The establishment of the Hungarian Protestant Literary Society and the issue of the religious popular press

Abstract

The Hungarian Protestant Literary Society was established in 1888 for the cultivation of scientific literature and the dissemination of popular religious literature. The controversy that broke out during its organization is well known in Protestant church history: the representatives of the Tiszántúl Reformed church district demanded the exclusion of the Unitarian denomination, which they did not want to recognize as Protestant citing credit considerations. The study examines another factor: the context in which the issue of religious folk literature and the popular press appeared in the debates preceding and accompanying the foundation of the society.
The study shows that the behaviour of the members of the Tiszántúl church district was also influenced by the question of the popular press. By the 1880s, the Protestant public had become more and more aware of the importance of the press, so there were heightened expectations before the establishment of the society. These both sharpened the antagonisms between evangelicals, reformed and unitarians, as well as within the individual denominations and raised the issue of the popular press – which had serious antecedents in the Reformed church district of Tiszántúl – into a kind of identity issue.