This redolence surely encouraged critics to pounce on the phrase as a solecism revealing the sexualized and gendered frameworks of Habermas’s conception of public debate. We might peer, alongside those critics, beneath the bourgeois public to see the plebian public, with its penny press and theaters of sensation, as an obscene violation of bourgeois norms. But Habermas wrote the introduction just as he was distancing himself, geographically and intellectually, from Frankfurt and its notions of “the identity of domination and reason.” We therefore have some reason to read the phrase as a catachrestic meta-commentary on his Habilitationsschrift itself.85 In this alternate reading, Habermas’s “stripping” of “literary garb” is, like Spillers’s vestibule, a poetic, self-referential, and perhaps self-critical gesture at enduring connections between print, clothing/investment, erotic violence, and performance. Calling the plebian public “stripped” (abgestreift) connotes its undisguised, more essential character and also gestures at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious and revolutionary rhetorics of disclosure.86 This stripped public, as Habermas notes, achieved significant benchmarks in circulation and organizing.87 Rather than being excluded from political economy, the plebian public, as later literary historians would discover, flowed directly from the seventeenth-century publics that arose from within cultures of printing, petitioning, and other excitations of controversy in broadly circulating print and oratorical culture, satisfying print capitalism’s profit motive without being markedly bourgeois.88 The plebian public flourished in eighteenth-century popular English colonial and U.S. evangelical print culture, much of it organized around public orations and the distribution of inexpensive or free print material.89 Habermas’s own subsequent reappraisals of the dialogue between religion and rationality also address the importance of religious dissent in the long Enlightenment, confirming that “Enlightenment rationality” began as a style of religious debate.90 Ultimately, in the wake of two generations of revisionary scholarship on the mutual development of popular and “proper” literature, as well as Habermas’s own movement away from a dialectic and unified notion of historical process, the “stripped” plebian public appears as an important part of the loosely jointed networks of print, oration, and organizing in which religious discourses of abjection flourished and were transformed.91
Well before his recent encounters with religion, Habermas subtly reframed his analysis of religious publicity by crediting E. P. Thompson’s 1963 Making of the English Working Class for his reconsideration of nonbourgeois publics.92 Thompson’s influence on Habermas has implications for my work on religious abjection in two competing ways. Thompson’s generous evaluation of working-class religious organizers has been inspirational to my work, but Thompson was also one of the first to employ psychoanalytic rhetoric to pathologize religious discourses of suffering. As part of his attempt to moderate celebratory accounts of Methodism’s influence on labor organizers, Thompson proposed that, if English Methodism was a “nursing-ground” for labor, the nurse was a cruel one. Working-class Methodists gained experience in economic and political organizing by struggling against Methodist rules and leaders as much as by working with them.93 Methodist publicity, Thompson concluded, partook of “pathological aberrations of frustrated social and sexual impulses” driven by a “perverted eroticism … by turns maternal, Oedipal, sexual, and sado-masochistic”; its “authentic language” was one “of sexual sublimation streaked through with masochism.”94 In short, for Thompson, sadomasochistic perversion was the internal psychic mechanism that stoked, and was reciprocally stoked by, the economic engine billowing out religion’s ideological smokescreen.
Thompson’s diagnosis of pathological religious masochism was for some time the abject within my own project. Its exemplification of a vexed scholarly engagement with religion made Thompson’s work hard to embrace.95 Why would Thompson, whose measured evaluations of working-class organizing made him vital to Habermas’s reevaluation of the plebian public sphere, criticize English Methodism in such violently normalizing psychosexual terms?96 Whatever its origin or intent, Thompson’s language is deeply rooted in the history of public debates about religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More specifically, it is a specimen of critique (quite familiar to Thompson himself) casting religious emotion as a form of erotic perversion.97 Following the seventeenth-century imagination of “sodomite” Quakers, or Gangraena’s delicious denunciations of schismatic “libertinism,” eighteenth-century religious dissenters’ secular competitors for public attention cast doubt on their piety by associating religious emotion with an uncontrollable, often feminized, sexual desire orchestrated by religious elites.98
We can condemn the tenor of Thompson’s critique, then, while finding in it a germ of insight. The vocabulary of submission in eighteenth-century evangelical texts helps frame erotic submission in broadly affective terms. This broader framework can help expand the horizons for contemporary queer readings of masochistic sexuality, as eighteenth-century evangelical negotiations of power, publicity, sex, and gender inform embodied and imagined pleasures in both the past and the present. Sexuality develops through a contradictory process of proscription and approbation, and the rhetoric of pleasurable suffering in eighteenth-century Protestant dissent could have simultaneously displayed an identification with Christ’s suffering and at the same time contributed to the transformation of sexual perversions. The commonsense reading of Moravian and Methodist hymns as, in historian Phyllis Mack’s words, “more plausibly … an identification with Christ’s redemptive suffering than … an unconscious sublimation of genital sex” corrects Thompson’s reductive psychoanalysis but should not exclude the possibility that the hymns might provide another sort of erotic charge for either Methodist adherents or their critics.99 Moravian and Methodist identifications with Christ’s suffering were, indeed, labeled perverse by hostile popular, theological, and scholarly publications. Methodism’s innovations in public evangelism also make Thompson’s claims about Methodism’s capacity to effect psychological change more plausible. In the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Methodism’s popularity was grounded in its unprecedented success in reaching and shaping a public. Like many Protestant evangelical sects, Methodism attracted adherents by cultivating a religious “sense” capable of hearing its messages “aright”; Methodism was particularly successful in its use of the sensual experience of the camp meeting, small group worship, hymn singing, exhorting, preaching, and many new forms of publishing and reading. Eighteenth-century Methodism thereby extended, in new public contexts, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rituals of abjection, including conversion processes of self-regulation and identification, that grounded and attempted to transcend the (sinful) modern self. When heard “aright,” these public practices claimed to ameliorate the effects of what Habermas terms “cultural differentiation,” bridging the growing divides between sexual, spiritual, and economic rhetoric.100 Heard wrong or circulating in the wrong context, this rhetoric could also lead to new perversions. These two outcomes may not be as distinct as either Thompsonian skeptics or the faithful would prefer. As Chapter 1 will show, the work of Jonathan Edwards and other eighteenth-century revivalists offers an affective alternative to the spectatorial delight imagined by Methodism’s critics, employing the racial and gendered tropes of suffering during conversion in different ways.
CHAPTER 1
Conversion, Suffering, and Publicity
What did it mean for a congregational minister in New England to write of his desire to be “emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone”?1 This famous passage from Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative” (c. 1739) offers a fruitful point of departure for tracing the connections between religious abjection, conversion, and protean theories of masochism in the eighteenth century. Edwards’s treatment of abjection is determined, to a large degree, by his concern for the public perception of the revival and his own place within it. Though often contrasted to “old light” moderates, Edwards intended to harness
