Some Traditions are Worth Fighting For: Historiography of Family Values Politics

by Lauren Davis

In one of the earliest academic works surrounding modern evangelicalism, sociologist Robert Booth Fowler declared that “it was in the year 1976 that America discovered the evangelicals” as many people in the political sphere became open about their affiliation to the religious movement.^[1] His publication, A New Engagement: Evangelical Political Thought, 1966-1976, argues that this rise forced Americans to become aware of evangelicalism, even if they did not properly understand it yet. His book acts as a detailed explanation of evangelical thought on individual and group levels, trying to enlighten his readers not only on a group that was becoming pervasive in everyday life, but also to hopefully kickstart scholarship on the subject as he felt the field lacked substance on the subject. This conviction led to Fowler writing twelve chapters with multiple subheadings to explain different aspects of evangelicalism.

His chapters contain interesting titles to draw readers in, but chapter ten’s “The Family Under Attack” directs his studies to an important part of evangelical culture: family values. Although Fowler’s book made distinctions between conservative and liberal evangelicals, this portion leans more towards the former as that group “[claimed] their concern was to defend the private family and Christain norms against the larger, public, secular world” in the wake of sexual revolution and the civil rights movement.^[2] Evangelical conservatives sought to uphold their ideas of traditional family life and used their recent emergence in the political field to cement their beliefs into laws and regulations.

Family values politics were distinct from other evangelical aspects not only because of their active presence in legislative ideology, but also in how the idea itself spanned back farther than the modern idea of evangelicalism formed. The decades following the 1960s and leading into the late 1990s would become the most well-known era for this rhetoric, but the earliest version resembling the contemporary form had been around since World War I.^[3] These budding evangelical conservatives defined their actions in defense of morals founded in Christian texts. Although the United States had no national religion, codified words in important documents like the Declaration of Independence influenced evangelicals to keep religion close in the political sphere.^[4] Before the idea had a name, it had people in government positions who influenced rules based on their beliefs.

A New Engagement being one of the first to discuss family values politics in 1982 is surprising given the ideology’s rich history, but many people have since written on the subject in both broad and specific terms. Ruth Murray Brown’s For a “Christian America” from 2002 begins with tales of women fighting against the Equal Rights Amendments’ passage and how many “moved on to oppose other perceived threats to the Bible-based family” at the same time.^[5] Although the title of her book suggests a broader overview into evangelical conservatism, her analysis focuses largely on their crusade in family values politics. The twenty year difference between Fowler’s and Brown’s works shows that the former’s hope of more scholarship on evangelicalism came true as the latter had enough resources to construct an entire book around this narrative.

Broad titles like Seth Dowland’s Family Values, Arlene S. Skolnick’s Embattled Paradise, and Robert O. Self’s All in the Family convey similar interest into evangelical conservatism and family values politics, covering multiple aspects at once.^[6] All books analyze deeper into aspects that evangelical conservatives feared would affect their families, like the aforementioned sexual revolution and civil rights movement and other topics such as LGBT+ rights, capitalism, and feminism. Those who pushed for family values politics viewed all of these ideas as public attacks on their idea of morality and thus needed to be eradicated through government action.

Some specific works seem to not fit in family values politics literature on the surface, but actually contribute a significant amount of information thanks to the many categories that encompass the subject. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood by Kristin Luker does not mention the phrase “family values” once, yet her discussion of how the government got involved in defining motherhood and how traditional families held themselves to certain expectations and morals makes her work an early definer in the scholarship.^[7] Luker and others who write with similar specificity may not be speaking to family values politics directly, but their subjects correlate with certain core tenants of the discipline. These particular titles are simply expansions upon the multiple aspects covered in broader books, thus they should be considered to show the field’s development. Early sources like these from where the broader, more contemporary works drew their information.

All of these sources combine to tell the story of how family values politics defined and continues to define many aspects of American life. From gender, to schooling, to sexuality and the sexual revolution, firm believers in the traditional Christian family went through political avenues to maintain their power and influence over society. Although Fowler believes that Americans discovered evangelicals and their family values politics in 1976, various scholarly works either inform their readers of the rich history prior to that year or exist in opposition as they describe decades-long debates commonly ascribed to this political group.

Gender is an important component to family values politics in both broad and specific academic books. Women’s liberation, according to Fowler, was “the most divisive within evangelicalism” out of other concerns.^[8] Evangelicals and other champions of family values politics feared the repercussions of women’s extended autonomy such as rights to divorce, more sexual freedoms, and generally more rights and recognition on the household ideology that they spent years crafting. The idea of equal rights threatened family values as they thrived on men being the breadwinners and women thriving in the domestic sphere of the home with cooking, cleaning, and childcare.

