The Spiritualist Economy: Religious Publishing and Psychic Enterprise 1865-1900

Introduction

The decades following the Civil War marked one of the most considerable transformations in American economic history. Railroads tied the continent together, factories multiplied, and literacy surged as Reconstruction and urbanization reshaped daily life. Amid this industrial and social acceleration, one industry grew with incredible speed, that industry was the printing and publishing sector. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of American printing establishments increased from roughly 5,100 to 12,700, while the sector’s value added by manufacture rose from $82 million to nearly $295 million.[1] These figures represent far more than commercial expansion. They mark the creation of a new national infrastructure through which religious and metaphysical ideas could be manufactured, distributed, and monetized. The story of The Banner of Light and other Spiritualist periodicals reveals how this economic boom gave birth to what might be called a spiritualist economy, an early marketplace of belief that transformed revelation into a reproducible commodity.

Measuring Growth

Quantitative data from the Historical Statistics of the United States provide the empirical foundation for this argument. In, 1870, American counted 5,135 publishing establishments employing 61,401 wage earners and producing $82.1 million in manufactured value. By 1880, those numbers had grown to 6,809 establishments and $123.5 million in output; by 1890, 9,489 establishments and $204.8 million; and by 1900, to 12,674 establishments generating $294.9 million.[2] Over three decades, publishing establishments increased by roughly 150 percent, wages and employment nearly tripled, and total productive value more than tripled. The compound annual growth rate for the industry, between 2.7 and 3.5 percent, outpaced national Growth Domestic Product (GDP) growth during the same period.

This measurable expansion reflected a combination of technologies and social factors: improved steam presses, stereotyping, lower paper costs, and a steadily increasing literacy rate, particularly among women and urban residents.[3] Publishing became one of the most dynamic components of the postbellum economy, supplying not only newspapers and novels but also the pamphlets, tracts, and metaphysical manuals that gave material form to the era’s spiritual experiences. The economic data thus reveal more than prosperity; they disclose the industrial scaffolding of a new religious culture.

Spiritualism in the Marketplace

Within the rapidly growing sector, Spiritualist and metaphysical entrepreneurs found fertile ground for dissemination. The Banner of Light, published weekly in Boston by Colby & Rich, offers a striking case study. Its October 1865 issue contained spirit communications, séance transcripts, advertisements for mediums, and commercial notices for metaphysical books and “spirit photography.”[4] It resembled a religious newspaper yet functioned unmistakably as a business enterprise. Readers subscribed annually, purchased back issues, and encountered a steady flow of advertisements for psychic healers, correspondence courses, and occult supplies.

The paper’s dual nature as both a theological forum and a revenue-generating periodical illustrates what Catherine L Albanese describes as an industry of the spirit, borrowing its techniques from the modern business world.[5] Spiritualism’s advocates did not retreat from the marketplace; instead, they measured it. Through advertising space and subscription models, they learned to monetize charisma. Their entrepreneurial strategies paralleled those of secular publishers. They serialized content to retain readers, sought endorsements to build credibility, and built distribution networks that reached across the industrializing North. The result was a distinct religious economy in which revelation circulated through the same channels as commerce.

Religious Economy of Growth

Interpreting this development requires moving beyond mere causation. The data does not suggest that economic growth caused Spiritualism, nor that Spiritualism drove industrial expansion. Rather, they show mutual adaptation between culture and economy. As Leigh Eric Schmidt notes, late 19-century metaphysical writers increasingly used the expanding periodical press to cultivate both communities of seekers and markets for their ideas, blending spiritual outreach with commercial exchange.[6] The print boom provided Spiritualists with affordable access to audiences, while the appetite for spiritual novelty supplied publishers with profitable content. Each sustained the other.

The Spiritualist publishing network also mirrored key features of industrial capitalism, features such as efficiency through mechanization, mass distribution via railroads, and demand creation through advertising. In this sense, the religious press was not peripheral to the postbellum economy, but emblematic of it. It integrated intangible aspiration with tangible production, linking spiritual yearning to market behavior. Albanese observes that by the 1890s, metaphysical publishing had fused spirituality with the culture of prosperity, treating success not as a worldly distraction but as a manifestation of divine harmony.[7] Belief became both a message and medium, a product of faith and a product for sale.

Interpretations and Implications

Quantitative and qualitative evidence together portray the postbellum publishing boom as the economic foundation for modern America metaphysical culture. The tripling of output between 1870 and 1900 enabled hundreds of small religious presses and periodicals to flourish, from denominational organs to occult journals. The Banner of Light was not an anomaly but part of an expanding spiritual industry that blurred the boundaries between sacred and secular enterprise.

This phenomenon reveals a broader historical principle, that is, when technology lowers the cost of communication, religion adapts not by withdrawing but by innovating. The postbellum press industrialized revelation, democratizing access to the invisible world while simultaneously commodifying it. What emerged was an early form of cultural capitalism in which Americans could, quite literally, purchase printed pathways to transcendence. The data from 1870 to 1900 show an economy learning to trade in belief, and a faith learning to thrive in the marketplace.

Conclusion

By 1900, the printing and publishing industry had become a central artery of American growth, and within it the Spiritualist movement found both a megaphone and a business model. The measurable rise in establishments and output quantifies the infrastructure of what might be termed a proto-national religious media network. This postbellum spiritual economy set the stage for the metaphysical and occult entrepreneurship of the early 20th century, the period explored more fully in The Business of Belief: Esoteric and Occultic Entrepreneurship in Early Twentieth-Century America. In converting revelation into reproducible print, postbellum publishers gave modern America one of its enduring paradoxes, a marketplace where even the spirit could be sold.

Footnotes:

[1] U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), Series P 58–62.

[2] Ibid., Series P 58-62.

[3] Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 379–403; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 45–75.

[4] The Banner of Light, Vol. 18, No. 6 (October 28, 1865), 3, https://iapsop.com/archive/materials/banner_of_light/banner_of_light_v18_n6_28_oct_1865.pdf.

[5] Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 389.

[6] Schmidt, Restless Souls, 48-63.

[7] Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 401–402.