Who runs church organizations? Who have been the pastors, rabbis, priests, and other kinds of ritual specialists? Who speaks for religious institutions? For most cases in the past, the answer to all these questions is the same: men. The excep- tions to this rule have received much attention—as in Catherine Brekus’s study (Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 [1998]) of fe- male preachers in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women who were erased from historical memory soon after their passing from the scene—but they have received such attention precisely because they were de- liberately, ostentatiously countercultural. Throughout American history, religion has upheld male hierarchy, while at the same time providing spaces for women’s authority and power. In America, as historian Anne Braude has explained, women go to church, as well as to synagogue and mosque. “Women’s history,” she has titled her notably bracing survey of the subject, “is religious history.”
Probably beginning in the eighteenth century, and definitely a reality from the nineteenth century forward, women have made up the majority of the congrega- tions of Christian churches, both Catholic and, even more so, Protestant. In Afri- can American churches, women historically have made up 60 percent or more of congregations, a percentage that has only increased in recent years as black churches have failed to attract younger generations of black men. In early-twen- tieth-century Italian Harlem, for example, women controlled the festival devoted to the celebration of the “Madonna of 115th Street.” It was, on the one hand, a cult of female power, as Italians brought their everyday problems and sorrows to their long-suffering Virgin, who originally came to America with the immigrants in 1881 and took up residence in the basement of a Catholic church. On the oth- er hand, it was a cult of female power celebrating female suffering. At its most extreme, it featured rituals of women dragging themselves on the hot mid-July New York pavement, their tongues licking the ground leading up to the Madonna. The act of extreme unction and obedience graphically symbolized the hold that the domus, the Italian conception of home and family rule, exerted over women in Italian Harlem. The domus was the center of women’s power, and the place of their imprisonment as well. The celebration of the Madonna of 115th Street enshrined, symbolized, and reenacted the entire complex symbol of religion, gender, and power.
In New Mexico, a similarly complicated and multivalent set of rituals arose around Los Hermanos Penitentes, popularly known there as “the Penitentes.” In this case, women were not in control; indeed, as the name “Los Hermanos” made clear, they could not participate at all in the secret brotherhoods, the male fraternities that organized the annual Penitente procession. Each year, the Penitentes slowly made their way up trails and roads in rural New Mexico. Members whipped themselves in acts of penance, mimicking the undeserved sufferings that the Lord Jesus Christ took on for the expiation of sin. At the same time, Latino Catholic men were famously anticlerical. They avidly, proudly, avoided Mass. “My son, there are three things which pertain to our religion,” one Mexican American immigrant heard from his family: “Our Lord, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the Church. You can trust in the first two, but not in the third.” The Mexican immigrants interviewed by sociologist Manuel Gamio in the 1930s consistently distinguished between a deep, popular, family-based piety fundamentally based on veneration of the Virgen de Guadalupe, la morenita, the brown-skinned Virgen whose image materialized in front of the Indian Juan Diego on a hill in Mexico in 1531. Thus Latino religious traditions involved women who tended a home-based piety and anti-clerical men who organized religious processions blessed by the Virgin of Guadalupe, the approximate equivalent to the Madonna of 115th Street that New York Italians exalted in their own version of domus based Catholicism.
Historians fascinated by the connection between women and religion in American history have written of the “feminization of religion,” a controversial but long- lived thesis that grapples with major changes in American theology in the nineteenth century and the growing dominance of women in religious institutions. According to this thesis, the Calvinist patriarchy of the Puritan era eventually gave way to a “softer” nineteenth-century evangelicalism that, in turn, became a normative American religious style. The turning point was the Second Great Awakening, generally dated to about the first third of the nineteenth century, co-terminus with the “market revolution” in American life. Protestant women essentially engineered the Second Great Awakening, largely by converting first and then bringing along husbands, sons, and other family members to the “anxious seat” to mourn publicly over their sin and seek ultimate redemption. Historians who have studied the evangelical revolution in particular communities—specifically in upstate New York, where the evangelical fires scorched the “burned-over district”—have documented the transmission of religious ideas and sentiment from women to family members, from which it spread in a broader societal revolution. In this case, the “feminization of religion” has a real and empirical social correspondent.
The “feminization of religion” thesis also has a broader, if less empirically documentable, meaning. In Ann Douglas’s well-known if controversial formulation, nineteenth-century evangelical women allied with Protestant clergy led the way in a “feminization” of religious style, away from doctrine and theological tracts and toward feeling and sentimental literature, especially heartrending tracts and popular novels. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne irritably complained about a generation of “scribbling women” who flooded the nation with a torrent of formulaically sentimental literature through the middle of the nineteenth century. Most of them are now forgotten, but a few, especially Harriet Beecher Stowe, created a revolution of their own when they harnessed the sentimental literary traditions to the hard struggle over slavery in America. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the little book that Lincoln reputedly told its author, only half-jokingly, had started the great Civil War, masterfully employed the themes of sentimental literature, especially an angelic child whose necessary death forwards the denouement—the crucifixion of Uncle Tom. Stowe’s conclusion—slavery is wrong because it is heartless and evil—climaxed in Tom’s death; the old slave stands in for Jesus himself. In the book, Uncle Tom is no “uncle tom” of later caricature, but a Christian martyr who gives his life in expiation of the national sin. Stowe also effectively ridiculed the self-interested hypocrisy of pro-slavery theology. She showed that sentiment can be a devastating weapon of the weak.
Despite the “feminization of religion” thesis, the fact remains that religious hierarchies controlled by ritual specialists—preachers, priests, rabbis, shamans, seminarians, exhorters, bishops, congregational readers, deacons, and others— have been overwhelmingly male. They remain so today, even when now more than half of students in seminaries are female. The complete exclusion of women from posts of religious authority—even from being able to cast a vote in a church meeting—has gradually given way to women slowly entering the ranks of religious leadership. Even there, the glass ceiling blocking their rise upward has been documented time and again by recent surveys of women in church organizations. Moreover, many of the largest and fastest-growing religious organizations—the Mormons, the Assemblies of God (the largest Pentecostal denomination), the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Catholic priesthood, to name just a few— either tacitly discourage or actively exclude and prevent women from entering positions of religious leadership.
In the liberal/conservative divide, which a number of sociologists have depicted as the most clear-cut religious fracturing of contemporary America, gender remains a fundamental issue splitting progressive and conservative iterations of the same religious tradition. This applies not only to women (straight or gay) but to gay men as well. In 2003, Bishop Eugene Robinson’s nomination and eventual election to the post of bishop in the Episcopalian Church split dioceses across the country in a bitter religious and philosophical war that centered squarely on sexuality. In this case, the globalization of Episcopalianism played a major role, as those from international dioceses, especially from Africa and South America, led the fight against Robinson’s nomination, and threatened to split the church in two.
Gender in American religious history abounds in ironies and painful paradoxes. It was Protestant evangelicals in the nineteenth century, especially liberals of the day such as Horace Bushnell, who created what is now called the ideology of “separate spheres.” That is, in an economic era in which home and workplace became increasingly separate and in which a competitive marketplace environment defined everyday working life, men were depicted as being prepared for the brutal jungle-like world of workaday competition, while women’s naturally nurturing souls fitted them for domestic duties, especially the inculcation of morality in the next generation. A woman’s gentle touch softened the moral calluses that the friction and pressure of the workaday world inevitably produced in its participants. As a concomitant of this view, women were naturally religious. This constituted a complete reversal from the early modern view, exemplified especially in the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, that women were congenitally more prone to penetration (in every sense of that word) by the devil, who craftily entered human souls through human orifices. By the nineteenth century, it was men whose harder souls left less leeway for the movement of the divine, in contrast to the close connection that women more fluidly maintained with holy influences.
At the same time, of course, this ideology broke down at the door of entrance into positions of religious leadership. The “feminization of religion” thesis cannot account for the astoundingly fierce defense of male privilege put up by religious educators and establishments over centuries of time. In the nineteenth century, women who felt the call of God faced a difficult road. At best, among the evangelical denominations (notably the Methodists), they could become exhorters, essentially traveling itinerants with no religious authority save for their own message, charisma, and guts. In a very few cases, women became the leaders of religious movements. The most famous example was Mother Ann Lee, founder of a small religious sect in England that in America became known as the Shakers. In another case, Mother Jemima Wilkinson, styling herself as “the Public Universal Friend,” led an offshoot of Quakerism that preached the complete abolition of distinction between the sexes. The development of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century—the belief and practice of talking to the dead, usually deceased relatives, induced by séances and the like—encouraged women’s active participation. Some women who went on to become abolitionists and women’s rights speakers, for example, started as voices of a spirit come back to deliver a message through a particular vessel. In this way, women not otherwise allowed to speak in public at all gained a voice. In sometimes quite lengthy discourses, they channeled the voices of spirits.
