Recent scholarship on the Christian right has centered on the movement's origins. Scholars such as Darren Dochuk, Kevin Kruse, Matthew Sutton, and Daniel Williams have documented a long history of evangelical political activism in the early and middle part of the twentieth century preceding the emergence of the Christian right on the national stage in the late 1970s. While not disputing this history, Seth Dowland's new book, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right, returns to the final three decades of the twentieth century to ask why “family values” came to hold such a prominent place in modern American evangelicalism.
Considering themselves “custodians of morality” (17), evangelicals believed that the family unit was central to a functioning society. Prominent conservative evangelicals crafted a “family-values” agenda that emphasized opposition to gay rights, feminism, and abortion, while supporting the proliferation of private Christian schools, homeschooling, and the military. It was this agenda that created the strong bond between evangelicalism and political conservatism, and as a result the Republican Party incorporated family-values language into their platforms.
Family Values is a flowing synopsis on the rise of the Christian right. Rather than asking what particular event was the catalyst for the emergence of the Christian right, Dowland's strength is that he incorporates multiple figures and events into a single unified argument, that of the evangelical “family-values” agenda, making previously conflicting arguments part of the same narrative. Further, Dowland nuances older debates and adds new arguments. The textbook fight in Kanawha County in the mid-1970s was not just the result of the urban–rural divide. Showing that considerable sympathy for the anti-textbook movement came from the suburbs, Dowland argues that parental rights, gender roles, and opposition to social history's critique of the American past were also central to the textbook backlash.
Family Values is split into three sections centered on education, motherhood, and masculinity. Dowland argues that while the rise of Christian schools in the South started as a response to desegregation, evangelicals came to view public schools as secular institutions that allowed students to challenge authority and question gender norms. Further, the perceived failure of public schools amongst conservative evangelicals drove support for the homeschooling movement. Despite the movement originating out of the anti-establishment left, it would ultimately become controlled by conservative evangelicals by the turn of the twenty-first century.
Motherhood became central in defining Christian right activism. Pro-life activists framed abortion as an assault on motherhood, in part because abortion made child rearing a matter of choice rather than women's primary role in society. Similarly, conservative evangelical activists framed their opposition to gay rights as a threat to the family, describing gay men as praying on children and shirking their family duties. Motherhood gave evangelical women the authority to become politically active. In the discussion of Anita Bryant's well-publicized anti-gay crusade in the late 1970s, Dowland notes of Bryant that “as a mother, she could become an activist” (168).
Masculinity became fundamental to conservative evangelicals. This explains in part how conservative evangelicals came to embrace Ronald Reagan, who despite perceived moral failings (previously divorced, a Hollywood movie star, passed a Therapeutic Abortion Law as governor of California), “presented himself as an aggressive, red-blooded American man” (177). Evangelicals became some of the standard bearers for the American military in the post-Vietnam era, and stood against multiple mainline churches in supporting Reagan's opposition to a nuclear freeze, deepening the relationship between conservative evangelicals and the Republican Party.
Dowland persuasively demonstrates the pervading influencing of family-values rhetoric. Numerous scholars have noted that in spite of its rise, the Christian right has lost many of its battles on gay rights, abortion, and school prayer. However, as Dowland notes, conservatives have succeeded in defining family values in national political discourse, with evangelicals playing a “key role in shifting the political battleground from equal rights to family values” (10). From today's vantage point, Dowland is correct, as both major political parties focus their attention on working families. In doing so, Family Values offers an important corrective to the rise-and-decline narrative of some Christian right scholarship. While one might question Dowland's lack of emphasis on race at the expense of gender, this is a highly readable and engaging perspective on the Christian right. Moving through the key figures and events, Family Values challenges and incorporates many of the older debates into a persuasive narrative that should engage both scholars and the general public.
