Introduction

Fanny Crosby (1820-1915) is sometimes described as the “Queen of Gospel Hymn Writers.”^[1] She was a prolific author, penning over nine thousand hymns by the end of her life, despite having been blind from a young age. During her lifetime, several of her hymns became massively popular, and she became a household name.^[2] Even today, a few of the hymns that she wrote, such as “Blessed Assurance” (1873) and “To God Be the Glory” (1875), remain recognizable standards to evangelicals around the English-speaking world.^[3]

Hymns often tell stories beyond just their theological content. For one, they are windows into the context of their authors and those who first sang them, imbibing their content in spiritually formative ways. Crosby’s hymns are no different, and they provide an interesting window into ideas about gender, spiritual affection, and piety among American evangelicals during the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century.

The Rise of Hymn Singing

Crosby began her hymn-writing career during the mid-1800s—a period which saw an explosion in the popularity of hymns. Hymnbooks, which had previously been primarily used as personal, devotional resources, were beginning to be widely used in churches.^[4] A new style of hymn was ascendant—the “gospel hymn,” which was usually musically simpler and written in a popular style, with a focus on core truths of sin, redemption, and personal testimony.^[5] Their ease of use, and adoption of contemporary musical style, contributed to their swift inclusion in Sunday morning worship across America.

Hymns had been a staple of public worship in some evangelical Protestant churches since the late seventeenth century. However, their use was controversial, as many churches preferred to sing metrical psalms. In addition, hymns were generally seen as private, devotional literature for use at home.^[6] Given the realities of gender in the Victorian era, in which the private, domestic sphere remained the reserve of women, home-based female hymn writers and poets were commonplace and accepted in England and the United States. Several of the most famous hymns from the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, including, “Just as I Am,” “Jesus Loves Me,” and “Jesus Paid It All,” were written by women: Charlotte Elliott, Anna Bartlett Warner, and Elvina M. Hall, respectively. But as hymns exploded into the public sphere in the postbellum United States, from 1870 onward, the language used by Crosby and other female hymnodists gained increasing power to shape the piety of millions of American Protestants.

Two hundred years earlier, in Puritan New England, sermons, poems, and other writings were filled with a model of affective piety in which the individual soul was married to Christ, the Bridegroom. Amanda Porterfield argues that this form of piety, paradoxically, allowed female leaders like Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) to “experience empowerment” through “feminine submission” to God and dependence on him, as claiming direct spiritual empowerment from God may give one a source of empowerment outside the authority structures of one’s community. Hutchinson, having done so too boldly and defiantly, “threatened her community,” and was ultimately exiled from Massachusetts.^[7]

Fanny Crosby’s hymns employed this same model of piety: empowerment through feminine surrender. Her hymns also conveyed a high level of affective piety that perhaps emanated from the higher level of surrender to Christ necessitated by her blindness.

Puritan Spousal Piety

Seventeenth-century Puritan writers often spoke about the Christian believer’s union with Christ using spousal language. For example, in his book Of Communion with God, John Owen (1616-1683) wrote, “Christ gives himself to the soul…to be its Saviour, head, and husband, for ever to dwell with it in this holy relation. He looks upon the souls of his saints, likes them well, [and] counts them fair and beautiful.”^[8] Historians have written about how this spousal imagery–rooted in both Song of Songs, and the Puritans’ emphasis on personal devotion–pervaded Puritan piety, even among men. Michael Winship comments that “its use was extensive, if not dominating.” He describes how Puritan men in New England wrestled with a certain sense of “gender polymorphousness,” as they interpreted the language of Song of Songs as having them take the role of the bride in that allegory.^[9]

For women, this Puritan spousal piety contained two primary characteristics: it emphasized an affective union with Christ, and it held up submission as the ideal feminine disposition. The spousal metaphor obviously caused less “gender polymorphousness”; indeed, Marilyn Westerkamp notes how Puritan sermons and other literature highlighted how “women were weak and in great need of male protection” and how “[f]eminine piety… [was] accompanied by a complete surrender to God.”^[10] She also highlights how some empowerment accompanied this affective union with Christ that Puritan women were encouraged to emphasize. For example, the fact that examples of Spirit-led women who fought for the faith, like Anne Askew (1521-1546), were held in high esteem in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments shows that women leading in the public sphere to some extent could sometimes be an accepted outworking of their dependence on the Holy Spirit.^[11] Porterfield makes similar observations about how Anne Hutchinson “depended on God with a radical assurance that disturbed and threatened her community” and how it was through this “feminine surrender” that she “experienced empowerment.”^[12]

