She specializes in modern U.S. history and studies the relationship between sexuality and religion.
Her first book is Disgraced: How Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism. The monograph is a sweeping religious and cultural history of ministerial sex scandals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It investigates how pastoral sex scandals have been covered in the popular press and how Protestant denominations and the reading public responded to the coverage.
Krivulskaya applied the “Page 99 Test” to Disgraced and reported the following:
Page 99 contains snippets of two of the many stories I tell in the book—these two from the early twentieth century. The first is about how an anonymous letter alleging homosexual activity and an internal Presbyterian investigation resulted in a quiet dismissal of John Balcom Shaw, an early fundamentalist leader, in 1918. To demonstrate how Protestant denominations began dealing with the epidemic of sex scandals, I write, “The Presbyterians succeeded in handling Shaw’s case internally and relegated his sexual proclivities to the realm of mental health.” (Shaw had been advised to admit himself to a sanitarium by the men in charge of the investigation.)Visit Suzanna Krivulskaya's website.
The second case, which I begin telling on page 99, is about the Episcopal Navy chaplain Samuel Neal Kent, who was accused of paying sailors for sexual favors in 1919. I explain that “during his trial, details of the government-sanctioned investigation by means of engagement with the alleged homosexuals shocked the public.” (The Navy had instructed undercover officers to obtain evidence of homosexual activity by engaging in it with the accused sailors and the chaplain.) Although the Episcopal Church initially stood by Kent, he was transferred to a different post shortly after his acquittal and left religious work altogether in 1921. This case, along with a handful of others, demonstrates that by the 1920s, Protestant denominations had begun to grapple with the best tactics for managing the sex scandals that kept plaguing them. While some labored to hide them, others attempted to defend the accused clergy—even if they ultimately chose to part ways with problematic ministers.
Page 99 gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about, though its scope is limited to two particular scandals that are representative of broader changes that I describe in the monograph. One way in which page 99 is a poor representation of the book is the fact that both cases featured here had previously been written about by other scholars: Kathryn Lofton first taught us about Shaw in her article “Queering Fundamentalism,” and George Chauncey and John Loughery have described the Kent debacle in their work. While Disgraced certainly builds on the insights of these and other historians, it also introduces many new stories, characters, and conclusions—particularly about the multi-decade trajectory of how sex scandals transformed American religion.
--Marshal Zeringue
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