HOLINESS AS KNOWLEDGE: BISHOP MARY MAGDALENA LEWIS TATE AND THE SANCTIFIED EPISTEMOLOGY OF BLACK WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS MODERNITY

Abstract

This thesis examines how Bishop Mary Magdalena Lewis Tate (1871–1930), founder of The Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth, headquartered in Nashville, TN, constructed holiness as a system of knowledge that integrated theology, gender, and institutional life within the early twentieth-century Holiness movement. While most studies of early Black Pentecostalism have centered on male founders, charismatic revivals, or external views of Pentecostal denominations as cultic movements, Tate’s writings, hymns, and denominational records reveal a sanctified epistemology, a way of knowing God through embodied discipline, institutional order, and communal survival. Drawing on primary sources such as the Year Book of the Church of the Living God (1922–23) and The Constitution and Government of The Church of the Living God (1915), and secondary works by Anthea Butler, Judith Casselberry, Delores Williams, and others, this thesis interpreted Tate’s holiness tradition as an early articulation of womanist theology. Her vision of sanctification transformed motherhood, administration, and spiritual labor into sacred modes of knowing. By reading Tate within the intellectual history of Black religious modernity, this study reframed holiness not as ecstatic piety but as an epistemic project that authorized Black women’s leadership and sustained their institutions amid the racial and gendered constraints of Jim Crow.