#christian history

[crazycatsiren]

Jesus Christ's birth wasn't some "Away in a Manger" very cutesy very mindful very demure lullaby bedtime story.

Mary had her baby in a barn. If you've been inside a barn, on a farm, then you know what I mean. It stinks. Excrements all over the place. It's got mice and rats and sometimes snakes. And near the end of December, it's cold. You can hear the rafters shake in the wind, there's dust and dirt and mud and god knows what everywhere.

She didn't even have a bed. If even a sheet to lie on. She gave birth to her son on a pile of hay in an outdoor shed where animals lived, and his cradle was a trough that was used to hold animal feed.

Then she held him close and went on the run.

It's not a dreamy fairytale, and that's the point. It's a young woman's fear and vulnerability, a mother's desperation and love.

[religious-extremist]

Westerners often accuse the Orthodox Church of losing the essence of Christianity, because the Orthodox lands were subjugated by Islamic powers: the Eastern Roman Empire fell to the Ottomans, the conquest of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria.

The funny thing with Islam is that, when it conquers a foreign land, their leaders demand a tax, the jizya, from those who do not convert to Islam. The more Christians converted to Islam, the less jizya they were able to collect; so they didn’t want too many of the Christians to convert to Islam, because then they would have less money.

But then Westerners say, God must have despised the disobedience of the Eastern Romans, of the Christians who called themselves Orthodox! They say that’s why God punished the Greeks; He used the Turks to destroy the Greek people and oppress their religion and scatter them and their congregation.

St. Kosmas the Aetolian spoke well when he said that God indeed showed His mercy upon the Greek people when, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the Venetians, the Papists, God preserved the Greeks by allowing the Muslims to take Constantinople instead. The Fall of Constantinople, this great tragedy which was indeed caused by the apostasy of the Greek people’s hearts, was also a great blessing.

Had the Venetians taken over, subjugated the Orthodox under the Papist yoke, we would have lost the Orthodox faith, forced to conversion. The Muslims at least had some incentive to preserve Orthodox Christianity amongst the Eastern Romans: that is, to collect taxes from them.

So those who had no faith in Christ our God had apostatized and became Muslims, and the ones who remained became saints, of faithfulness stronger than diamonds and brilliance more resplendent than the sun. The purest of gold can only be tried by fire, after all. Even the Old Testament spoke of “the righteous remnant.” And so, until today, the Orthodox faith remains unadulterated, preserved by these souls, the bulwark of Orthodoxy.

[creature-wizard]

The more you actually learn about the history of Christianity from credible academic sources, the more you learn that Christianity's origins are very easy to explain without either accepting the Gospels as historical fact or believing in some cockamamie "Jesus never existed, he was invented by the Catholic Church who based him on Horus" conspiracy theory.

The more you learn about the actual history of Christianity, the more it becomes obvious that it was a simple product of its time and place, largely unremarkable aside from the fact that Rome eventually assimilated it and made their imperialized version a dominant religious force. Christianity originated from an environment where weird mystical salvific religions and messianic movements were just what people did.

In my opinion it's genuinely fascinating to learn about, because the deeper you go the more obvious it is that it was a very organic, very human sociological phenomenon, and there's no reason to single it out as uniquely compelling to join, or uniquely sinister in origin. It's just... a thing. A plain ol' regular thing started by plain ol' regular people, just like you and me.

[eternal-echoes]

It really is a huge disservice to equate colonization with missionary work because the priests who chose to do missionary work had to strip themselves of their wealth, cultural roots, and comfortable lifestyle in order to minister to the salvation of the indigenous people of the new country they moved to, while colonizers went to those countries in order to exploit them for their resources. It’s the extreme contrast of selflessness and selfishness. And often times, missionary priests had to stand against the colonizers in order to protect the human rights of the indigenous people much to the detriment of their own lives.

To associate missionary work with colonization is to dismiss their self-sacrificial work for the sake of the Heavenly kingdom hereafter while colonizers worshipped their earthly kingdom at the expense of their own salvation.

[campgender]

from God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission by R. Marie Griffith (1997)

evangelical subculture was less a bulwark against than a variant of the therapeutic culture.

As evangelicals gradually ceased denouncing psychology outright, they shifted the battle lines, accepting the psychologists’ diagnosis of modern dilemmas while asserting that the cure for emotional sickness was religious faith rather than secular therapies. Popular evangelical writers increasingly began to discuss problems in terms of “anxiety” and “inferiority complexes” and advisedreaders on heightening “self-esteem” and fulfilling emotional “needs,” however, and the boundary between religious and secular prescriptions steadily blurred. Religious writers quoted enthusiastically from psychotherapists and other “positive thinkers” such as Dale Carnegie and Joshua Loth Liebman.

