128 Patricia M. Y. Chang
strategies that closely reflect religious ideals and priorities. At the same time, the com-
petitive environment that voluntary conversion fosters also nurtures a worldliness and
pragmatism that are often overlooked in theoretical schema.
The most successful religious groups have been those who have been most pragmatic
and flexible, overcoming traditional constraints and adapting strategies to achieve their
goals. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the fastest-growing groups were the Baptists
and Methodists who abandoned the requirements of having a college-educated min-
istry and the practice of assigning ministers to a particular geographic parish (Finke and
Stark 1992). Instead, they developed a system that utilized lay preachers who traveled
continually across the frontier, and who spoke to their listeners in a simple common
language, often improvising text and message to suit their audiences. These preachers
created a wave of religious revivals that drew thousands to fields and camp meetings
where these lay ministers baptized converts by the score. Successful meeting practices
were refined and taught as strategic techniques to produce successful revivals. Charles
Finney, one of the most well-known revivalists of his time, wrote explicit directions on
how to plan, organize, and implement a camp meeting that would produce successful
conversions (Finney 1979). The most successful religious evangelists were highly en-
trepreneurial and saw their efficiency as a way of serving God, rather than as evidence
of secularization. As the historian Frank Lambert observes,
by applying means from the world of commerce to publicize his meetings, Whitefield
generated large, enthusiastic crowds. Like the rest of us, the evangelist constructed
his social reality with the elements at hand, and in the mid-eighteenth century, com-
mercial language, and techniques abounded, affording him a new way of organizing,
promoting, and explaining his evangelical mission. (Lambert 1990)More recently, evangelicals have made innovative use of television, radio, and pub-
lishing media to saturate the popular culture with Christ-centered messages. And even
the Catholic Church has taken to marketing the Pope’s image on everything from ball-
point pens to t-shirts (Moore 1994).
Less well known are the sophisticated national marketing strategies that religious
entrepreneurs pioneered in their attempts to spread the influence of Bibles and religious
tracts to people all over the nation in the early nineteenth century. The American Tract
Society, whose goal was to influence the coming of the millennium by marketing reli-
gious tracts to everyone in the nation, reports publishing and distributing 32,179,250
copies of tracts in the first decade of its existence between 1825 and 1835. It did so
through a complex distribution system that utilized professional managers, a network
of regional sales managers, and an army of door-to-door salesmen and women who
peddled tracts within their neighborhoods (Griffin 1960; Nord 1995; Schantz 1997).
The models of mass marketing used by these religious entrepreneurs arguably influ-
enced lay leaders to apply similar methods in their nonreligious enterprises. Sociol-
ogists who have been quick to fit narratives of such innovative behavior into secu-
larization theory have failed to see that religious zeal was often the inspiration for
developing creative models of greater organizational efficiency. The rationalization of
efficiency in American religion, far from being a sign of secularization, has in fact been
the hallmark of its successes. American religion has inspired waves of institutional civil
reform by connecting the passion of individualist evangelical worldviews to national
enterprises.