”O, sälla dag då du mig fann”: Baptistiska omvändelseberättelser och performativa könsidentiteter i 1900-talets början

Abstract

”O, blissful day when you found me”: Swedish Baptist conversion narratives and performative gender identities

In this article we explore how young women and men in a Baptist congregation in Sweden in the early twentieth century described their conversion experience. Our premise is that conversion narratives can be understood as part of a performative making of the self and have the potential to enable novel ways of constructing masculinity and femininity. The assumption is that religion played an ambivalent role in the transformation of gender roles around the turn of the twentieth century. The study is qualitative, using rhetorical and content analyses of 21 conversion narratives derived from the Strängnäs branch of the Baptist youth association Senapskornet around 1913–1919. Writing about one’s conversion was not only a way of voicing one’s own experiences, but also of establishing the credibility of one’s personal identity as a Baptist, which required the use of accepted rhetorical and theological frameworks specific to the movement. We examine how male and female Baptists engaged with the rhetorical and theological frameworks, indicating the tendencies towards gender differences in the material. These included descriptions of crying and tearful prayer – exclusively attributed to women – and a variety of opinions about sin as either sinful behaviour or a subjective experience of the believer’s own sinfulness. However, we conclude there were smaller gender differences in Baptist conversion narratives than in those of other Christian movements of a similar date. Thus we contribute to the understanding of how identity is constructed through conversion narratives, as well as how constructions of gender can shape descriptions of religious conversion.