“Doing Gender, Doing Culture”: Wives, Marriage, and the Restoration of Evangelical Leaders Accused of Sexual Abuse

• In Event: Identities, Repertoires, and Interpretive Resources

Abstract

Evangelical sexual abuse scandals present a recurring puzzle: pastors credibly accused of sexual abuse not only survive public exposure but often return to large and enthusiastic followings. In this paper, I argue that these scandals are occasions for gendered universe‑maintenance, in which accused leaders mobilize Christian marriage to keep the crisis inside a religious, rather than legal or secular, frame. Within this frame, wives are the pivotal actors. By performing culturally legible emotion work that foregrounds their own suffering and marital resilience, wives make the restoration of accused male leaders appear morally plausible to their communities. Theoretically, I bring cultural sociology into conversation with gender theory to show that doing gender is the primary channel through which these cultural performances of restoration succeed. Empirically, I use an interpretative case study of five evangelical Protestant leaders who were publicly accused of sexual abuse yet achieved observable restoration. Combining ethnographic content analysis with an abductive approach to grounded theory, I analyze sermons, statements, interviews, documentaries, podcasts, and social media posts produced by leaders and their wives before, during, and after scandal. Across cases, I show how couples foreground the wife’s marital trial, background alleged survivors, and leverage wives’ accumulated symbolic capital to validate the husband’s restoration. Ultimately, I argue that the restoration of accused leaders is a project of gendered meaning‑making in which wives’ performances of feminine virtue become key cultural resources for restoring accused leaders’ moral authority. More broadly, my analysis develops a cultural‑sociological account of how threatened sub‑worlds harness gendered performances to convert potentially destabilizing scandals into internally resolvable social dramas.

Author

• Bridget Eileen Rivera, CUNY-Graduate Center