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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.
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.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published February 7, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 27, 2019
A groundbreaking, eloquently written history of conservative women in America.
August 5, 2020
Many of the architects of the religious right were white men, including Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Paul Weyrich, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson. We've all seen photographs of GOP lawmakers assembled around a table, with most of the individuals being (usually older) white men. But it would be a mistake to think that there are no conservative women in the religious right's ranks and Emily Suzanne Johnson profiles six such women in "This Is Our Message: Women's Leadership in the New Christian Right." Marabel Morgan, Anita Bryant, Beverly LaHaye, and Tammy Faye Bakker have either largely faded from the spotlight in their old age or passed away, but the political ascents of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann in the 2000s and 2010s showcases the persistence of conservative Christian female leadership. Johnson situates each figure she profiles and helpfully explores how their conservative values encountered and often clashed with feminist orthodoxy.
November 16, 2022
It was interesting reading this book because though I spent time in evangelical circles (growing up in an SBC church and being a homeschooler) but I was never quite apart of them. I was too young to know Morgan, Bryant, LaHaye, or Bakker so that history was really interesting to me but when the author got to Palin and Bachmann the author’s arguments started losing steam for me.
What I liked:
I love reading books that dig up women’s history in movements that, though happening not that long ago, have already been forgotten. The author really underscores what I have noticed throughout women’s history: the way that women gain authority is by insisting that they don’t have any. Women will insist that they are still under their husband’s and/or pastor’s authority. Many times they would also tell a story on how they felt God calling them to a more public role, and how unwilling they were because they thought it was unbecoming of a good Christian women, but they felt no peace until they obeyed God’s calling for their life. Under these conditions, women have been holding limited authority in Christian circles for centuries. Sometimes they are remembered but many times their stories are overcome by male counterparts or, like Bryant, they make life choices that are “unforgivable” as a Christian woman.
The constant tension between upholding “traditional” gender roles while also continually renegotiating what those roles actually are is so subtle that most people don’t even notice what’s going on until they’re reading a history book about the movement. I go back and forth between whether these women knew exactly what they were doing to maneuver themselves into positions of power or if it really did happen the way they narrated. The interesting thing about all of these women is that none of them seemed to have “traditional” life growing up so while I understand why they wanted to fight for a more stable family life for American’s in general, they did it by looking back on a golden age that was never there. They wanted to turn American back to a “normal” that was never their normal. Though I can’t really agree with a lot of what these woman stood for I do feel admiration for some of them.
What I thought could have been better:
While I felt Chapter 1-4 was very connected and interesting I started struggling to follow the author’s argument in chapter 5 which focused on Palin and Bachmann. Perhaps it was because I actually lived through those elections but I didn’t quite understand how we got from women like LaHaye, who was quite the politician though never holding office, to Palin and Bachmann who I’m still wondering what people saw in them (To be fair, it’s probably still too fresh for me to be objective.) But my biggest issue was the author’s definition of “complementarianism”. The author described it as a “husbands’ and wifes’ mutual submission under God” (probably basing it on Ephesians 5:21) and that this is what these women where really promoting. Though complementarianism has a spectrum, this is not a definition I’ve ever heard for it. This definition more closely fits with the egalitarian/mutualist movement. So to say that the media and non-evangelicals misunderstood Bachmann when she tried to get around her “submission” comment seems a bit unbelievable to me.
Conclusion
I love reading women’s history even if I don’t agree with their message because it is too often ignored and forgotten so I’m glad the author decided to write this and would recommend it if you enjoy women’s history. I would also suggest reading it alongside other histories of this time period like “Jesus and John Wayne” by Kristin Kobes du Mez.
What I liked:
I love reading books that dig up women’s history in movements that, though happening not that long ago, have already been forgotten. The author really underscores what I have noticed throughout women’s history: the way that women gain authority is by insisting that they don’t have any. Women will insist that they are still under their husband’s and/or pastor’s authority. Many times they would also tell a story on how they felt God calling them to a more public role, and how unwilling they were because they thought it was unbecoming of a good Christian women, but they felt no peace until they obeyed God’s calling for their life. Under these conditions, women have been holding limited authority in Christian circles for centuries. Sometimes they are remembered but many times their stories are overcome by male counterparts or, like Bryant, they make life choices that are “unforgivable” as a Christian woman.
The constant tension between upholding “traditional” gender roles while also continually renegotiating what those roles actually are is so subtle that most people don’t even notice what’s going on until they’re reading a history book about the movement. I go back and forth between whether these women knew exactly what they were doing to maneuver themselves into positions of power or if it really did happen the way they narrated. The interesting thing about all of these women is that none of them seemed to have “traditional” life growing up so while I understand why they wanted to fight for a more stable family life for American’s in general, they did it by looking back on a golden age that was never there. They wanted to turn American back to a “normal” that was never their normal. Though I can’t really agree with a lot of what these woman stood for I do feel admiration for some of them.
