The religious scholar Stephen Prothero sees religion as one of the main organizing ideologies of the social and political reality of the nineteenth century. For Prothero there is a close and intimate ideological relationship between theological beliefs and culture; therefore, they are not separable from the characterization of the nineteenth-century religious mood. Prothero argues that many Americans were “inspired by the republican [rhetoric] of liberty and equality, and by a popular revolt against deference and hierarchy” (47). This liberalizing spirit applied to the religious, political, and domestic spheres inspired women to protest the restricted role they had been given by the existing hierarchy. The well-defined restrictions of religion, like the law, were structured in a dominant position; black women encountered its hegemony in both their gendered and racial constructions, while white women primarily based on their gender. However, both groups have consciously reshaped the organizational structure of religion to diminish the ordering of their lives in the public and private spheres. Prothero postulates that while “The Bible remained authoritative [. . .] Americans insisted on interpreting it for themselves” (47), especially the women who lived under its patriarchal construction. “In this effort,” Prothero continues, “they were assisted by a new cultural hero: the populist preacher, who combined evangelism and egalitarianism in bold and new ways” (47). Prothero argues that it was “the rise of pulpit storytelling” (51) that enabled such a revisiting of religious ideology. Prothero goes on to argue that the “story sermon” (51) as a rhetorical style “did not catch on so fast in New England as in the South and West (51),” a point…middle of paper…. ..h 2009. McCurry, Stephanie. “The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender Politics and Slavery in Antebellum South Carolina.” The Journal of American History 78 (1992): 1245-1264. Mountford, Rossana. The gendered pulpit: Preaching American Protestant spaces. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. Pitney, David Howard. The African American Jeremiad: Calls for Justice in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Prothero, Stephen. American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision.” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1978. Ring, Nancy C., et. al. "Scriptures, Canons and Creeds". Introduction to the study of religion. MaryKnoll: Orbis Books, 1998: 178-207.