Victorian Christianity’s gentility and restraint became coded as feminine

Evidence

By the early twentieth century, Christians recognized that they had a masculinity problem. Unable to shake the sense that Christianity had a less than masculine feel, many blamed the faith itself, or at least the “feminization” of Victorian Christianity, which privileged gentility, restraint, and an emotive response to the gospel message. But American masculinity, too, had recently undergone dramatic changes, contributing to this sense of unease. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, when most men made a living by farming or otherwise working with their hands, or by owning small businesses, masculinity seemed more of a given. During this time, Christian manhood entailed hard work and thrift, and also the ability to exhibit a proper gentlemanly restraint. Self-denial, after all, was a useful virtue for entrepreneurial businessmen and industrious workers. But by the 1890s, this model of manly restraint had begun to falter. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 35

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the framing of gender and religion as cultural apparatus — ‘restraint’ as feminine relates to how evangelical masculinity will later reject it entirely. — connects to: Christian doctrine institutionalized women’s subordination despite early egalitarian impulses — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 204; The feminization of religion was blamed for driving men from the church — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 648