Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right

By now, the language of “family values” has become commonplace in national politics. But where did this discourse emerge? How did it connect disparate issues of work, education, fiscal policy, gender, and sexuality? And why did it succeed in a time of dramatic religious and political change in the nation? Seth Dowland answers these questions in his engaging and accessible history of family values, a political language and ethos that helped knit evangelical Christians and the Republican party together from the 1960s to the 1990s. Dowland cleverly divides his book into three sections: “Children,” “Mothers,” and “Fathers,” a structure that highlights how the religious Right politicized these three components of the “traditional family.” It also provides a chronological framework for the book. Evangelical political activism, Dowland argues, originated in the education realm in the 1960s. Alarmed by Supreme Court decisions outlawing prayer and Bible reading in public schools, conservative evangelicals transferred their children to private Christian schools or launched their own homeschools. Others battled against “secular humanist” textbooks and curricula they believed the secular state had imposed on public education. Whether rejecting or seeking to reform public schools, these activists all drew from the language of family values to defend their efforts. In the book's best section, Dowland shows how evangelical beliefs about the family as divinely ordained and the model of proper authority figured in debates over education. Public schools undermined parental authority by teaching students critical thinking skills (rather than rote memorization, which reinforced facts as truth) that conservatives argued would lead children to question their parents’ religious faith and values. Sex education robbed parents of the right to instruct their children on the most intimate matters. Christian schools and homeschooling, conversely, affirmed parental authority, especially the male headship of the family, in their curricula and institutional culture, and used science, history, and even math lessons to emphasize conservative gender roles and the patriarchal family

Christian right · Ethos · Family values · Political science · Politics · Realm · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Law

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