Leslie Dorrough Smith, Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity

Abstract

Reviewed by: Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity by Leslie Dorrough Smith Elaine Schnabel Leslie Dorrough Smith, Compromising Positions: Sex Scandals, Politics, and American Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) Leslie Dorrough Smith’s second book, Compromising Positions, examines the role of US Christianity in creating the conditions that allow some politicians and not others to survive a sex scandal. Smith argues that sex scandals are not about sex. Sex scandals are about the construction and embodiment of national identity, a complex theater in which racialized and gendered tropes determine the political fate of the men who wield them. In other words, Americans will condemn some politicians and excuse others for perceived sexual immorality based on the extent to which a politician can mobilize and embody a form of white masculinity associated with “American Values.” To make this argument, Smith draws on a familiar cast of characters, both an interdisciplinary gamut of theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Lauren Berlant, Bruce Lincoln, and Benedict Anderson, and political figures whose sexual relationships for a time captured the American imagination like Anthony Weiner, Roy Moore, and (of course) Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump. In tackling issues of gender and sexuality, politics, and morality, Smith’s work is a timely explication of the seeming contradictions inherent in American evangelical support of the 45th president. [End Page 145] In each chapter, Smith examines both the “winners” and “losers” of various sex scandals, using the case studies to explore the religious conditions that lead to those results. Chapters one and two focus on scandal and religion respectively, while three through five focus on sex, nation, and media. In her first chapter, Smith proposes a new model for understanding sex scandals as crises of national identity, using Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy as her case study. In chapter two, Smith shifts to the role of religion in that model, following Bruce Lincoln to argue for religion’s inherently political nature. For Smith, religious discourse is “the means by which various groups within a culture preserve their power structures and norms” (62). Supernatural or extraordinary elements lend credence to these groups seeking to legitimate these regimes of normativity. She compares and contrasts the cases of Mark Foley and Roy Moore to explicate how sex scandals can decimate some careers and leave others relatively untainted. Anita Hill and Paula Jones are featured in chapter three where Smith draws connections between evangelical marriage and sexuality literature and the ways women are characterized (“feminists” and “whores”) during these scandals. Chapters four and five fill out her argument by incorporating conceptions of nationhood and the role of the media. Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Arnold Schwarzenegger provide the empirical data for her argument that certain men are able to mobilize a kind of virile or toxic masculinity. Because of its capacity to protect US citizens, this aggressive masculinity makes some men’s promiscuity not just acceptable but natural. Others—such as John Edwards and Anthony Weiner—fail to mobilize that ideology in their favor because they apologize or admit their weaknesses. In her final chapter, Smith compares and contrasts the recent Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Blasey Ford hearings with the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings to explore the strength and malleability of white masculinity. Despite Blasey Ford’s portrayal of the ideal (white, rational) victim of sexual assault, the credibility of Kavanaugh’s white masculine aggression and rage made him a righteous and innocent victim of the Democrats’ sinister machinations. Compromising Positions comfortably sits in a body of work that identifies US Evangelicalism’s political role in establishing white, patriarchal heteronormativity on a national scale. For the most part, Smith argues that White Evangelicalism is simply one of the most politically powerful carriers of racialized and gendered tropes that shape US national identity. While Smith proves this with aplomb, some of her chapters evince a disconnect between the case studies about sex scandals and her preceding theoretical argument. For instance, in chapter four, Smith draws on Lauren Berlant and others who show the strong correlation between the conviction that the US is a “Christian” nation and the people who voted for Trump. Smith persuasively builds on the work of...