Evangelicals of the nineteenth century were extremely optimistic futurists. This roundtable on Sonia Hazard’s Empire of Print allows us to consider a vital question: How can the materiality of religion embody millennial promises and people attempt to realize the future? And, what can we learn from these material practices that might be less apparent, less immediate, and certainly less tactile, in mere discourses?
Hazard analyzes the American Tract Society, an evangelical Christian organization in the nineteenth-century United States that dreamed of papering the world. Through their networks, the ATS expended significant effort and capital to realize their imperial, expansive vision across the nation. This roundtable thinks with Hazard and the ATS as co-theorists of the future’s material and discursive structures. As Hazard explains, these futurists pioneered religious technologies. We ask, then, how these technologies and their economies continue to ensnare our own visions of connectivity and progress.