Continuing to denounce liberal Protestants for accommodating and selling out to “secular humanism,” evangelical authors devised an updated theology of their own, in which sin was often reconceptualized as sickness and concerns over salvation were replaced by concerns for earthly happiness, comfort, and health. Those who packaged their message most successfully, such as the well-known Christian pediatrician and psychologist James Dobson, tended to address a largely female audience and directed their concerns to marriage and family life, sex, and depression.

The historian Donald Meyer, whose 1965 study of “religion as pop psychology” was published just prior to The Triumph of the Therapeutic, shared Rieff’s argument and gave it a historical frame of reference, looking back to Mary Baker Eddy and the theology of mind cure for precedents of current therapeutic religion. Having failed to recognize evangelicals as participants in the phenomenon he described, fifteen years later Meyer added a chapter attributing the recent upsurge of conservative evangelicalism to that group’s appropriation of positive thinking and practices of healing therapy.

Tracing the career of Oral Roberts, who ceased his tent meeting healing services in favor of building a colossal modern hospital, Meyer noted the urge among evangelicals to make healing “obtainable as a predictable and rational expectation.” Not only in the Christian counseling centers and medical centers but also in the charismatics’ and other evangelicals’ continuing emphasis on divine healing, the mixing of the therapeutic with popular religion became highly visible. It seemed irrefutable that a deep cultural shift “from salvation to self-realization” had taken place; as two historians independently noted not long after Meyer’s postscript.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

“(In the name?) of St Titus.

Holy, holy, holy!

In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God!

The Lord of the World

Resists (to the best of his ability?)

All attacks(?)/setbacks(?).

The God(?) grants the well-being

Entry.

This means of salvation(?) protects

The human being who

Surrenders to the will

Of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,

Since before Jesus Christ

All knees bow to Jesus Christ: the heavenly

The earthly and

The subterranean and every tongue

Confess (to Jesus Christ).”

There is no reference in the text to any other faith besides Christianity, which would also have been unusual at this time.

According to the Frankfurt Archaeology Museum, reliable evidence of Christian life in the northern Alpine regions of the Roman Empire only goes as far back as the 4th century AD.

‘Fantastic find’ made possible by modern technology

Wolfram Kinzig, a church historian and professor from the University of Bonn, helped Scholz to decipher the inscription.

“The silver inscription is one of the oldest pieces of evidence we have for the spread of the New Testament in Roman Germania, because it quotes Philippians 2:10–11 in Latin translation,” Kinzig explained in an interview published on the University of Bonn’s website.

“It’s a striking example of how Biblical quotations were used in magic designed to protect the dead,” said Kinzig.

Peter Heather, a professor of medieval history at King’s College London with a specialist interest in the evolution of Christianity, described the discovery as a “fantastic find.”

Heather, who wasn’t involved in the research, told CNN:

“The capacity to be able to decipher the writing on that rolled-up piece of silver is extraordinary. This is something that’s only possible now with modern technology.

If they’d found it 100 years ago they wouldn’t have known what it was. Silver amulets are probably going to contain some kind of magical scroll but you don’t know what – it could be any religion.”

He added:

“You’ve got evidence of Christian communities in more central parts of the empire but not in a frontier town like that in Roman Germany so that is very unusual, well it’s unique. You’re pushing the history of Christianity in that region back.”

[whereserpentswalk]

The idea that the Christians were some sort of persecuted minority in the Roman empire is so commonly taught in history, but when you look at actual early Christian beliefs things seem a lot diffrent.

Like, Christians were a highly reactionary and militant religious group that wanted to force a relatively diverse society to follow its extremely strict and conservative moral values. They were known to engage in destructive praxis, and had a strong cult of martyrdom that's an undercurrent of every facist movment. They were a religious minority, but they weren't one that just wanted to practice on their own, they were a rapidly spreading reactionary movement with incredibly conservative values they wanted to push on society.

So don't view Roman citizens trying to keep Christianity out of their society as the ignorant and hateful mob you're often taught about them being, think of them a bit more like we view people trying to keep nazis out of their communities today.

