Fundamentalism and the family: gender, culture, and the American Pro-Family Movement

Abstract

Within a historical perspective, the relationship between fundamentalism and the recent pro-family movement is complex. From the time of their origins in the late nineteenth century until World War II, fundamentalists said little about the family except as a means of deepening the lines of separation with the surrounding culture. If anything, moderate and liberal Protestants owned the family issue, for they emphasized "Christian nurture" and religious education in the home. The moment of shift in fundamentalism toward a pro-family orientation was the neo-evangelical revival of the 1940s and 1950s, which repudiated the militant separatism of fundamentalism and moved in a direction of more positive cultural engagement. The middle-class family of the 1950s was a powerful symbol of respect-ability and morality, and evangelicals embraced this image in the 1960s and 1970s. But conservative Protestants soon encountered a series of events—Supreme Court rulings on school prayer and abortion, and the sex education movement—that they believed challenged the moral autonomy of the family. The political agenda of the pro-family movement grew in response to these circumstances, but within a pattern of engagement already set by the historical and theological legacy of fundamentalism.