Evangelicalism

White evangelical culture is investigated here regarding the ways that its fundamental theological beliefs propagate and maintain patriarchal assumptions surrounding women. These beliefs further function to legitimate men’s sexual abuse of women and girls. While official theological evangelical beliefs may seem benign, and perhaps commendable to some, a closer examination suggests the mobilization of those beliefs create the foundation for enslavement and destruction of women. The fundamental beliefs undergirding evangelicalism propagate internalized oppression through patriarchal colonialism of women’s bodies, minds, and souls. Tactics of spiritual rape within White evangelical purity culture enact violence, control, and manipulation to appropriate and profit from the sacred power within the spirit of another.
My analysis of #ChurchToo tweets demonstrates how formerly-evangelical women exorcize internalized patriarchal identities by reversing patriarchal myths, reclaiming, renaming and becoming Holy Haggard Hags who enact Righteous Fury through the Rage of Dreadful Women. Through the process of renaming and reclaiming, the confiscated and distorted power of the four Great Hags of Our Hidden History are recovered. The Myth of Evil Eve becomes “Ezer Kěnegdô,” Bathsheba the Innocent Lamb dethrones King David, Jezebel returns as a Confident, Clever, and Powerful Woman and her Spirit exorcises Satan’s Agents and Devouring Wolves, and Tamar the Trickster reappears as a Prophetess, with gifts to symbolize the collective power of sisterhood.

This thesis examines the way several evangelical Christian universities (and evangelicalism more broadly) speak about and conceive of sexuality and gender in order to consider implications for their students. It argues that these universities consider nonheterosexual, non-cisgendered identities to be incompatibile with Christian identity and, consequently, grounds for denial of subjectivity. It analyzes the language of student handbooks and the universities’ rhetorical self-positionings and stagings necessary to maintain authority while engaging and exploring the lived experiences of several queeridentifying alumni—each of whom express feelings of “dehumanization” and cognitive dissonance. Finally, it considers how those subjected to messages of incompatible identities reconcile claiming both Christian and queer identities simultaneously.

What began as an intra-church religious struggle by conservative evangelicals to defend the inerrancy of the Bible and the establishment of prophetic doctrines, after initial great success, expanded into secular culture and confrontations with liberalism in many of its forms, such as the teaching of evolution in public schools and the use of alcohol in society. Fundamentalists, however, could not compete with the intellectual persuasiveness and political power of either prominent liberal theologians, or the secular advocates of modernism. As an act of survival, fundamentalists terminated their confrontations with secular liberalism and withdrew from mainstream Protestant denominations. They organized strong independent churches and, more importantly, established numerous colleges, seminaries, and publishing houses, in order to insure that their conservative message would continue to be instilled in the hearts and minds of the American public, especially the young.

Scholars of southern Jewish history maintain that ante-bellum southerners displayed genuine philo-Semitism towards their Jewish neighbors. Historians attribute this to the southern Jews "effort to assimilate into southern society and to the presence of other, more preferred, targets of the southerners" animus, namely blacks and Catholics. This analysis, however, is not sufficiently broad to explain the South's Protestant-Jewish dynamic. It neither appraises the relationship from the perspective of the Protestants, nor accounts for the intellectual inconsistencies such a conclusion presents regarding both Protestants and southerners, generally. This thesis identifies and responds to these shortcomings by examining southern philo-Semitism through the eyes of the Protestants and thesis argues that pro-Judaic rhetoric of southern evangelical clergy inundated southerners with favorable references and images of the biblical Jews, causing southerners to develop a high degree of reverence and respect for Jews, whom they saw as their spiritual kinfolk.

There are several competing theoretical explanations for why Pentecostal Protestantism is growing rapidly in Latin America including affinities with the indigenous religions of the region, a recent increase in the supply of Pentecostalism due to missionary movements, a reduction in government regulation of religion, social anomie theory, and the pull of economic upward mobility through conversion. This study analyses the growth of Pentecostal Protestantism in the case of Mexico, utilizing state by state comparative data measuring these variables. While higher percentages of indigenous residents are correlated significantly with Pentecostal growth, government regulation and supply are less so. Social anomie and economic upward mobility are not conducive to studying in minute detail but on a larger scale seem to serve as broad explanations for Pentecostal growth. Theories explaining Pentecostal growth should be revised to reflect these convergent factors and focus on the reasons for the divergent growth patterns.