Historians have demonstrated that this mystical form of Puritan piety largely died out in preaching by the 1740s.^[13] However, it persisted in the hymn tradition that began to form among English and American evangelicals. This tradition particularly formed among dissenting denominations, such as the Baptists and Methodists, as well as among evangelical Anglicans, during the eighteenth century. One of the most prominent early hymn writers was the English Congregationalist Isaac Watts (1674-1748), who, in 1707, published Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Hymn number 66 in Book One of this collection, “Let Him Embrace My Soul and Prove,” based on Song of Solomon 1:2-5, 12, 13, and 17, is explicit in utilizing the metaphor of Christ as the Bridegroom of the soul. The singer calls on Christ to “embrace my soul, and prove mine interest in his heavenly love.” Then, in a comparison to marital sexuality, he describes Christ as one who “draws virgin souls to meet [his] face.” He describes his soul as taking a position of feminine surrender and dependence in response, as “[his] soul shall fly into [Christ’s] arms.”^[14] When this hymn was published, spousal imagery was still being used by New England Puritan preachers, prior to its mid-century decline. However, Watts’ hymns would only become more influential throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century.

Hymns and Spiritual Songs was widely adopted by evangelicals in the British American colonies, especially in New England, and its use only increased after the 1740s. Despite common Protestant objections to hymn-singing in public worship, and even though it would be another century and a half until hymnals were widely used in church services, Jane Giscombe has demonstrated that Watts’ hymns were widely sung in New England Congregationalist churches as early as the 1710s.^[15] This was likely aided by the fact that Watts’ hymns were often explicit interpretations of the Psalms, and by George Whitefield (1714-1770) using Watts’ hymns in his 1740s revivals. Additionally, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) published Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Philadelphia, in 1742, and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) used them in public worship services in his church.^[16]

Fanny Crosby’s Background

At just six weeks old, Fanny Crosby suffered an illness that left her blind for the rest of her life.^[17] Despite this, the young Crosby still took an early love for hymns and poetry. Born in Connecticut in 1820, she took pride in her Puritan stock, writing in 1902, “My ancestors were Puritans; my family tree rooted around Plymouth Rock.”^[18] However, as she was growing up, she witnessed an eclectic mix of hymnody traditions, with the influences of Puritanism and evangelicalism converging around her.

Crosby’s first exposure to hymns was in her family’s Calvinistic Presbyterian church. Her diaries recall that the hymns she heard there were mostly composed by the church deacons and that actual hymnals were rare. In Reformed churches like hers, these hymns were mostly psalm-based, as their interpretation of the regulative principle of worship wrought a suspicion of man-made hymns.^[19] In addition to using metered Psalters, deacons would write out hymns closely based on Psalms and then lead the church in a lined-out singing of them. Occasionally, Isaac Watts’ hymns, most of which were closely based on psalms, would be permitted.^[20]

Crosby’s first knowledge of a broader hymn tradition was imparted to her by a Methodist tailor who, when she was 12 years old, invited her to his church. At these Methodist services, Crosby “came to love the stately and beautiful hymns of Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts.”^[21] She later officially became a Methodist by the time that she was attending the New York Institution for the Blind (NYIB), between the ages of 15 and 18.^[22] And when she was at the NYIB, she was instructed in poetry, reading a wide variety of authors, including more Wesley.^[23]

Thus, Crosby grew up amid the confluence of these various strands of hymnody. At first, only having been exposed to psalm-based hymns composed by the deacons at her “primitive-stock” Presbyterian church, she remembers that by the age of 8, though blind, she felt that she could write better ones.^[24] Given her eventual encounters with Wesley and Watts, it is not surprising that their use of affective, spousal language proved formative for Crosby.

