This Is Our Message: Women's Leadership in the New Christian Right

Over the past 50 years, the architects of the religious right have become household names: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson. They have used their massively influential platforms to build the profiles of evangelical politicians like Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz. Now, a new generation of leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress enjoys unprecedented access to the Trump White House. What all these leaders share, besides their faith, is their gender. Men dominate the standard narrative of the rise of the religious right. Yet during the 1970s and 1980s nationally prominent evangelical women played essential roles in shaping the priorities of the movement and mobilizing its supporters. In particular, they helped to formulate, articulate, and defend the traditionalist politics of gender and family that in turn made it easy to downplay the importance of their leadership roles. In This Is Our Message, Emily Johnson begins by examining the lives and work of four well-known women-evangelical marriage advice author Marabel Morgan, singer and anti-gay-rights activist Anita Bryant, author and political lobbyist Beverly LaHaye, and televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. The book explores their impact on the rise of the New Christian Right and on the development of the evangelical subculture, which is a key channel for injecting conservative political ideas into purportedly apolitical spaces. Johnson then highlights the ongoing significance of this history through an analysis of Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy in 2008 and Michele Bachmann's presidential bid in 2012. These campaigns were made possible by the legacies of an earlier generation of conservative evangelical women who continue to impact our national conversations about gender, family, and sex.

About the Author :
Emily Suzanne Johnson is an assistant professor of history at Ball State University in Muncie, IN, where she teaches courses in American history and histories of gender and sexuality.

Review :
"Through exploring the careers and writings of several of these key women, Johnson shows that their presence as national leaders was critical to the success of this movement." -- Journal of the American Academy of Religion "Johnson's work is notable for its deft execution, thorough research, and admirably clear prose ... This Is Our Message elegantly corrects a historiography much in need of historical revision and analytical recalibration, thereby charting a new and exciting course of research in the study of American religions -- most likely for years to come." -- L. Benjamin Rolsky, Reading Religion "Emily Johnson has written a masterful history of evangelical women in the modern conservative movement. With absorbing biography, she examines the careers and personal lives of five iconic women, showing how they negotiated the delicate balance between traditional feminine submission and the duty to assert these Christian values in an authoritative and public way. This is Our Message is essential for understanding the growth of women's influence in the Republican Party and white women's strong support for Donald Trump in 2016."--Michelle Nickerson, Associate Professor, Department of History, Loyola University Chicago "The paradox of women in high positions of influence and leadership urging other women to conform to traditional domestic roles has long puzzled observers outside of the conservative religious fold. This is Our Message convincingly explains how such women as Marabel Morgan, Anita Bryant, Beverly LaHaye, Tammy Faye Bakker, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann thought about themselves as wives, mothers, and obedient daughters of God, and how they helped persuade countless numbers of American Christians to take an activist political stance against feminism and women's rights. Emily Johnson has written a deeply researched, original, and subtly argued book that is essential for understanding the gender politics of the New Christian Right."--R. Marie Griffith, John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis "Emily Johnson's tightly argued, crisply written study of conservative women and the religious right guides readers out of the realm of grassroots activism-a well-studied site of female political influence-and onto the national stage, where charismatic and able leaders such as Marabel Morgan, Beverly LaHaye, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin helped construct sprawling institutional structures, media empires, and political lobbies through which they could shape America's gender politics, and ultimately modern America itself. This is a timely and important study of our recent-and current-political moment."--Darren Dochuk, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Notre Dame