On the side of angels: Redemption, race and gender in the politics of the Christian Right.

Abstract

This dissertation employs narrative analysis to penetrate the race-ed and gendered meanings that animate the stories of the Christian Right. I locate the stories in the publications produced by key organizations: Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council, Christian Voice, and Christian Coalition. The Christian Right is approached as a social movement legitimately engaged in pursuing political change. Additionally, I periodize the movement into two waves of social movement activity. The First Wave dates from 1979--1989, during which the Christian Right oriented around a national political agenda. The Second Wave dates from 1990--1996, during which the Christian Right reoriented to the grassroots and added local concerns to the movement agenda. The major finding is that the movement is guided by a narrative structured around a doubled meaning of redemption. In its first meaning, the narrative focuses on saving the nation and the family from the consequences of immorality. Gender figures most prominently here. In the second meaning, the narrative focuses on recovering the nation and the family to an imagined prior state of grace. Race figures most prominently in this second meaning. Gender and race structure the narrative by providing hierarchical templates for the desired moral order of the movement. An additional contribution of this dissertation is the use of narrative analysis in the study of a prominent social movement. I argue that attending to the stories of social movements extends our ability to penetrate movement culture and to better understand the cultural materials made available to movement participants.