Preaching Cleanliness and Peddling Purity: The Sacred and Secular of Soap

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Seales, Chad

Keywords

Cleanliness, Purity, Soap, Advertisements, Sacred, Secular, Mission, Cleanliness Institute

Area of Concentration

Religion

Abstract

My thesis examines the cultural history of cleanliness within U.S. business efforts at home and American missionary efforts abroad to argue that religion can be about the mundane, and the secular can be about the transcendent. Scholars have often defined the sacred and the profane, and religion and the secular in opposition to each other. Soap, a modern economic commodity full of social, scientific, and religious meaning, blurs many distinctions between sacred religions and profane secular institutions in ritual practice to the point that they are nearly indistinguishable. I hope to show through two case studies that cleanliness "scrambles" the sacred and the profane, and the religious and the secular. The first case is the Cleanliness Institute, a soap marketing institute in New York, 1927-1932. The second case is a Brethren of Christ American Protestant mission in Rhodesia, Africa 1898-1914. Both of these organizations unleashed campaigns that differed in ultimate motivation, but both set out to spread the philanthropic gospel of modern cleanliness and soap.

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