The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family

By Sophie Bjork-James

The Divine Institution provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this theology are both personal suffering for individuals who cannot measure up to prescribed gender and sexual roles, and political support for conservative government policies. Exposure to experiences that undermine the idea that an emphasis on the family is the solution to all social problems is causing a younger generation of white evangelicals to shift away from this narrow theological emphasis and toward a more social justice-oriented theology. The material and political effects of this shift remain to be seen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978821866

Book preview

The Divine Institution

The Divine Institution

White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family

SOPHIE BJORK-JAMES

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bjork-James, Sophie, author.

Title: The divine institution: white evangelicalism’s politics of the family / Sophie Bjork-James.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020029114 | ISBN 9781978821842 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978821859 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978821866 (epub) | ISBN 9781978821873 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978824492 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Family—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Evangelicalism—Political aspects—United States. | Political theology and race—United States.

Classification: LCC BT707.7 .B59 2021 | DDC 261.8/35850973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029114

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Sophie Bjork-James

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Marie

Contents

1 Family Values and Racial Politics

2 The Divine Institution and the Segregated Church

3 Reading the Bible with James Dobson: The Family and Christian Nationalism

4 Same-Sex Attraction and the Limits of God’s Love

5 Paternal Politics

6 Losing (and Remaking) My Religion: The Transformation of White Evangelicalism from Within

7 Conclusion: The Future of White Evangelicalism

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

The Divine Institution

1

Family Values and Racial Politics

In the late 1970s, white evangelicals across the United States entered the political fold to defend the family. Thus, in the decade after widespread successes of the civil rights movement, led by African American Christians, Jerry Falwell Sr. and other white evangelical leaders aligned a language associated with personal sanctification—the work of becoming godly—to a political project of sanctifying the nation.¹ This movement successfully began to shift national political debates away from questions of equality just as it worked to transform white evangelicalism from a somewhat politically diverse religion into a political movement defined by conservative politics and anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQI stances.² Before the late 1970s white evangelicalism was not associated with a particular political position, and the evangelical movement a century earlier focused on a variety of issues that today would register as progressive, from abolition to women’s suffrage.³ As late as the mid-1970s, a multiracial group of evangelicals were defining a progressive evangelical agenda that included support for racial justice and other progressive causes.⁴ While conservative religious leaders had been mobilizing politically for almost a decade, sociologist Nancy Ammerman writes that the leaders did not yet know that they were a movement until the late 1970s.⁵ The concept of family values provided the conservative political movement—which since the success of the civil rights movement had been associated with either overt racism or economic elitism—with new energy and a new base.⁶ Over the next forty years white evangelicals became one of the most consistent voting blocs in the country, representing nearly one-quarter of the electorate and making the evangelical voter a mainstay in popular media reporting. In political debates, white evangelicals became primary defenders of heterosexual privilege.⁷ These values voters understand themselves as defending their faith, and prioritize issues that defend the nuclear family, focusing on reproduction and sexuality.

Despite evangelicals’ self-concept, it is not faith alone that shapes evangelical politics. Since the emergence of the Religious Right, the politics of defending the family has drawn support from Christians almost solely on one side of the color line.⁸ While white evangelicals and Black Protestants are nearly identical in terms of salience of religion, biblical literalism, certainty of God’s existence, and frequency of prayer and church attendance, when it comes to voting no two religious groups diverge so significantly as white evangelicals and Black Protestants.⁹ While many African American churches embrace patriarchal gender roles, this has not translated into the same support for Religious Right politics as it has in white evangelicalism.¹⁰ Anthropologist Ellen Lewin importantly notes that in many Black churches a commitment to social justice traditions exists alongside a commitment to patriarchal gender roles and heterosexual norms.¹¹ Race clearly has an effect on the politics that stem from these different Christian traditions.

White evangelicals are not a monolithic group, and an evangelical tradition focused on the family is not uncontested. There is a long tradition, epitomized in Jimmy Carter’s faith, of evangelicals emphasizing moral commitments to the poor over a defense of existing hierarchies. Various progressive evangelicals in this tradition continue to vocally advocate a different political emphasis in evangelicalism, as in the work of Jim Wallis and Sojourners. A robust group of evangelical feminists challenge the dominant emphasis on complementary gender roles, offering instead a biblical interpretation calling for egalitarianism.¹² More recently, younger evangelicals are increasingly calling for a faith that advocates social justice over defending the family, and a vocal group of LGBTQ evangelical Christians are challenging the notion that their identities are incompatible with evangelicalism. And along with increasing demographic diversity, Asian and Latinx evangelicals will likely change the white evangelical-led Religious Right in new ways.¹³