What I thought could have been better:
While I felt Chapter 1-4 was very connected and interesting I started struggling to follow the author’s argument in chapter 5 which focused on Palin and Bachmann. Perhaps it was because I actually lived through those elections but I didn’t quite understand how we got from women like LaHaye, who was quite the politician though never holding office, to Palin and Bachmann who I’m still wondering what people saw in them (To be fair, it’s probably still too fresh for me to be objective.) But my biggest issue was the author’s definition of “complementarianism”. The author described it as a “husbands’ and wifes’ mutual submission under God” (probably basing it on Ephesians 5:21) and that this is what these women where really promoting. Though complementarianism has a spectrum, this is not a definition I’ve ever heard for it. This definition more closely fits with the egalitarian/mutualist movement. So to say that the media and non-evangelicals misunderstood Bachmann when she tried to get around her “submission” comment seems a bit unbelievable to me.
Conclusion
I love reading women’s history even if I don’t agree with their message because it is too often ignored and forgotten so I’m glad the author decided to write this and would recommend it if you enjoy women’s history. I would also suggest reading it alongside other histories of this time period like “Jesus and John Wayne” by Kristin Kobes du Mez.
March 6, 2019
In an age of polarization, where liberals and conservatives dismiss each other as foolish or even evil, this book is extraordinary. By taking the women she profiles seriously and treating them with respect, the author is able to offer deep insights into the foundations of the New Christian Right that help people outside it to better understand its enormous influence on contemporary American politics. Her analysis helps explain not only the rise of conservative women in politics, like Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin, but also the depth of support for conservative male politicians as long as they deliver on "family values" issues. If you can't understand why people continue to support flawed conservative politicians, this book is for you.
October 16, 2021
The first 3 chapters are amazing. The fourth is a little weird and doesn’t really seem to fit with her thesis. My biggest problem with this book (and those like it), is that it needs an Evangelical editor. There are a few statements that are incorrect about evangelicals as a whole, that she seems to credit to all evangelicals. A really fascinating and needed book. Super interesting and well written.
October 1, 2025
Really appreciated some of the new perspectives I gained from reading this one. The style of approaching the themes through individual women as case studies helped get a clear picture of the arguments. There was an extent to which it felt like a bit of a jump to the final chapter on more modern women like Palin though.
December 18, 2020
The success of a historical monograph usually lies in its ability to contextualize: to apply methods or insights from one subfield to evidence conventionally assumed to be part of another one (e.g., using the history of gender to think about labor history); to tie together two scholarly literatures that have seldom interacted (say, intellectual history and the history of physical culture); or to use new or unorthodox sources to rethink where a particular figure or event fits into the broader landscape.
This Is Our Message does all that, but it also succeeds on another level: it successfully challenges a conventional way of thinking about the politics of gender that treats non-feminist or anti-feminist women as incomprehensible and deluded. Or, as Johnson says, "The widespread conflation of 'women's issues' with feminism erases the concerns of conservative women, making their political commitments seem impossible or ironic despite a long history of conservative women's activism" (128).
Johnson's intentness on understanding women like Beverly LaHaye, Anita Bryant, and Sarah Palin (among others) on their own terms can be read in a number of ways. The worst way is to read the book as an apology for/defense of anti-feminism (which is completely inaccurate). A slightly better way is--as one of the book's blurbers put it--that this book "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." But that is a far more functionalist reading of Johnson's argument than I think she intends: the point is not to figure out why white evangelical women vote the way they do but to understand what a vote for Donald Trump might mean to a white evangelical woman.
In other words, the book asks the question, "what is a woman's issue?" and accepts that women will answer that question in different ways. Some of those answers may objectively help men control women's behavior, but it does not immediately follow that those answers are merely foisted on women by men or are the result of ignorance or self-delusion. A "woman's issue" may be defined in ways that circumscribe or enclose women's authority within particular spheres or that create narrow conditions for the exercise of that authority. To put it tersely, for some women, "women's issues" do not have the goal of liberating women. However, that does not necessarily mean that the women involved are actively seeking the opposite--their goals are not to make women less powerful or more subservient. Instead, their definitions of what constitutes a woman's issue often have goals that face away from the liberation-submission axis: the point is not to gain or lose power vis-a-vis men but to assert authority over a particular issue or to make a place for greater participation within a particular domain of social or private life.
For instance, evangelical women have often defined children's education as a woman's issue by virtue of the woman's domestic duties and authority. Education can at times encompass a variety of issues for political activism, but it is more often limited in scope--for one thing, it is typically local rather than national.
