The prescriptive literature about sexuality creates models for every stage of a believer's life. Born-again Christians embody their faith by refraining from prohibited sexual acts or participating in sanctioned sexual acts. Although there is diversity among evangelicals all born-again believers affirm that heterosexual sex is natural, is sanctioned by God, and should be practiced only in marriage. Rather than denying the sexual body the authors of evangelical sex literature present distinct visions of how sexual acts and rituals can be productive for individual and world salvation. Rather, the fight is usually fiercest between two groups that have been educated in very different ways.Īmerican evangelicals engage in the cultural conversations about sexuality that reflect the theological, social, and racial diversity of the movement. After all, our culture wars aren’t between one group of educated people and another group that has not been educated. Plus, only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America’s continuing culture wars. If we hope to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to understand this influential network of dissenting institutions. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools have thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, and a proper American, all within the bounds of biblical revelation. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education.
Why do so many conservative politicians flock to the campuses of Liberty University, Wheaton College, and Bob Jones University? In Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools they have been vital intellectual citadels in America’s culture wars. The lessons of FW and the HOW organization turned these women’s attention outward to the nation and committed them to countering the country’s social and sexual developments they believed directly opposed their moral vision and ideological worldview. This chapter examines Andelin and Davison within the context of LDS teachings on sexuality as a way of understanding how Mormon women responded to and helped shape the development of Mormonism’s conservative culture of sexuality and gender and its political consequences. HOW soon claimed ten thousand members in all fifty states.
Creating the organization Happiness of Womanhood (HOW), Davison’s group not only targeted the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) but also opposed abortion, homosexuality, pornography, sex education, busing, and the removal of school prayer. While Andelin mostly avoided the brewing controversies of her era, the meetings radicalized Davison. Andelin’s workshops, and her accompanying best-selling book, Fascinating Womanhood, offered LDS women the hope of personal fulfillment by accepting their divinely ordained roles and responsibilities, including embracing their sexual gifts as wives. In the late 1960s, Jaquie Davison, an Arizona housewife who struggled to find happiness while raising her seven children, enrolled in a Fascinating Womanhood (FW) workshop at her Mormon church ward led by a fellow Latter-day Saint (LDS) woman, Helen Andelin.
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