The political ethics of intimacy in American evangelism
Item
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Title
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The political ethics of intimacy in American evangelism
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:1f3e877e4037:11902
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identifier
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12543
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Creator
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Bjork-James, Sophie F.,
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Contributor
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Leith Mullings
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Cultural anthropology | American studies | Religion | affect | evangelicalism | family | gender | sexuality
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Abstract
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The Political Ethics of Intimacy is an ethnographic study of how conservative evangelical ethics are cultivated within religious communities and become linked to political projects. Based on fourteen months of participant observation research in evangelical churches and Bible study groups in Colorado Springs, I argue that evangelical ethical life is modeled on hierarchical relationships defined by gender and symbolized in the patriarchal family. As the heterosexual nuclear family has become both the central metaphor structuring evangelical ethics and the site where lived evangelicalism is practiced, issues perceived as threatening this family structure are seen as threatening to evangelical ethical life. Thus, abortion and gay rights receive continuing political concern by evangelicals, while issues not framed as directly affecting the family receive less political concern. I show how the familial ideals that shape white evangelical ethical and political life are tied to a racial history of seeing the normative, patriarchal family as the moral foundation of the nation, ideas that shaped resistance to racial equality in the United States from debates about abolition to the Civil Rights Movement.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Anthropology
