Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right by Seth Dowland (review)

Few historians of religion in the United States have not, at one time or another, been asked to explain the rise of the Christian Right as a political force in America. For as much gnashing of teeth as consecutive victories for George W. Bush occasioned among the generally liberal membership of the American academy, those who specialize in accounting for and contextualizing developments in American religious history benefited immensely from the movement that put Bush in the White House. Syllabi were drafted, conferences papers and dissertations were proposed and written, and centers were funded and refunded all because what had long been apparent to students of religion in America was suddenly undeniable: religion matters in American public life. In teaching about the rise of the Religious Right, scholars have long turned to William Martin’s With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York, 1996) for an account of the early years of the movement, the disparate parts that came together to form it, the causes, the concerns, the hypocrisies, and the small victories that moved the Religious Right toward political power.

In Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right, author Seth Dowland takes readers over much of the same ground covered by Martin, but from a perspective that differs in two main ways. First, as the title indicates, Dowland focuses on the way that advocacy for “the family values agenda” became the defining characteristic of the movement (p. 19). He also describes the political work that the simple phrase was able to do. Dowland shows how a neutral, indeterminate concept came to have such a specific political meaning and such enormous emotional and normative force. He argues that in the political arena, the phrase retained enough confessional ambiguity that participants in the movement, from leaders to the rank and file, could rally around “family values” in spite of religious, economic, and cultural backgrounds that were often quite different. One of the enduring paradoxes of the Christian Right in America is its professed commitment to limited government and its simultaneous full-throated support for interventions in American homes, in American beds, and in female bodies. The movement’s commitment to family values and its near univocal insistence that these values are biblical, the bedrock of American society, and under direct attack by both governmental and cultural forces go a long way toward explaining the Christian Right’s selectively laissez-faire philosophy.

Second, Dowland comes to this story at a different historical moment than William Martin did. In the early 1990s the Religious Right was quite influential but was still on the rise. In 2016 it was no longer clear that the family values dog can hunt. Five decades after being whelped in the Barry Goldwater campaign and fifteen years after its full political maturity, forces beyond the control of Pat Robertson, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, and even the Texas school book commission are creating American congregations and forging an American electorate less inclined to fear and/or hate those who identify as LGBTQ and far more comfortable with women who have been successful in careers outside the home. A quick glance at the major party nominees for president in 2016 reveals a lot about the current political leverage of the family values movement, at least on a national scale.

Dowland’s book, then, can be read both as history and as prelude to an autopsy. In the former regard it is sound, insightful, and accessibly written, covering the movement’s teachings and actions on children, women, and men. In the latter it suggests that the family values movement may be falling victim to the very truth it so long denied: that definitions of “family,” including the definition it deemed divine, are culturally conditioned and historically contingent.