One way of looking at this choice is to say that by defining education as a proper domain for women's political activism, women are ceding other domains--like city planning, say, or health care or monetary policy or diplomacy--to men, enabling them to monopolize the true centers of power. But that is not an accurate description of the reasons why women would make this choice. Their objective is not to give up power, to strengthen men's control over them, or to diminish their own authority overall.
Where the problem lies, then, is not necessarily in an objective analysis of the overall situation. One can hold onto one's feminist presuppositions about patriarchal power and how it works: any situation in which women's power and authority is circumscribed or can only be exercised selectively *does* objectively increase men's power over women. But the level at which that is true--an abstract and remote level--may seem relatively unimportant or even unrelated to a woman's concrete decision about her individual actions. For her, the power she gains by, say, speaking up at a school board meeting or by running for city council or by making her marriage stronger is a real gain, and a worthwhile one. Moreover, that gain exists separately from considerations of a struggle between men and women over power--at least at the level that the woman may be analyzing the situation.
Thus, the problem lies in an insistence that the abstract level of analysis is the only valid one, that the evangelical woman's reasoning is deficient or ignorant or, at best, incomprehensible simply because it eschews that general level of the overall struggle of men and women for power. The actions of conservative anti-feminists or non-feminists will continue to bedevil and elude their feminist critics so long as their decisions are evaluated from that abstract level and their own level of reasoning is brushed away as ipso facto invalid.
This Is Our Message does all that, but it also succeeds on another level: it successfully challenges a conventional way of thinking about the politics of gender that treats non-feminist or anti-feminist women as incomprehensible and deluded. Or, as Johnson says, "The widespread conflation of 'women's issues' with feminism erases the concerns of conservative women, making their political commitments seem impossible or ironic despite a long history of conservative women's activism" (128).
Johnson's intentness on understanding women like Beverly LaHaye, Anita Bryant, and Sarah Palin (among others) on their own terms can be read in a number of ways. The worst way is to read the book as an apology for/defense of anti-feminism (which is completely inaccurate). A slightly better way is--as one of the book's blurbers put it--that this book "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." But that is a far more functionalist reading of Johnson's argument than I think she intends: the point is not to figure out why white evangelical women vote the way they do but to understand what a vote for Donald Trump might mean to a white evangelical woman.
In other words, the book asks the question, "what is a woman's issue?" and accepts that women will answer that question in different ways. Some of those answers may objectively help men control women's behavior, but it does not immediately follow that those answers are merely foisted on women by men or are the result of ignorance or self-delusion. A "woman's issue" may be defined in ways that circumscribe or enclose women's authority within particular spheres or that create narrow conditions for the exercise of that authority. To put it tersely, for some women, "women's issues" do not have the goal of liberating women. However, that does not necessarily mean that the women involved are actively seeking the opposite--their goals are not to make women less powerful or more subservient. Instead, their definitions of what constitutes a woman's issue often have goals that face away from the liberation-submission axis: the point is not to gain or lose power vis-a-vis men but to assert authority over a particular issue or to make a place for greater participation within a particular domain of social or private life.
For instance, evangelical women have often defined children's education as a woman's issue by virtue of the woman's domestic duties and authority. Education can at times encompass a variety of issues for political activism, but it is more often limited in scope--for one thing, it is typically local rather than national.
One way of looking at this choice is to say that by defining education as a proper domain for women's political activism, women are ceding other domains--like city planning, say, or health care or monetary policy or diplomacy--to men, enabling them to monopolize the true centers of power. But that is not an accurate description of the reasons why women would make this choice. Their objective is not to give up power, to strengthen men's control over them, or to diminish their own authority overall.
Where the problem lies, then, is not necessarily in an objective analysis of the overall situation. One can hold onto one's feminist presuppositions about patriarchal power and how it works: any situation in which women's power and authority is circumscribed or can only be exercised selectively *does* objectively increase men's power over women. But the level at which that is true--an abstract and remote level--may seem relatively unimportant or even unrelated to a woman's concrete decision about her individual actions. For her, the power she gains by, say, speaking up at a school board meeting or by running for city council or by making her marriage stronger is a real gain, and a worthwhile one. Moreover, that gain exists separately from considerations of a struggle between men and women over power--at least at the level that the woman may be analyzing the situation.
Thus, the problem lies in an insistence that the abstract level of analysis is the only valid one, that the evangelical woman's reasoning is deficient or ignorant or, at best, incomprehensible simply because it eschews that general level of the overall struggle of men and women for power. The actions of conservative anti-feminists or non-feminists will continue to bedevil and elude their feminist critics so long as their decisions are evaluated from that abstract level and their own level of reasoning is brushed away as ipso facto invalid.
June 3, 2024
stellar! Johnson's passion for the topic shines through her writing so clearly. fantastic, informative, digestible.
December 8, 2024
Great political and religious history of important female leaders and conservative pioneers!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews