United States - Ethnic & Race Relations, Christianity - General & Miscellaneous, United States History - Religious Aspects, Protestant Church History, Sex Role - General & Miscellaneous, African Americans - Religion, U.S. Church History

A Mighty Baptism

Name: A Mighty Baptism
Author: Susan Juster and Lisa MacFarlane
ISBN: 9780801482120

by Susan Juster and Lisa MacFarlane

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Overview

Throughout most of the eighteenth century and particularly during the religious revivals of the Great Awakening, evangelical women in colonial New England participated vigorously in major church decisions, from electing pastors to disciplining backsliding members. After the Revolutionary War, however, women were excluded from political life, not only in their churches but in the new republic as well. Reconstructing the history of this change, Susan Juster shows how a common view of masculinity and femininity shaped both radical religion and revolutionary politics in America. Juster compares contemporary accounts of Baptist women and men who voice their conversion experiences, theological opinions, and preoccupation with personal conflicts and pastoral controversies. At times, the ardent revivalist message of spiritual individualism appeared to sanction sexual anarchy. According to one contemporary, the revival attempted "to make all things common, wives as well as goods." The place of women at the center of evangelical life in the mid-eighteenth century, Juster finds, reflected the extent to which evangelical religion itself was perceived as "feminine" - emotional, sensual, and ultimately marginal.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"Juster and MacFarane have shaped an extremely interesting collection of essays that seek to explain important aspects of religious experience in America during the nineteenth century. Contributors to the work explore the warp and woof of gender and race in the fabric of Protestant culture."-American Literature, March 1997

Library Journal

Juster (history, Univ. of Michigan) examines the changing role of Baptist women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England. At first essentially equal to men in church governance and in the right to speak in church, women were gradually excluded from power in Baptist churches after the Revolution. As the Baptist church adopted a more patriarchal model of church organization, women were not only marginalized and silenced but associated because of gender with several serious sins, including sexual misconduct, lying, and slander. For an earlier, more general discussion of Baptists in New England, see William G. McLoughlin's New England Dissent 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State (1971) and Soul Liberty: The Baptists' Struggle in New England, 1630-1833 (Univ. Pr. of New England, 1991). Appropriate for academic libraries and collections in women's studies and history of religion.-Patricia A. Beaber, Trenton State Coll. Lib., N.J.