The feminization of religion was blamed for driving men from the church
Evidence
Carl Delos Case’s The Masculine in Religion (1906) exemplifies this trend among white Baptist ministers in Brooklyn, New York. Case identified the “overfeminization of religious life” as both cause and effect of the preponderance of female church members. He blamed the feminizing process for creating a modern church predisposed to selfsacrifice, meekness, and self-abnegation. He charged that women’s pervasive influence too narrowly defined Christian life as synonymous with feminine behavior and consequently made the church unattractive to men by denying them a continuity between the church and the male personality. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 648
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the moral-panic logic in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — a cultural shift blamed on women’s influence — and the general theme of oppressed/out-group policing of internal boundaries in the politics of respectability literature. — connects to: Women channeled the ecstatic religious madness that patriarchy had displaced onto a male god — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 340; The church’s meek Sunday school Jesus was blamed for failing to inspire masculine faith — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 370; Internal Christian divisions were blamed for driving would-be converts away from the faith (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- The church’s meek Sunday school Jesus was blamed for failing to inspire masculine faith
#exemplifies(0.90) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 370 - Victorian Christianity’s gentility and restraint became coded as feminine
#expands(0.85) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 35 - Internal Christian divisions were blamed for driving would-be converts away from the faith
#corroborates(0.75) - Women channeled the ecstatic religious madness that patriarchy had displaced onto a male god
#qualifies(0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 340 - Diaspora Judaism’s spirituality was a defensive feminized redefinition of loss
#expands(0.70)