“An oppressive insensibility”: disestablishment, clerical infirmity, and the origins of the manual labor movement
Date
2023-05-03
Authors
Stokum, Christopher J.
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Stokum CJ. “An Oppressive Insensibility”: Disestablishment, Clerical Infirmity, and the Origins of the Manual Labor Movement. Church History. 2022;91(4):803-823. doi:10.1017/S0009640722002797
Abstract
In the contested spiritual economy of the early nineteenth century, recently disestablished American clergymen consolidated themselves in theological seminaries. Members of the dominant New England Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministries, these seminarians organized a defensive front against itinerant, populist rivals by intensifying their curricula, proscribing physical exertion as a distraction from study, and shielding clerical students from popular influence. Yet critical voices from within the seminaries soon reported that unrelenting study damaged students’ bodily health and alienated the clergy from a laity on whom their educational funding now depended. Accompanying such critiques were proposals for an alternative pedagogy that gained its fullest expression in the manual labor school, where physical vigor was enshrined as a complement to theological training and where barriers separating clergy from laity were minimized. By situating the infirmities that seminarians logged in memoirs and exposés alongside their efforts to reform the seminary system, this article argues that the graduate clergy mustered a coherent, forceful response to the crisis in spiritual leadership that disestablishment precipitated. The article presents clerical elites not as casualties of democratization or as agents of capital, but as self-aware and self-interested economic actors in the reordering of American religious authority after disestablishment.
Description
License
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of Church History. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.