The broader books on family values contain entire sections dedicated to gender due to the aforementioned importance of the subject. Embattled Paradise: The American Family In An Age Of Uncertainty by Arlene S. Skolnick, written in 1991, is one of the earlier books to convey fears and questions about women’s liberation in family values politics. She describes how the 1950s emphasis on trying to have fun in parenting and contradictory advice from professionals “made parental success more elusive than in the past.”^[9] Anxiety around parenting alluded to the crumbling of traditional family life, which brought more fear around losing that idealized life.

Using interviews as a good portion of her source base, Brown’s For a “Christian America” discusses the opposing end of motherhood as conservative women felt joy in their specific duties. One of her interviewees, Ann Patterson, worked against the Equal Right Amendment’s passage in the 1970s and 1980s. She explained that “her view of what it means to be a woman was relevant to her opposition to the ERA” as she believed that men and women performed different tasks better than the other, thus women did not need to clamor for men’s positions in life.^[10] According to Brown, other women echoed her statement, confirming that they were comfortable with their jobs as women, housewives, and mothers. They believed that new laws would uproot the traditions and families that they worked hard to build.

Robert O. Self’s All in the Family tackles a similar antifeminism topic in relation to the family. He discusses how Phyllis Schlafly, one of antifeminism’s biggest activists, “portrayed the broad legislative agenda of feminists and other women’s advocates as both antifamily and a burden on beleaguered taxpayers.”^[11] She directly stated that women trying to achieve rights would break the family structure that tradition had long built up, thus those who believed in family values needed to rise to protect them. According to Self, she and other antifeminists berated women who did not conform to motherhood and participated in the workforce. Their family values emphasized child rearing as a woman’s main occupation and working outside of the home would disrupt the household organization.

Women’s association with children is what led to pro-life and pro-choice debates, chronicled in Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Published in 1985, Luker wrote in the middle of abortion “[moving] from the fringes of public concern to center stage” of politics.^[12] She explains the transformation from abortion being a private concern that no one talked about to a public issue requiring government intervention through the eyes of both pro-life and pro-choice advocates. Through retelling the history surrounding abortion, Luker hopes to explain the feelings surrounding both sides of the argument.

Her tie into family values politics is not direct, but her statements correspond with points made in Seth Dowland’s Family Values. Anti-abortion proponents explain many reasons for their stance often tied into morality, but some of it also deals with the traditional nuclear family structure. Their idea of women involved “[spending] most of their adult energies raising a family rather than pursuing paid employment” to the point where a textbook on marriage and family from the 1950s conveyed this stringent career path.^[13] Thus, the idea of a woman choosing to terminate her potential start to the foundation of her life threatened everything that traditional family champions held dear. Dowland confirms that “abortion made motherhood a matter of choice rather than destiny,” taking away a woman’s purpose in the family structure.^[14] The fear of the crumbling household dynamics among other moral issues contributed to the pro-choice outlook. Taking away a woman’s “destiny” to have children would make the family impossible, thus abortion is a family values issue.

In another case of specific works on gender, Michelle M. Nickerson’s Mothers of Conservatism focuses on women’s activism on the right primarily in the 1950s. While focusing on the anticommunism and antielitism of the movement, she explains that these women operated within their traditional roles. They “made the domestic ideology guiding their family, social, and civic lives into political careers” by creating clubs for spreading information, campaigning for changes to school staff and curriculum for their children’s benefit, and pushed for a Christian morality resurgence in America.^[15] Conservative women leaned into their positions as mothers and housewives to push for family values in their respective spaces, spreading to government campaigns whenever political gains on the left threatened to destroy everything they knew. They led grassroots movements but stepped aside whenever men wanted to take over, emphasizing a woman’s role in submission to her male counterparts. The women’s actions in their campaigns mirrored the traditional family values that they promoted in their work. Their femininity and their motherhood guided how they operated in men’s spaces in an acceptable way.

As one of the pillars of motherhood was protecting the children, these conservative activists focused on another important tenant to family values politics: schooling and how to mold it to their desired educational standards. Nickerson takes an entire chapter to explain how one woman “used her position on the school board to fire and blacklist teachers” and how others utilized similar tactics to keep liberals out.^[16] Anticommunism continued to guide this particular movement as these mother activists believed that a progressive education meant socialist brainwashing. “Placing a high value on their moral and spiritual contributions to society,” these women saw those in their conservative circle as the only ones with qualifications to fight indoctrination.^[17] They believed that they knew what was best for their children to learn, so they navigated the school system to enforce their educational ideas on the curriculum.

