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

The Faithful Citizen is an intertextual analysis of the ways in which Christian-themed popular media texts model forms of civic participation for Christian viewers. Kristy Maddux pays close attention to the construction and deployment of gender in each of her major case studies, which include films, a popular Christian fiction series, and a hit family television show. Breaking from the social scientific model of analyzing faith-based civic participation through measured reception studies, Maddux uses rhetorical criticism as well as feminist theory and close textual analysis to find “five conflicted images of civic engagement with five different ideologies of gender, which, taken together, suggest the richness of contemporary ideals of civic participation” (6). To Maddux, these models of civic participation include narrow definitions of citizenship, shifting impulses between moral reform and social justice, and the influence of new media in making visible new ways of participating in civic life (6–7).

Maddux organizes her book around media texts and their corresponding notions of gendered civic participation. Amazing Grace (chapter two) illustrates “genteel masculinity” in William Wilberforce’s fight for abolition; The Passion of the Christ (chapter three) models “feminine submission” and valorizes suffering, while blurring the lines between liberation theology and perceived (white) victimhood; Left Behind (chapter four) idealizes “brutish masculinity” in the novel’s apocalyptic setting; 7th Heaven (chapter five) depicts the Camden family’s “feminine charity,” suggesting that faith communities can (and should) provide for the welfare needs of their neighbours when the federal government cannot; and The DaVinci Code (chapter six) depicts “civic nonparticipation,” or the relegation of human sexuality and religious faith to the private sphere. Maddux’s final chapter explores the limitations and implications of each model of gendered participation for other identity categories, such as race.

It is important to note that Maddux does not treat these texts as repositories of “ideas” but, rather, as texts that “construct, disseminate, and popularize these ideologies and identities” (24). Maddux seeks to identify what these texts “do in their social world, not simply what they mean about their social world” (24). By performing close readings and parsing out the various conventions at work, Maddux not only makes notions of gendered civic participation explicit but also legible to readers.

One example of this kind of legibility is found in Maddux’s chapter about The DaVinci Code where she clearly deciphers how gender, religion, and “civic nonparticipation” intersect in a popular text, which many leaders of Christian denominations viewed as being radically feminist. While The DaVinci Code’s historical narrative and surface-level plot celebrate “the sacred feminine,” Maddux contends that its focus on women’s capacity to engage in heterosexual reproduction and motherhood is made “at the expense of any other feminine qualities” (160). Rather than being a true feminist text, Maddux argues, The DaVinci Code presents a model of “civic nonparticipation” that leads The DaVinci Code into “a celebration of the private sphere, which has more affinity with the conservative moral reform tradition than any feminist platform” (160). By demonstrating how sexuality is linked to the privatization of reproduction, Maddux makes an interesting argument about how heterosexuality and motherhood become “the natural [expression] of faithfulness” and a form of civic “nonparticipation” that is relegated to the private sphere.

The strength of Maddux’s argument lies in the project’s intertextuality. By choosing an archive of texts that span both medium and genre, Maddux covers important ground. The historical, political, social, and theoretical contexts she intertwines throughout each chapter connect material and discursive realities in ways that either capture important debates or speak back to them in important ways. And Maddux cogently depicts how ideas about Christian civic participation, gender, and popular media are woven together to create a story about what kinds of bodies and behaviours make someone a true “citizen.” However, feminist readers might be critical of the ways in which Maddux privileges gender over other important identity markers. Maddux’s incorporation of race in...