Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him: Radical Holiness Theology and Gender in the South

by Colin B. Chapell

Overview

Examines how religious belief reshaped concepts of gender during the New South period that took place from 1877 to 1915 in ways that continue to manifest today

Modernity remade much of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was nowhere more transformational than in the American South. In the wake of the Civil War, the region not only formed new legal, financial, and social structures, but citizens of the South also faced disorienting uncertainty about personal identity and even gender itself. Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him traces the changes in southern gender roles during the New South period of 1877–1915 and demonstrates that religion is the key to perceiving how constructions of gender changed.
 
The Civil War cleaved southerners from the culture they had developed organically during antebellum decades, raising questions that went to the very heart of selfhood: What does it mean to be a man? How does a good woman behave? Unmoored from traditional anchors of gender, family, and race, southerners sought guidance from familiar sources: scripture and their churches. In Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him, Colin Chapell traces how concepts of gender evolved within the majority Baptist and Methodist denominations as compared to the more fluid and innovative Holiness movement.
 
Grounded in expansive research into the archives of the Southern Baptist Convention; Methodist Episcopal Church, South; and the Holiness movement, Chapell’s writing is also enlivened by a rich trove of primary sources: diaries, sermons, personal correspondence, published works, and unpublished memoirs. Chapell artfully contrasts the majority Baptist and Methodist view of gender with the relatively radical approaches of the emerging Holiness movement, thereby bringing into focus how subtle differences in belief gave rise to significantly different ideas of gender roles.
 
Scholars have explored class, race, and politics as factors that contributed to contemporary southern identity, and Chapell restores theology to its intuitive place at the center of southern identity. Probing and illuminating, Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him offers much of interest to scholars and readers of the South, southern history, and religion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817390075
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	09/15/2016
Series:	Religion and American Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Colin B. Chapell teaches history at the University of Memphis.

Read an Excerpt

Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him

Radical Holiness Theology and Gender in the South

---

By Colin B. Chapell

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9007-5

---

CHAPTER 1

Baptists and Methodists in the New South

The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845, when northern and southern Baptists split over the question of slavery. Just a year earlier, American Methodism had survived a schism over the same issue. These denominational divisions did not dictate disaster for either Baptists or Methodists in the American South. In fact, three decades after these fraternal fights, members of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, accounted for somewhere between 32 and 39 percent of the entire population across Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. In other words, these two denominations, more than any others, constituted a broad evangelical base during the New South period at the turn of the nineteenth century.

For many southerners, the period historians define as the New South, 1877–1915, seemed to be a particularly high point of religious fervency. The historian Ed Ayers suggests that even skeptics were surrounded by religious language and imagery: "It permeated public speech as well as private emotion. For many people, religion provided the measure of politics, the power behind law and reform, the reason to reach out to the poor and exploited, a pressure to cross racial boundaries." Certainly for those who believed, religion influenced every aspect of their lives and could define the very core of their being.

It was thus very troubling for many parishioners who believed that their churches were undergoing a profound shift as the South began to go industrialize and urbanize. Yet even while a growing number of progressive, middle-class denominational officials were located in towns, there was still impressive growth among rural parishioners. The urban/rural split was most pronounced when churches and church officials held to different standards of behavior and discipline, depending on their location in town or country parishes. This trend was even stronger among southern white men, who often viewed the town as a place where sin was tolerated, making market days in county seats across the South a day of drinking, cussing, and fighting.

While occasional violence would break out in town among rural white southern men, perhaps nowhere in New South society was violence as accepted as in the relations between white and black southerners. While there were preachers and pastors who condemned racial violence, there were also, unfortunately, those who believed that racial violence was justified as a means of keeping society functioning. In fact, some parishioners found justification for racial suppression and violence in their Bibles and shouted praises at lynchings.

