RELIGION / HISTORY / MEDIA STUDIES
An comprehensive study of evangelical magazine discourse during the 1970s and 1980s and how it sustained religious convictions
Evangelical News Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s Anja-Maria Bassimir
MAY 6 x 9 / 392 PAGES / 28 B&W FIGURES ISBN 978-0-8173-2124-6 / $59.95s CLOTH ISBN 978-0-8173-9400-4 / $59.95 EBOOK “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
Religion & American Culture ALSO OF INTEREST Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home Hilde Løvdal Stephens ISBN: 978-0-8173-2033-1 $49.95s CLOTH EBOOK AVAILABLE
16 Spring 2022
The 1970s and 1980s were a tumultuous period in United States history. In suit 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. This was also a time when Americans in general and evangelicals in particular grappled with issues and ideas such as feminism, legal abortion, and restructuring traditional roles for women and the family. During this time, there was a diversification as well as surge of 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—contributes to and participates in the overall dissemination of evangelical ideology, they all also have their own outlooks and political leanings when it comes to hot-button issues. In Evangelical News: Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s Anja-Maria Bassimir presents, through a thoroughly researched lens, a better understanding of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century and provides a nuanced picture of a religious subculture that is too often reduced to caricature. 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 and the use of childhood as a symbol of unspoiled innocence and the pure potential of humanity.
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.
