During the past half century, Protestant evangelical Christianity has become synonymous with conservative social issues. From abortion to same-sex marriage, contemporary evangelicals seem singularly focused on regulating the reproductive bodies and sexual practices of their neighbors and fellow citizens. But why? What are the historical roots of this distinctive cultural worldview?
American evangelicals haven’t always been conservatives. Join award-winning historian Douglas Winiarski as we look back to the Revolutionary era in which the most radical evangelicals questioned everything: family structures, gender roles, sexual identities, and marital arrangements.
In this illustrated presentation, Winiarski argues that the people called “New Lights” in New England—progenitors of the modern evangelical movement—experienced problems involving the dualism of mind and body with greater intensity than other kinds of Protestants. If the Whitefieldian new-birth experience engendered a sense of certitude among revival converts about the state of their elect, born-again souls, it also made them acutely aware of the persistent failings of their all-too-earthly bodies. Sexuality, marriage, and family structures thus became issues of deep and abiding concern for many lay men and women in Revolutionary New England. Solving the conundrum of immortal souls constrained by mortal bodies became a lifelong obsession.
Focusing on a unique 1824 pamphlet published by a Maine woman named Olive Junkins, this talk will place Junkins’s extraordinary religious experiences in the context of similar examples drawn from the sprawling network of Congregational separatists, separate Baptists, Methodists, and Universalists that emerged in Greater New England during the period between 1750 and 1820, along with those of upstart evangelical sectarians such as the Allinites, Dorrellites, New Dispensationists, Publick Universal Friends, Shakers, and Vermont Pilgrims.
About the Speaker
Douglas L. Winiarski is professor of religious studies and American studies the University of Richmond. His first book, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England, won the 2018 Bancroft Prize. Doug's current research examines the spiritual worlds of the early American religious sectarians known as the Shakers. Articles from that larger project have appeared recently in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of American History, and his edited volume, Shakers at the Center: Manifesting Spirits and Spectacles in Nineteenth Century America, which was published earlier this year by the University of Massachusetts Press.
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The Communities In Conversation Series - Sponsored by the Central New York Library Resources Council
This program offers both in-person and virtual (Zoom) attendance options. Regardless of your choice, all registered participants will receive the Zoom link. Additionally, a recording of the event will be emailed to everyone a few days after the program.
All proceeds support the preservation of the Oneida Community Mansion House and its educational programs.
