Evangelicals were “sick and tired of the status quo.” They were looking for the leader who would “reverse the downward death spiral of this nation that we love so dearly.”

In an era when race was increasingly discussed through coded language, her ideas were embraced by the same communities who opposed civil rights. In fact, the ERA was the first issue conservatives rallied around after they lost the legal battle for segregation.

With a broader Christian market replacing denominational distribution channels, authors and publishers needed to tone down theological distinctives and instead offer books pitched to a broadly evangelical readership.

One by one, conservatives gained control of the denomination’s seminaries, purging faculties of moderate voices. Moderates denounced this “power-crazed authoritarianism, a win-atany-cost ethic and a total disregard for personal values and religious freedom,” but to little avail.

The communist threat positioned women and men in distinct ways; men were to provide for their families and defend the nation, while women were deemed vulnerable and in need of protection. In this way, Cold War masculinity was intimately connected to militarism, to the point that they could seem inseparable.

Contrary to later myths about “the good war” and “the greatest generation,” the military was known as an institution where drunkenness, vulgarity, gambling, and sexual disease abounded. (In 1945, when President Truman proposed universal military training for males over the age of eighteen, evangelical churches resisted, concerned about what would

Accounts of the battles over the SBC commonly focus on the question of biblical inerrancy, but the battle over inerrancy was in part a proxy fight over gender.

But the LaHayes took Morgan’s advice a step further by situating sex more fully within the framework of patriarchal authority. “God designed man to be the aggressor, provider, and leader of his family,” they explained, and these roles were directly tied to a man’s sex drive. You couldn’t have a man’s “aggressive leadership” without his aggressive

Contemporary evangelical partisanship can only be understood in terms of a broader realignment that transformed partisan politics from the 1950s to the 1980s, a realignment that evangelicals themselves helped bring about. At the heart of this realignment were attitudes toward civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and “family values.”