Fanny Crosby’s Hymns

The lyrics in Fanny Crosby’s hymns routinely emphasize feminine surrender and dependence in affective union with Christ. One of Crosby’s most-sung hymns, “I Am Thine, O Lord,” written in 1875, gives this away in its title and opening words: “I am thine, O Lord/I have heard thy voice/and it told thy love to me.” Crosby wrote this hymn following a conversation, on a sunset walk with her friends Howard and Fanny Doane, about the nearness of God. In it, the singer declares himself to be a possession of the Lord, who has drawn him into an intimate, loving relationship.^[25] He desires more of this: “But I long to rise/in the arms of faith/and be closer drawn to thee.” And the chorus asks, “Draw me nearer; nearer, blessed Lord/to the cross where thou hast died/Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer, blessed Lord/to thy precious, bleeding side.”^[26] Also, in addition to employing the idea of feminine surrender to Christ, the hymn also suggested that the audience would receive spiritual empowerment through doing so. If, in the first verse, the singer describes himself in a posture of surrender to the Lord, the second verse emphasizes the empowerment experienced in this gracious union: “Consecrate me now to thy service, Lord, /by the pow’r of thy divine grace.” “I Am Thine, O Lord” was enormously popular, getting published in hymnals that were used weekly, in church, by millions of American evangelicals in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The same themes are clear in two less popular Crosby hymns, “Thou My Everlasting Portion” (1874) and “Savior, More Than Life to Me,” (1875). In “Thou My Everlasting Portion,” the singer describes Jesus as “more than friend or life to [him].”^[27] There is a deeper relationship there—one of “everlasting” affection. He asks if he may walk “close to thee [Jesus]” through his whole “pilgrim journey” on the earth. This request is repeated numerous times throughout. Finally, at the end of the third verse, he looks forward to entering “the gate of life eternal…with thee [Jesus].” The singer describes a relationship of eternal affection for and dependence upon Christ, which grants spiritual empowerment, enabling him to “toil and suffer” within “the vale of shadows” before reaching “life eternal.”

In “Savior, More Than Life to Me” the singer opens by declaring that he is “clinging, clinging close to [his Savior, Jesus Christ].” The word “clinging” here suggests a passive, feminine submission and dependence. In this relationship with Jesus, he experiences Jesus’ “tender love to [him],” about which he asks, “may [it] bind me closer, closer Lord, to thee.” This relationship of tender love in union with Christ is spiritually empowering as it provides a “reconciling” to God, a “cleansing,” and makes it so that he “cannot stray.”

The most vivid example of these themes of feminine affective dependence, and surrender, to Christ is arguably found in Crosby’s 1874 hymn “Hold, Thou, My Hand.” This hymn begins with the singer asking Jesus to “Hold [his] hand”—a phrase with possibly romantic, and at least, very affective connotations because he is “weak” and “helpless.”^[28] He describes his life as one of total surrender and submission to his “loving Saviour,” declaring that he “dares not take one step without [Jesus’] aid.” The result of this is spiritual empowerment, since, with Jesus holding his hand, “No dread of ill shall make [his] soul afraid.” In the second verse, then, Crosby repeats the same themes, with the singer asking Jesus to “closer, closer draw [him] to [Him]self— [his] hope, my joy, my all,” and, again, to “hold [his] hand,” “lest haply [he] should wander, and missing [Jesus], [his] trembling feet should fall.” Jesus, in an intimate relationship with the singer, provides him safety as he surrenders passively to His guiding lead. In the third and fourth verses, Crosby then gives several descriptions of spiritual empowerment; Jesus holding the singer’s hand gives him “heights of joy” and “rapturous songs,” with her finally seeing “heav’nly light” when she “reach[es] the margin of that lone river.”

One lyric in what has arguably become Crosby’s most popular hymn, “Blessed Assurance,” written in 1873, perhaps encapsulates empowerment by feminine surrender more than any other. This hymn quickly achieved immense popularity, especially thanks to extensive use in Dwight Moody’s (1837-1889) revival campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s. Ira Sankey (1840-1908), who was in charge of the worship for Moody’s campaigns, wrote that it was “one of the most popular and useful” hymns that they used.^[29] Later, it was employed as one of the core hymns in Billy Graham’s (1918-2018) crusades, becoming familiar to millions of people around the world if it was not already—though one scholar notes that one reason Graham used “Blessed Assurance” in the United Kingdom, specifically, is that it was already so widely known among evangelicals there. Given that Crosby was American, this demonstrates its wide-reaching influence.^[30]