As for the Roman government attack Christians I view it with the same skepticism I view any government trying to attack reactionaries. It's never a good path for a state to go down, even when the ideas they're attacking are awful. And like most governments that start attacking reactionaries, they eventually embrace and enforce those reactionary ideas.

[nickysfacts]

Turns out historically, life hasn’t been easy for those who lived foolishly as foolish fools!

🎊🃏🎊

[gemsofgreece]

My God Netflix... take a fucking hint maybe. Let it rest, honestly, such projects are apparently not for you, it's okay.

Also, can I just add some screenshots from the Hercules thing because

Okay, who watches this unironically and then unironically gives it a 3/5... come forth! I can't stop laughing it looks like bad porn

I will give Tarak and Saphirra the benefit of the doubt as apparently the movie has little to do with accuracy to mythology anyway. There are some scarce myths that Heracles had visited India with Dionysus but that’s nowhere in the plot. And I also doubt this is how the names were in Sanskrit but I don't know much about that.

Lucius is a Latin name, hope they din't give it to a Greek that was "contemporary" of Heracles, also hope they don't gave it to a Roman because there weren't Romans at the time of Heracles. But as I see in the wikipedia page that someone chose to make for this film, apparently, Heracles was sold to a gladiator slave promoter, who was Lucius, so I guess indeed according to Netflix Heracles / Hercules lived with Romans and more so at the time of their peak.

BUT all this is fine compared to SOTIRIS. Sotiris, a pal of Heracles. Sotiris is a Greek name all right and it has an ancient Greek origin indeed.... Soter or Sotir in the modern pronunciation is an epithet meaning "Saviour" and it was a way several gods were called i.e Zeus Soter. Then also some Hellenistic kings used it as an epithet, i.e Ptolemy I Soter. And finally, Jesus. The famous early crypto-Christian fish, if you know. Early Christians who did not want to be discovered and persecuted by pagan Romans and Greeks used as their secret symbol the fish, which in Greek is ΙΧΘΥΣ, and served as an acronym for Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ (Iēsûs Chrīstós, Theû Huiós, Sōtḗr - Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour).

The problem is that from Soter the adjective Soterios was derived, meaning the same thing, and soon enough Sotirios (because the pronunciation was already half-modern at the time) was popularised after Jesus and Chirstianity as a first name for normal people that were getting baptised. Nowadays, girls are baptised as "Sotiria" (salvation, the noun, for them) and boys are baptised as "Sotirios" (the adjective) and almost always go with "Sotiris" for shorter.

In other words, they really went for "Hercules and Jack" or something.

This is the Thanos thing happening all over again.

[official-neue-bundeslaender]

@ catholic side of tumblr: why does st mary (?) have a wand here o.o

[the-orphic-youth]

Magic amulet in a form of engraved heliotrope gem, XIth c., Byzantium, 52 x 47mm.

The National Museum of the Przemyśl Land.

[totheidiot]

that new testament john x jesus post of mine is doing so good i might have to start cooking up another new testament related post. can't complain religious history when it comes to christianity and islam is of my most favorite things and i love to talk about it. if you want my thoughts on something concerning specifically the life of jesus and anything regarding islam before the sunni-shia split, shoot me an ask. i will come to you with an extremely long analysis post, trust.

[many-sparrows]

Martin Luther and Paul the Apostle would have either gotten along like a house fire or they wouldn't have been able to stand in the same room. It's about the self loathing.

[hiding1ntheforest]

Neoplatonic Influence on Early Christianity: The Cappadocians, Mysticism and Orthodoxy

A particularly fascinating aspect of Christianity is its Neoplatonic characteristics which shaped it during the beginning of its development. Neoplatonism is a philosophy that emerged during the 3rd century with Plotinus, a follower of Plato. It is characterized by monist thought, asserting that all things such as our material reality are emanations of the One, an omnipotent yet obscure force. Although I am not a Christian myself, I would consider myself a Neoplatonist. After all, Neoplatonism has its origins in the philosophy of Hellenic polytheists. However, not all Neoplatonists are polytheists, leading us to today’s exploration of Early Christianity and its philosophy as well as key figures. Neoplatonism may not be as prominent in Christianity as it once was due to the rise of protestantism but we can still see remnants of it in Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Like all religions, Christianity was heavily shaped by the cultures that it interacted with. Despite it being birthed from Second Temple Judaism, numerous great European thinkers of classical antiquity contributed to its theological growth.

