In Righteous Rhetoric, Leslie Dorrough Smith, Avila University Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, explores the rhetorical structure and content used by Concerned Women for America (CWA) in its public statements. Founded by Beverly LaHaye—wife of Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series—in 1979 as a conservative Christian counterpoint to feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women, CWA resisted the Equal Rights Amendment of the late 1970s, battled legal abortion in the 1980s, and was a combatant in the “culture wars” of the 1990s. Today, the CWA claims to be the largest women's group in the United States with hundreds of thousands of supporters and a multi-million dollar budget. Because of CWA's status as one of the heavyweight organizations of the Religious Right and its continued relevance in twenty-first century cultural battles, Smith identifies the organization as being of “particular interest” for scholars of religion and American culture (19).

Righteous Rhetoric analyzes “how a type of speech that [Smith] call[s] chaos rhetoric is used by CWA to transform public religious talk about sex, gender, and reproductive issues into a powerful political engine that portrays conservative Christian norms as mainstream American values” (5). Through an introduction and five chapters, Smith explores the implications of chaos rhetoric as “a type of declension speech that attempts to persuade an audience by stressing an imminent threat to a beloved entity” (5). In the introduction, Smith outlines how conservative Christians, especially protestant women, in the twentieth century developed a specific pattern of chaos rhetoric that framed changing women's roles in society—from women's suffrage in the first quarter of the century to the sexual revolution of the 1960s—as a threat to the “beloved entity” of an idealized unity of family and the nation (5).

Like their predecessors in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the women associated with CWA argue that aberrant sexuality, nontraditional gender roles, and immigration threaten American families and, by extension, the nation. The book's three core chapters use close readings of the organization's press releases, fundraising pleas, and email blasts to explore how CWA uses rhetorical tropes of disorder and fear to naturalize certain conservative assumptions about gender, sex, and family in the United States. For instance, chapter three documents recent cultural battles over the word “feminism.” Smith demonstrates how CWA's chaos rhetoric oscillates between condemning feminists as “psychologically damaged” “lesbians” who see gender oppression where there is none (114) and appropriating the phrase “true feminism” to describe the cultural mission of conservative, Christian women (120–121).

The final chapter provocatively compares CWA's chaos rhetoric with the rhetoric used by two prominent liberal advocacy groups: the National Organization for Women and People for the American Way. Smith uncovers the “striking similarities” in the rhetoric used by all three organizations to “create a heightened sense of social chaos and threat” through the deployment of “themes of nation, logic, populism, and science” (172). This conclusion prompts Smith to assess recent scholarship on the Christian Right to consider the ways academics similarly deploy subtle forms of chaos rhetoric to persuade their readers that the Religious Right represents an anti-intellectual, bigoted, and anti-democratic current in contemporary culture. Smith's point is not to dismiss existing scholarship or to call for greater levels of “objectivity” (187). Rather, she challenges scholars to recognize that their discourse is “simply a product of culture . . . An awareness of the politics that shape the classificatory exercises essential to the scholarly enterprise thus allows scholars themselves to reflexively question the source of their own perspectives, positions, and presumptions” (187).

Theoretically, Righteous Rhetoric builds on the critical tradition of religious studies favored by Bruce Lincoln and Russell McCutcheon. Smith synthesizes this perspective with a range of critical cultural theories—Michel Foucault's concepts of discourse and biopolitics; Judith Butler's interrogation of the social and psychological microfunctions of power and gender; and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Smith draws these critical models together to consider the embodied, emotional function of chaos rhetoric as it works to create salient social boundaries between “good” Christian women and “dangerous” feminists, and generally works to construct ethical hierarchies between contesting cultural forces.

Although Righteous Rhetoric outlines a helpful framework for reading CWA's literature, it is worth noting that Smith focuses most of her critical gaze on material produced in the Internet era. Consequently, much of her rhetorical analysis fails to consider the mounds of mailers, published papers, and printed ephemera that CWA distributed before the late 1990s. Likewise, Smith cares little for illuminating the inner workings or the organizational structure of CWA. One is left to wonder how organizational pressures—for example, maintaining the group's nonprofit tax-exempt status or managing the strong-willed personalities behind its endless stream of public statements—helped shape the chaos rhetoric studied by Smith.

These limitations aside, Smith's text does a service for scholars studying the intersection of religion, gender, and politics in twentieth-century U.S. culture. First, CWA is an oft-invoked organization that rarely draws sustained scholarly consideration. Smith's extensive attention to the organization's publications and public statements make the text notable. Second, her attention to the critical turn in religious studies is an especially useful supplement for students of American religious history. Of the many excellent recent historical monographs on the development of the Religious Right, few exhibit the sustained interdisciplinary interest in religious studies, gender studies, and cultural theory synthesized by Smith. Her writing is lucid and serves as an engaging introduction to such notoriously difficult cultural theorists as Foucault, Butler, and Kristeva. Finally, although short and begging for further development, Smith's closing comparison of ostensibly “conservative” and “liberal” organizations and her critical comments on recent historical studies of the Religious Right should prompt productive debate and reflexive introspection about the rhetorical strategies scholars use to shape their narratives and persuade their readers.