The broader family values readings discuss the conservative struggle against liberal teachings with a wider scope. Although parents were worried about progressive education corrupting their children, some had complaints about the school system themselves. Brown inserted quotes from disgruntled parents who “remembered the schools of their youth and compared present-day schools unfavorably with them.”^[18] Public schools’ lack of religion was bad, but teachers not taking responsibility to constantly update parents on their child’s grades or counsel them on proper hygiene was almost just as sinful. These complaints would rise into further discussion and protest from those who felt public school neglected the family.

Dowland describes one of the solutions parents created to the public school problem. Evangelicals believed that “God had been kicked out of the public school classroom” with the court ruling banning mandatory prayer in classrooms, so they would find God elsewhere.^[19] Unlike the women who fought the public school system in Mothers of Conservatism, Family Values discusses those who fled and made their own private Christian schools. One such school described their advantages as “quality education, no drug problem, legal Bible reading and prayer, no hippies, and the teaching of patriotism.”^[20] These standards appealed to evangelicals, pushing them towards this kind of private schooling. With religious leaders at the helm of their child’s education, Christians felt assured that their children would be learning the proper family values.

Susan D. Rose’s Keeping Them out of the Hands of Satan: Evangelical Schooling in America expands upon the others’ schooling views as she solely focuses on education. She analyzes two separate schools with “different traditions within evangelicalism” but their determination for religious education and disdain for liberal public schools keeps them linked.^[21] Parents feared their children drifting away from God, so they made sure to center His word while they received formal education. Religion was important to family structure, so family values champions pushed for its incorporation everywhere they could.

Rose describes the school lives that teachers and students alike experienced in their religious education. She first establishes her two evangelical subjects: “a working-class, fundamentalist Baptist congregation” labeled as Lakehaven and “a middle-class, independent charismatic fellowship” labeled as Covenant.^[22] These distinctions were necessary early on so she could make adequate comparisons in their schooling. Covenant school demonstrated its dedication to family values starting with the teachers’ pay. Women did not earn as much as their male counterparts with the explanation that they “did not need to support families.”^[23] Even if the women were single, Covenant’s determination to maintain the traditional familial hierarchy kept the reasoning in place. Lakehaven functioned with low salaries to begin with, but their hiring process still showed a bias towards men. “Two of the three classrooms [were] run by a husband-wife team” where the husband took the leadership role while his wife had monitor duties.^[24] Their dual teaching system replicated the traditional family values that the parents at home practiced and preached. By laying women’s subordination into the foundations of the schools, Rose describes how these two Christian academies appealed to religious families seeking asylum from secular public schools.

Although Brown’s book counts as one of the more broader overviews, she makes important smaller arguments about schooling and sex education. “Christian conservatives believe that parents are the best ones to provide sex education for young people” primarily through abstinence through marriage and following their family values.^[25] Already distrusting of public schools, evangelicals did not want their children learning sex education that drifted away from the Bible and their own morals. They worried that teaching about contraceptives would lead to sex outside of marriage, and eventually to teen pregnancy.^[26] Not wanting to encourage these kinds of behaviors in their children, evangelicals pushed for sex education only within the home or at church. That way, they argued, religious leaders could counter the rising sexual revolution that was beginning to change the culture as they knew it.

Secular society threatened to change for the worse as it embraced the sexual revolution and sexualities outside of heterosexuality. Evangelicals primarily focused on women as their sexual liberty threatened the potential motherhood of their hypothetical families, but fathers had their own battles as well. Dowland describes how family values champions believed that “manhood required strength, wisdom, power, and virility,” all attributes that they refused to accept that gay men could possess.^[27] In their eyes, gay men could not fit their fatherly image not just because they will not date or marry women, but because of stereotypes directed at their masculinity. Members of the LGBT+ community threatened their family structure, so evangelicals took political avenues to try and keep them out of regular life. The pushed “a number of laws proscribing same-sex behavior and forbidden gay and lesbians from attaining certain occupations” to isolate them and keep them ostracized from society.^[28] Evangelicals fought through whatever means they could to make sure that homosexuality would not be accepted so they could protect their family structure.

