A comprehensive study of evangelical magazine discourse during the 1970s and 1980s and how it navigated and sustained religious convictions in a time of dramatic social change
The 1970s and 1980s were a tumultuous period in US history. In tandem with a dramatic political shift to the right, evangelicalism also entered the public discourse as a distinct religious movement and was immediately besieged by cultural appropriations and internal fragmentations. Americans in general and evangelicals in particular grappled with issues and ideas such as feminism, abortion, birth control, and restructuring traditional roles for women and the family. During this time, there was a surge in readership for evangelical periodicals such as Christianity Today, Moody Monthly, Eternity, and Post-Americans/Sojourners as well as the feminist newsletter Daughters of Sarah.
While each of these magazines—and other publications and media—contributed to and participated in the overall dissemination of evangelical ideology, they also had their own outlooks and political leanings concerning hot-button issues. In Evangelical News: Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, Anja-Maria Bassimir presents a nuanced view of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century through the lens of the movement’s own media.
Bassimir argues that community can be produced in discourse, especially when shared rhetoric, concepts, and perspectives signal belonging. To accomplish this, Evangelical News traces the emergence of evangelical social and political awareness in the 1970s to the height of its power as a political program. The chapters investigate such topics as how evangelicals reenvisioned gender norms and relations in light of the feminist movement, the use of childhood as a symbol of unspoiled innocence, and the place of evangelicals as political actors.
Anja-Maria Bassimir is assistant professor in American studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She is coeditor of Religious Periodicals and Publishing in Transnational Contexts: The Press and the Pulpit.
“This impressively researched study offers important correctives to common understandings of evangelical discourse, particularly regarding the key political initiatives of the religious right. Evangelicals’ increasingly reliable voting behavior has often been mistaken as an indication of the movement’s homogeneity. Bassimir demonstrates that within the pages of evangelical periodicals, evangelicals hashed out a number of competing views on feminism, abortion, reproductive technologies, and political involvement itself.” —Seth Dowland, author of Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right
“Evangelical News makes a much needed contribution to our understanding of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century. Grounded in a deep reading of evangelical magazines from the 1970s and 1980s, it provides a nuanced picture of a religious subculture that is often misunderstood.” —John Schmalzbauer, author of People of Faith: Religious Conviction in American Journalism and Higher Education