The Nature of God

Of course, the belief in God is at the forefront of any religion. The Neoplatonists and many early Christians are in agreement on several aspects of the nature of God, such as God’s qualities (or lack thereof) and relationship with man. Gregory of Nyssa, a key figure in the creation of Christian mysticism and a saint recognized within Eastern Orthodoxy heavily advanced the notion of God being an unknowable force. The human mind simply cannot begin to understand God while his existence surpassing all earthly characteristics makes him impossible to define. This sentiment is shared by Augustine of Hippo, a Christian theologian that is continually discussed today. I generally don’t share direct quotes in my posts in order to prevent them from being too long, but this excerpt from Augustine’s “On the Nature of Good” is too beautiful to pass up: “For He (God) is so omnipotent, that even out of nothing, that is out of what is absolutely non-existent, He is able to make good things both great and small, both celestial and terrestrial, both spiritual and corporeal.” This description is spot on with the Neoplatonic conception of God with Plotinus arguing that God’s rather simple nature allows him to be the cause and creator of all things. This can be traced back to Plato’s view of God as being eternal and inspiring all life forms through archetypes in the physical realm. To both the Neoplatonists and theologians of Early Christianity, God is inherently good and beautiful yet completely beyond our comprehension. Despite God being seemingly unknowable, we learn a lot about pursuing union with God, or theosis, from a variety of Christian allegorical readings. Pseudo-Dionysius, arguably one of the most famous figures in Christian esotericism, makes an allegory of Moses’s journey to mount Sinai in order to obtain the ten commandments. His journey is interpreted by Pseudo-Dionysius as an internal contemplative one which allows him to level with God. I have briefly discussed such a contemplative journey in my post about theurgy. Specifically, Porphyry advocated for deep contemplation and intellectualization which would purify the individual and allow him to reach communion with God. Gregory of Nyssa claimed that the journey to unify with God is an endless one as God himself is limitless.

Hesychasm

Within Eastern Orthodoxy is the movement of hesychasm, a contemplative mystical practice which can be traced back to the monks of Mount Athos during the 14th century. It is also one of the most overtly Neoplatonic traditions within Christianity. Hesychasm stems from the Greek word ‘hesychia,’ meaning “tranquil” or “still.” As the translations indicate, it is characterized by not only physical stillness but mental stillness as well. Saint Thalassio of Libya argued that Hesychasm allows for the Nous to become free from any impurities which may hinder it from becoming one with the divine. The Nous may be referred to as the intellect and according to Plotinus, it is the cosmological mind as well as existence. It is the reflection of the One. An aspect of physical hesychia is adopting certain positions during prayer or meditation and these positions may further assist in purifying the Nous. It may also refer to avoiding all that is corporeal as well as abstaining from temptations, paralleling Porphyry’s ascetic contemplation. Additionally, the foundation for Hesychasm is developing virtues by way of the commandments. This ties into Pseudo-Dionysius’s allegory in which Moses receiving the ten commandments is more of an introspective quest. This idea is also expounded by Saint Symeon the New Theologian who stated that to acquire the ten commandments is to acquire God.

The Trinity

When I first began reading about Orthodoxy after learning about Neoplatonism, I immediately compared the triad of the two: surely, the Father must correspond to the One, the Son corresponding to the Nous, and the Holy Spirit must correlate to the Soul. Initially, this makes sense when we think of the Father as the origin of all things, the Son being a reflection of the Father (in the way that the Nous may reflect the One) and the Holy Spirit being the essence of the world. However, we must consider the nature of the Trinity. It is important to note that God is worshipped as the Unified Trinity, meaning God is one, but is also distinguishable by various beings. The Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son. God is equally one as he is three. This disrupts the emanationism of Neoplatonic thought. However, another overlooked similarity may be considered: in the Enneads, Plotinus said to even name the One would draw distinctions upon it. Orthodoxy and Neoplatonism are both characterized by apophatic theology in this way. The Early Christians also borrowed several terms from Neoplatonism and incorporated it into trinitarian writings.

