Preaching without a Pulpit: Women's rhetorical contributions to scientific Christianity in America, 1880-1915

"Preaching without a Pulpit" considers the widespread public debate surrounding metaphysical healing in the late nineteenth-century and outlines the rhetorical theories and practices of important female metaphysical healers, particularly Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins. Because their theories assume the harmony of science and religion, Eddy and Hopkins engage both the Christian and liberal rhetorical traditions. I argue in this dissertation that metaphysical theologies such as those of Eddy and Hopkins are a powerful example of the conciliatory project of liberal Christianity during the period, challenging the assumption that the rhetorical practices exhibited in the liberal and Christian traditions are inherently contradictory. Their liberal characteristics provide metaphysical rhetorics with aims distinct from evangelical rhetorics and traditional pulpit oratory. Therefore, their relative absence in rhetorical history does more than marginalize a series of prolific "gurus": it substantially stymies our theoretical understanding of the possibilities and limits of religious discourse.;My analysis of the rhetoric of metaphysical healing draws from published and archival material from the period between 1880 and 1910 and approaches these texts from a historiographical and feminist perspective. The Introduction argues for increased attention to the tradition of liberal religious discourse; Chapter One ("Exploring the Intersections of Rhetoric, Gender, and Liberal Religion") subsequently suggests that the metaphysical healing movement participated in the broader conciliatory project of liberal religion, as it sought a means of making scientific and religious modes of understanding compatible. It also introduces the three major themes that I will use to characterize metaphysical healing as a liberal religious discourse: social progress vs. individual enlightenment; reason vs. passionate belief; and professional authority vs. individual expression. Chapter Two ("'Neither Christian nor scientific': Character, Common Sense, and the Liberal Backlash Against Metaphysical Healing") offers a detailed analysis of the popular debate over metaphysical healing, addressing each of the three themes introduced in Chapter One. I show that women held the same contested relationship to religious liberalism that they held to liberalism more generally: they risked being dismissed as speaking subjects, precisely because their arguments relied heavily on liberal assumptions about reason and objectivity.;Chapters Three ("The Liberty of the Daughters of God: Mary Baker Eddy and a Rhetoric for Woman's Hour") and Four ("'I AM the radiant Logos in Mind': Emma Curtis Hopkins, Spirituality, and the Divine Dialectic") address the major figures of this study. Chapter 3 claims that Mary Baker Eddy melded Christian and liberal values to develop what she understood as a truly progressive Christianity. In integrating these two discourses, she redefined progressive, liberal standards in feminine terms and thus undermined the standard arguments against women's public speaking and active participation in public religious life. However, Eddy remained invested in nineteenth-century visions of feminine spirituality, ironically reifying the very stereotypes that stymied female preaching. Chapter 4 argues that Emma Curtis Hopkins advanced a dialectical vision of religious discourse that is in many respects more radical than Eddy's. Hopkins encouraged dialogue as a means of religious instruction, emphasizing the democratic and mutually uplifting relationship between teacher and student. However, the sense of empowerment Hopkins provided her followers rarely extended beyond the personal and private. The work of these two figures suggests that a liberal religious discourse held implications for nineteenth-century women that were contradictory, shifting, and undeniably complicated.