“Blessed Assurance” contains less affective language than the other hymns discussed thus far, being mostly a bare-bones Gospel hymn. However, two lines, both about “Perfect submission,” sum up the themes we have considered. The second verse opens with “Perfect submission; perfect delight!”^[31] The juxtaposition of “perfect submission”–submission being a feminine disposition–and “perfect delight” illustrates that spiritual empowerment comes through a spousal relation to Christ. Then, the third verse opens with the lyrics, “Perfect submission; all is at rest! I, in my Savior, am happy and blest.” This goes further than the last line, indicating that this position of “perfect submission” is one in which the singer is in Christ —in an intimate, affective union with Him. And in this union with Jesus, is spiritual empowerment: “all is at rest;” he is “happy and blest.” He is given that most empowering thing of all: “blessed assurance.”

Conclusion

Two hundred years earlier, Anne Hutchinson’s reliance on spiritual empowerment through feminine submission, “threatened the community,” resulting in her exile. Likewise, Crosby’s hymns received pushback from male leaders who saw Gospel hymnody as emblematic of a societal move, characterized by “the development of a corporate, consumer-oriented society,” toward effeminacy, and who wanted to advocate a more “muscular” Christianity.^[32] However, in Crosby’s case, her hymns were so popular that “muscular” Christianity would prove simply unable to challenge their influence.

Historians have identified this “muscular Christianity” as a popular movement in American Protestantism between 1880 and 1920. On the national, political level this was epitomized by President Theodore Roosevelt; on the social/community level, by organizations like the Young Men’s Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.); and on the religious level, by the revivalist Billy Sunday.^[33] Advocates of muscular Christianity thought that nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity had been too “emotional, emphasizing heart over head” and identified this…with Protestantism’s feminization.”^[34]

This “muscular Christianity” movement can be read as, in part, a reaction against the likes of Crosby. Despite its best efforts, however, Crosby’s hymns remained enormously popular in evangelical worship throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, as we will see later, they often remained popular with the exact demographic which “muscular Christianity” claimed had been alienated by the supposed feminization of Protestantism. Now, advocates of “muscular Christianity” may have said this was precisely the problem, and why their work was necessary. Regardless, it is clear that no single gender-inflected model of piety dominated American evangelicalism in this period.

The early twentieth century saw some backlash to Gospel hymns, including ones written by Fanny Crosby. Some leaders thought that they were too effeminate. This was part of a larger phenomenon occurring in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians–including Kristen Du Mez, who, in the first chapter of her 2020 book Jesus and John Wayne, introduced this historical phenomenon to a mass audience–have written about how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there arose, among American Protestants, a “muscular,” masculine, Christianity that challenged the “gentility and restraint” of Victorian Christianity.^[35] Du Mez describes how, during World War I, this “muscular” masculinity was a phenomenon widely embraced by mainline Protestant churches in support of the war effort, before being embraced by fundamentalist Protestants in the 1920s. Thus, it was embraced by American Protestant Christians across the board.^[36]

Du Mez argues that this set the stage for a “militant masculinity” that would define much of twentieth-century white American evangelicalism. Underlying this movement was the idea that there were up to three million “missing men” from Protestant churches in America, which had become too feminized and thus did not appeal to men. Advocates of “muscular Christianity” advocated for churches to embrace physical and outdoor activities–sports, especially–to bring men back into the Church.^[37]

However, the popularity of Fanny Crosby’s hymns in the early twentieth century complicates Du Mez’s and others’ arguments about the rise of “muscular” Christianity. While this article does not dispute that the phenomenon of “muscular” Christianity occurred, it does offer evidence to suggest that it may have not been as dominant as Du Mez and others suppose. Consider American Protestantism in the 1910s, for example: on the one hand, as Du Mez notes, the evangelical evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935) was preaching revivals in which he “preferred to pack his ‘old muzzle-loading Gospel gun with ipecac, buttermilk, rough on rats, rock salt, and whatever else came in handy’ and let it fly,” and in which he would jump on top of a pulpit, waving an American flag.^[38] His choice of hymns to be sung at his revivals reflected this—he liked “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “The Fight is On.”^[39]

