By focusing on children’s resistance and resilience, the panel explores how these values are formed through literature, religious education, community life, and cultural experiences. Instead of viewing resilience as a personal attribute, the session traces how resilience is created through social, religious, and imaginative frameworks, and how children engage in resisting restrictive narratives and constructing new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
Scholarship on evangelical women has boomed over the past decade, offering insight into the American Christian Right and its politics of gender and sexuality. But a major gap within this sub-field remains: historical analysis of evangelical girlhood(s) and the nuanced power structures therein, especially as separate from a theological or confessional approach. Building on the work of Heather Hendershot, Emily Suzanne Johnson, and Sara Moslener, and utilizing a Foucauldian framework of power, this paper examines Focus on the Family's Brio Magazine and argues that evangelical girls exist at specific nexus of disenfranchisement and unique authority that constitutes them as a particular type of subject in both religious and political discourses. Girlhood is a unique position that cannot be earned nor disposed of; Indeed, it is impossible to fully grasp the trajectory of contemporary evangelicalism without understanding the role that teenage girls play in the evangelical imagination and American political realities.
"The child" as constructed by the Early Church and inherited via colonization by the West is not, in fact, a child at all. A reflection and manifestation of adult cultural and spiritual anxiety, the child in Christian political discourse has often served as a tool for the consolidation of power as opposed to furthering the interests of concrete children themselves. While attempting to attenuate the impacts of such instrumentalization through positive discourse attending to children as actual persons is of certain value, this paper proposes that the greatest good might be done by removing children from political rhetoric altogether. Children, and indeed all those whom their lives touch, would be better served by encouraging Christian communities to resist their urges to consolidate power in moments of anxiety and lean into the faith they proclaim they possess.
This paper explores the ways that Unitarian-Transcendentalist and social reformer Caroline Wells Healey Dall, in her children’s book series Patty Gray’s Journey, broadly, and its second book, specifically, translated slavery, the Civil War, and the aftermath of both for young readers. Her insistence that children, especially white, Northern children, must know what slavery was and what war was and what both left behind is a reflection of her belief that resilience is forged through knowledge—a belief rooted directly in her Unitarian and Transcendentalist principles. When, Dall prompts us to ask, does the privilege of childhood innocence give way for real-worldly resilience?