Abolitionist and suffragist women moved quickly from purportedly inert channeling of a spirit voice to directly communicating their own radical thoughts and visions. Of course, in doing so they brought controversy and calumny on them- selves and their male supporters. These “long-haired men and short-haired women” challenged the most fundamental verities of nineteenth-century American society, most especially including gendered religious conventions.
In the twentieth century, even as gender hierarchies in terms of religious leadership remained firmly in place for most religious organizations (save for new and marginalized ones, such as the early Pentecostal churches), women still made up the majority of church members, raised vast sums of money to fund home and foreign missions, served local churches in innumerable ways, and ran extensive national organizations that left a legacy of reform in public policy. Frances Willard’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, for example, not only influenced the passage of national Prohibition but also demonstrated how moral sentiment could be effectively channeled into political action, a lesson taken to heart by the suffrage movement. In addition, Progressive Era women’s leaders organized massive campaigns for nearly every conceivable sort of social reform, ranging from the control of individual behavior (in Prohibition, strengthened prostitution laws, and the like) to reining in the behavior of government and corporations. Progressive Era women mixed evangelical sentiment with scientific rationality, at a time when church organizations themselves often adapted the language of “scientific management” and “efficiency.”
While women inspired by Social Gospel sentiments of reforming the social order dominated religious activism in the Progressive Era, later in the twentieth century it was conservative women who led public discussions of religion and politics. In what is sometimes referred to as “the great reversal,” the historic tendency of religiously based or religiously inspired activism to be concentrated on the left, toward movements of fundamental social reform, shifted rightward through the twentieth century, toward ideologies that stressed conserving “traditional values.” In recent years, groups such as Concerned Women for America, Operation Res- cue, the Eagle Forum, and the Christian Coalition inspired devout women from various religious traditions into organized political interest groups on behalf of conservative causes. Many expressed a devout opposition to feminism, despite the obvious fact that it was the women’s movement that had afforded women such as conservative Phyllis Schlafly the opportunity to gain attention as nationally recognized sociopolitical voices. But, as Kristin Luker has shown in Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984), hot-button “social issues” such as abortion have increasingly divided women along the lines of those who define themselves in secular terms, and those for whom religion is a primary locus of meaning. One cannot draw any such distinction too broadly, and certainly the Social Gospel faith of the Progressive Era accompanied any number of religiously inspired women in the feminist movement. Nonetheless, the rise of conservative evangelical women as a powerful social and political force is a significant development in American religious history. It bears examination, too, insofar as gender itself is a religious construction, one that signifies an entire way of sacralizing the social arrangements of men and women—as explored in Anthony Michael Petro’s “Religion, Gender, and Sexuality.” In a previous era, the nexus between what the historian Jane Dailey has called “sex, segregation, and the sacred” had been a primary defense of southern apartheid. Dailey has explained that “it was through sex that racial segregation in the South moved from being a local social practice to a part of the divine plan for the world. It was thus through sex that segregation assumed, for the believing Chris- tian, cosmological significance” (“Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred After Brown,”
Journal of American History 91 [2004]: 119–144). Gendered constructions of the social order, then, were fundamental to segregation.
In the post–civil rights era, conservative evangelicals recaptured and highlighted the biblical language about wifely “submission” from the biblical Pauline letters, while men’s groups such as the Promise keepers exalted men’s roles as leaders of the family. In 1998, for example, delegates to the largest Protestant denomination in the country, the Southern Baptist Convention, voted overwhelmingly to proclaim a new faith and message statement. Originally adopted in 1963 as an informal but important statement of belief for Southern Baptists, the later adaptation added significant new sections addressing specific questions of gender relations. Dorothy Patterson, a noted conservative evangelical spokeswoman, wrote the statement: the marriage relationship models the way god relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the god given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of god as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the god given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.
This resolution came five years after the SBC had issued an official apology for its complicity in and support of slavery and segregation. As white southern Christians belatedly acknowledged their historic support for slavery and racism in America, they moved explicitly into a definitive rejection of contemporary gender mores. In good measure, this move was engineered by women themselves, who felt that contemporary feminism violated norms of godly family structures. The terrain of battle in this culture war had shifted, in effect, from race to gender, but faith in a God-ordained hierarchy remained central.
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