Evangelicalism and Revivalism

Evangelical Protestantism first came to prominence in the English-speaking world in the eighteenth century, and it soon became a major strain in American religious and cultural life. As such, it has had an important influence on constructions of manhood in America, particularly in its emphasis on emotional display, self-abasement, and submission to God.

Evangelicalism first reached colonial America during the revivals of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening. In these revivals, Anglo-American evangelicals like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley developed the emphases that became central to evangelical Christian constructions of manhood: (1) an emphasis on faith-based personal experience rather than ritualized forms of worship; (2) an antiestablishment posture privileging the individual's heartfelt relationship to God rather than adherence to church doctrine; (3) a premium on conversion, requiring that believers be “born again” in their Christian belief as adults; (4) a doctrine of submission, in which believers surrender themselves to the sovereignty of God; and (5) the primacy of emotion, or the “religious affections,” in the pursuit of salvation. Public emotional display and the demand for personal abasement in religious matters, while central to evangelical understandings of manhood, differed significantly from the Enlightenment-informed model of rationalism, self-control, and moderation associated with the reigning ideologies of eighteenth-century masculinity.

Anglo-American evangelicals often compare the believer's relation to Christ with the wife's relation to her husband. Derived from the Old Testament's Song of Songs and Christ's parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25: 1–12), the idea of Christ as a bridegroom and his believers as submissively loving spouses has a long tradition in New Testament theology. Theologically, this notion has implied an inversion of gender roles by requiring that the male believer assume a posture of wifely submissiveness and dependence, but in reality, particularly in the eighteenth century, it has reinforced normative gender roles by deeming it “natural” that husbands enjoy the “trust, submission and resignation” of wives full of “humility, modesty, purity, [and] chastity” (Greven, 128).

In the first half of the nineteenth century, for a number of reasons, evangelical Protestant identity became widely associated with femininity. During this period, republican notions of manhood began to identify masculinity with independence and self-determination rather than submissiveness, and the market revolution generated a definition of manhood grounded in aggressive competitiveness and selfmade economic success. Further, evangelical males were marginalized from positions of cultural authority, and evangelical theologians of the Second Great Awakening downplayed a stern Calvinist God in favor of a loving Jesus associated with traditionally “feminine” qualities. This development was evident in the minister Horace Bushnell's suggestion that parents should strive to instill a “domesticity of character” in their male children. Other pre–Civil War evangelicals, in resistance to the feminization of Christianity, attempted to masculinize evangelical Protestantism by adopting a less emotional pulpit style and emphasizing the elements of retributive justice found in Calvinistic theology.

Mid-century evangelical Christianity also emerged as a political force, mobilizing a variety of pre–Civil War social protest movements, including abolitionism, temperance, prison reform, and (ironically enough given evangelicalism's contemporary social conservatism) women's rights. That the majority of reformers involved in these social protest movements were women further contributed to the feminization of evangelical Protestant culture, and to American literary and popular culture in general. Male evangelicals, whether ministers preaching to largely female congregations or to lecture-hall audiences, became both culturally and economically dependent on women to spread their messages.

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