This chapter investigates bodily atheism in New England, focusing on female experiences. Locating atheism in the body reinforced the efforts of religious authorities to repudiate heterodoxy and regulate the body itself. However, laypeople also invoked the body to renegotiate their relationship with atheism and religion. Repudiating, regulating, and renegotiating embodied atheism reflected and shaped Protestant attitudes to conversion, salvation, physiology, and sexual morality. The first section examines prescriptive seventeenth-century Congregationalist literature to ascertain the strategies that ministers deployed to repudiate atheism and regulate the body. The second section explores the writing of an eighteenth-century laywoman active during the Great Awakening who confronted bodily atheism to reaffirm religion, while also developing personal approaches to theology, belief, and practice. The chapter concludes by considering some late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant attitudes toward atheistic immorality and sexual impropriety, as well as the ways in which female freethinkers subverted conventional assumptions about bodily atheism.

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Atheism, Women, and the Body in New England, c. 1600–c. 1800

  • Patrick Seamus McGhee

摘要

This chapter investigates bodily atheism in New England, focusing on female experiences. Locating atheism in the body reinforced the efforts of religious authorities to repudiate heterodoxy and regulate the body itself. However, laypeople also invoked the body to renegotiate their relationship with atheism and religion. Repudiating, regulating, and renegotiating embodied atheism reflected and shaped Protestant attitudes to conversion, salvation, physiology, and sexual morality. The first section examines prescriptive seventeenth-century Congregationalist literature to ascertain the strategies that ministers deployed to repudiate atheism and regulate the body. The second section explores the writing of an eighteenth-century laywoman active during the Great Awakening who confronted bodily atheism to reaffirm religion, while also developing personal approaches to theology, belief, and practice. The chapter concludes by considering some late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant attitudes toward atheistic immorality and sexual impropriety, as well as the ways in which female freethinkers subverted conventional assumptions about bodily atheism.