Before the Culture Wars: Conservative Protestants and the Family, 1920-1980

This dissertation examines conservative Protestant efforts to preserve the social and religious mission of the evangelical Protestant family between the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and the rise of the New Christian Right in the 1980s. It focuses on how members of five conservative Protestant groups - the fundamentalist movement, the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, and the neo-evangelical movement - responded to sweeping changes in American family life and social thought during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Confronted with changes in women's roles, rising divorce rates, changing romantic and sexual expectations within marriage, social chaos in the form of crime and international threats, and secularization, they replied with a growing pool of advice books, periodical literature, sermons, and denominational and parachurch campaigns that aimed to define and revive Christian marriage and parenthood.

Conservative Protestant writing about the family reveals that commentators sought to make the religious ideals of personal salvation and holiness cohere with middle-class American faith in progress and self-improvement. During the interwar years writers articulated a conservative religious version of the middle-class ideal of the family as an emotionally intimate and spiritually potent institution able to build the nation by forming the minds, characters, and bodies of individual citizens. Following World War II, they increasingly presented Christian belief and practice as a means of achieving a companionable marriage, sought to ensure harmonious and sexually warm relationships between couples, and instructed parents to balance the rigors of Christian training and discipline with an appreciation for the child's feelings and developmental needs. Greater acceptance of popular and counseling psychology encouraged conservative Protestants to embrace the expectation that personal and marital happiness could be obtained through self-understanding, self-improvement, and a salvific relationship with God.

In the 1970s Dr. James Dobson and Tim and Beverley LaHaye, all leaders in the emerging New Christian Right, established themselves as psychologists, counselors, and teachers invested in improving family life. In these roles, they called upon conservative Protestants to defend their conception of the family and moral order, along with the cherished hopes they had attached to each.