Relationships Matter

The common view of the nineteenth-century pastoral relationship--found in both contemporary popular accounts and 20th-century scholarship--was that women and clergymen formed a natural alliance and enjoyed a particular influence over each other. In Without Benefit of Clergy, Karin Gedge tests this thesis by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister, the female parishioner, and the larger culture. The question that troubled religious women seeking counsel, says Gedge, was: would their minister respect them, help them, honor them? Surprisingly, she finds, the answer was frequently negative. Gedge supports her conclusion with evidence from a wide range of previously untapped primary sources including pastoral manuals, seminary students' and pastors' journals, women's diaries and letters, pamphlets, sentimental and sensational novels, and The Scarlet Letter.

User Reviews about Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Religion in America)

Gedge attacks a contemporary stereotype of 19th century America that depicts clergy and women of that time as having mutual ideas and being mutually supportive of each other. This stereotype is evidenced in countless movies and novels set in that era. The authors of such plots probably automatically assumed this, from reading earlier tales.

What Gedge offers is a close scrutiny of contemporary primary sources. These include letters and diaries of women. She found repeated, separate and independent accounts of male clergy abusing their pastoral duties and also sexually abusing some of their female parishioners, in stark constrast to some of the sanitised fiction of the time.

But perhaps the modern reader would not be too surprised by her findings. Recent revelations (a ironic word in view of its religious connotations) of modern clergy doing likewise have become all too common. It is no difficult stretch to imagine their earlier counterparts to be equally mortal. All men are fallen, as the Christian catechism says. -- All men are fallen