The Other Book That Shaped America

In 1812, the aging revivalist Edmund Botsford imparted a few words of wisdom to a young South Carolina pastor. Among the most valuable books to read, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is, for Botsford, “next to the Bible.”

In terms of sales, Bunyan’s allegory of the Christian life, published in 1678, was literally next to the Bible. No book in English, except Holy Scripture, had been so widely read over such a long period of time.

Today, little has changed. The book has been translated into more than 200 languages. No work other than the Bible has had such a colossal, wide-ranging influence on American culture. Pilgrim’s Progress is America’s second-favorite book.

Early Republic

In the early United States, Bunyan’s work helped Americans make sense of their uncertain times. In 1825, William Weeks, a minister in the “Burned-Over District” of western New York, wrote Pilgrim’s Progress in the Nineteenth Century to warn his fellow patriots. The Revolution had unleashed an unbridled energy, defiance of authority, and recklessness that, unless tempered with order and biblical religion, would be their undoing.

Drawing from the language and images of Bunyan’s famous work, Weeks warned that the infant nation was plummeting to a spiritual “city of Destruction.” Only by the “wicket-gate” could Americans flourish as a people and reach “the Celestial country.”

As the nation began to fracture over politics and slavery, Bunyan’s words were imprinted indelibly on Northerners and Southerners alike. In the late 1820s, Boston merchant Lewis Tappan returned home from church one Sunday to find a local handyman named Caleb distressed about the salvation of his soul. Rushing into his office, Tappan returned with a handful of published sermons and “medicine suited to the case”: Pilgrim’s Progress.

Bunyan was a sound choice for helping someone understand salvation. After all, the book opens with a man clothed in rags, Bible in hand, and a great burden, who cries out, “What shall I do?” Below the Mason-Dixon line, the refined Charlestonian James P. Boyce also relished the book. When he visited the Yosemite Valley with his family, he recorded, “It seemed to us impossible how that anything could be more beautiful.” To Boyce, the scene “brought to [their] minds the description of the mountains from which Bunyan’s Pilgrim was said to look on the beautiful land of Beulah.”

On the frontier, Pilgrim’s Progress was sometimes the only religious work aside from the Bible that those of humble means could obtain. Other than classroom texts, Abraham Lincoln’s first books were those his stepmother brought from Kentucky. Pilgrim’s Progress was one of the first books Lincoln ever consumed, and according to historian David Herbert Donald, the future president knew the book so well that “the biblical cadences of Lincoln’s later speeches owed much to John Bunyan.”

Pilgrim’s Progress was one of the first books Abraham Lincoln ever consumed.

Even the glitz and glamour of the Gilded Age couldn’t erase the cultural staying power of Bunyan’s magnum opus. The greatest novelists of the late 19th century still tipped their caps to Bunyan. When Mark Twain published a European travelogue in 1869, he titled it The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress. When Harriet Beecher Stowe inscribed a short sentence on the flyleaf of her biography in 1889, she took the words of Valiant for Truth in Pilgrim’s Progress: “My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage & my courage & skill to him that can get it.”

Twentieth Century

At the dawn of what publisher Henry R. Luce called “the American century,” Pilgrim’s Progress continued to shape public discourse and the American mind. Not only did Bunyan help Americans conceptualize politics and literature, but he also influenced the way they thought about big business and even the national media.

During the Progressive Era, when President Teddy Roosevelt attempted to describe the new corps of investigative journalists who began exposing abuses of power in political parties and corporations, he sought Bunyan’s help. Roosevelt called these reporters “muckrakers”—named after Bunyan’s character “the man with a muck-rake,” who “could look no way but downwards,” ignoring the celestial crown above his head.

As Bunyan explained, “Earthly things, when they are with power upon men’s minds, quite carry their hearts away from God.” Roosevelt knew that most Americans would understand the reference.

The muckrakers themselves were reading Bunyan too. During her research to expose the Standard Oil Company, Ida Tarbell visited her father in Pennsylvania, who caught her reading a report on a congressional trust investigation before evening church. “You shouldn’t read that on Sunday, Ida,” her father reproved. Tarbell recalled, “I quickly exchanged it for Pilgrim’s Progress which is not without a suggestion for a student of the trust.”

In an instance of further irony, John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil’s founder, justified his business practices by vowing to pull that “broken-down industry out of the Slough of Despond,” a reference to the bog in Pilgrim’s Progress that sinks Christian into a burdensome pit.

Every corner of American life was imbued with some allusion or reference to Pilgrim’s Progress. Whereas capitalists appealed to Bunyan, so did socialists. When Eugene V. Debs was nominated as the presidential candidate at the Social Democratic convention in 1900, he was announced in strikingly religious terms by a Massachusetts congressman: “Like a John of Patmos, he had revealed to him a vision of the things that were to be, of the new kingdom, of the new era. There it was that there came to him a message which was the completion of the Pilgrim’s Progress of labor.”

From socialist politicians to oil barons to muckrakers, everyone envisioned himself or herself on some form of pilgrimage, but Bunyan’s original idea of a spiritual conversion was often left behind.

Every corner of American life was imbued with some allusion or reference to Pilgrim’s Progress.

Pastors and professors appealed to Pilgrim’s Progress on both sides of the Fundamentalist-Modernist aisle and on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, in the 1930s, liberal New York pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick appealed to the “foul fiend Apollyon” who straddled the road in the Valley of Humiliation to block Christian’s way. Fosdick then exhorted his listeners, “Once more Apollyon straddles the road, and what he wants above all else is to spill our souls. The hope of the world is in people who answer, No!”

In the same decade, American evangelicals read C. S. Lewis’s work The Pilgrim’s Regress, which plays on Bunyan’s classic work.

Pilgrims Today

While Pilgrim’s Progress may be less celebrated today than it was early in our nation’s history, its gigantic footprint remains in American culture. For example, while many Americans may not be familiar with characters like Mr. Worldly Wiseman or Giant Despair, they do perhaps know the magazine Vanity Fair, which draws its name from the town market in Pilgrim’s Progress. They may also be accustomed to phrases like “wilderness of the world” or “Doubting Castle” or “Great-heart.”

While America has changed significantly in 250 years, Americans across all walks of life and across all generations have envisioned themselves as a people on a journey. Therefore, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress continues to speak profoundly to sinners on the way, and especially to the Christian seeking a Heavenly City.