The women’s moral crusade expressed anxiety over the church’s declining urban authority

Evidence

The black Baptist women’s tireless crusade against worldliness, ignorance, and indifference expressed their sense of evangelical mission in restoring the primacy of spiritual concerns in the lives of people. But their crusade also expressed anxiety over the church’s declining status and their own diminished influence as church women within the context of twentieth-century urban America and its impersonal and secularized social relations. In the teeming cities of the North and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in southern cities the dominant position of the church as well as the organic link between church leaders and the masses appeared to be on the decline and to be unable to stem the tide of commercialism and materialism that swept all of American culture. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 951

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates about moral reform movements as defensive reactions to perceived status loss, and to ‘politics of respectability’ as internal policing under external threat. — connects to: Urban secular life pushes pious women to extend scriptural reasoning into new problem areas; English churches opposing women bishops grow while mainline congregations gray and shrink — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 1003

Broader Connections

• Urban secular life pushes pious women to extend scriptural reasoning into new problem areas #expands (0.78)
• English churches opposing women bishops grow while mainline congregations gray and shrink #exemplifies (0.76) — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 1003