American Evangelicalism in Black and White (1750–Present)

This chapter begins with an examination of the evangelical movement among African Americans, including the testimonies of ex-slaves and the spiritual autobiographies of George White and Jarena Lee. It then considers the role of conversion in the Second Great Awakening. Although there was no overarching unity to this awakening, the revival profoundly shaped an emerging generic Protestant evangelicalism. However, not all were pleased with this age of revivalism. John Williamson Nevin and Horace Bushnell, two products of the revival, eventually became its most vociferous critics and questioned the notion of instantaneous conversions. In the industrial age, Walter Rauschenbusch articulated a view of conversion as social reconstruction, and in the twentieth century, Billy Graham appeared as the charismatic champion of “born-again” religion. The chapter concludes with a discussion of young evangelicals who questioned the individualistic emphasis of evangelical conversion and of others who left the evangelical fold and converted to Catholicism or Orthodoxy.

A Moral Architecture

This chapter traces the interminglings of Lockean with Protestant conceptions of child malleability and innateness and their implications for the mother-child nexus in the nineteenth century. It revisits the key question of predestination posed by sociologist Max Weber and examines changing notions of innate depravity through the lens of Christian motherhood as found in an early Evangelical mothers’ periodical written by women, many of whom were mothers. The experiences and concerns of mothers and the ever-present problem of child malleability combined to undergird a new kind of understanding of the child—one that considers and perhaps enables the privileging of the child’s subjectivity as consequential for this-worldly action in the form of mothering practices and ideologies. In the process, the duty of knowing, intuiting, and imputing the actions, motivations, and responses of and to children devolved to white, Christian mothers. The “Liberal Protestantism,” exemplified and brought forth in the writings of Horace Bushnell in mid-century, enacted something beyond a “feminization” of religion through sentiment and affect. It also indispensably assisted in ushering the “child” to the forefront of consideration in ways consequential to the subsequent rise and cultural predominance of a “modern,” consumerist child subjectivity.