The Cappadocian Fathers

The Cappadocian Fathers were church fathers in Cappadocia, Turkey who furthered the development of Orthodox and trinitarian theology, as well as mysticism. They include Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus. Firstly, Gregory of Nyssa served as the bishop of Cappadocia until his death at the very end of the 4th century. He was especially notable for his writings on God’s unknowable nature and the mystic ascent towards unification. Additionally, some believe that he studied in Athens where Neoplatonism had began to flourish due to Plutarch reestablishing Plato’s Academy. Basil of Caesarea was Gregory of Nyssa’s older brother and was also a bishop during the 4th century. It is recorded that he studied in Athens and went on to produce a number of works on monasticism. Basil also compiled the writings of Origen of Alexandria, a follower of Platonism. Finally, Gregory of Nazianzus was an archbishop and theologian. He contributed heavily to the Orthodox formulation of the trinity. Gregory also studied in Athens where he crossed paths with Julian the Apostate, a Neoplatonist who would later become the emperor and attempt to reestablish paganism. Gregory published “Invectives Against Julian” after the emperor’s rise to power. Macrina the Younger, the sister of both Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea, is a saint recognized within Orthodoxy who is known for her ascetic lifestyle.

Conclusion

Much of the theology and developments in Christianity, especially that of Orthodoxy, is heavily rooted in Neoplatonic philosophy as a result of interactions with the Hellenic world. Figures such as Plotinus and Origen certainly guided the thinking of numerous theologians and church authorities. The influence is especially prominent in the conception of God and the trinity while inspiring the practice of mysticism. Finally, The Cappadocian Fathers heavily built upon many of these aspects.

[girlactionfigure]

History lesson on Temple mount to the UN

Naveed Anjum

[campgender]

“The S Word” – on the performance of Christian patriarchy & the word no one says

from The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities by Kate Bowler (2019)

transcript under the cut

The apportionment of power between husband and wife was not simply a private matter, either. In the 1970s and 1980s, submission had become something akin to dogma as conservative Christianity reacted to economic and social challenges that had pulled many wives out of the house and into paid employment. Over half of the readership of Today’s Christian Woman, to take a sample of an evangelical readership, had entered the workforce. In this new dispensation, it had become increasingly difficult to assume what women’s work was—she might work longer hours or earn more than he did. He may have heeded the call to assume more of the housework.

Those church leaders uneasy about such a situation began to emphasize that there was a natural order to things—in families, in churches, and in nations—and that God had ordained the superiority of men and a life of submission for women. Defenses of the Christian patriarchy were everywhere, from bestsellers like Larry Christenson’s The Christian Family, seminars like Bill Gothard’s, parachurch ministries like Focus on the Family, and entire movements, like the Shepherding controversy (see Chapter One).

The ambiguity around what constituted modern women’s work created great shows of deference from conservative Christian women who were beginning to be offered other choices. Books like Being #1 at Being #2 encouraged women to accept their husbands’ place as number one (“Do you find yourself in the role of supporting cast rather than the star?”). However, submission was as much a performance as it was a teaching, something to be seen and believed.

A 1968 how-to manual for Christian wifedom offers clues about how such submission was meant to be performed. Submission, the author contended, was like a divine drama with God playing the part of producer, husband playing the part of Jesus, and wife playing the part of the church. A wife’s “script” is submission, but it is not treated as an established fact but an ongoing series of gestures. She puts out the nice china for him with a little comment about how “I’ve been asking the Lord to help me be a better wife.” Her “hearty and joyous” lovemaking demonstrates “the quality of her submission” in the most powerful manner. The wife is even given a script and props for his enthronement as she “voluntarily dethrones her will to make him her lord,” a coronation ceremony that requires that she cut out a paper crown for him.

The most vocal defenders of submission understood that subservience must be enacted. Dorothy Patterson regularly made mention of the fact that, despite her own onerous teaching and speaking schedule, she was Paige’s enthusiastic helpmeet. “I enjoy teaching, I enjoy traveling, I enjoy speaking to women, but I don’t enjoy anything as much as being the wife of Paige Patterson,” she happily told one reporter, while also mentioning her willingness to iron their pillowcases and sixteen of Paige’s shirts before turning to her own work. “I had an appointment at 10 a.m. and a speaking engagement that night, so I started at 6:30 a.m.,” she said. “I just couldn’t go another day without having all those shirts in order.”

Though both had doctoral degrees in theology, he takes his rightful place and she takes hers. Likewise, the cover of the evangelical women’s book A Woman’s Privilege shows a housewife with a cape draped over her apron using a scepter as a scrub brush. The message is clear: she is still royalty at the kitchen sink.

Submission was always much easier to see than to defend. A photograph series in Upon This Rock, a tribute to Anne and John Gimenez’s Virginia megachurch, shows its entirely unremarkable body language. The caption reads: “Pat Robertson interviewing the Gimenezes.” The illustration shows a sunny day and Pat Robertson and John Gimenez are turned toward each other, chatting into their respective microphones. A step behind her husband, Anne clasps her empty hands in front of her, smiling though no one is looking at her.

