Celibate Gay Christians, Tradwives, and Christian Nationalists: The Discursive Regime of Mandatory Heterosexuality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism

Informed by the new historiography of American evangelicalism and critical, queer, and feminist theory, this paper is a strategic intervention in the social and cultural history of the sexual politics of conservative evangelicalism in the United States. Relying on a careful analysis of a wide range of primary sources (e.g., autobiographical literature, social media posts, and church-adjacent documentation), I frame the seemingly disparate enunciative modalities of contemporary evangelical Christian intimacy as taking place within a dense cluster of related discursive regimes. Moreover, I connect these threads through their effects as examples of discursive violence.1 This cluster of discursive regimes produces new subjectivities that hinge on the violence(s) of mandatory heterosexuality, misogyny, and the normalization of patterns of institutionalized abuse and gendered violence. Case studies of “celibate Gay Christian” homonationalism, the imperial, white supremacist logics of “tradwives,” and the neo-Volkskörper of Christian Nationalism converge against the backdrop of rapidly changing coordinates of public space and place, ever increasing socio-economic precarity, and the decline of the public sphere under neoliberal capitalism. The paper includes a discussion of how these American-born cultural products are being exported elsewhere, especially to Europe.