Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (North American Religions)

Book info: Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (North American Religions) (Hardcover, 288 pages) – NYU Press, 2024. Language: English.

Illuminates how white American Protestant women embraced a racially specific version of socialinclusiveness that centered themselves as the normAmidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embracedthe idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquelyqualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within thechurch, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism.Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement tocreate a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from anearlier Protestant world view that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions amongraces were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritized issues like civil rights and racialintegration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired towas still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians.In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalismto focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessarylayer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire.

Editorial Reviews Review "Through close examinations of a wide range of practices from mission study to pageants to committee meetings to worship services, Christian Imperial Feminism reveals the ways that Protestant women embraced a Christian cosmopolitanism that simultaneously embraced diversity and sought to manage it…. A thoughtful exploration of Protestant churchwomen as full people with good intentions and deep flaws who took action in a world that they thought they understood far better than they actually did, with effects that they could not always predict." -- Emily Conroy Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic

"Expertly written…. Will be of most interest to historians, particularly those working on missions, Christian women, and US Christianity in the twentieth century." -- Hillary Kaell, author of Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage

"[Christian Imperial Feminism] expands feminist theory, which often focuses on secular feminism, by showing how Christian feminism shaped global women’s rights movements. With its very detailed analysis and academic focus, the main audience for the book includes historians and scholars of religion, feminism and gender studies, postcolonial studies, and American studies, but the book, especially chapters four and five, could be of great interest to those in the field of social work." ― Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work

"As part of a growing field at the intersection of American religious studies and interdisciplinary studies of US empire, Christian Imperial Feminism refocuses the spotlight on the continuities from the missionary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the US to the advancement of liberal ecumenicalism." ― American Religion

"Kenny’s book joins the freshest voices of the scholarly conversation reconsidering the intersections of religion and empire in the early decades of the twentieth century." ― The Journal of Presbyterian History

"Christian Imperial Feminism asks: who gets to decide what world we collectively inhabit? ...Ultimately demonstrates the scaled reverberations of the imbrication between Christianity and US empire." ― American Religion

"Where other scholars have noted discontinuities in this institutional history ― a shift from emphasis on evangelism to more of a social work orientation, or the addition of a few Black leaders ― Kenny highlights continuities." ― American Historical Review

"Gale L. Kenny’s Christian Imperial Feminism is an exemplary contribution to a more expansive understanding of missions history that historians studying religion, gender, and culture in the twentieth-century United States will not want to miss." ― Journal of Church and State About the Author Gale L. Kenny is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-emancipation Jamaica, 1837-1866.