Talking about submission was a complicated act, for it was difficult for men to discuss without reinforcing their reputations as dominating and primary beneficiaries of this teaching. So, for the most part, submission was played out with the lightest touch. The most popular defenders of the doctrine of submission were usually women, who could put audiences’ minds at ease that their husbands exercise benevolent leadership rather than a cold dictatorship. “Woman is the feminine of man. We are not only created to be man’s helper, but also his complement,” wrote cowgirl Dale Evans Rogers of her co-star and husband.

In fact, the stronger the public teaching against women in ministry, the stronger the woman on the stage had to be. Take, for instance, the opening of the Art of Homemaking conference, where President Paige Patterson’s quip comparing his wife’s obedience to a dog. Audiences would have flinched if Dorothy Patterson were not a steel magnolia herself, who, in closing that evening, flatly told her husband to sit down so someone else—someone who knows what they are doing—could make the announcements.

Her books were careful studies in how to submit to your husband but, in public, they seemed to relish their parts in this Punch and Judy show. The famous couple was almost expected to fight or tease or put each other in their place in a culture preoccupied so much with talk of power, dominance, and submission.

If a famous pastor was married to a shrinking violet, the pageantry of respect around her only increased. Take, for instance, the bombastic Jerry Falwell, primary architect of the Religious Right, whose rhetorical fireballs were lobbed at almost every target—single parenthood, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, drugs, public schools, secular politicians, and even fellow televangelists. His wife, Macel, was rarely seen on stage, preferring the privacy of family life, and so much had to be said about her as a formidable woman.

“My wife and I have been married twenty-eight years. . . . And I want to tell you in twenty-eight years we’ve had some knock-down and drag-outs. [Laughter] I’ve lost every one of them. [Laughter] I tell you, men, the best thing you can do is quickly raise your hands and unconditionally surrender because you’re gonna lose.”

It was a hard doctrine disguised as a joke, a playful show of weakness by men and strength by women. The role reversal—his submission, her dominance—was meant to calm fears about men lording their power over their wives. It was a twinkle in the eye that told the audience, it’s okay.

When asked in a rare interview whether she was “the power behind the Jerry Falwell throne,” she demurred, “a lot of people say that I do fit that role.” In truth, legitimating the inequality between men and women—while allowing both parties to be heroes—was the most difficult aspect of these public partnerships. Ministries longed to strike that note celebrated in the tagline of one California megachurch’s women’s ministry: “Confident heart. Surrendered soul.”

Over time, the doctrine of submission took two different paths as megaministry proliferated and diversified. White evangelicalism, for the most part, softened in its public stance on the subject. David Platt, a young star of the Southern Baptist denomination and president of their mission board, was the embodiment of the undemanding patriarch with his boy-next-door image, calling female audiences “sisters” in a soft, imploring tone and making goofy jokes about how ineptly he courted his wife.

Evangelicalism was still a standard image bearer of Christian families but submission was less discussed than occasionally alluded to. When Beth Moore, the most famous Southern Baptist evangelist, spoke to ten thousand women in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2016, she devoted only a minute to the denomination’s teachings on the matter by saying: “Some women think they can do anything in the church,” a sentiment that was initially met by cheers until the audiences collectively realized that she was beginning a critique and fell silent. “I’m not looking to take a man’s place . . . I’m just looking for my place,” she continued, and audiences warmed the silence with applause.

“Women don’t talk a lot about the s-word anymore,” another megachurch wife told me.

“What’s the s-word?” I asked.

“It’s the word no one says. Submission.”

Black churches, on the other hand, largely adhered to a rich pageantry of submission, particularly when it came to the First Lady. The most deference in women’s biographies in the four hundred largest churches in the countries fell to African American women of almost all theological persuasions (ranging from historic black denominations to non-denominational and pentecostal churches).

A First Lady was not simply a woman but an icon in three respects. She was dutiful wife, first and foremost. Second, she was the church’s paragon of womanhood. And, lastly, she was an ambassador to the community. In this last respect, the role departed significantly from white women of similar denominational stripes. White women would not be called on to serve on the board of a city council’s literacy initiative, for instance, but, rather, she might write a book called The Princess Within. As we shall see throughout the book, black women had to be both a public symbol of the church and the family with a stronger performance of submission.

The presentation of all wives, however, could be so deeply respectful that it masked the intensity of the massive family-run industries that surrounded them and of which they were often a part.