Yet Clifford Putney argues that “it was clearly white, liberal churchmen who espoused the [“muscular” Christianity] movement first” and, like Du Mez, he argues that it was not until the 1920s that evangelical and fundamentalist Christians widely adopted the movement.^[40] This tracks with the fact that, for example, Crosby’s hymn, “I Am Thine, O Lord,” was featured in hymnals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from more evangelical or conservative denominations like the Baptists, the Methodists, the Southern Presbyterians, as well numerous Lutheran and Pentecostal hymnals, while not being included in the hymnals of The Episcopal Church or the northern Presbyterians—more modernist and high-church denominations.^[41] So, perhaps one could argue that “muscular” Christianity was predominantly popular before the 1920s in places where, largely, Fanny Crosby hymns were not sung: modernist and/or high-church denominations, rather than evangelical ones.

Yet there is no simple divide to be made pre-1920 between a “muscular” Christianity among liberals and a more affective piety among evangelicals. Billy Sunday was no liberal Protestant but was already advocating muscular Christianity before the 1920s. And yet, one historian notes how Billy Sunday did, in fact, sometimes cave and allow “Blessed Assurance” to be sung at his revivals, because his audience of working-class men would request it.^[42] Hence, we can infer that at least a fair number of his audience of working-class, evangelical men were interested in another kind of piety than “muscular Christianity”—even if they were simultaneously interested in “muscular Christianity,” as well.

Additionally, the massive popularity of Fanny Crosby’s hymns endured well beyond the 1910s. Even as late as the 1950s and 1960s, several of Crosby’s hymns, including “Blessed Assurance,” were centerpieces at the revivals of Billy Graham—the most prominent evangelist in the world during the twentieth century. If “muscular Christianity” and evangelicalism are meant to be synonymous, it is hard to square this with evangelicalism’s longstanding embrace of Crosby’s affective, feminine piety.

Ultimately, the massive popularity of Fanny Crosby’s hymns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries testifies to the presence of an influential strand of piety in American evangelicalism that was neither a “muscular” masculinity nor a Victorian piety of “gentility and restraint.” Rather, Crosby’s hymns injected the spousal piety of a believer experiencing deep feelings of affection, in union with Christ–the bridegroom to the soul–into the lives of millions of American evangelicals, 250 years after its apogee in Puritan New England. Emphasizing spiritual empowerment as coming through a posture of feminine surrender to and dependence upon Christ, in affective union with him, these hymns offered a dramatically different–and more feminine–view of personal piety, which existed in the mainstream of American evangelicalism alongside “muscular” Christianity.

Though “muscular” Christianity arose partly in opposition to the “feminization” of Christianity, and its advocates saw hymns like Crosby’s as one feminization’s main culprits, Crosby’s hymns remained unrelentingly popular, even among the audience to which advocates of “muscular” Christianity were most attempting to appeal—white, American, evangelical men. It is striking and illustrative to consider a Billy Sunday revival during the 1910s. While he was jumping on the stage, waving an American flag, and encouraging everyone to sing about how they were soldiers under the command of Jesus Christ, there were working-class men there who wanted to sing about “Perfect submission; perfect delight.”

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Jacob Huneycutt is a second-year M.A. student in the Department of History at Baylor University, in Waco, Texas.

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1. Bernard C. Ruffin, Fanny Crosby: The Hymn Writer (Ulrichsville, OH: Barbour, 1995), 130. ↑

2. Ruffin, Fanny Crosby, 130. ↑

3. Ruffin, Fanny Crosby, 114; Ian M. Randall, “Conservative Constructionist: The Influence of Billy Graham in Britain,” The Evangelical Quarterly 67, no. 4 (1995), 322. ↑

4. June Hadden Hobbs, I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent: The Feminization of American Hymnody, 1870-1920 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 27-8. ↑

5. Donald Hustad, Jubilate!: Church Music in the Evangelical Tradition (Carol Stream: Hope Publishing Company, 1981), 234. ↑

6. Hobbs, I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent, 27-8; also, see footnote 32 on the Regulative Principle of Worship in Reformed theology. ↑

7. Amanda Porterfield, Feminine Spirituality in America: From Sarah Edwards to Martha Graham (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 38. ↑

8. John Owen, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (Each Person Distinctly) in Love, Grace, and Consolation; Or, the Saints Fellowship with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost Unfolded (Oxford: 1657). A new edition. (London: Printed by W. Nicholson, Warner-street, for W. Baynes, 54, Paternoster-row, 1808), 64. ↑

