"In a Different Voice": Male and Female Narratives of Religious Conversion in Post-Revolutionary America

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Quarterly. EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTISM'S RISE TO NATIONAL PROMINENCE IN THE PERIOD1790 to 1830 was a watershed in the cultural history of the United States. As both an institutional movement with distinctive organizational and ideological features2 and a revolution in sentiments and their modes of expression,3 the phenomenon of evangelicalism held enormous potential as a force for cultural change. Yet historians have only begun to explore the possibilities for new configurations of familial and sexual relations implicit in the "heart" religion promoted by early nineteenth-century evangelicals.4 Mary Ryan was among the first to suggest that through participation in revivalist religion, young Americans "became acquainted with novel ideas about the family and gender."5 Her study of evangelicalism and family life in Oneida, New York, opened up new areas of investigation for the student of evangelical culture.This study proposes to shed light on the role of evangelical religion in transforming the terms of an ongoing dialogue that engaged early nineteenthcentury men and women on questions of selfhood, personal autonomy, and the problem of agency. Through a close reading of narratives of religious conversion, the central event in the evangelical scheme-the awakening of the sinner to the true nature of his or her depraved state and the final regeneration of the soul through a process of self-abasement and unconditional surrender to the will of a gracious God-can be viewed as an allegorical rendering of prevailing notions of gender and authoritarian relations. The I would like to thank James Turner, Carol Karlsen, Rhys Isaac, and especially Ken Lockridge and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Susan Juster is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Michigan. This article is part of a larger study of the construction of new models of gender and authority within the evangelical community in New England from 1720 to 1820. 34 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 6 Feb 2015 06:04:58 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RELIGIOUS CONVERSION IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA 35 relationship of sinner to savior parallels the relationship of men and women in society to the various manifestations of authority in the secular world. The representation of the unregenerate state as one of alienated authority and its transfiguration under the influence of grace in narratives of conversion, for instance, can be taken as a metaphor for the at once precarious and visionary nature of post...

Theories of Conversion: Understanding and Interpreting Religious Change

“…Is religious conversion healing and helpful to women, or another mode of domination? It is imperative that conversion studies incorporate feminists' concerns in future research and writing (see Brereton, 1991;Connor, 1994;Juster, 1989Juster, , 1994…”

Engendered Encounters: Men of the Church and the “Church of Women” in Maasailand, Tanzania, 1950–1993

“…5 Near the end of his remarkable synthesis of the vast literature on conversion, Lewis Rambo notes the scarcity of studies of women's conversion experiences "to offset the assumed generic (but almost always male) research to date" (Rambo 1993:174). Several recent studies which do consider women's experiences are Juster (1989), Davidman (1991), and Brereton (1991), but none of them explore the issue in terms of missionary settings. sionary writings, interviews with missionaries and catechists, and ethnographic and historical data from three communities (Emairete, Mti Mmoja, and Embopong ) served by the Monduli mission in northern Tanzania.…”

“My Highest Motive in Writing”: Evangelical Empowerment in the Autobiography of Annie Leake Tuttle

“…For women, the experience frequently included a "recovery of moral agency" which was both frequently and aptly expressed in "the metaphor of a loosened tongue." 7 Marguerite Van Die used a wider variety of women's writing -their letters, diaries and memoirs -in her exploration of the influence of evangelical religion on a number of Canadian women between 1830 and 1875. 8 This work moves in a useful direction, for there is yet much to be learned about the role of Christianity in the lives of women who neither exercised nontraditional ministries nor wrote religious autobiographies in the conventional sense.…”