While white religious southerners split over whether racial violence was justified, many were united in their veneration of the Lost Cause. Scholars have examined how southerners used the myths of the Lost Cause to deal with defeat, reaffirm social norms, and imagine what a good society might look like — effectively creating a civil religion. While there were plenty of laity involved in the celebrations of the Lost Cause, many church officials also participated, and some were afforded almost celebratory status in the American South. Perhaps one of the most revered was Father Abram Ryan, a Roman Catholic priest who wrote a number of well-received poems eulogizing the Confederacy. Another well-known Lost Cause sympathizer was the Methodist bishop Charles Galloway. He was the leader of the Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. His sermons were peppered with references to southern leaders, and one of his most well known addresses was a hagiographic recounting of the life of Jefferson Davis. Many church leaders participated in the veneration of the Confederacy and its leaders, and even children participated in these rituals. Young women, in particular, played important symbolic roles at the unveiling of monuments, as well as at political celebrations.

Yet even as some elements of civil religion seemed to unite most white southerners across denominational lines, many people were fiercely loyal to their specific denomination. Thus, while individuals might attend services wherever there was a preacher on a given Sunday, they retained their denominational identities and were members only of a specific denomination. (In rural communities this might mean that individuals would attend the Baptist church one week and the Methodist the next.) While doctrinal issues were certainly one source of denominational division, different types of church government appealed to different southerners.

Southern Baptists prided themselves on their congregational government, in which each congregation had authority over only itself. Local churches could voluntarily join associations and work together, but they had no authority over one another. These associations could be broken at any point, and the Convention itself had no binding authority over local bodies, except that which each local church had voluntarily given. In this way, each individual church could operate autonomously while freely associating with other local, regional, or national bodies for the purpose of the "prosecution of great Christian work at home and abroad." Perhaps because of this, SBC members hailed from a broad cross section of southern culture, representing "everybody from sharecroppers to school superintendents, lumber camp workers to lawyers, mill workers to mill owners."

The SBC's congregational style of church government meant that theology throughout the denomination could have different emphases, but there were a few points that bound Baptists together. One can point to the doctrine of believer's baptism as an area of agreement for the entire SBC. However, the focus on believer's baptism was a subset of a larger theological emphasis for Baptists across the Deep South. The major stream of theology running throughout this otherwise diverse and dynamic denomination was an emphasis on the individual. While other denominations highlighted the importance of conversion to Christianity, the SBC elevated the importance of the individual to a greater degree than did other groups. Indeed, the SBC's individualistic theology, as demonstrated in the foci of individual responsibility before God, believer's baptism, and congregational church government, wound its way through the worldview of denominational officials and had powerful implications for how church leaders understood the relationship between gender identity and religious belief.

Southern Baptist church leaders felt that individual faith was important, because of their beliefs about who God was and how they understood the relationship between humanity and the divine. They believed that sinful, finite human beings needed to be reconciled to a holy, just God. This understanding was not unique to the SBC; all evangelicals believed that humans needed to be converted to Christianity.

Despite this broad evangelical unity around the central message of Protestantism, many Baptists in the New South believed that they represented the true, unbroken line of Christian worship. Those who so believed earned the sobriquet of "Landmark Baptists" and felt that Baptist churches represented the only true form of Christianity. While there were pockets of Landmarkism throughout the South in the post-Reconstruction era, as well as several significant disputes about these ideas, the biggest controversy concerned the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, William H. Whitsitt. Whitsitt wrote one of the firstfully documented histories of Baptists in 1879 and had spent a great deal of time in English archives tracing the denomination's history and practices. In his research, Whitsitt found that he could not trace an unbroken line of Baptist practice any farther back than 1641 — suggesting that the Landmark claim of an unbroken succession of Baptists traceable to the first century was tenuous at best. Landmark Baptists excoriated Whitsitt for this article, and heated debate spread across the South. While not immediately schismatic, the controversy reached its height in 1897 and 1898, when a number of Baptist state associations were in danger of splitting apart. It was then in the summer of 1898 that Whitsitt offered his resignation as seminary president.

