Divine destiny
Subtitle: gender and race in nineteenth-century Protestantism
By: Carolyn A. Haynes.
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Jackson, Miss
Language: eng
Number of pages: 190
Subjects: Protestant churches -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; Sex role -- Religious aspects -- Christianity -- History -- 19th century.; Race relations -- Religious aspects -- Christianity -- History -- 19th century.; Protestantism -- History -- 19th century.; United States -- Church history -- 19th century.
Description: Curiously, despite their exclusion from the Protestant rhetorics of manifest destiny and domesticity, the nineteenth century featured a remarkable growth in the conversion of women and nonwhite men to the Protestant faith. Why did women and nonwhite men seek to join a dominant religion that in many ways set out to limit and oppress them?

This book responds to that question by exploring the actual words and rhetorical choices made by some of the most progressive Protestant white, African American, and Native American thinkers of the era: Olaudah Equiano, William Apess, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, and Amanda Berry Smith.

It argues that American Protestantism was both prohibitive and constitutive, offering its followers an expedient, acceptable but limited means for assuming social and political power and for forming a mutually empathetic, relational notion of self while at the same time foreclosing the possibility for more radical roles and social change.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [167]-183) and index.