About Religious Telescope

Religious Telescope

The Religious Telescope was the denominational newspaper of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, first published on 31 December 1834 at Circleville, Ohio. It had been authorized by the church's General Conference of 1833, and its publishing house was formed in May 1834 under the Scioto Conference. Its first editor was William R. Rhinehart, formerly connected with the Mountain Messenger. The paper began as a bi-monthly of four pages, with about 1,200 subscribers paying 1.50 dollars a year. It later moved to Dayton, Ohio, which became its long-term home and the seat of the United Brethren publishing enterprise. Its editors across more than a century included William Hanby, David Edwards, John Lawrence, who edited from 1852 to 1863, Daniel Berger, Milton Wright, who edited from 1869 to 1877 and was the father of the Wright brothers, J. W. Hott, Isaiah Kephart, who edited from 1889 to 1908, J. M. Phillippi and W. E. Snyder, who edited from 1926 to 1946. After 1889 it served as organ of the United Brethren Church under its new constitution, and after 1946 it merged with the Evangelical Messenger to form the Telescope-Messenger.

The Telescope's file is one of the great denominational archives of nineteenth-century America. Among its contents, historians have counted about 900 obituaries of United Brethren Union soldiers from the Civil War, making the paper a primary source for the denomination's war experience, alongside its sermons, conference reports, missionary intelligence and the internal debates of a German-American evangelical church becoming fully American. Its Dayton mastheads of the 1880s, preserved in digital collections, show a mature denominational weekly at the centre of a publishing house that served a national church.

Authorized in 1833, Born on the Last Day of 1834

The Religious Telescope began institutionally before it began in print. The United Brethren General Conference of 1833 authorized a church paper, recognizing that a denomination spread across the expanding western settlements needed a printed organ to hold it together. In May 1834 the Scioto Conference, in Ohio, formed the publishing house that would produce it, and on 31 December 1834 the first issue appeared at Circleville, Ohio, the conference's seat. A New Year's Eve founding for a paper named a Telescope, an instrument for seeing far, suited a church whose members were scattering across the frontier faster than its bishops could ride to them.

The first editor, William R. Rhinehart, came to the post from the Mountain Messenger, an earlier religious paper, bringing a printer-editor's experience to a venture that began modestly: bi-monthly publication, four pages per issue, roughly 1,200 subscribers at a dollar and a half a year. Those numbers describe the reality of denominational publishing in 1834, a small, committed readership sustaining a paper whose value was measured in church cohesion rather than profit. From that base the Telescope grew with its church across the century, enlarging in frequency, pages and reach until it stood among the significant religious weeklies of the Midwest.

The United Brethren and Their Paper

The Church of the United Brethren in Christ, founded in the revival movements of German-speaking Pennsylvania and Maryland, was among the first denominations born in America, and its people carried a bilingual, evangelical faith into Ohio and the West. A church paper in English, as the Telescope was, marked the denomination's Americanization, serving the generation that was leaving German behind while retaining the church's distinctive piety and discipline. The Telescope carried the materials such a church required: bishops' letters, conference minutes and appointments, sermons and theological argument, Sunday school and missionary reports, temperance advocacy, obituaries and the correspondence of scattered congregations.

To edit such a paper was a denominational office of the first rank. The Telescope's editor spoke, in print, for the church's collective mind between conferences, shaped its response to national events and disciplined its internal controversies. The succession of editors preserved in the church's historical record therefore reads as a roll of the denomination's nineteenth and early twentieth-century leadership, each editor chosen by the church's processes and accountable to its conferences in a way no independent religious editor was.

Editors of the Nineteenth Century

After Rhinehart, the documented succession includes William Hanby, an early editor remembered in the church's history, and David Edwards, before the long editorship of John Lawrence from 1852 to 1863. Lawrence's tenure embraced the denomination's antebellum growth and the coming of the Civil War, the crisis that tested every American church's unity and that filled the Telescope's columns with the war's meaning for United Brethren families. Daniel Berger followed among the paper's editors, a churchman whose work in the denomination's education and publishing extended the Telescope's influence in the postwar years.

From 1869 to 1877 the editor was Milton Wright, a United Brethren minister and later bishop, whose name is known worldwide for another reason: he was the father of Wilbur and Orville Wright, the inventors of the aeroplane, who grew up in the household of the Religious Telescope's editor in the years of his editorship and after. The connection gives the paper a singular place in American biography, the denominational weekly edited by the man whose sons, formed in a print-rich ministerial home, would conquer the air. J. W. Hott followed in the editorship, visible on the paper's Dayton mastheads of the 1880s alongside assistant editor M. R. Drury and publisher W. J. Shuey, the masthead of a mature publishing operation.

Dayton: The Publishing House City

The paper's removal to Dayton made that city the United Brethren's publishing capital. Dayton issues of the Religious Telescope from the 1880s, preserved in the digital collections of the church's heritage institutions, show the paper in its prime form: a large weekly folio whose columns joined sermons and theology to conference reporting, children's pages, family prayer instruction, temperance argument and the business of a national denomination. The July 1882 issues alone move from national temperance politics to Greek literature's treatment of children, from soldiers' home chaplains to Sabbath school reports, the miscellany of a paper that served as a Victorian family's religious library delivered weekly.

