Abstract
Leslie Dorrough Smith, Righteous Rhetoric Sex, Speech and the Politics of Concerned Women for America, Oxford University Press: New York, 2014; 256 pp.: 9780199337507, £22.99/$35.00 (hbk)
As the USA gears up for another season of presidential primary elections, and as the global media fuels our seemingly insatiable appetite for American politics, the role of religion and its unique interplay with US national identity again comes into view. It is an area of endless fascination and of deep contestation, and notwithstanding the decline in personal religious observance in the US, the public and political significance of religion, and specifically Christianity, remains crucial to US national identity. Leslie Dorrough Smith enters this well-trodden realm and with her Righteous Rhetoric Sex, Speech and the Politics of Concerned Women for America focuses on the manner in which American Conservative Protestant groups (and Christian Right leaders) deploy particular constructions of the gender order in the pursuit of a particular political and moral agenda.
Leslie Dorrough Smith has written a fascinating, insightful and highly original work. Her thesis is a sophisticated and nuanced one that enables the reader not only to understand the nature and purpose of the rhetoric used by Concerned Women for America (CWA) but also to recognize that the deployment of such rhetoric and tactics are rather unexceptional, albeit no less effective for that. Concerned Women for America was founded in 1979 by Beverly LaHaye, the wife of evangelical Christian minister and author of the Left Behind series, Timothy LaHaye. Originally established because of the perception that the National Organization of Women did not represent Christian women’s perspectives on gender roles and family, CWA now claims to be the largest organization working on policy matters for women in the USA, with over 500,000 participating members. Its focus is on sexual and reproductive issues, although it also promotes an allied set of policies associated with US foreign relations, namely, the absoluteness of national sovereignty and support for the state of Israel. In particular the CWA is concerned with promoting ‘traditional’ family values and gender roles, and is strongly opposed to abortion and wide-scale access to contraception; to same-sex relationships and marriage equality; to sex education in schools; and to all forms of pornography, prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation.
There is no doubt that this particular nexus of gender, religion and politics is highly significant in the USA, and the task of understanding its dynamics is a complicated one. Dorrough Smith brings a fresh and original analysis to bear on these intersecting factors. She accomplishes this primarily through her focus on the rhetoric employed by CWA, which she calls ‘chaos rhetoric’, which is designed to create a heightened sense of social and political chaos in the event of certain norms and values not being upheld and promoted given the threats of liberalism, secularism and feminism. Dorrough Smith’s focus is on CWA but her argument holds for many other conservative Protestant political groupings. Her central argument is that, in contrast to the popular perception, the appeal and success of these groups is not in the articulation of rigid moral absolutes, but rather in the manner in which they successfully deploy a rhetoric that fuses a decline in sexual morality with national decay.
This is a thought-provoking work which makes the very persuasive case that we need to interrogate this ‘chaos rhetoric’ if we are to understand more accurately the contemporary political landscape in the USA. Dorrough Smith constructs her case carefully. In Chapter 1 she expertly demonstrates that the practice of linking a failure of sexual mores with national decline is a long-standing one in the USA, and that the CWA has simply reproduced an extremely effective, modern version of an age-old trope in American politics that links patriarchal gender norms and the consequent sexual mores with a political vision of American power and destiny. The subsequent three chapters investigate the gender politics of the Christian Right through the rhetoric of CWA, and in the process challenge certain key assumptions and myths. She demonstrates that the absolutism and order with which these groups are typically associated is a by-product rather than core element of their identity and that the core is rather this chaos rhetoric that is flexible and dynamic and garners support by threatening a specifically constructed sense of order that is both built and maintained by relegating its opponents to categories of abjection (p. 27). She further suggests that in many respects religion is a tactic rather than the essence of the organization and highlights how the centrepiece of its agenda is its portrayal of the nation as a powerful entity that, nonetheless, is under threat and rendered vulnerable by the violation of the gender order and traditional sexual and family norms.
In addition to her investigation of CWA (and through it comparable conservative Protestant political groups) Dorrough Smith makes a parallel argument about the prevalence, indeed the ordinariness, of chaos rhetoric in the contemporary political landscape. It is, she argues, ubiquitous in political life and among social groups with a political agenda. And while this parallel argument, though intriguing, merits further interrogation, there is no doubt that the central thesis of Dorrough Smith’s fine work is persuasive, enlightening and compelling.