Awesome Families : The Promise of Healing Relationships in the International Churches of Christ

Warrior Chicks: Youthful Aging in a Postfeminist Prosperity Discourse

“…During the same period a female muscular Christianity took shape in the Young Women's Christian Association, the Camp Fire Girls, and the Girl Scouts, all of whom embraced an active strenuous life. Putney (2001) calls these historical groups “muscular women.”Jenkins (2005) finds a contemporary version of female muscular Christianity at work in the International Churches of Christ. Wagner's muscular Christian women are highly active, building strong bodies, and emotional reserve for battle on various fronts.…”

“…Sociologists of religion give attention to complex gender ideology and negotiation among evangelical and conservative Christian communities, concentrating primarily on contradictions in belief and practice that impact marriage and institutional power relationships (e.g., Bartkowski 2001; Brasher 1998; Jenkins 2005). This article pushes such exploration further by considering age and aging as an intersecting point of analysis in the construction of legitimated religious roles for women and calling attention to the plural, adaptable, and particular nature of feminisms at work in evangelical congregations.…”

“…Judith Stacey (1991:19), for example, argues that the term postfeminism describes “the gender consciousness and strategies of” those who “hold their distance from feminist identity or politics,” and yet have been “profoundly influenced by feminist ideology,” which is especially true for contemporary evangelicals who find their religion to be a “flexible resource for reconstituting gender and kinship” (1991:139). Subsequent studies call attention to the ways evangelical women negotiate ideas about female submission with their own strategic versions of Christian female power and religious mission (Griffith 1997; Jenkins 2005). As an extension of this scholarship, this research suggests that God Chicks’ prosperity‐tinged discourse of independent, strong, attractive, and youthful Christian women is a formidable and appealing postfeminist amalgamation, most especially in its construction of a common religious identity that merges young with old and simultaneously embraces and rejects consumerism and Western beauty and body standards.…”

Their Fault, Not Mine: Religious Commitment, Theological Conservatism, and Americans’ Retrospective Reasons for Divorce

“…Findings from qualitative, small-sample studies of divorcées consistently reveal that men and women often feel like their divorce stigmatizes them in the eyes of other believers. Despite the fact that clergy often report wanting their congregation to care for individuals experiencing family disruption (Edgell 2006;Jenkins 2014), these clergy are paradoxically often very vocal about defending the sanctity of marriage, and criticizing the surrounding "individualistic" American culture for its perceived devaluation of marriage (Jenkins 2005;Konieczny 2016). This can consequently convey the message that churchgoers who get divorced (regardless of circumstances) are selfish, broken, and/or unspiritual.…”

“…Others suggest that religious communities likely also place social pressure on individuals to work through problems in marriage, reluctantly permitting divorce only as a "last resort" (Jenkins 2005;Levitt and Ware 2006), often only for situations of abandonment or sexual infidelity (Gilkerson 2015;Van Biema 2007), and within some conservative Protestant camps not even then (Piper 2009) 1 . Both of these factors heighten the possibility that Americans within these religious communities will experience more acute internal and social consequences when divorce actually occurs.…”