A Tale of Two Patriarchs;or,How a Eunuch and a Wife Created a Family in the Church

Abstract

This article uses the spiritual friendship of Jeremiah Minter, Methodist preacher, and Sarah Jones, a planter's wife, as a window into southern patriarchal norms and the alternative affective families created in evangelical churches. Their correspondence was erotically charged, but religious devotion offered them a language in which to safely recast their ardor into piety. Minter, by rejecting slavery and the culture of honor and by choosing to become a “eunuch for the kingdom of heaven's sake,” and Jones, by being a spiritual leader, challenged family patriarchs and southern gender conventions. Through the Methodist Church, both formed fictive families that were loving and egalitarian and that supported and sustained them.