When the Medium was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture

Abstract

During the global pandemic, the publication of new books proved challenging for authors and readers alike. Many texts missed the wider audience they deserved, and readers lost the opportunity to delve into groundbreaking texts. Jenna SuppMontgomerie’s When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture was one of these books that, if you missed it in 2021, it is time to circle back. A part of the New York University Press’ excellent North American Religion series, When the Medium was the Mission makes significant contributions to the study of religion and material culture by combining media theory, network and infrastructure studies with religious studies, Supp-Montgomerie offers a game-changing study in four chapters that include a preface, introduction, and epilogue. She reorients the story of the telegraph, US Protestant missions, religion, and the media. The introduction opens with a familiar moment in the history of the United States and the telegraph, Samuel Morse’s successful electric telegram between Washington DC and Baltimore, Maryland, in 1844 and the famous message, “What hath God wrought.” Supp-Montgomerie argues that historians looking for religion often focus on content and practice as “sites of meaning” and by doing so, they overlook the ways technological infrastructure relocates “meaning from content to technology” (167). When the Medium Was the Mission provides a corrective to this approach by “taking infrastructural religion seriously” and, in the process, remakes the history of science and religion (12). Materiality plays a principal role in Supp-Montgomerie’s book. She demonstrates how religion and media are deeply intertwined materially, culturally, and politically. Supp-Montgomerie reminds us that a telegraph cable without an operator is just a line with electricity running in bursts through it (26). Religion, particularly US Protestantism, played a central role in developing network culture through the expansion of the telegraph. Media and religion were co-constitutive. She provides a genealogy of network culture and the hopes and dreams that permeated it. She excavates to the absences and silences of those excluded from these dreams of unity. These network culture imaginaries remain active in the twenty-first-century networks. Four chapters flow from a “global to local” perspective centering on the United States in a larger global context that considers the emerging national context (30). The first chapter introduces many of the storylines that unfold throughout the book. Supp-Montgomerie employs new materialist theory to show the ways US Protestant missions directed the expansion of telegraphy (37). She clearly shows the ways US Protestants utilized the telegraph as a symbol of civilization and technological savvy that missionaries employed to promote white superiority in colonial settings. In the American West, the telegraph was used as a tool of domination over the Native American tribes. Treaties and other agreements made between Native Americans and the US government included “rights-of-way for telegraph lines and additional rights to the natural resources needed for their construction, such as timber” (101). These examples flip the familiar characterizations of networks “as connective, expansive, technological,” “public” and “politically neutral” and shows us the other side of the telegraph that was political, racist, and promoted and supported white supremacy (100). The relationship between US Protestant Christian missions and technology was not casual. The media became a part of the mission—a mission that was religious, colonialist, and imperialist. Supp-Montgomerie shows in this chapter how communication is more than connection; it is about disconnection, disruption, breakage, failure, and exclusion. Disconnection is a theme she reflects on throughout the book. Chapters two and three trace the birth of network imaginaries and the optimism that accompanied the construction of telegraph infrastructure at home and abroad. Dreams of global, national, and social unity and the radical transformation of distance and time appeared in media, public speeches, and in utopian communities. Supp-Montgomerie explores how the new telegraph imaginaries overtook alternative imaginaries of telegraph, such as Spiritualism’s telegraph. Chapter three centers on the Oneida community and other utopian groups and how they imbued the telegraph with meaning Material Religion volume 18, issue 3, pp. 384–385 © 2022 Nicole C. Kirk Reviewed by Nicole C. Kirk Meadville Lombard Theological School, Chicago, IL, USA