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As these elaborate Bibles circulated in Europe (mostly among the landed elite, since a single copy cost more than a peasant's lifetime earnings), they spread more than the word of God--they also set, in their rudimentary way, new technological standards. Georgetown professor Martin Irvine calls this manuscript culture "the first information age." He explains that "it was the first time a whole civilization configured around a standard technology for recording and distributing information."
Proselytizing via these handwrought manuscripts was not an easy task. The Bibles were rare, fragile and generally came in one flavor: Latin. The problems didn't go away until the mid-1400s, when a German inventor named Johann Gutenberg wheeled his movable-type press out of its secret hiding place and into history.
Appropriately enough, the first book Gutenberg printed was the Bible. His simple press passed sheets of paper under specialized plates that could be changed in minutes instead of weeks, revolutionizing intellectual commerce. Ideas that once could be communicated only in person, or at large universities in cities such as London or Hanover, suddenly took wing across the Continent. And though Gutenberg printed just 200 Bibles before losing control of his invention, there was no turning back. In 1456, when the first Bible rolled off his press, there were fewer than 30,000 books in Europe. Fifty years later, there were 9 million, most devoted to religious themes.
Many scholars credit the printing press with theology's next revolution: the Reformation. Thirty-seven years after Gutenberg's death, young Martin Luther renounced his plans to become a lawyer (his father's idea) and instead, seized by spiritual anxiety, joined the Monastery of the Emerites of St. Augustine. It was a fateful decision. Luther's tortured soul, which attached itself to new ideas with a fervor that seems strikingly modern, turned in a decade's time against the institution he had vowed to serve and created one of history's greatest religious splinter groups. Rome wanted to suppress his ideas, but Luther quickly found that the printing press could be used as a sort of technological megaphone--printing copies of his Ninety-Five Theses faster than they could be gathered up and destroyed.
The drive to spread the Gospel continues into the modern era and what used to be called the radio age. By 1926, 14 years after Edwin Armstrong cranked up his first receiver, the good word was streaming from American radio stations, first shocking and then energizing what was then still a devoutly conservative country. Father Charles Coughlin, a firecracker Catholic priest who pounded a broadcast pulpit from Detroit, built a virtual congregation in just four years. For tens of millions of Depression-era believers, his Shrine of the Little Flower was a beacon of hope--until an embarrassed church pulled the plug. And though there was plenty of anti-Semitism, isolationism and fear mongering in Coughlin's speeches, there was little irony: even as he used all this blessed new technology, he damned the capitalist economy that produced it.