Parenting and Politics: The Personal and the Political in the Evangelical Family Values Movement

Abstract

Today, evangelical Christians in the U.S. are known for their passion for the so-called traditional family and engagement in political and cultural battles over children and child rearing. That has not always been the case. This article examines how parenting became a cultural and political battleground for evangelicals in the last decades of the 20th century. Conservative Protestants have engaged with politics and culture in the past. They supported the Prohibition movement; they opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution; they worried about the decadent culture of the 1920s. In the late 1900s, however, child rearing and parenting became a catch-all framework for all their concerns. Parenting took on new, profound meaning. Preachers like Billy Graham would reject his former notions that he was called to preach, saying he was first and foremost called to father. Evangelical Christian family experts like James Dobson and Larry Christenson linked parenting to social order. Family experts guided evangelicals in their political and cultural activism, telling them that the personal is political and that political issues can be solved one family at a time.