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Christine Leigh Heyrman, “Reflection,” Journal of Southern Religion<\/em> (20) (2018): jsreligion.org\/vol20\/heyrman.<\/p>\n This work is licensed CC-BY<\/a>. You are encouraged to make free use of this publication<\/a>. Long ago in what now seems like another galaxy, Jimmy Carter won the presidency, thanks in large part to sweeping the evangelical vote. Those believers were the ticket to his success, the pundits all agreed, and Newsweek <\/em>magazine emblazoned that consensus (\u201cBorn Again!\u201d) on its cover. It was the first semester of my first job, at the University of California, Irvine and my specialty\u2014in fact, the only subject I knew much about\u2014was New England Puritanism. That had put me on the receiving end of some bracing intellectual challenges from my colleagues in the History Department, many of whom were committed Marxists, accomplished social historians, or both. They took every opportunity to tease me about my interest in a subject so \u201cepiphenomenal\u201d as religion. But the morning after Carter\u2019s election, the wittiest of the bunch\u2014a historian of the South\u2014stood at my office door and announced with mock contrition, \u201cChristine, we need to talk.\u201d He was thinking about Newsweek<\/em>\u2019s cover, of course, and at that moment I started wondering: how did<\/em> the South become the Bible belt? There were so many books I hadn\u2019t read; surely one of them had answered that question already.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That\u2019s the origins story of Southern Cross<\/em>, and once evangelicals colonized my imagination, there was no getting rid of them. With my next project, a study of Islamophobia in the early republic, I became intimately acquainted with a small circle of northern evangelicals who served as the first American missionaries in the Middle East. Some themes I first explored in Southern Cross<\/em> migrated into that book, American Apostles <\/em>(2015), particularly the pivotal role evangelicals played in the construction and performance of masculinity. But the surprising take-away from my exploration of the early foreign missions movement is how lastingly and powerfully its northern evangelical backers shaped the ways in which most Americans understood not only Islamic cultures but the entire world.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n While taking this \u201cglobal turn\u201d on evangelicalism, I kept coming across references to, of all improbabilities, a love triangle. At its center was an aspiring young woman who found her missionary career ambitions first encouraged and then thwarted by men and women, young and old, obscure and powerful, in the North\u2019s evangelical circles. Her romances gave rise to rumors and a richly documented scandal proved her undoing. She was not alone: women\u2019s efforts to extend their influence beyond the household, a transformative change that began in this era, triggered a backlash from both sexes. Doomed Romance<\/em>\u2014the working title of this project\u2014brings to light the paradoxical role played by Congregationalist and Presbyterian evangelicals who first cultivated and then tried to constrain promising, potentially powerful women. Watching one such woman\u2019s fate unfold against this wider historical canvas takes us a long way toward understanding why the majority of northern evangelicals\u2014even as many took radical stances in opposition to slavery and Indian removal\u2014held back from agitating for women\u2019s civil, legal, and political rights.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What I like best about Doomed Romance <\/em>is its uncanny resonance with the sexual politics of contemporary America. That\u2019s because now, more than ever, we need to talk. We, historians of religion in the South and elsewhere, should be exchanging with scholars in other fields and engaging with the public at large to explore why evangelicals have emerged yet again as key players in American politics. As every poll shows and some contributors to this discussion of Southern Cross <\/em>have noted, white evangelicals form a core constituency of Donald Trump\u2019s supporters. Not coincidentally, they are also key players in the backlash against women\u2019s efforts to gain equal rights, equal pay, and reproductive justice and the strivings of the LGBTQ community for full protection under the law and an end to stigmatization. The legacy of the evangelical past with respect to race, gender, and sexuality is far richer, more diverse, and often more radical than many of today\u2019s believers either realize or acknowledge. It\u2019s our job as historians to encourage such a reckoning by bringing the perspective of the past to bear upon the vexed politics of the present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reflection Christine Leigh Heyrman Robert W. and Shirley P. Grimble Professor of American History at University of Delaware JSR Volume20 Cite this Article Christine Leigh Heyrman, “Reflection,” Journal of Southern Religion (20) (2018): jsreligion.org\/vol20\/heyrman. Open-access license This work is licensed CC-BY. You are encouraged to make free use of this publication. Long ago in what…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-910","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":937,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/910\/revisions\/937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\t\tOpen-access license
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