Raising a Son, Razing a Nation: White Christian Nationalism and the Farcical Mission to Turn Every Boy into a Straight Man

White Christian nationalism has disrupted our liberal democracy over the past decade, leading to increased interest from scholars investigating the movement’s followers and their politics. These investigations have unearthed key components of the movement. For example, Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead outline some beliefs held by White Christian nationalists, including supporting ethnic-racial hierarchies, gender-sexual hierarchies, and xenophobic immigration policies. Other scholars including Lerone Martin and Kristin Kobes Du Mez have noted the role of politicians and government officials in promoting White Christian nationalism, with Du Mez emphasizing the movement’s valorization of “militant masculinity” and opposition to feminism. The movement, according to Perry, Bradley Onishi, and Robert P. Jones, is (hopefully) the final gasp of air of the dying corpse of White Christian hegemony that has barred us from achieving a multiracial, multireligious liberal democracy. Even if the movement is taking its dying breath, the corpse of White Christian America is thrashing and kicking – committing violence and attempting to sustain its power by erecting legislative barriers to LGBTQ and racial equality.

Scholars are deftly addressing the existential threat of White Christian nationalism, and one underexplored avenue is sexuality. Sophie Bjork-James has demonstrated the role of White Christian nationalism in mobilizing evangelicals against LGBTQ rights. Other scholars including Mark Jordan and Heather White, although not framing evangelicals’ anti-LGBTQ politics through the lens of White Christian nationalism, have, nonetheless, demonstrated how evangelicals connected their anti-LGBTQ politics to conspiracies about pedophilia, supposed attacks on the family by LGBTQ people, and the alleged moral degradation of the nation stemming from the gay rights and feminist movements. As Jonathan Ned Katz points out, heterosexuality remains an underexamined category in sexuality studies. Heterosexuals, according to White Christian nationalists, are godly and deserve privileged status in our political system and society. Nonetheless, as recent anti-LGBTQ legislation has shown, White Christian nationalists are once again promoting the lie popularized by Anita Bryant: children are under threat from LGBTQ people who want to "turn" them gay.

This paper attempts to examine how White Christian nationalists understand heterosexuality and operationalize it within their nationalist ambitions. To limit the scope of this project, I focus on how White Christian nationalists imagine the sexual development of boys into straight men who, in White Christian nationalists' machinations, will father Christian children, head the household, and lead the nation. My source base primarily includes childrearing manuals from evangelical and White Christian nationalist authors, including James Dobson, Doug Wilson, and John Eldredge. These manuals contain valuable - and often pseudoscientific - information that instructs parents on how to raise their boys into straight men. With this source base, I hope to apply the theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Lee Edelman to demonstrate how families mediate a boy's sexual development, as parents surveil their son's sexual behavior, punish supposed homosexual tendencies, and guide him towards heterosexual adulthood. As such, I aim to build on the work of Du Mez by demonstrating that, while families are a microcosm of the Christian nation, building the Christian nation starts with the child.

This paper is a work in progress. I am writing it for a seminar and want to develop it into an article. As such, I am hoping that attending the Gay Men and Religion Unit’s June online meeting will provide me with insight on methodology and argumentation, as I am new to queer theory and believe it can help us better understand the connection between sexuality and nationalism. My preliminary thesis is that White Christian nationalists restrict sexuality to a procreative logic, pushing boys to become heterosexual men who have children and raise them Christian, and thus the cycle starts again. As such, homosexuality is not merely a moral threat to a nation in their eyes; it also undermines the ability to create future generations of Christian families. Evangelicals, therefore, write childrearing manuals as part of this broader nation-building project. I have not thought through this element yet, but I want to put this thesis in conversation with thinkers like Jasbir Puar who point to the assimilation of white gays and lesbians into national projects during the 2000s. I believe that the unit can help me develop my project given its interest in scholarship covering the assimilation of LGBTQ people into patriarchy and heterosexism.