Braveheart , Sacred Heart: Exploring Resistance to Patriarchal Discourses in Mainstream Media and Faith in the American Spiritual Marketplace

Abstract

This research assesses the relationship between gender identity and Christian faith through the lens of myriad forms of media. Specifically this essay first recognizes the use of a new marketing strategy employed by evangelical churches - namely the incorporation of Hollywood movies into religious messages - and then explores how male and female churchgoers receive the patriarchal discourses that exist within the varied media formations they encounter as they develop faith and identity in their everyday lives. This work is defined as a study of resistance to the subordinate identity that female churchgoers are invited to accept in the spaces of their churches - not a struggle against the masculinist tropes within the Hollywood movies that are woven into religious messages, however, but instead opposition only to a perceived patriarchal bias in religious texts. For what this study has revealed is that while evangelical females are quite critical of religious texts used by their church leaders, they offer no overt resistance to the strong patriarchal bias in the mainstream movies used during church sermons, those media formations that have become inextricably woven into religious messages. This research revolves around three central questions. First, what beliefs about gender are evangelicals invited to accept in the spaces of their churches now that the imagery and discourses of commercial entertainment media permeate religious messages ? Second, how do evangelical men and women who are exposed to this new mediated form of religion define and negotiate issues of gender in their lives inside and outside church? Finally, why is there no resistance to the patriarchal discourses in the commercial media texts, those media formations that are meant to attract the Unchurched Harry and Mary demographic?1 Is there something about evangelical perception of religious versus secular commercial texts that makes them less critical of the movies that have become an integral part of the development of their faith? Ascertaining what messages regarding gender are being sent to evangelicals in the spaces of their churches and how these individuals navigate issues of gender in the context of their faith is important, given the relatively recent rise of a new, highly mediated marketplace, one where Hollywood movies and television shows are used to both evangelize and instruct the faithful2 Marketing Religion In recent decades, American evangelicalism has undergone a significant shift. While some of the central tenets of evangelicalism - including a belief in the authority and inerrancy of the Bible, an emphasis on developing a personal relationship with Jesus, and the perceived need to evangelize, or spread the good news - remain, there is a new approach to evangelicalism characterized as a marketplace.3 The phrase spiritual marketplace was coined by Wade Clark Roof (1999), who recognized a new religious environment that is more closely influenced by a market mentality of supply and demand, one where religious institutions are redefined as a business and churchgoers are repositioned as consumers with personal choice. Other scholars have built on Roof s findings of increased market influences on religion (Einstein 2009; Hoover 2006; Schofield Clark 2003; Finke and Stark 2005; Wolfe 2003; Cimino and Lattin 1998). Cimino and Lattin, in their exploration of the ways in which evangelical churches market themselves to churchgoers, state that evangelical church leaders have now shifted to a business model of worship, one in which megachurches ... are the evangelical answer to Home Depot (1998, 56). The idea of competition between religious institutions is also recognized by Einstein, who in Brands of Faith states it succinctly: contemporary American religion is packaged as just another branded product in the American consumer-focused environment, one that can be advertised by companies (churches) and purchased by consumers (churchgoers) (2008, 10). …