The Faithful Citizen: Popular Christian Media and Gendered Civic Identities (review)

An unfortunate divide exists between American evangelical Christians and the mainstream academy. Academics too easily adhere to crude stereotypes of evangelicals that are very much congruent with Clarence Darrow's infamous description of his religious opponents as "bigots" and "ignoramuses." Likewise, evangelicals too easily adhere to crude stereotypes of academics as benighted, darkened, and antithetical to faith and virtue.

Increasingly common, fortunately, has been the appearance of both academic and popular work that can help to bridge this gap in cognition and credibility. In so doing, such work can provide not only a greater understanding of the significance of religious rhetoric in civic life, but also a more nuanced sense of how religious voices can play an edifying role in a pluralistic and democratic society. Kristy Maddux's The Faithful Citizen is a clear example of work that engages these theoretical tasks and engages them quite well.

Maddux's primary purpose is to probe the contemporary confluences of gender, religious (particularly Christian) faith, mediated popular culture texts, and frameworks for understanding civic identity and civic engagement. She is "concerned with broader questions of Christian ideals of gender and civic participation," and particularly with "the role that entertainment media play in articulating those ideals" (xii). She presumes, correctly, that mediated and explicitly religious popular culture texts—as themselves modes of symbolic action—function in a sociocultural and generative sense to shape and reinforce community-shared understandings of the nature of religious faith and the natures of religious and civic identity. She seeks to show not only how these understandings are built and reified in these types of public texts, but also how particular and underlying constructions and arrangements of gender drive the "logic" behind these symbolically constructed understandings.

The book is organized primarily as a series of case studies. Its five analytical chapters feature close textual analyses of rhetorically significant and religiously inflected popular culture texts: the 2007 film Amazing Grace, which showcases the accomplishments of British abolitionist William Wilberforce; Mel Gibson's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ; Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's wildly successful Left Behind novels, which portray the world in tribulation in the years immediately preceding the return of Christ; the religion-themed 7th Heaven cable television series, which premiered in 1996 and ran for ten seasons; and Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, along with the subsequent film that it inspired. In each of these chapters, Maddux illustrates how the text showcases a distinct rhetorical topography in which gender, religious faith, and norms for civic participation interact.

Maddux's analysis of Amazing Grace, for instance, makes a case for how an important example of radical social activism is framed in ways that both appeal to conservative American evangelicals and help them to justify their own public policy goals, particularly with respect to abortion and homosexuality. In her view, the film advances a "genteel masculinity" that implicitly casts intellectualism, rationality, and strategic persuasion as both essential to social change and as exclusively masculine domains. The film's portrayal thus neglects, even erases, female agency and political accomplishment. The film also advances a congruent portrait of "prophetic" political activism as the preferred mode of civic engagement, in which positive social change is achieved by accepting the stark and easily identifiable line between right and wrong, and by then summoning the courage to act tenaciously and indefatigably in the service of the former.

This sharp contrast between right and wrong—between good and evil—is shared in the portrayal of civic engagement offered in the Left Behind series, which follows a group of Christians, all of whom came to the faith after the "rapture" of the Church (as conceptualized in premillennial dispensational theology) out of this world, and who battle the forces of the Antichrist in the years immediately prior to the return of Christ. The preferred mode of action, though, is not reason and sustained public advocacy, but violence. [End Page...