Evangelicals have long navigated a tangled web between faith and freedom. From embracing authoritarian rule to regulating sexual activity to negotiating the possibilities and perils of capitalism, evangelical faith has both informed and constrained their adherents’ views of freedom. This session will explore various facets of the vexed relationship between evangelicals and their proliferating ideologies of freedom.
This paper applies the concepts of "late fascism" and "fascist freedom" in the work of Alberto Toscano to consider the paradoxical vision of freedom animating ascendant ethno-nationalist evangelicals. This application generates an analysis of freedom rhetoric in public evangelicals like Charlie Kirk. On this basis, the paper demonstrates how thicker accounts of fascism indeed offer purchasing power for not only categorizing popular evangelical support for authoritarian political coalitions, but also generating questions that provoke and imagine resistance against authoritarianism.
This paper unpacks the development and spread of the so-called “72-hour rule” within Evangelical Christian teachings, where married couples ensure husbands are free from lust by engaging in regular sexual acitivty. The paper presents a feminist historical critique of the theological anthropology undergirding this “rule,” as well as of the related martial sexual economy. Drawing on Evangelical Christian sexual advice manuals published between the 1970s and today, as well as sermons, blogs, and Christian TradWife social media, the paper argues that the 72-hour rule provides a perfect microcosm for understanding the wider complexities of American Evangelical “purity culture.” Like purity culture teachings more broadly, the rule reduces complex human sexual behaviour into simplistic mandates that are presented as divinely authoritative. Understanding the history of the rule opens up an interesting case study in the Evangelical use, circulation, and application of extra-Biblical authorities and directives.
After a half-decade of stagflation, how do you make capitalism fun again? This was the challenge administrators at Oklahoma Christian College took on in the late 1970s. Their answer took the form of a multi-million dollar "edutainment" center called Enterprise Square, USA. Employing animatronics, puppet shows, video games, and cutting-edge interactive multimedia, Enterprise Square took visitors on a grand tour of the American free market, hopefully leaving them enchanted enough at the end to buy one of the gift shop's "I <3 CAPITALISM" bumperstickers. This paper examines the "aesthetics of persuasion" (to borrow James Bielo's term) developed within Enterprise Square's exhibits, scripts, and displays. The paper situates Enterprise Square's edutainment efforts within a larger history of American Christian projects that embrace and promote capitalism as God's will for the United States, and it seeks to develop a language for identifying ongoing attempts to baptize capitalism as the economics of Christianity.