Self also wrote about homosexuality in evangelical family values politics, especially as gay people began to fight for more right. The idea that “that sexual identity was the basis for personal authenticity and collective politics” liberated LGBT+ communities, but threatened straight couples who built their lives on the husband-wife nuclear family structure.^[29] What threatened them even more was LGBT+ activists trying to combat them on the political scene. When a Democratic politician was questioned about his anti-gay remarks, he admitted “that it had never occurred to him to consider homosexuals a political constituency.”^[30] This opinion was likely due to the effort of family values champions to silence the LGBT+ voice. However, as evangelicals would have to reckon with, the gay community would rise to fight against the norms they established.

Another rising movement that family values champions had to fight against was the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution encompassed a lot of the aforementioned sexuality ideas, but largely focused on throwing away the shackled of repression and behavior associated with conservative principles. Self talks about how, similar to sexuality, the sexual revolution “upended existing institutions and constraints, answering the first question required rethinking the state’s relationship to its newly sexualized citizens.”^[31] Women were wearing more revealing clothing and sleeping around, relationships were not automatically monogamous, and access to contraceptives and abortions was more widespread. All of these changes struck fear into the hearts of family values champions, as they thought they were witnessing the moral breakdown of society itself. “Antiliberalizing and antigovernment moral conservatives announced their presence on the American political landscape in the sex education fight” in one of the earliest steps in creating the evangelical conservatism platform.^[32] These future evangelicals entered politics to fight for their family values, refusing to let new definitions of morality corrupt their society.

Skolnick discusses the culture at large and the hallmarks that signaled to family values champions that the sexual revolution was coming. Traditionalists witnessed “startling new styles of hair, clothing, music, dance, and the widespread use of illegal drugs” which coincided with increasing sexual liberties.^[33] These changes became demonized by religious groups due to this association, believing that the youth would compromise their morals should they partake in any of the new styles. “In the late 1960s rates of premarital intercourse seemed to rise dramatically again” which further solidified family values champion’s fears of degrading societal principles.^[34] Premarital sex directly contradicted with expected family values, so evangelicals were quick to combat everything that belonged to the newly rising counterculture. If the youth embraced new styles and activities which led to avenues outside of the nuclear family, evangelicals would combat all associations with the sexual revolution.

However, as Amy DeRogatis explains in “What Would Jesus Do? Sexuality and Salvation in Protestant Evangelical Sex Manuals,” not every family values champion shunned the sexual revolution as long as it conformed to their standards. Evangelicals had their own sex manuals which catered to their beliefs and morals. “The images chosen to accompany the text are clinical” in nature, making sure to not focus on the body too much.^[35] Despite being conservative with the images, the texts discussed orgasms, bodily fluids, and how to make the most out of sex. As long as evangelicals considered the Bible’s teachings in their sexual relations, both partners could enjoy the intimacy.

The emphasis on husband and wife both enjoying sex was not always priority thanks to traditional family values. Post World War II, sex manuals represented the aforementioned anxiety around roles in the household. They prioritized men by defining sex as “heterosexual intercourse that leads to male orgasm,” placing any potential blame for not achieving that on his wife.^[36] As the male orgasm was the only thing required in starting a family, it was the only thing that mattered. Emphasis on men’s top place in the household also led to neglecting women during sex, as family values already pushed the idea that the wife must keep everything in the home as a welcoming place for the husband.

While fighting the sexual revolution, evangelicals were actively benefitting from its liberation in their manuals. Most of the publications were more so “marriage manuals” as they still primarily catered to relationships that fit their family values.^[37] Although these guides did not radically change their information or promotion of husband-wife relations, the market started to see more diversity in types of manuals. “Countless books… aimed at their sex-specific questions and needs” could act as study guides before a couple’s marriage and honeymoon or a husband and wife looking into the changes that the sexual revolution was promoting.^[38] Just how evangelicals promoted family values out of a love for their tradition and a belief that they had the right ideas on how to live, they carried the same thoughts about sex. Since they relied on the Bible and church teachings to guide their lives, they were the authority on all aspects of society including sexual intercourse.^[39] Those who did not live through God and structured their families like theirs were doomed to destroy society and corrupt their youth. The nuclear family with the husband in charge, the wife taking care of the household, and the children acting obedient was the only way for people to live.

When Fowler constructed his book to talk about evangelicalism’s growth through “contact with the broader culture” and its acceptances and stubborn denials of such changes, he was not aware that there was already a start in evangelical studies.^[40] His little chapter on evangelical’s family values would correlate to other scholarly works focused on abortion, feminism, sexuality, and other rising issues at the time. Academics like Luker and Rose did not label their books as chronicling family values’ defense, but any talk of pushback against things deemed immoral and damaging to the nuclear family entered their work in family values politics. Resistance to these rising ideas happened for many reasons, but one sneaky motive that always lingered at the back of their debates was the threat they posed to husband-wife dynamics and the overall structure of the household. Evangelicals held their traditions strong as the Bible commanded them to, so they would fight back against counterculture through obtaining positions of power and engaging in politics to systematically shut the cultural violators out.

