Since the 1850 publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, cultures of belief have provided shape for an American literary tradition. Yet this tradition arose from an earlier proliferation of less highbrow reading practices and more accessible forms of religious devotion. As evangelical Protestantism brought new faith to new readers in the nineteenth century, millions sought personal relationships with God through the books they bought and sold. The result was a body of American literature built to touch, inspire, and elevate, the spirit of backwoods revivals in best-selling novels. What were these novels selling? And why did they sell so well? This seminar examines this alchemy of "high" and "low" through the shared terrain of faith and fiction in the nineteenth-century US. We'll read popular religious works, including tracts from the American Tract Society, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Silent Partner, and Lew Wallace's Ben Hur, as well as more canonical works like Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Henry James' The Bostonians. Throughout, we will examine the significance of faith as a vehicle of social and literary reform. We will also consider how our own convictions inform the way we value reading.