9. Michael P. Winship, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh! Marital Imagery in Massachusetts Preaching, 1630-1730,” Early American Literature 27 (1992): 172. Note: Winship’s language here may read slightly controversially to us now, given the excesses of contemporary gender ideology. However, it would be anachronistic to read him as seeking to “queer” Puritan spirituality or anything of the sort, and we should take his language more neutrally. ↑

10. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 25. ↑

11. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 26. ↑

12. Porterfield, Feminine Spirituality, 38. ↑

13. Winship, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!”, 180. ↑

14. Isaac Watts, “Let Him Embrace My Soul and Prove,” https://ccel.org/ccel/watts/psalmshymns/psalmshymns.I.66.html. ↑

15. See: Jane Giscombe, “The Dissemination and Reception of Isaac Watts’s Hymns and Psalms in the British North American Colonies to 1748.” In Negotiating Toleration: Dissent and the Hanoverian Succession, 1714–1760. Nigel Aston and Benjamin Bankhurst, eds., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 231-52. ↑

16. Giscombe, “The Dissemination and Reception of Isaac Watts’ Hymns,” 244, 246. ↑

17. Fanny J. Crosby, Memories of Eighty Years: The Story of Her Life, Told by Herself: Ancestry, Childhood, Womanhood, Friendships, Incidents, and History of her Song and Hymns (Boston: James H. Earle & Company, 1906), 19. ↑

18. Edith L Blumhofer, Her Heart Can See: The Life and Hymns of Fanny J. Crosby (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 1. ↑

19. The Reformed doctrine of the Regulative Principle of Worship is described in Chapter 23, Paragraph 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), which states, “The acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.” The language that God may not be worshiped “according to the imaginations and devices of men” led many Calvinists, including the New England Puritans, to tend toward the idea that man-made hymns were dangerous and that it was best, in worship via song in church, to stick with the Psalms, which they viewed as written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. ↑

20. Ruffin, Fanny Crosby, 24. ↑

21. Ruffin, Fanny Crosby, 31. ↑

22. Crosby, Memories of Eighty Years, 55. ↑

23. Ruffin, Fanny Crosby, 39. ↑

24. Fanny Crosby, Memories of Eighty Years, 55. ↑

25. I am choosing to use the pronouns “he/him/himself” for the singer throughout my descriptions of Fanny Crosby’s hymns–even though Crosby, the hymn writer and authorial voice behind the lyrics, was a woman–because my primary point in this article, in relation to these hymns, is to show how their being sung by evangelical American men complicates the notion of male evangelical piety in the early twentieth century being dominated by “muscular” Christianity. Thus, I am asking the reader to, while reading these descriptions, imagine what it was like for these hymns to be sung from the male perspective. ↑

26. Fanny J. Crosby, “Draw Me Nearer” (1875), Hymnary.org, https://hymnary.org/text/i_am_thine_o_lord_i_have_heard_thy_voice. ↑

27. Fanny J. Crosby, “Close to Thee” (1874), Hymnary.org, https://hymnary.org/text/thou_my_everlasting_portion. ↑

28. Fanny J. Crosby, “Hold Thou My Hand” (1874), Hymnary.org, https://hymnary.org/text/hold_thou_my_hand_so_weak_i_am_and_helpl. ↑

29. Ruffin, Fanny Crosby, 147. ↑

30. Randall, “Conservative Constructionist,” 322. ↑

31. Fanny J. Crosby, “Blessed Assurance” (1873), https://hymnary.org/text/blessed_assurance_jesus_is_mine. ↑

32. Gail Bederman, “‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough:’ The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911-1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism,” American Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1989): 435. ↑

33. See Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Bederman, “‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough:’ 432-65; and Kristen Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020), 15-22. ↑

34. Bederman, “The Women Have Had Charge,’” 441. ↑

35. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 14-17. ↑

36. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 17-22. ↑

37. Bederman, “‘The Women Have Had Charge,’” 440. ↑

38. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 18. ↑

39. Hobbs, I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent, 144. ↑

40. Putney, Muscular Christianity, 10. ↑

41. Hobbs, I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent, 144. ↑

42. Hobbs, I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent, 144. ↑