Girls Gone Fundamentalist: Feminine Appeals of White Christian Nationalism

Abstract

GirlDefined Ministries is a flourishing multiplatform purity ministry developed by Texan sisters Kristen Clark and Bethany Beal. Clark and Beal’s goal for GirlDefined Ministries is to develop a sisterhood that encourages women and girls to find their identity in what they imagine as God’s design for femininity. Analyzing this discourse, we demonstrate how it mobilizes White supremacist strategies that have long nationalist histories within White Christian rhetoric in the United States. Moreover, we demonstrate how these strategies manifest in discourse through a particularly patriarchal version of femininity—thus, the sexism we identify in GirlDefined Ministries reinforces racial privilege for White people. Ultimately, we illustrate how this ministry utilizes rhetorical styles that first draw girls and women into an identity we describe as “pure White womanhood” and then deploy this identity on the front lines of the Christian culture wars.

Keywords:

• Beauty
• culture wars
• evangelical
• gender
• Whiteness

Notes

1 Clark and Beal are the sisters’ married surnames. We use these surnames in our prose, while our citations reflect their surnames at the time of publication.

2 There are no absolute delineations between fundamentalist, evangelical, and mainstream Protestant denominations in the United States, yet these terms denote different flavors of Protestantism and different doctrines (see Bebbington, 1989) and refer to different denominational histories (see Maddux, 2011; Noll, Bebbington, & Marsden, 2019; Putnam & Campbell, 2010). Yet within current popular culture, the term “evangelical” is largely used in the same way “fundamentalist” was thirty years ago: to denote an especially strident, conservative brand of American Christianity (see Bruenig, 2020). As such, when we refer to fundamentalism and evangelicalism, we recognize that the terms are not quite synonymous and yet we discuss White fundamentalist evangelicalism as a widespread, transdenominational expression of doctrines and practices that espouse White supremacist, patriarchal gender roles.

3 Karen Cox (2021) demonstrates how this Lost Cause ideology suffused the recent attack on the U.S. capitol. Firmly believing in the rightness of their (lost) cause, Christian nationalists and other White supremacists acted in the full faith of their convictions—refusing to accept the election results even as the South refused to accept the Confederacy’s crushing defeat.

4 The way Clark and Beal link behavior and feminine beauty is reminiscent of the way Christian ex-gay conversion narratives link behavior and (supposedly) authentic gender (see Bennett, 2003).