Ministers Behaving Badly: The Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century America

Karin E. Gedge. Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. viii + 290. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00.

The jeremiad of feminization has structured too much of nineteenth-century American history in the last twenty-five years. Without Benefit of Clergy challenges the powerful paradigms of gender, mass culture, and religion that Ann Douglas laid out in The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Gedge re-examines Douglas's assertion that the relationship between women and their ministers was dangerously intimate. By exploring the gender relations rather than just the gender roles of women and ministers, Gedge shows us why women had difficulty sustaining satisfying spiritual relationships with their ministers and how ministers struggled with their pastoral duties. She analyzes the stories women and ministers told themselves about themselves as well as the circumstances of individual interaction. She frames her argument around four categories: perceptions, imagination, ideal relationships, and experience, rather than dividing evidence into fact and fiction, and she supports her cultural analysis with impressive archival research in a wide array of sources. Gedge uses the phrase "without benefit of clergy," with its multiplicity of associations, as a critique of the scholarly paradigm of the feminization of religion. If the bonds between women and ministers were not as Ann Douglas described them, and Gedge is very convincing on this front, then the conclusions Douglas drew from these observations also must be seriously questioned. It is here that Gedge offers much more than a revisionist history of congregational life. She dismantles one of the central premises of Douglas's book: the decline in the rigor and spiritual health of the nation during the nineteenth century was perpetrated by the insidious influence of weak-minded women on their equally weak-minded ministers. Ministers, in Douglas's assessment, became yes-men for the sentimentalized faith that sustained bonbon-popping, novel-reading women. Gedge argues that far from an unholy alliance that weakened and feminized religion, women and their ministers were estranged; more often than not they failed to create strong personal and spiritual bonds. Both groups resented their mutual dependence; both felt that the other group did not achieve the requisite level of spiritual rigor.

Gedge relegates the bulk of her historiographical discussion to an appendix where she discusses the larger historical context for her study and the limited engagement of church historians, literary historians, and women's historians with the pastoral relationship. The appendix is a brief, compelling overview of the major issues in nineteenth-century American history; it addresses the ways historians have explained the growing numbers of women in Protestant churches beginning in the years after the Revolution. While her decision to address the historiographical aspect of her argument separately makes good intellectual and practical sense, it would be helpful, especially for undergraduate readers, if Gedge more frequently anchored her story back to the larger social, political, and economic trends with brief discussions in the chapters themselves.

As Gedge notes in the appendix, there are many studies of the roles women played in the creation of church communities of reform in the nineteenth century and the importance of these communities for the reformers as well as the people they helped. There is also a strong body of literature that addresses the conflict between the vision women reformers had of the world they were trying to create and the perception the recipients had of their benevolent work. But the conflict between two groups who should have been natural allies—ministers and the engaged members of their congregations—is a new story. Previous studies of the pastoral relationship, Gedge argues, were organized around a loosely framed consensus that the history of the nineteenth-century church could be best understood through the rubric of feminization, whether this was seen as a positive or negative category. Gedge finds this consensus unsatisfactory. The...