The Divine Institution focuses on a hegemonic tradition within white evangelicalism to ask, What allows for such significant political unity among many white evangelicals, and why does race play such a large role in shaping evangelical politics? And, given that white evangelicals have led opposition to LGBTQ rights for decades, why are sexual politics so central to evangelical politics? On a sunny Father’s Day in 2006, I drove across my hometown in Washington State to a popular large, nondenominational church to begin to investigate these questions. I was preparing to start research on the politics of evangelicalism in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the bulk of this research took place. That morning, when I drove into the large parking lot, orange-vested traffic ushers greeted me and directed me to the closest parking spot, far away from the main door. Walking toward the church entrance along with hundreds of others, I passed by a line of vintage cars on display in the center of the lot. A shiny vintage Mustang was parked in the grass at the entrance to the church.

After I found a seat in the back of the sanctuary, seven twenty-something musicians who made up the church band entered the stage. The main lights went dark, and stage lighting lit the band in streams of deep blue light while jumbotrons bordering the stage broadcast the musicians’ faces as they softly began strumming guitars, plucking a bass, and tapping drums. Their expressions shifted from meditative smiles to sincere joy as they began a raucous love ballad to Jesus called Now That You’re Near, written by the famous Australian church band Hillsong United. It began:

Hold me in your arms

Never let me go

I want to spend eternity with you

I stand before You Lord

And give You all my praise

Your love is all I need

Jesus You’re all I need¹⁴

The audience responded to the enthusiasm of the band. People stood, jumping up and down to the music and raising their arms skyward in that deeply symbolic gesture of evangelical worship. After about twenty minutes of music and prayer, with the audience swaying and dancing, the main pastor walked onto the stage.

Wearing a Hawaiian shirt, knee-length khaki shorts, and flip-flop sandals, Pastor Joe stood center stage with eyes shut as the final music from the band began to die down. Hanging almost directly above him, suspended from the ceiling with thick steel cables, was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Good morning! Pastor Joe finally beamed at the crowd of three thousand gathered that morning, Notice anything different this morning? What do you guys think about my bike? After the loud cheers finally died down, he told us enthusiastically that he had transformed the church into a space more welcoming to men to celebrate Father’s Day. He told us that far more women than men attend church every week across America, and that this needs to change. See, folks, Pastor Joe preached, the problem is that we have turned Jesus into a soft guy, into a weak person. But Jesus was a man’s man, Jesus wasn’t a sissy! Who made Christians and sissies the same? Jesus’s message, he said, had been domesticated and pacified, so instead of representing Jesus as a warrior, we think of his humbleness as weakness. This turns men away from the church. The thing is, Pastor Joe implored, men want adventure, wildness, and risk. Jesus wasn’t about safety, he was into danger, into messing with them, with the authorities. He claimed that men hate going to church because they have to sing love songs to another man, even if it is to Jesus. The congregation laughed loudly at this routine reference to gendered and heterosexual boundaries of behavior. He called our attention to the muscle cars in the parking lot as another measure to make church a more inviting place for men. We need more testosterone in the church! Pastor Joe yelled gleefully.

In the following eight years, after completing over sixteen months of research on white-dominated evangelical spaces, including attending dozens of sermons, listening to countless hours of Christian radio, and completing one hundred interviews with evangelical leaders, pastors, and congregants, I realized that this first introduction to contemporary white evangelicalism provided a key insight into my research questions. I came to see that just as Pastor Joe hung his motorcycle—as a symbol of masculinity—in the center of the church, masculinity and male headship, and a resulting female submission, structure the theological and social order of conservative white evangelical religious practice.¹⁵ This gendered order of authority and submission is represented in the nuclear family, which is broadly revered as a divine institution. Many studies have shown how this gender ideology shapes gendered and family life within evangelical cultures. Here, I am making a slightly different argument. I found that this emphasis on gender and the family structures a central religious ethic within the white evangelical tradition. In the spaces of this research, one’s relationship with God is a primary relationship, something many others have shown; but this relationship is also refracted through other relationships, particularly in heterosexual marriage and one’s relationship with one’s father.¹⁶ Eventually I came to see this emphasis on family life in lived religion as a corollary to the Religious Right’s political emphasis on defending the family. Religious Right political sensibilities, I argue, are cultivated in large-church evangelicalism that emphasizes a particular family form as the center of one’s faith. Defending the patriarchal family—particularly through opposition to LGBTQ rights—then, becomes a way to defend one’s faith and one’s understanding of God. While I found overt political commentary rare during my research (such as comments about voting or petitioning one’s elected officials), messages about fathers, gender norms, and heterosexuality are central to the theology articulated in much large-church evangelicalism.¹⁷ This religious focus on the family, then, has far-reaching political effects, particularly in motivating ongoing opposition to LGBTQ rights. The racial segregation that continues to shape the contemporary geography of U.S. Christianity ensures that these political effects are shaped by race. Here I explore the racial politics of this theology of the family and the sexual politics attached to it. The churches, parachurch organizations, and Religious Right conferences that provide the foundation of this research are all majority-white spaces with nearly exclusively white leadership.¹⁸

