Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Sophie Bjork-James, "The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
Description: The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explaining all social problems as a failure of the individual to achieve the strong gender and sexual identities that ground the nuclear family. The consequences of this theology are both personal su...