Description
Book SynopsisThrough two years of ethnographic fieldwork at a megachurch, sociologist Sarah Diefendorf investigates the ways in which the evangelical church is working to grow during a time in which cultural shifts are leading young people to leave religion behind. In order to expand, the church has revisited topics long understood as external threats to the organization, such as feminism, gender equality, racial inclusivity, and queer lifetopics Diefendorf classifies as the imagined secular in the minds of evangelicals. The Holy Vote shows, however, that the church continues to uphold already privileged identities even as it reworks its messages to appear more welcoming, offering insight into how White evangelical understandings about sex and families have shaped a political movement that has helped remake the Republican Party and transform American politics. In this enlightening work, Diefendorf highlights the complex origins of these understandings and considers their intersections with contem
Trade Review"A keenly perceptive ethnographic study. . . . it should attract a wide range of readers, not just those interested in sociology of religion or White evangelicals, but anyone interested in the endurance of social inequalities." * Social Forces *
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
1. Good and Godly in Trump’s America
2. The Fear of Religious and Cultural Decline
3. The Imagined Secular: Confronting Feminism, Gender, and Family Life
4. White Evangelicals: Emotion Work and Racial Inequality
5. Sacred Sex: Marriage and Heterosexuality
6. We Aren’t the Extremists: Same-Sex Marriage and Changing Ideas of Sin
7. Enduring Inequalities in Unsettled Times
Appendix A: Navigating Prayer, Positionality, and Institutional Review
Appendix B: Participant Overview
Notes
References
Index
