This article focuses on the political participation of ministers from five evangelical Protestant denominations that differ in theology, polity, and history. Despite such differences, these clergy respond to political influences in much the same fashion. We find that the standard theories of political participation have varying success in accounting for their political involvement. Sociodemographic explanations provide little help, but psychological engagement with politics has more explanatory power. Professional role orientations are the best predictors of actual participation. And the clergy who see moral reform issues as the most important confronting the country—and who hold conservative views on such issues—are most likely to become engaged. Finally, membership in Christian Right organizations serves to elicit more activity than might occur if ministers were left to internally motivated participation. Despite the emphasis on other contextual variables in some work on clerical politics, we find that communications exposures, congregational influences, and even the support of clerical colleagues have very limited independent effects on political involvement.
Disney’s cable channel has global reach and the highest audience share among 9–14 year olds, demonstrating its powerful influence in constructing narratives for young citizens. It has produced several films and television shows aimed at tween girls, which embody the paradoxes and ‘double entanglements’ of postfeminism discussed by Angela McRobbie. These representations demonstrate many postfeminist characteristics, such as a focus on girls’ empowerment and neoliberal agency; temporal anxiety and time travel; commodification of racial difference; affluence and consumerism; the assumption of gender equality, even as its achievement makes it politically irrelevant; and femininity/romance as girls’ free and natural choice. This paper examines current Disney Channel hits such as Liv and Maddie, Girl Meets World, K.C. Undercover, Teen Beach Movie and Teen Beach 2. The doubling of female identity – following the Hannah Montana pattern of a double life, and replicated in K.C. Undercover and the Teen Beach movies by creating past/present dyads of characters from the 1960s/1970s and the present day – creates the opportunity to represent contrasting ideas of femininity and feminist history, engaging a politics of nostalgia that erases feminism as a political movement, while reaffirming a neoliberal notion of postfeminist girlhood.
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