The End of Religion and the Death of the Book

Religion has been dying for a very long time. So too has the book. “One hundred years from today,” predicted Voltaire, that preeminent philosophe of the French Enlightenment, “the Bible will be a forgotten book.” At least that is what evangelical writers have been claiming for almost two hundred years. They also like to point out that, after Voltaire’s death in 1778, the very house in which he made this impious prediction was purchased by a Bible society and used as a warehouse for distributing scriptures. Although there is very little evidence to suggest that Voltaire actually made such a claim, or that any of his several houses was ever owned by a Bible society, one can almost forgive these apologists for failing to substantiate a narrative so deliciously ironic. After all, it is just the kind of thing Voltaire probably would have said had it occurred to him. And yet, fiction or fact, religion did seem to be increasingly on the defensive as the decades passed. Despite titanic proselytizing efforts on the part of churches and missionary societies throughout the nineteenth century, academics in old and new disciplines alike joined a growing chorus of voices heralding the end of religion. Chief among them was Auguste Comte, the founder of both sociology and positivism, who assured his readers that the rise of modernity would lead inevitably to the death of religion or, as he put it, the shuffling off of the “theological stage” of social evolution. This view—codified by subsequent scholars as the secularization thesis—met with almost universal assent among academics and reached a kind of zenith in the middle decades of the twentieth century when Anthony C. F. Wallace, a noted anthropologist of religion, famously remarked that “the evolutionary future of religion is extinction.” It seemed the book—and not the Bible only—was destined to fare little better. Calls for its technological superannuation date back at least as far as the nineteenth century when Thomas Edison introduced a machine—the phonograph—that could reproduce the human voice in 1877. Just a year later, Edison conjectured that the advantages of “phonographic books” over printed books were “too readily seen to need mention.” They would be more compact, they would be listened to with great ease and frequency, and they would preserve “more than the mental emanations of the brain” but also the author’s own living voice. Although it would take more than a century for what would later become known as the audiobook to achieve commercial viability, the death of the printed book seemed always to be just over the horizon as a remorseless cataract of new technologies—radio, motion pictures, television, and finally the Internet—crowded the media landscape. Marshall McLuhan, prescient in so many ways, called for an end of the printed book—what George Steiner wryly referred to in a review of McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy as “a linear progression of phonetic units reproduced by movable type”—on the grounds it was “no longer to be trusted.” Jacques Derrida and countless others echoed McLuhan’s entropic predictions. More recently, when Amazon introduced its dedicated Kindle e-reader in 2007, it seemed that the end of the book might at last be coming into real sight. “Nothing is forever,” opined Steven Levy in a Newsweek cover story on the future of reading. Levy cited Bill Hill of Microsoft who expressed profound incredulity at the “energy-wasting, resource-draining process” that continued to be devoted to producing physical books. “Do you really believe,” Hills asked, “that we’ll be doing that in 50 years?” Probably not, Levy concluded, before adding, “that’s why the Kindle matters.” Yet somehow religion and the book …