ABSTRACT
The history of religion and sexuality in the United States may best be understood as a history of narratives——sometimes competing, sometimes not——that are as personal as they are political. In this sense, the conversion stories of Sarah Edwards and John Grimes might show us the effect of sexual repression sublimated into religious ecstasy or a case of religious extremism reflected in hyper-eroticism. Religion and sexuality have also shared a similar fate in the pervasive rhetoric of our secular age——both doomed to the private sphere, even as they incite the most spectacular of public dramas. Some of the earliest uses of the noun religion or the adjective religious marked “the careful performance of ritual obligations” in late antiquity, a meaning glimpsed today when we say someone studies “religiously,” meaning carefully and repetitively.
