Southern Cross by Christine Leigh Heyrman

Author:Christine Leigh Heyrman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307829733
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

THOSE SECOND thoughts and bruised feelings made it easy for preachers to empathize with the many other white southern men for whom godly women threatened self-regard. Not least among them were the godly lay brethren. While male church members sometimes acknowledged to being inspired by the prayers and exhortations of female relatives and neighbors, just as often those same men responded to women’s public performances with confusion, resentment, and even alarm. Most stopped short of the draconian solution adopted in 1804, by the Baptist brethren of one South Carolina church, who deprived female members of the liberty to pray in public. But the sentiments prompting that instance of backlash were widespread among evangelical laymen. As far west as Kentucky they soured some of the members of John Taylor’s church on female members testifying publicly to their conversions. Taylor duly lectured his flock on the proper understanding of St. Paul’s admonition, insisting that the apostle had not objected to a woman speaking in church, as long as she covered her head with a cap or veil, thereby showing that she “manifested due respect to her husband” and acknowledged that “the government of the church, mainly lay with the male members.” “It is a pity,” Taylor chided, that “a church should lose any gift that is among them, merely because it is found in a female.” Even so, he acknowledged that women’s virtuosity presented a real problem, especially in those churches, as he wryly added, where “the greatest strength of intellect and counsel is in the females.”26

Scrupulous as the Baptists and Methodists had been in enshrining as a male prerogative the powers to preach and rule, they had not gone far enough to satisfy most southern men by the turn of the century. The spiritual and moral authority exerted by devout women through public prophecy, prayer, and exhortation still taxed the patience of the brethren—to say nothing of the feelings that such practices inspired among unchurched men. Indeed, during the same post-Revolutionary decades in which evangelical leaders discovered that spiritually empowering young men could prove a mixed blessing, they also learned that encouraging female adepts could create similar dilemmas. On the one hand, touting the religious gifts of both groups as extraordinary providences lent support to the claim that evangelical churches enjoyed divine favor. On the other hand, allowing those charismatic displays to become the basis for endowing the young or the female with authority of any kind diminished the churches’ ability to attract mature white men.

It was troubling, then, when the clergy observed that even those men inclined toward evangelical views fell prey to warring emotions when their spouses won acclaim for their spiritual talents. That problem preoccupied, among other preachers, John Taylor, who noticed that even men who, although not church members, came regularly to his sermons balked when their wives’ religious seriousness deepened. Some objected on the purely practical grounds that holy women made bad housekeepers, so consumed by spiritual concerns that they let the dust gather, the spindle stop, the weeds wave, and the children cry while supper burned on the hearth.

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