While at the time outsiders may have been puzzled by the ferocity with which Baptists attacked each other over the question of baptismal succession, historian Wayne Flynt suggests that this controversy, and the anathemas that followed, grew out of widening class divisions within the SBC. As noted earlier, the divisions among rural and urban churches grew during the New South period, and many of the urban churches emphasized Landmark ideas less frequently. In contrast, poor, rural churches sometimes became centers of Landmarkism. While the controversy over these ideas came to a head, and nearly tore apart some churches and associations, Landmarkism gradually lost its place as a hot-button issue for most Baptists after the turn of the century. Yet even within Landmarkism, the stream of individualistic theology could still be found, as one major tenet of most Landmark pastors was the autonomy of the local church in all matters.

While individualistic theology ran through the SBC, Methodists in the American South had different understandings of gender owing to their own theological emphases. Foremost among the theological ideas running throughout the MECS in the New South era was the emphasis on conversion to Christianity. Even the organization of the MECS was designed to highlight the importance of conversion.

The MECS inherited its organizational structure from the Methodist Episcopal Church, having split from the northern branch in 1844. This split, though painful to many in the church, did not negatively affect membership totals, and by the time the American Civil War broke out sixteen years later, the MECS had 749,068 members and attendees — a number that included over 207,000 African Americans — and almost 8,000 additional pastors (both itinerant and settled). In fact, Methodism was "the most pervasive form of Christianity in the United States" in the decades surrounding the Civil War, with almost a million people attending Methodist camp meetings each year.

With such a massive presence around the time of the American Civil War, it is no surprise that at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the MECS had a powerful influence throughout the American South. The denomination was highly organized and comprised lay members as well as settled pastors, traveling (or itinerant) ministers, regular preachers, and bishops. Each group of individuals held separate responsibilities within the church.

Despite the incredible organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the denomination deliberately accommodated a wide breadth of theology at the turn of the century. One writer boldly declared, "There are really no distinctively Methodist doctrines. ... There is not a single doctrine held by us as a Church that is not held by some other Church." Instead, they believed that the Methodist system of overlapping geographical boundaries and highly organized church government was for the purpose of preaching the message of Jesus and converting people to Christianity. Indeed, each time MECS church officials met together, they were expected to report on the number of new converts and members in their districts. So important to MECS polity and practice was the idea of conversion that Bishop Charles Galloway claimed that the idea "Ye must be born again" was the premier doctrine of the church. Similarly, Alabamian pastor James Madison Crews told his congregants, "The doctrine of regeneration is the most important in all the Scripture. ... Without it the Bible would be unintelligible." While conversion was an important part of both Baptist and Holiness theology, neither elevated it to the level the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, did.

The focus on conversion to Christianity in the MECS led to a heightened focus on the person of Jesus and his example as the perfect man. This focus on the person of Jesus, for the purpose of conversion, generated specific ideas about gender in the New South. Certainly, other important ideas influenced identity. But for many people within the MECS, the denomination's emphasis on Jesus for the purpose of conversion was the defining stream of theology in their lives.

While Methodism represented a full third of all churchgoers in these Deep South states, the Southern Baptist Convention by the close of the nineteenth century had more members throughout Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Combined, the two denominations comprised between 80 and 90 percent of all churchgoers in the South, and roughly one-third of the total population could be lumped into one of these two theological traditions.

The combined theological dominance of Methodists and Baptists created a broad-based evangelical culture that heavily influenced ideas of gender identity. This theological hegemony meant that ideas of gender flowing from these two denominations, even when watered down, defined the personal identity of hundreds of thousands of people across the New South. These ideas were a significant part of what it meant to be a religious southerner.