The Divine Institution argues that the main theological emphasis in post–civil rights era white evangelicalism is on the supremacy of the heterosexual, male-headed nuclear family. This theology of the family inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this religious tradition are both personal suffering for individuals who cannot measure up to prescribed gender and sexual roles and political support for conservative government policies that perpetuate structural disadvantage for LGBTQ people, people of color, and the poor. Exposure to experiences that undermine the idea that an emphasis on the family is the solution to all social problems is causing a younger generation of white evangelicals to shift away from this narrow theological emphasis and toward a more social justice–oriented theology. The material and political effects of this shift remain to be seen.

A number of studies explore the political dimensions of evangelicalism.¹⁹ There are also a number of studies of evangelical gender norms that note that while male headship is important in theory, more egalitarian arrangements are often enacted in practice in evangelical families.²⁰ My approach explores how in this evangelical tradition, a gendered ethics connects religious praxis with political perspectives, rooted in a religious imaginary that produces a distinct understanding of social life.²¹ Throughout my research I rarely heard discussion of overt political issues during or even after church services, with the exception of occasional comments about abortion. What did saturate evangelical ethical discourse was a fixation on gender norms and the family. This approach recognizes that religion exists not only in sacred texts and sermons and sacralized spaces, but also in how individuals practice their religion, in how religion is lived.²² In observing how evangelicals live out their religious ethics I found that an emphasis on the family shaped a paired religious-political worldview. Evangelicals I met tended to dismiss distinctions between the sacred and the secular. God didn’t divide up the world, evangelicals frequently told me, so why should we?, articulating a belief that everything one does is of religious significance, challenging secular divisions between political and religious practice that have often shaped social analyses of evangelicalism.²³

The Divine Institution explores how this tradition is inseparable from a history of racial segregation and in turn reproduces a racial politics. The evangelicals in this study are, generally, passionately committed to color blindness and vehemently opposed to personal racial prejudice. They also live, like the majority of Americans, in deeply segregated neighborhoods, attend primarily segregated churches, and socialize within largely segregated friendship networks. This racial isolation provides a buffer from other experiences and perspectives. And as I will show, racial segregation has profoundly shaped the formation of this emphasis on the family, and the conservative social movement connected to it. The legacy of racial segregation in the United States has produced this distinct religious worldview that understands itself as nonracial, yet has significant racial impacts.

Although fostered in weekly pastoral messages and in Christian media, this religious tradition manifests as racial as it fosters a politics emphasizing the protection of the patriarchal family as the center of moral responsibility, cumulatively directing political interest away from questions of racial or social justice.²⁴ This particular emphasis implicitly reinforces the racial status quo. This is not an argument that the white evangelical movement is a secretly racist or an intentionally racist movement, but rather that this particular religious tradition stems from a history of racial segregation and that in turn the political defense of this worldview mobilizes a politics with racial effects.²⁵

In the late 1970s, white evangelical activists such as Anita Bryant constructed the homosexual threat as a lightning rod to mobilize white evangelicals to engage in politics. In turn, the formation of an antigay movement helped to spur a national lesbian and gay rights movement.²⁶ Opposition to LGBTQ rights has remained a central white evangelical priority, and I came to see this opposition as the corollary to the focus on the family that dominates so much of white evangelical practice. In his study of Bible-believing churches in Philadelphia, historian David Watt found widespread marginalization against nonheterosexuals in the churches he studied. He found that discrimination and prejudice were justified through a carefully worked-out set of axioms and arguments in which ‘God’ provided the warrants for discriminating against those who do not conform to heterosexual norms. Watt writes, Indeed, in the Bible-carrying Christian churches I studied, that was one of the most important things that ‘God’ did.²⁷ I found a similar pattern in the religious spaces of this research in Colorado.