Dayton's publishing house grew around the Telescope into the denomination's print centre, issuing books, Sunday school literature and other periodicals, including the Children's Friend and Missionary Visitor whose subscription figures appear in the paper's own conference reports alongside the Telescope's. The paper functioned within that system as the flagship, its circulation a measure of the church's health reported conference by conference. When United Brethren historians at Huntington University's United Brethren Historical Center summarize the denomination's story, the Telescope's publishing house and its editors stand near the centre of the account.

The Telescope and the Civil War

The paper's most distinctive historical deposit is its record of the Civil War. The Religious Telescope published obituaries of United Brethren soldiers who died in Union service, about 900 of them by the count preserved in the church's historical summaries, each notice recording a young man's faith, service and death for his home congregation to read. Multiplied across four years of war, those obituaries made the paper a denominational book of the dead, and they remain a primary genealogical and military source for the families and regiments involved, a use of a church paper that its founders in 1834 could not have imagined.

Beyond the obituaries, the Telescope interpreted the war to its church: its causes in slavery and disunion, its demands on Christian patriotism and its theological meaning, in a denomination whose members served overwhelmingly in the Union armies. The paper's war years under John Lawrence's editorship to 1863 and his successors form a continuous denominational commentary on the conflict, preserved in the files that church archives and digital collections now maintain.

Organ of the Church After 1889

In 1889 the United Brethren Church adopted a new constitution, an event attended by a division in the denomination, and the Religious Telescope continued as the organ of the church under that new constitution, the majority body headquartered with its publishing house in Dayton. Isaiah Kephart's editorship, from 1889 to 1908, began with that settlement and carried the paper through the turn of the century, the longest documented tenure in its later history. Under Kephart the Telescope served a denomination consolidating its institutions, colleges, missions and publishing, and debating its place among the evangelical churches of an industrializing America.

J. M. Phillippi followed among the editors, and W. E. Snyder's editorship from 1926 to 1946 closed the paper's independent life. Snyder's twenty years embraced the Depression, which strained every denominational budget, and the Second World War, which filled the paper again with a generation's service and sacrifice. That the Telescope maintained weekly denominational publication through those decades, from a church of modest size compared with the great Methodist and Presbyterian bodies, testifies to the publishing discipline the Dayton house had practised since the 1830s.

Merger Into the Telescope-Messenger

After 1946 the Religious Telescope merged with the Evangelical Messenger to form the Telescope-Messenger. The merger of papers followed the merger of churches: in 1946 the Church of the United Brethren in Christ united with the Evangelical Church to form the Evangelical United Brethren Church, and the two denominations' papers combined as their churches had, each title preserved in the joint name. The Telescope-Messenger continued the Telescope's service to the united church, which itself entered the United Methodist Church in 1968, carrying the United Brethren stream into American Methodism's main current.

The merged title's later life is itself archived: the Evangelical United Brethren Heritage Center at Dayton published Telescope Messenger as its historical journal into the twenty-first century, with issues from 2000 and 2011 preserved in digital archives, the name of the 1834 paper still heading a publication devoted to the tradition it created. A title that began as a church newspaper thus ended as the banner of its church's historical memory, an apt final transformation for a paper whose files had become the denomination's archive.

The Telescope as a Historical Source

Modern access to the Religious Telescope comes through the institutions that guard United Brethren history: Huntington University's United Brethren Historical Center, the heritage collections associated with the Evangelical United Brethren tradition in Dayton and digital libraries holding its Dayton issues of the 1880s and other years. Researchers use the paper for denominational history, for genealogy through its obituaries and marriage and conference notices, for the history of American evangelicalism and temperance, and for biography, including the Wright family story that passes through its editor's household.

The paper's own contemporaneous reports, conference statistics listing Telescopes taken alongside Sunday school papers and missionary periodicals, allow historians to measure the print saturation of a nineteenth-century denomination quantitatively. Few sources let a church's reading be counted as this one does. Combined with its sermons and debates, the Telescope offers a near-complete record of what one American denomination taught, argued and mourned across 112 years, from the frontier of 1834 to the world war of 1946.

Legacy of the Religious Telescope

The Religious Telescope's legacy is its demonstration of the denominational newspaper's power in American religious history. Authorized by a conference in 1833, launched at Circleville on the last day of 1834 with 1,200 subscribers, carried to Dayton and edited by a succession of churchmen including a bishop-to-be whose sons invented flight, the paper held a scattered church together in print for more than a century, buried its soldier dead in its columns, argued its theology and recorded its growth. Its merger in 1946 was not a failure but a union, reflecting its church's own union, and its name survived in the Telescope-Messenger and in the heritage journal that still bears it.

Today the Telescope is read in archives rather than in homes, in past tense as a completed institution, but its completeness as a record keeps it in active scholarly service. The United Brethren, now within the United Methodist tradition, possess in the Telescope's files the fullest account of their separate history that exists. The instrument named for seeing far has ended by letting the future see back, clearly, into the world that made it.