Browsing by Subject "Protestantism"

“Taking the Moral Ground” examines the relationship between Protestantism and the movements for feminist and gay equality in North Carolina during the 1970s and 1980s to answer two central questions: How did a group of white heterosexual clergy, moderate mainliners, and African American ministers in central North Carolina become the spokespersons for feminist and gay liberation in the 1970s and 1980s? What did the theoretical frameworks of organized religion offer that made these types of unlikely alliances possible? To answer these questions “Taking the Moral Ground” begins with an exploration of the religious values that framed the upbringing, activist career, and ministry of Pauli Murray, a native of North Carolina and the first African American woman ordained by the Episcopal Church. Emphasizing the importance of the black freedom struggle and a universal understanding of human rights to her ministry, this dissertation moves on to explore how the key tenets Murray championed—universal love and justice—played out as religious feminists fought for women’s equality within a platform of intersectional social justice across North Carolina in the 1970s. Against the backdrop of a burgeoning movement for women’s liberation and the rise of the New Right, women across the state melded the philosophies of the social gospel with feminist practices like consciousness raising. They fought for stronger female representation at Duke Divinity School, more professional opportunities for women clergy, and the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. In the 1980s, gay Christians and moderate clergy picked up where feminists left off as they formed alliances with anti-racist groups and agitated for the acceptance of the LGBTQ community in local churches while simultaneously drawing on Christian values to support citizenship rights for gays and lesbians across the state. While organized religion provided plenty of obstacles to transplanting this vision of the religiously-driven inclusivity onto campaigns for women’s rights and gay liberation, it also offered institutional frameworks, rituals of belonging, and a certain theological flexibility that most strictly secular movements lacked. In this way, many of the religious coalitions forged during the 1970s and 1980s in North Carolina exceeded the effectiveness and organizational breadth of other strictly secular groups across the state and nation.

The Senses of Fundamentalism: A Material History of Sensing Bodies in Early Twentieth-Century American Fundamentalism offers a new historical narrative about the rise of fundamentalism. I argue that sensing bodies laid the foundation of fundamentalism. New kinds of Christian sensory practices around the turn of the twentieth century established the shared frames of reference that allowed a broad fundamentalist coalition to emerge. Fundamentalists felt their faith in their guts.

Each chapter of this work explores the role of one of the senses in fundamentalist life: sight, hearing, touch, and the spiritual senses. Using visual and material evidence, I explore how fundamentalists trained their eyes to see truth from dispensationalist charts, how they taught their ears to hear the voice of God on radios and phonograph records, how they regulated and controlled contact between gendered bodies through clothing, and how they honed their bodies to sense spiritual presences.

Using the methods of visual and material culture studies of religion, I examine the how specific sensory practices structured the everyday realities of fundamentalist life. I examine the specifics of how sensation operated in fundamentalist religious practice. Current studies of fundamentalism tend to treat the movement as primarily concerned with intellectual matters. My material and visual history of fundamentalism intervenes in the historiography to show that efforts to describe fundamentalism as an intellectual movement have excluded important bodies of data. By studying ideas and doctrines, scholars have too long presumed that fundamentalists forbade material forms of religious devotion or disregarded bodies altogether. My work materializes the study of early fundamentalism, exploring how material objects and sensory practices undergird traditional concepts like “belief,” “theology,” or “literalism.” This project recovers sensing bodies as the cornerstone of fundamentalism.