Two centuries ago, most American magazine and newspaper editors professed Christian faith and wanted their publications to show it—but many lost their audiences when new publications offered street-level reporting that won more readers than literary essays.
That’s important history to understand, but you won’t read about it in Alex Wright’s new book Empire of Ink, a supposed history of American journalism through 1900. Wright amusingly describes antics of The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper, as the subtitle states, but he skips the Christians and in doing so misses the forest for trees, billions of which fell in the centuries when words on paper ruled.
But just as Wright overlooks something important, so did I—until my research for a history of abortion led me to what Wright rightly calls “racy papers … bearing names like The Flash, The Whip, The Rake, and The Libertine,” bearing “headings like Lives of the Nymphs.” They published detailed and prurient profiles of prostitutes, listing their addresses as a service to readers eager (as one critic wrote) to “fill the paths to perdition.”
Wright also describes how newspapers first celebrated Charles Dickens when the author came to the US in 1842, then called him “a literary bagman.” Dickens reciprocated, attacking “moral poison” and arguing that “the influence of the good, is powerless to counteract the moral poison of the bad.” My sense is that Wright overemphasizes the bad in early American journalism, but I may have underestimated it.
Empires of Ink does show how geographic journalistic polarization led to the Civil War. Southern newspapers said some Northerners had “impurity of mind among men” and “unchastity among women.” A typical Northern editorial predicted that Southerners “will eat dirt. They will back out. … They are wonderful hands at bragging and telling fantastical lies; but when it comes to action, count them out.”
Sadly, count them in, and 600,000 deaths resulted. I do give Wright credit for digging up dramatic stories. In Roseburg, Oregon, competing editors in 1870 fought a duel in which one “took a bullet in the chest, but the bullet lodged inside a thick stack of papers that he happened to be carrying in his coat pocket.” That editor then shot his competitor in the midsection and then was himself shot in the head, neck, and shoulder. “Miraculously,” no one died, and neither did their newspapers.
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If you like reading serious history books, I’ll suggest two that go deeper and have particular Christian interest.
Jonathan Cheng’s 2026 Korean Messiah offers in its subtitle a surprising twist: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult. The mentor of North Korea’s first Communist dictator was a Methodist pastor. In October 1945, the first head of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (Soviet-dominated North Korea) was a Presbyterian elder. But Kim schemed, out-maneuvered Christians (many who then fled south), erected statues to himself, and had his lackeys portray him as a Christ figure—but one who sacrificed others, not himself.
And Robert E. Bonner’s The First Pariah State: How Proslavery Confederacy Menaced the World, also new in 2026, shows how the 1861 assertion by Alexander Stephens that slavery was “the cornerstone” of the Confederacy became a soundbite heard round much of the world. Much of Europe identified the South with inhumanity, and 1,000 ministers in Scotland attacked their counterparts across the ocean for using religion to defend a cause “founded on wrong and crime” that was earning God’s “righteous wrath.”
Marvin Olasky is editor in chief of Christianity Today.
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