Evangelical News: Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s

The 1970s and 1980s were a tumultuous period in United States history. In suit with a dramatic political shift to the right, evangelicalism also entered the public discourse as a distinct religious movement and was immediately besieged by cultural appropriations and internal fragmentations. This was also a time when Americans in general and evangelicals in particular grappled with issues and ideas such as feminism, legal abortion, and restructuring traditional roles for women and the family. During this time, there was a diversification as well as surge of readership for evangelical periodicals such as Christianity Today, Moody Monthly, Eternity, and Post-Americans/Sojourners as well as the feminist newsletter Daughters of Sarah.

While each of these magazines--and other publications and media--contributes to and participates in the overall dissemination of evangelical ideology, they all also have their own outlooks and political leanings when it comes to hot-button issues. In Evangelical News: Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s Anja-Maria Bassimir presents, through a thoroughly researched lens, a better understanding of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century and provides a nuanced picture of a religious subculture that is too often reduced to caricature.

Bassimir argues that community can be produced in discourse, especially when shared rhetoric, concepts, and perspectives signal belonging. To accomplish this, Evangelical News traces the emergence of evangelical social and political awareness in the 1970s to the height of its power as a political program. The chapters investigate such topics as how evangelicals reenvisioned gender norms and relations in light of the feminist movement and the use of childhood as a symbol of unspoiled innocence and the pure potential of humanity.