By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
Victorian religion in America was less doctrinal and more sentimental than its Puritan antecedents. Jesus as a friend and companion, rather than God as an angry judge, dominated popular religion. Victorian Protestantism was more sentimental, decorative, and “feminized” than its predecessors.
Feminized Christianity in Women’s Literature
Women’s literature about a kind of middle-class heaven was very popular, with Jesus as a sensitive friend and helper.
The great figure here was a writer named Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. In 1868, she published a novel called The Gates Ajar, which was extremely successful, and it follows the fortunes of a family who are bereaved because the young son of the family has recently been killed at the Battle of Gettysburg.
An aunt comes to stay with them and she says, “Don’t grieve. After all, he’s gone to heaven.” She then proceeds to give a very, very long description of heaven and what it’s like, and in fact, the description makes it sound, again, very much like the ideal middle-class home in Victorian America. Everybody lives in a little cottage with a neat garden, and they have a piano, and they gather round the piano to sing hymns.
In fact, the novel ends with this woman, the aunt herself, contracting terminal cancer, but rather than having a gloomy mood, it’s got a very upbeat mood, because she herself says, “Well, now I’m going off to heaven to meet Billy, and heaven’s great.” Apparently in the sequels, the novels are actually set in heaven itself.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Jesus’ Empathy for Women
Later on, near the end of the century, Elizabeth Phelps published another book called The Story of Jesus Christ. It’s a biography of Jesus in which she has this insight: “Jesus is the only man who ever lived whose only earthly parent was a woman.”
She didn’t use the language of genetics, but the implication is because God was Jesus’s father, the earthly part of Jesus came entirely from his mother; no wonder he had such a sensitive understanding of women’s special needs and problems.
Jesus in Popular Fiction
Other indications of Jesus came in a massive popular fiction. One of the most famous is a novel by Charles Sheldon called In His Steps. This was the novel that originated the phrase, “What would Jesus do?” that you still commonly see today.
Another terrific bestseller from the 1880s and 1890s was Ben Hur, written by Lew Wallace. Ben Hur is really a rip-roaring adventure story about the Roman Empire, but in the crucial moments in the plot, Jesus appears to transform the fortunes of Judah Ben Hur, who’s the main character.
The work has all the adventure stories, the great fights between the war ships, the chariot races, set peace battles, villains, and so on, but then also at the end, there is Jesus saving Ben Hur’s mother and sister from leprosy, and Ben Hur himself deciding that instead of being a revolutionary leader for Jewish independence, he’ll become one of the first members of the new Christian community. Ben Hur was part of the muscular Christian counterattack.
Grandeur of the Reformation Tradition
Protestant churches in earlier times had emphasized the Puritan heritage very strongly. As more and more American Protestants became wealthy, they started building grander churches for themselves, so that Gothic ornamentation, which earlier would have been out of the question in places like Presbyterian and Baptist and Methodist churches, began to creep in.
The Reformation tradition became steadily less austere: more stained glass, more Gothic style, more choral instrumental music. Popular preachers, revival preachers, also began to emphasize free-will conversion, rather than the old theology of predestination.
Divisions in Protestantism
It was in this period that American Protestantism began to divide into liberal and evangelical branches, and it’s a division that persisted and sharpened in the 20th century. That’s because of various problems confronting Christians.
One of them was Darwinian biology. If what Darwin said about the origins and development of life was true, then the Bible account in Genesis could not be true. They were too different. According to Genesis, God created each of the species distinct right from the beginning, but according to Darwin, each of them had evolved out of simpler earlier forms.
Problems with Protestantism
There was a problem for Protestant Christians, in fact, for all Christians. If you say, for example, of the book of Genesis to look at things metaphorically and consider a mythical or symbolic rendering of the origins of the Earth, then you’re setting yourself up as the judge of which parts of the Bible are true, and which are not. This is again a slippery slope.
One group of American Christians continued to insist that the Bible is God’s absolutely infallible word in all things—the Bible isn’t merely the work of man, it’s the work of God.
Whereas another group of American Christians believed that the biological and geological work fits beautifully with the evidence we have in terms of animal adaptation, and in terms of the geological fossil record. How can we possibly doubt it?
Widening Gap Between Liberals and Fundamentalists
As scholars in Germany and America began to study scripture more intensively, they began to notice that different parts of the Bible, were full of contradictions, and that they showed plentiful evidence of having been written in different times and places. Moreover, the comparative literature showed that there were striking similarities between, for example, the story of the flood in Genesis and flood myths in many of the other civilizations of the ancient Near East.
This also had the effect, of course, of undermining the idea that the Bible was absolutely reliable information about God’s truth, so the liberal Protestants were those who accepted the collective findings of our intellectuals. The “fundamentalists” were those who believed that irrespective of all the evidence, doing so would be turning against God himself. This was a split that became steadily wider.
Common Questions about Victorian Protestantism
These are two different opinions. According to Genesis, God created each of the species distinct right from the beginning, but according to Darwin, each of them had evolved out of simpler earlier forms.
The liberal Protestants were those who accepted the collective findings of intellectuals like Darwin. The “fundamentalists” were those who believed that irrespective of all the evidence, doing so would be turning against God himself.
The Victorian religion in America was less doctrinal and more sentimental than its Puritan antecedents – it was more decorative, and ‘feminized’.
