Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (AAR Reading Religion Book Review)
Kathryn House, a doctoral candidate in Practical Theology at BU School of Theology, recently reviewed Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics by R. Marie Griffith. Please see the beginning of House’s review below and visit the Reading Religion website for the full review.
Reading Religion (RR) is an open book review website published by the American Academy of Religion (AAR). The site provides up-to-date coverage of scholarly publishing in religious studies, reviewed by scholars with special interest and/or expertise in the relevant subfields.
Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. New York, NY: Basic Books, December 2017. 416 pages. $32.00. Hardcover. ISBN 9780465094752. Additional formats available from Basic Books.
Review excerpt
In Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics, Marie Griffith exposes fault lines in complicated 20th century American debates where sex, Christianity, and politics intersect. “The very meaning of sex, gender, and sexuality” were at the heart of these contentions, she wagers, and a key orienting concern would be whether tradition or change should be embraced on questions of gender, marriage, and sexual norms (xiii). Beginning with the 1920s, a decade of provocative change fueled by the women’s rights movement, Griffith follows a loose pattern of attending closely to one central debate and one or two significant figures per decade.