R. Marie Griffith’s far-reaching history of Christian conflicts over sexuality and gender, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics, reminds us that these concerns did not arise with the Religious Right in the late 1970s.²⁸ Across the twentieth century, a dominant consensus about U.S. family life—involving wifely submission, male headship, and monogamous, heterosexual marriage—lost its hegemonic status. A wide variety of fears have motivated the movements working to sustain the old sexual order, fears about gender and racial change and also about national decline.²⁹ Similarly, religious studies scholar Sara Moslener traces the history of contemporary sexual purity campaigns to nineteenth-century evangelical campaigns that saw in white teenage sexual purity the future strength of the nation.³⁰ These important histories encourage scholars of gender, sexuality, and religion to recognize how multiple issues become mobilized in sexual politics, including racial concerns and concerns about the nation.

During the tumultuous 2016 presidential race, white evangelicals early on directed their support to Donald Trump. Trump’s vice presidential pick of Mike Pence further cemented this support, and despite widespread accusations of spurring racist sentiments—and the ticket’s accruing overt endorsements by all of the major white supremacist and white nationalist groups—white evangelical support for Trump was undaunted. Indeed, Trump’s victory would not have been possible without broad support by white evangelicals. Exit polls during the 2016 election showed that white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump at higher rates than they had voted for Mitt Romney.³¹ As one postelection Christianity Today article put it: Trump Elected President, Thanks to 4 in 5 White Evangelicals.³² After the election dozens of new anti-abortion and religious freedom laws were introduced at the federal and state levels, attempting to criminalize abortion and to protect the rights of Christians to discriminate against LGBTQ people. White evangelicals thus continue to exert a significant political impact in the United States.

This group remains a leading force in anti-LGBTQ politics.³³ As I will show, heterosexuality profoundly defines the limits of this religious community. During my research I met many people who had never been married, couples where the wife made more money than the husband, or couples who did not have children, none of whom expressed anxiety that their lives did not fit within conservative evangelicalism. Just as in Marla Frederick’s study of African American Christian women, I found that the evangelicals I met through this research practiced creative agency in choosing how to live out their faith.³⁴ Individuals are meant to cultivate the internal capacity to hear and feel God’s presence so that they may submit their own agency to God, letting God be their own personal spiritual guide. Yet I also found that within the spaces of this research this creative license to allow one’s relationship with God to direct one’s life was limited by patriarchal and heterosexual norms. It was Christians who experience what they describe as unwanted same-sex attraction who talked of their nonconformity to this ethical paradigm as a crisis. Often these Christians felt that their sexual attractions were incompatible with evangelical Christianity, because of a failure to fit within the hierarchical family model that requires heterosexuality. This ethical order requires the possibility of joining a heterosexual marriage and having children, even if one does not actually get married or have children.

This analysis helps to explain the contours of white evangelical politics, particularly around environmental issues. White evangelicals are the demographic group most likely to doubt the reality of human-caused climate change.³⁵ And throughout my time in Colorado Springs I never witnessed a conversation about the climate crisis take place among evangelicals. I did, however, frequently hear negative comments about the environmental movement. Once, the lead pastor of a large Colorado Springs church preached in a sermon: Who would show more compassion for an animal? It is crazy that today we have laws protecting the horned owl, but we don’t have any protection for the unborn baby! Another time I saw a motivational speaker give a talk at Focus on the Family’s organization headquarters, saying: Some things aren’t right! Ever noticed that most people who support animal rights are for abortion? Hug an owl and flush a human! Such statements suggest that Christians need to choose between caring for humans or caring for nonhumans. There are several evangelical organizations working to mobilize evangelicals around the environment, including the Evangelical Environmental Network and Evangelical Youth for Climate Action, but I did not see evidence of this work in Colorado.

Race, Evangelicalism, and the Divine Institution

Why have family values—as a shorthand for talking about reproductive politics, sexuality, marriage, and gender—remained at the center of evangelical politics since the emergence of the national Religious Right movement? And what role does race play in shaping this link between evangelical lived religion and the Religious Right movement? To explore these questions this book analyzes, as political scientist Nancy Wadsworth encourages, the interaction of religion (as a worldview, a set of practices, and a basis for identity) with other categories considered central to intersectionality.³⁶ Intersectionality is the theoretical framework put forward by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to analyze the ways that multiple forms of oppression are experienced. For example, one cannot understand the discrimination faced by Black women by looking solely at gender or race, but only through analyzing the nexus these identity categories form.³⁷ Other feminist scholars have challenged this framework for implying that these social locations are more fixed than they sometimes are, suggesting other terms, such as interlocking³⁸ or assemblage.³⁹ Wadsworth proposes a corrective that she calls foundational intersectionality. This approach acknowledges the dynamics whereby some categories co-construct or co-constitute one another and, as a result, are never neatly separable.⁴⁰ This allows us to engage