Being a religious southerner did not simply equate to being a man, and many women in the post-Reconstruction South chafed against the restrictions of the SBC and the MECS. Indeed, both denominations underwent a period of flux at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, when women's auxiliaries and missionary societies became part of the official denominational cultures. In the Southern Baptist Convention, almost a decade of meetings paid off when the Women's Missionary Union (WMU) was founded in 1888. In the same decade, Methodist women launched several missionary organizations within the MECS.

The efforts to establish these organizations, and make them part of denominational culture, were hotly contested among both Baptists and Methodists. The issues at stake ranged from women's roles in the church and home to being a proper southern lady. Even the establishment of the organizations themselves did not answer all of these questions, as there were contrasting ideas even within these groups. For several years after its official affiliation with the denomination, representatives from the WMU were still discouraged from reading the organizational report on the floor of the annual convention and relied on male allies to do so to avoid controversy.

As the fights about women's auxiliaries demonstrated, ideas of gender were highly charged and intimately connected with theology in the New South. The following four chapters outline the ways in which the Baptist and Methodist streams of theology defined gender. Baptist individualism and the Methodist emphasis on Jesus and conversion were serious ideas to many clergy across the South, who used these theological streams as the basis for their ideas of manhood, womanhood, and family life. For many people in the post-Reconstruction South, religion was not something they assented to on Sundays only. Instead, it was a vital part of their lives, giving meaning to the mundane and clarifying the extraordinary.

CHAPTER 2

Faithful Baptist Families and Women

Between 1877 and 1915, many white southerners still felt as though they were adjusting to a way of life that did not include the prescriptive ideals of plantation homes. For some southern families this meant leaving farms and moving to cities in hopes of a better tomorrow. Other families dealt with the changes of the period by planting more cotton, buying better farm equipment, and going deeper into debt. Of course, there were also families who chose neither extreme but moved close to county seats while staying on the land. Often as families decided how best to deal with the changes happening in the American South, they turned to their pastors for spiritual guidance and advice. For more than a million southerners, this meant turning to church leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Baptist leaders responded by offering prescriptive ideas on how Baptist theology defined identity. While most officials in the Southern Baptist Convention emphasized the individual in their sermons, this emphasis fell sharply away when Baptist preachers and pastors talked about proper femininity and family life. Rather than encouraging a robust theology of individual mastery as they did with men, most Baptist officials encouraged a model where a large share of the responsibility for the moral integrity of the family fell to women. This does not mean that men were exempt from moral responsibility for rearing their children and families. Rather, Baptist officials believed that both parents shared responsibility for their family's spiritual life.

The Language of Kinship

Utilizing the language of kin and family provided a countercurrent to the denomination's individualistic theology for some SBC officials. Pastors sometimes used the term "sonship" or "divine sonship" to recognize those who had accepted Jesus. While the term had its origin in Scripture, it worked well for Baptists, who emphasized both the familial and the individual natures of Christianity.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him by Colin B. Chapell. Copyright © 2016 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Establishing the Standards of Evangelical Identity
Chapter 1. Baptists and Methodists in the New South
Chapter 2. Faithful Baptist Families and Women
Chapter 3. Masterful Manhood in the Southern Baptist Convention
Chapter 4. The Manly Soldiers of Methodism
Chapter 5. Methodist Women as Home Missionaries                      
Part II: Radical Theology and Radical Identity
Chapter 6. Defining Holiness
Chapter 7. Consecrated Regardless of Sex
Chapter 8. Perfect Masculine Love
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him is a significant contribution by an emerging scholar who has convincingly conveyed the relevance of his topic to the role that faith played in identity construction in the twentieth-century South."
—Journal of Southern Religion

“This volume covers much important material, presents a coherent and well-organized argument, and introduces points right at the cutting edge of the field of religion and southern history.”
—Paul Harvey, author of Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South and coauthor of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America
 

“I can think of no one who has treated the gist of a new kind of manliness and a new perspective on women's roles in church and society as this project does. This is a fresh account, rich with detail, and offers a provocative argument.”
—Randall J. Stephens, author of The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South and coauthor of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age

 

From the Publisher