After years of focusing on radical reformers and people who initiated change, scholars recently have begun to construct narratives of conservative movements. Skolnick, Brown, Self, and Dowland are just a few examples of historians who first recognized the potential in the smaller books and used them to construct their broader arguments. Nickerson and DeRogatis focused their studies on more specific issues, but they benefited from the same foundational texts and paid homage to family values’ influence on their subjects. Now, the field has an ever-growing collection of works specifically catered towards studying family values. Each one takes different approaches to studying the same movement, creating complex arguments and presenting forgotten evidence that help diversify the literature.

Even with their contributions, family values politics remains a relatively new field in need of varying perspectives. One glaring hole in nearly all of these works is the lack of race in analysis. Whenever the books mention race, it is often through evangelicals’ reaction to the civil rights movement. The scholars do not analyze much beyond their place in the counterculture, neglecting experiences unique to black evangelicals. Nonwhite evangelical conservatives existed, so analyzing their role would help broaden the field and give additional voice to scholarship’s forgotten faces. Analyzing nonwhite family values champions in conjunction with gender, sexuality, and capitalism can help broaden readers’ understanding of how society functions differently according to one’s race.^[41] Overall, focusing more on race’s impact is an excellent place for the field’s future.

Family values politics is a much larger field now than when Fowler wrote his book in 1982. Foundational texts have given way to excellent analysis and insight as to why evangelicals and other religious groups clung onto their traditions in the face of change. The current scholarship and the others to come are useful in explaining conservative involvement and goals in politics as they fight to enshrine their beliefs in law.

^[1] Robert Booth Fowler, A New Engagement: Evangelical Political Thought, 1966-1976 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 1.

^[2] Fowler, A New Engagement, 191.

^[3] Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 4; Arlene S. Skolnick, Embattled Paradise: The American Family In An Age Of Uncertainty (New York, N.Y., United States: Basic Books, 1991), 41.

^[4] Ruth Murray Brown, For a “Christian America”: History of the Religious Right (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 20.

^[5] Brown, For a “Christian America,” 16.

^[6] Dowland, Family Values; Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York, N.Y., United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012); Skolnick, Embattled Paradise.

^[7] Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1985).

^[8] Fowler, A New Engagement, 194.

^[9] Skolnick, Embattled Paradise, 70.

^[10] Brown, For a “Christian America,” 33.

^[11] Self, All in the Family, 283.

^[12] Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 1.

^[13] Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 113.

^[14] Dowland, Family Values, 114.

^[15] Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, N.J., United States: Princeton University Press, 2012), 14.

^[16] Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, 139.

^[17] Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, 110.

^[18] Brown, For a “Christian America,” 254.

^[19] Dowland, Family Values, 23.

^[20] Dowland, Family Values, 28.

^[21] Susan D. Rose, Keeping Them out of the Hands of Satan: Evangelical Schooling in America (Oxfordshire, England, U.K.: Routledge, 1988), 7.

^[22] Rose, Keeping Them out of the Hands of Satan, 3.

^[23] Rose, Keeping Them out of the Hands of Satan, 71.

^[24] Rose, Keeping Them out of the Hands of Satan, 114.

^[25] Brown, For a “Christian America,” 207.

^[26] Brown, For a “Christian America,” 208.

^[27] Dowland, Family Values, 157.

^[28] Dowland, Family Values, 159-60.

^[29] Self, All in the Family, 202.

^[30] Self, All in the Family, 214.

^[31] Self, All in the Family, 174.

^[32] Self, All in the Family, 183.

^[33] Skolnick, Embattled Paradise, 85.

^[34] Skolnick, Embattled Paradise, 87.

^[35] Amy DeRogatis, “What Would Jesus Do? Sexuality and Salvation in Protestant Evangelical Sex Manuals, 1950s to the Present.,” With Appendix: Works Consulted, Special Collections, Michigan State University 74, no. 1 (March 2005): 99.

^[36] DeRogatis, “What Would Jesus Do?” 103.

^[37] DeRogatis, “What Would Jesus Do?” 107.

^[38] DeRogatis, “What Would Jesus Do?” 110.

^[39] DeRogatis, “What Would Jesus Do?” 112.

^[40] Fowler, A New Engagement, 2.

^[41] Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of History (Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2016), 264.