The Love Triangle That Caused a Religious Panic - The New York Times

DOOMED ROMANCE
Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America
By Christine Leigh Heyrman

The historian Christine Leigh Heyrman’s “Doomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America” may seem at first like a charming confection, a droll tale of an early-19th-century New England love triangle involving moony aspirational missionaries who get all wrapped up in what we would now call their “feels.” It is that. But in Heyrman’s telling, it becomes far more, as she remorselessly dissects the fragile male selfhood at the heart of evangelical Protestantism and its “vexed relationship with ideals of manhood.” Since the needs of that self are ever devouring the American body religious and politic, an exploration of its origins deserves attention.

“Doomed Romance” reads like a bodice-ripper, less “Bridgerton” than Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” Fewer push-up bras, plenty of smoldering letters. Heyrman, who admits to “a taste for low gossip,” was transfixed by her discovery of a cache of salacious documents, preserved as part of an extralegal investigation into a young woman who, in 1826, dropped one fiancé for another. She was Martha Parker, a comely middle-class lass “possessed of many charms.” No portrait survives, but she seems to have inspired more than the usual ardor. She is “no Everywoman,” Heyrman instructs us, yet representative of white Northern ladies serving as teachers and missionaries, enjoying a softer life than the lower classes who labored on farms or in mills.

Pursuing her were several self-righteously pious and overenthusiastic suitors: Thomas Tenney, studying to be a minister; Elisha Jenney, a Dartmouth student who takes disappointment poorly; and, finally, the stalwart and wonderfully named Elnathan Gridley, a Yale graduate preparing to minister to the heathen of Palestine. Part of a “culture of entitlement,” Tenney and Jenney were connected to Dartmouth and all three to the evangelical community. Had Martha bruised the egos of lesser beings, her behavior might have passed without notice. But these were men of God.

Looming over all is a darker entity, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, then the “largest corporation in the early Republic,” committed to overseeing the conduct of evangelists. Its missionaries, some of whom perished abroad, becoming martyrs, attracted fervent admiration and significant donations, so any hint of scandal attaching to them was to be avoided. The board’s officious members — as well as their consultants, including a president of Dartmouth College — would devote themselves to meddling in Martha’s tangled affairs. Heyrman argues that their prying presaged a crackdown on female autonomy, betraying a core anxiety that makes this account so deliciously relevant: the fear that women, prodigious consumers of sermons, revivals and missionary narratives, might become so powerful within the movement that they would threaten male hegemony.

Martha’s ambivalence regarding her beaus arose from an unsettled family life. Born in 1804, growing up in Dunbarton, N.H., she was one of eight siblings who lost their father when they were young. With two elder sisters, she attended the “deeply religious” Bradford Academy, in Essex County, Mass.; the eldest, Ann Parker, soon married and went to the Palestine mission in Beirut. Teaching at another such school, Martha was besotted with the idea of “forsaking all” for Christ. The curriculum she chose, involving “geography with the use of maps and globes,” speaks to an ambition for female education on par with those of men.

All went well for her until, at 21, overwhelmed by a crush of courting during the summer of 1825, she made a series of romantic missteps. Fatefully, she dallied with Tenney, her second cousin, known to her since childhood, an earnest young man redolent of the “odor of sanctity” who had first courted another of her older sisters, Emily. His proposal rejected by Emily, he turned to Martha, proposing again and causing sisterly astonishment over his fickle affections. Martha turned him down twice but that summer changed her mind, dangling before him the prospect of winning his “highest earthly happiness.” His affections violently rekindled, he decided that “she loved me ardently.” She and Tenney became engaged that December.

Then, as now, double standards were the rule. At the time, Heyrman tells us, one in five New England brides arrived at the altar pregnant, yet trifling with a man’s affections was considered the height of female dishonor, especially if it involved sexual impropriety. “The Coquette,” a popular 1797 novel by Hannah Webster Foster (one of America’s first woman novelists), deplored those who doled out “caresses.” Women were, however, allowed to change their minds about whom to marry; indeed, it was one of their few powers. So when Martha accepted Tenney but was then beguiled by Gridley and his promise of missionary glory, she was within her rights. She broke off her engagement by claiming that she had failed to reconcile Emily to it, a self-serving explanation that paved the way for the tempest to come. By April, she and Gridley were engaged.

Blindsided, Tenney rounded on her, branding her “a base girl, a deceiver, a liar,” and letters began flying, questioning her Christian character. Behind it all lay the unspoken threat of Ye Olde revenge porn: public disclosure of intimacies they may have shared (lost to history, alas). A “self-righteous bully,” Tenney, Heyrman writes, “had a religious duty to keep a woman so spiritually unfit from serving, of all places, in the Holy Land,” and was aided by the treacherous testimony of Jenney, another of Martha’s rejected suitors. Bennet Tyler, then president of Dartmouth, eagerly took Tenney’s part, triggering an investigation in which the board grilled poor Martha like a trout. Some declared that she would be committing “adultery” if she married Gridley.

Under pressure, she broke off her second engagement, and Gridley resentfully took himself abroad alone, soon to die of a nameless disease in Turkey. Martha’s sister and brother-in-law, in Beirut, exploded with defensive rage, declaring Tenney “detestable.” But back home, Martha buckled, married Tenney and was silenced forthwith, one of countless devout women whose “romance with evangelicalism … filled them with dreams but then doomed their full realization.”

Mining missionary records, Heyrman unearths some astonishing revelations. Even as church leaders were turning the screws on women, they were tolerant (given what would come later) of same-sex relationships. She quotes male partners in the mission at Beirut, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, who had pledged to “give ourselves to each other,” “our hearts knit together as the heart of one man.” A pair of Virginia Methodists went further, with one “covenant brother” telling the other that he dreamed of “kissing you with the kisses of my Mouth.” She finds revenge too: The Tenneys’ eldest daughter, Mary Eliza, grew up to join the ranks of foreign missionaries with her aunt Ann’s help, fulfilling her mother’s ambition. She became a popular writer, and Heyrman catches her, in her fiction, dissing the very prototype of her “unprepossessing” father.

“Doomed Romance” uncovers a boiling anthill of evangelical hypocrisy, seething with the same divisions that plague it today, including the debate over whether women should be allowed to preach, which rages on in the Southern Baptist Convention even as hundreds of its leaders have been accused of sexual misconduct. In the crowded annals of such scandal, the Baptists are hardly alone: Justin Bieber’s hip former pastor, Carl Lentz, of the megachurch Hillsong, was recently fired for lying and extramarital boffing. Since the Puritans, American zealots have excelled, as Heyrman puts it, in “character assassination with anonymous letters and gossip, threats and blackmail, the promise of punishment in this life and the next.” Elegantly written and hilariously astute, this gloriously indelicate history suggests that women’s infatuation with evangelicalism has been a bad romance indeed.

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