Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him is a thoughtful, well-written intellectual and theological history of gender identities among white Southern Baptists, Southern Methodists, and Holiness believers. Chapell blends top-down church history with lived religion in a methodology he terms “lived theology”: although theology is in part a product of culture, “adherents, and particularly church officials, tried to center their lives and identities around what they professed to believe” (2). More specifically, Chapell argues that Baptist and Methodist theologies reinforced southern gender norms, while radical Holiness theologies drove divergent gender ideals and behaviors.

Chapell focuses on the period from the emergence of a distinct Holiness tradition around 1877 to its peak around 1915, and on Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Each tradition—Baptist, Methodist, and Holiness—comprises roughly a third of the book, which is, therefore, a broader history than its title suggests. Chapell analyzes books and pamphlets, sermons, conference and convention proceedings, denominational publications, letters, and photographs to explain each tradition's theological framing of gender.

The Southern Baptist Convention takes center stage first, and it represents both the largest and most staid proportion of white southerners. Chapell argues that Southern Baptists embraced individualist theologies, and their gender ideologies followed suit. Southern Baptist men stressed the language of mastery, both over other humans and their own desires, and described the church in martial terms, as a place for spiritual warfare. But only men could be masters; women's identity was bound to home and family. Despite a broad range of notions about women's abilities, educational needs, and suitability for the public arena, most Southern Baptists subordinated women's individual identities to family responsibilities and hierarchies. Generically pure and motherly, women must always be ready to sacrifice their own desires for those of their families. Thus, an emphasis on an individual and personalized manliness contrasted with a universal ideal of white womanhood.

For Chapell, Methodists occupied both a theological and cultural middle ground. Men of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, crafted their own gender identities around two distinct images of Jesus: the “gentle shepherd” and the “conquering crusader” (62). The gentle shepherd model allowed Methodist men to express affection openly in family life, and it allowed for a more communal sense of manhood. Yet the model of Christ as the conquering crusader also led Methodist men to see themselves as part of a “grand army of the Lord” and permitted expressions of love and gentleness only within the household (62). For Methodist women, an emphasis on spiritual rebirth and conversion defined the home as a mission field and the woman as both nurturer and minister. Methodist women enjoyed more educational opportunities and support than Baptist women because of the emphasis on their teaching role in the household, but that role limited the nature of their training. Chapell concludes that “theology influenced every idea MECS officials had about gender, about what it meant to be a man, about how femininity should be thought of and displayed, and about the nature of family life” (95). That claim leads to his driving question: could radical theologies transform southern notions of gender?

For Chapell, the answer is a resounding “yes,” and the third of the book that focuses on Holiness theologies and gender performance is the most compelling and nuanced. As they parted ways with Methodism, Holiness evangelists like W. B. Godbey, Mary Lee Cagle, and Beverly Carradine linked entire sanctification to spiritual maturity and Christian service. Their emphasis on sanctification “led the leaders of the Holiness movement to define themselves differently and to understand gender in ways that did not fit into the larger evangelical culture” (99). Furthermore, with these new ways of seeing gender and the Holiness theology that undergirded them, believers spread their message widely both within and beyond regional boundaries, abandoning, even rejecting, regional identities.

More than Baptists or Methodists, Chapell argues, “Holiness leaders believed that their theology transformed personal identity” (112). They encouraged women to claim authority in the church, and men and women alike “pointed to marriage as a model of the relationship between God and the sanctified believer, allowing both women and men within the movement to consider themselves the bride of Christ” (112). In line with other historians of the movement, Chapell shows that Holiness believers did not challenge the prevailing emphasis on fundamental differences between men and women, but they argued that sanctification mattered more than gender. Women should accept male headship and superiority, but they also had to preach if God called.

Chapell's most significant argument is that Holiness believers adopted a more communal theology than the Baptists and the Methodists, and they saw the faith as something to pass down from one generation to the next. Alongside the bride-of-Christ model, this emphasis on communal love meant that sanctified men could show open, deep affection for one another and in worship, even as they used martial language to talk of spiritual battle and to denounce their unsanctified opponents as immature, unmanly Christians. For Chapell, these affectionate relationships “contradicted the ideals of Southern manhood” and intensified mainline loathing for Holiness believers (130).

This analysis of competing masculinities, particularly between Holiness believers and the major denominations, is superb. Chapell's discussion of familial responsibilities and women's identity is also excellent. Chapell attends carefully to whiteness and white supremacy among his subjects, who had a “religious paradigm to begin looking past racial differences” but were too embedded in the South's violent white supremacist culture system to imagine or pursue an alternative (115). Chapell leaves open questions about how black Baptists, Methodists, and Holiness believers engaged with their white counterparts and how they dealt with ideas about gender that were circumscribed by race at least as much as they were driven by theology. Still, Chapell's study of southern Holiness theology is sensitive, insightful, and necessary. This is a unique and remarkable book. It will appeal especially to scholars of southern religion, whiteness, and gender, but it is also short and readable enough for undergraduate courses.