Well before his recent encounters with religion, Habermas subtly reframed his analysis of religious publicity by crediting E. P. Thompson’s 1963 Making of the English Working Class for his reconsideration of nonbourgeois publics.92 Thompson’s influence on Habermas has implications for my work on religious abjection in two competing ways. Thompson’s generous evaluation of working-class religious organizers has been inspirational to my work, but Thompson was also one of the first to employ psychoanalytic rhetoric to pathologize religious discourses of suffering. As part of his attempt to moderate celebratory accounts of Methodism’s influence on labor organizers, Thompson proposed that, if English Methodism was a “nursing-ground” for labor, the nurse was a cruel one. Working-class Methodists gained experience in economic and political organizing by struggling against Methodist rules and leaders as much as by working with them.93 Methodist publicity, Thompson concluded, partook of “pathological aberrations of frustrated social and sexual impulses” driven by a “perverted eroticism … by turns maternal, Oedipal, sexual, and sado-masochistic”; its “authentic language” was one “of sexual sublimation streaked through with masochism.”94 In short, for Thompson, sadomasochistic perversion was the internal psychic mechanism that stoked, and was reciprocally stoked by, the economic engine billowing out religion’s ideological smokescreen.
Thompson’s diagnosis of pathological religious masochism was for some time the abject within my own project. Its exemplification of a vexed scholarly engagement with religion made Thompson’s work hard to embrace.95 Why would Thompson, whose measured evaluations of working-class organizing made him vital to Habermas’s reevaluation of the plebian public sphere, criticize English Methodism in such violently normalizing psychosexual terms?96 Whatever its origin or intent, Thompson’s language is deeply rooted in the history of public debates about religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More specifically, it is a specimen of critique (quite familiar to Thompson himself) casting religious emotion as a form of erotic perversion.97 Following the seventeenth-century imagination of “sodomite” Quakers, or Gangraena’s delicious denunciations of schismatic “libertinism,” eighteenth-century religious dissenters’ secular competitors for public attention cast doubt on their piety by associating religious emotion with an uncontrollable, often feminized, sexual desire orchestrated by religious elites.98
We can condemn the tenor of Thompson’s critique, then, while finding in it a germ of insight. The vocabulary of submission in eighteenth-century evangelical texts helps frame erotic submission in broadly affective terms. This broader framework can help expand the horizons for contemporary queer readings of masochistic sexuality, as eighteenth-century evangelical negotiations of power, publicity, sex, and gender inform embodied and imagined pleasures in both the past and the present. Sexuality develops through a contradictory process of proscription and approbation, and the rhetoric of pleasurable suffering in eighteenth-century Protestant dissent could have simultaneously displayed an identification with Christ’s suffering and at the same time contributed to the transformation of sexual perversions. The commonsense reading of Moravian and Methodist hymns as, in historian Phyllis Mack’s words, “more plausibly … an identification with Christ’s redemptive suffering than … an unconscious sublimation of genital sex” corrects Thompson’s reductive psychoanalysis but should not exclude the possibility that the hymns might provide another sort of erotic charge for either Methodist adherents or their critics.99 Moravian and Methodist identifications with Christ’s suffering were, indeed, labeled perverse by hostile popular, theological, and scholarly publications. Methodism’s innovations in public evangelism also make Thompson’s claims about Methodism’s capacity to effect psychological change more plausible. In the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Methodism’s popularity was grounded in its unprecedented success in reaching and shaping a public. Like many Protestant evangelical sects, Methodism attracted adherents by cultivating a religious “sense” capable of hearing its messages “aright”; Methodism was particularly successful in its use of the sensual experience of the camp meeting, small group worship, hymn singing, exhorting, preaching, and many new forms of publishing and reading. Eighteenth-century Methodism thereby extended, in new public contexts, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rituals of abjection, including conversion processes of self-regulation and identification, that grounded and attempted to transcend the (sinful) modern self. When heard “aright,” these public practices claimed to ameliorate the effects of what Habermas terms “cultural differentiation,” bridging the growing divides between sexual, spiritual, and economic rhetoric.100 Heard wrong or circulating in the wrong context, this rhetoric could also lead to new perversions. These two outcomes may not be as distinct as either Thompsonian skeptics or the faithful would prefer. As Chapter 1 will show, the work of Jonathan Edwards and other eighteenth-century revivalists offers an affective alternative to the spectatorial delight imagined by Methodism’s critics, employing the racial and gendered tropes of suffering during conversion in different ways.
CHAPTER 1
Conversion, Suffering, and Publicity
What did it mean for a congregational minister in New England to write of his desire to be “emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone”?1 This famous passage from Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative” (c. 1739) offers a fruitful point of departure for tracing the connections between religious abjection, conversion, and protean theories of masochism in the eighteenth century. Edwards’s treatment of abjection is determined, to a large degree, by his concern for the public perception of the revival and his own place within it. Though often contrasted to “old light” moderates, Edwards intended to harness the disruptive potential of revival affect. This is especially true of the moments of apparent perversity that arise from the extremity of Edwards’s religious sentiments. Looking at Edwards’s expressions of religious abjection in a revivalist context helps us see how they are constituted by the interplay between “personal” emotional experience and public political exigency. Revivalism also helps us flesh out discrete intellectual, textual, and historical connections between Edwards’s religious practice and masochism’s established Enlightenment philosophical basis.
The affective or inward turn in eighteenth-century revivalist publicity, as well as the strong links between Scotland and New England, points to the crucial role of theories of sentiment in structuring Edwards’s accounts of affective conversion. Although historian J. G. Barker-Benfield noted more than twenty years ago that eighteenth-century sensibility and evangelism were “two branches of the same culture,” subsequent accounts of sympathy, eroticism, and pleasure have attended to the former at the expense of the latter.2 Studies of the interdependence of pornographic and humanitarian depictions of slave suffering, for example, rely overwhelmingly on Adam Smith’s account of sympathetic feeling to define the relationship between sympathizer and sufferer. While Smithian accounts of sympathy fold neatly into accounts of sadism, I assert a clearer line connecting masochism to the sorts of evangelical affective religious practices that Smith and Burke, following Shaftesbury, condemned as forms of religious enthusiasm. Eighteenth-century “enthusiastic” revivalist affect, speech, performance, and publicity wove together