During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, black members of the Methodist Episcopal (ME) Church published a steady stream of anti-Mormonism in their weekly newspaper, the widely read and distributed Southwestern Christian Advocate. This anti-Mormonism functioned as way for black ME Church members to articulate their denomination's distinctive racial ideology. Black ME Church members believed that their racially mixed denomination, imperfect though it was, offered the best model for advancing black citizens toward equality in both the Christian church and the American nation. Mormons, as a religious group who separated themselves in both identity and practice and as a community experiencing persecution, were a useful negative example of the dangers of abandoning the ME quest for inclusion. Black ME Church members emphasized their Christian faithfulness and American patriotism, in contrast to Mormon religious heterodoxy and political insubordination, as arguments for acceptance as equals in both religious and political institutions. At the same time, anti-Mormon rhetoric also proved a useful tool for reflecting on the challenges of African American life, regardless of denominational affiliation. For example, anti-polygamy opened space to comment on the precarious position of black women and families in the post-bellum South. In addition, cataloguing Mormon intellectual, moral, and social deficiencies became a form of instruction in the larger project of black uplift, by which African Americans sought to enter the ranks and privileges of the American middle class. In the end, however, black ME Church members found themselves increasingly segregated within their denomination and in society at large, even as Mormons, once considered both racially and religiously inferior, were welcomed into the nation as citizens and equals.

This article examines how radical evangelicals employed psychological concepts such as sanity, temperament, and especially the subconscious as they struggled to understand and respond to the rapidly expanding pentecostal movement within their midst. By tracing the growing tensions over ecstatic spiritual experiences that emerged among Holiness and Higher Life believers during the 1880s and 1890s, this article demonstrates that differing assumptions about the importance of consciousness for the religious life presaged reactions to the pentecostal revivals of the early twentieth century. Although their proclivity for rational judgment predisposed Higher Life evangelicals to question the sanity of involuntary phenomena such as speaking in tongues, some prominent leaders within this community appealed to “mental science” in an effort to revise conventional understandings of the spiritual self and its capacities. For participants in the Christian and Missionary Alliance— an organization in which disputes over the propriety of pentecostalism were particularly contentious—notions of temperament and the subconscious articulated in the works of “new psychologists” like William James offered resources for reassessing Higher Life views of authentic spirituality in light of pentecostal revivalism. By analyzing how a particular faction within the radical evangelical movement made use of psychological theories to contend with the challenge of the revivals at Azusa and elsewhere, this article exposes some of the social divisions that exacerbated debates over the validity of pentecostal religious experiences. Exploring the complicated interactions and creative tensions that arose as Higher Life evangelicals appropriated constructs such as the subconscious in the wake of Azusa Street also shows that this influential contingent of conservative Protestants engaged with aspects of the field of psychology in dynamic and inventive ways that involved both selective borrowing and critical resistance. While there is truth in the common observation that radical evangelicals were deeply suspicious of the “new science of Psychology,” this article uncovers a more complex history that expands our understanding of the interplay among scientific discourse, the varieties of evangelical spiritual experience, and the emergence of pentecostalism in the early twentieth century.

This article examines advice literature directed at English-speaking members of the American Catholic priesthood in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. From the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884 through the late 1920s, advice literature transformed from emphasizing how the priest should be a man set above the laity into emphasizing how the priest should be part of a broad priestly fraternity, taking on the role of a public citizen speaking out on issues of the day. After the modernist controversies of the first decade of the twentieth century that stifled their intellectual development, American priests’ seminary training particularly emphasized virile masculinity, athletic rigor, and duty and conformity to their superiors. In the late nineteenth century, advice literature encouraged priests to see their lives together in rectories as schools of charity, where all of the priests would, with the assistance of obedient and nonthreatening household staff, encourage each other to be men of prayer and self-sacrifice despite each others’ individual foibles. Every aspect of a priest's life, from the rectory environment to his clothing and bearing, was supposed to mark him as a man set apart. During and after World War I, however, advice literature shifted from addressing the priest's life in his rectory and parish alone to encouraging him to participate in civic duties as an American citizen. Diocesan priests like John A. Ryan took a lead role in advocating for social reforms that married public policy with social and economic justice. While priests’ sacramental duties remained at the center of their lives and ministries, advice literature nonetheless encouraged them to rethink their place in the sociocultural landscape and to become more vocal promoters of Catholic values in the public sphere.