Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World, by Anthea D. Butler. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
We have all heard the saying “behind every great man is a great woman,” but within the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) in the early twentieth century, the great women did more than just stand behind the men. They carved out leadership positions alongside the men, often surpassing the “brothers” in education, prominence, and spiritual and temporal authority. In doing the “women’s work” under the separate structure of the “Women’s Department,” female leaders created a powerful space for themselves. Anthea Butler’s book, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World, expertly presents the tales of these leaders between 1911 and 1964.
These narratives are pieced together from information gathered digging through many “musty closets and bedrooms,” where much of the denomination’s historical documentation remains, waiting to be discovered by scholars or thrown out by careless relatives. Butler rescues denominational pamphlets and books, newspaper articles, meeting minutes, tape recordings, photos, and other textual relics which prove invaluable in illuminating the role of women in COGIC. She supplements this data with interviews of elderly church members who were often able to thicken the descriptions of various historical events. The resultant narrative highlights the ways in which COGIC women strategically used their beliefs and their role as “mothers” to empower themselves within the denomination, and eventually outside of it.
Key to Butler’s understanding of COGIC women is an “emphasis on how belief–in this case, belief in sanctification–acted as the impetus for what church mothers actually accomplished” (p. 4). This approach takes issue with other treatments that have suggested that practices like sanctification led to a disengaged and otherworldly stance on social issues. Quite the opposite happened with the second generation of COGIC leadership, among whom Butler sees the focus on sanctification leading to social engagement on issues like education, politics, and civic interaction. Here Butler hopes to push beyond an earlier analysis of sanctified women offered by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes by suggesting that, through their religious beliefs and world view, “it was COGIC women themselves who shaped the denomination’s engagement with the community … through their alliances outside the denomination” (p. 119). Read the rest of this entry »
