Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life provides a sociological and historical analysis of gender, family, and work among evangelical Protestants. In this innovative study, Sally Gallagher traces two lines of gender ideals--one of husbands' authority and leadership, the other of mutuality and partnership in marriage--from the Puritans to the Promise Keepers into the lives of ordinary evangelicals today. Rather than simply reacting against or accommodating themselves to "secular society," Gallagher argues that both traditional and egalitarian evangelicals draw on longstanding beliefs about gender, human nature, and the person of God. The author bases her arguments on an analysis of evangelical family advice literature, data from a large national survey and personal interviews with over 300 evangelicals nationwide. No other work in this area draws on such a range of data and methodological resources. Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life establishes a standard for future research by locating the sources, strategies, and meaning of gender within evangelical Protestantism.

For most people, the terms “evangelical” and “feminism” are contradictory. “Evangelical” invokes images of conservative Christians known for their strict interpretation of the Bible, as well as their support of social conservatism and traditional gender roles. So how could an evangelical support feminism, a movement that seeks, at its most basic level, to redress the inequalities, injustice, and discrimination that women face because of their sex? Evangelical Feminism offers the first history of the evangelical feminist movement. It traces the emergence and theological development of biblical feminism within evangelical Christianity in the 1970s, how an internal split among members of the movement came about over the question of lesbianism, and what these developments reveal about conservative Protestantism and religion generally in contemporary America. Cochran shows that biblical feminists have been at the center of changes both within evangelicalism and in American culture more broadly by renegotiating the religious symbols which shape its deepest values.

Why won't religion just go away? -- Buildings -- Becoming -- Belonging -- Growing -- Giving -- Changing -- Gender and congregational culture -- Fieldwork in three congregations

This in-depth study examines the lives and faith of conservative Christian women, as told in their own voices through extensive interviews. Although conservative Protestant women are often perceived as submissive servants by those who do not share their world view, Shared Beliefs, Different Lives offers a vision of evangelical women as purposeful agents who negotiate the boundaries of their faith in the process of day-to-day living.

"This work is an innovative treatise on the evangelical magazine market during the 1970s and 1980s and how it sustained religious community and ideology. Bassimir argues that community can be produced in discourse, especially when shared rhetoric, concepts, and perspectives signal belonging. The 1970s and 1980s were a tumultuous period in United States history. In suit with a dramatic political shift to the right, evangelicalism also entered the public discourse as a distinct religious movement and was immediately besieged by cultural appropriations and internal fragmentations. This was also a time when Americans in general and evangelicals in particular grappled with issues and ideas such as feminism and legal abortion, restructuring traditional roles for women and the family. The Watergate Crisis and the newly emerging Christian Right also threw politics into turmoil. During this time, there was a surge of readership for evangelical magazines such as Christian Today, Moody Monthly, Eternity, and Post-Americans/Sojourners. While each of these magazines-and many other publications-contributes to and participates in the overall dissemination of evangelical ideology, they all also have their own outlooks and political leanings when it comes to hot-button issues. Evangelical Visions, through a thoroughly researched lens, makes important correctives to common understandings of evangelical discourse, particularly regarding the key political initiatives of the religious right. Bassimir demonstrates that within the pages of these periodicals, evangelicals hashed out a number of competing views on feminism, abortion, reproductive technologies, and political involvement itself. To accomplish this, Evangelical Visions traces the emergence of evangelical social and political awareness in the 1970s to the height of its power as a political program. The chapters in this monograph also delve into such topics as how evangelicals re-envisioned gender norms and relations in light of the feminist movement and the use of childhood as a symbol of unspoiled innocence and the pure potential of humanity. Presently, most accounts of evangelicalism cite evangelical magazines only very selectively, and virtually no studies make substantive use of those magazines as objects of investigation. Bassimir's Evangelical Visions makes a much needed contribution to our understanding of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century by providing a nuanced picture of a religious subculture that is too often reduced to caricature. This study is located at the intersection of history, religious studies, and media studies and will appeal to scholars and students of all of these fields"--

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.

"Vivid, lucid, and well-written. I came away with a better understanding of how the specific realities of being 'submissive wives' are negotiated, constructed, challenged, and transformed."—Lynn Davidman, author of Tradition in a Rootless World "Griffith's deft portrayal is a unique and important contribution to the study of Pentecostal spirituality and a compelling model for the retelling of women's religious experience in twentieth-century American culture."—Margaret Bendroth, author of Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to Present