the religion-supported state with religious anxiety and controversy. Questions of religious liberty were shaped by public debates among evangelicals, Unitarians, Universalists, deists, and others about the moral implications of religious truth and error. The author traces the shifting, situational political alliances they constructed to protect the moral core of their competing truths. New England's religion-supported state still resonates in the United States in the twenty-first century.

Excerpt from Proceedings of the Bible Convention, Which Met in Philadelphia, April 26, 27, 28 and 29, 1837: Together With the Report of the Board of Managers of the American and Foreign Bible Society, Embracing the Period of Its Provisional Organization Aar. II. The object of this Society shall be to aid in'the translation, printing, and circulation, of the Sacred Scriptures. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.