Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity

Americans have long believed that the private lives of their politicians are important indicators of their fitness to lead and of their ability to defend and uphold American values. For many, a sex scandal renders a person ineligible, or at the very least questionably qualified, for public service. In Compromising Positions, Leslie Dorrough Smith questions the assumption that sex scandals are really about sex-- that is, that they are primarily concerned with the discovery of sexual misconduct. She argues that they are, instead, a form of cultural storytelling that uses racial and gendered symbols to create a collective sense of national worth and strength.Smith shows that sex scandals involve the use of four very powerful social tools--gender, race, politics, and religion-- that together create a rhetoric about what America is, who is eligible to formally represent it, and what types of symbolic religiosity such leaders must display to legitimize their power. Americans tend to condemn or excuse the sexual misdeeds of their politicians depending on the degree to which the individual in question reinforces evangelical interpretations of "American values" and a "Christian nation." Such values include not just moral integrity, but strength, courage, and conquest. As a consequence, sex scandals are less likely to occur in cultural moments when the public is open to reading a politician's moral lapse as a symbolic form of national dominance. Put simply, when a leader is perceived as strong, domineering, and necessary for national health, many people will find ways either to overlook his illicit sexual behavior or somehow read it as an American act.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: Sex Scandals, National Fantasies, and the Stories We Tell Chapter 1 - Scandal: The Story of Wayward Men (featuring a full cast, with special guest star, Donald Trump) Chapter 2 - Religion: The Story of Right and Wrong (featuring Mark Foley and Roy Moore) Chapter 3 - Sex: The Story of Feminists and Whores (featuring Anita Hill and Paula Jones) Chapter 4 - Nation: The Story of American Values (featuring Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards) Chapter 5 - Media: The Story of Just Desserts (featuring Anthony Weiner and Arnold Schwarzenegger) Chapter 6 - Epilogue: Brett Kavanaugh and the Contradictions of American Masculinity (featuring Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, Anita Hill, and Clarence Thomas, with a role reprisal by Donald Trump)

About the Author :
Leslie Dorrough Smith is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Avila University. She is also the author of Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (Oxford, 2014). Her areas of specialty include evangelicalism in America, its impact on sex, gender, and reproduction issues, and feminist theory, more broadly.

Review :
"Leslie Dorrough Smith has once again offered readers a masterpiece of critical scholarship, drawing attention to how coverage of and debate over public sex scandals function to legitimate contested national narratives and particular visions of white, hetero-masculinity. I know of few scholars capable of presenting sophisticated, counterintuitive, and complex arguments with this level of clarity, precision, and accessibility. This book should be of interest to scholars who study whiteness, masculinity, nationhood, or evangelical Christianity, or who simply are invested in the future of US politics." -- Craig Martin, St. Thomas Aquinas College "In Compromising Positions, Smith demonstrates that religious sex scandals are about far more than religion and sex. Through deft rhetorical analysis, she reveals how gender, race, and nationalism determine which politicians fall from grace and which survive to see another election cycle." -- John A. Schmalzbauer, Missouri State University "With her characteristic combination of humor and incisive analysis, Leslie Dorrough Smith offers a cool-headed consideration of the scripts and stages actors use to perform public moral outrage about sex scandals in US political theater. Paying particular attention to codifications of race and gender in these performances, Compromising Positions brilliantly responds to media echo chambers by asking its readers to slip into something a little less comfortable." -- K. Merinda Simmons, University of Alabama