Nostalgia, Faith, and Fiction: Evangelical Women’s Cultural Production of Christian Nationalism

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Politics and Gender (Table 13)

Abstract

Rising Christian nationalism in the United States has drawn extensive scholarly attention to male-dominated political movements, megachurches, and institutional evangelical power. Yet the cultural infrastructure sustaining evangelical nostalgia — the stories that construct and transmit an imagined Christian American past — has received far less scrutiny. This paper examines the Christian Fiction community, a billion-dollar, predominantly female-led publishing industry, as a critical but overlooked site of evangelical cultural production and nationalist narrative construction. Drawing on Griswold's (1987) cultural framework and Polletta and Callahan's (2019) account of how "deep stories" are built through shared community narratives, I argue that Christian Fiction functions as a feminine-dominant mode of contributing to the collective nostalgic imagination underpinning contemporary Christian nationalism. Barred from formal theological and political leadership, evangelical women exercise considerable cultural authority through storytelling by producing narratives that model evangelical femininity, embed divine action in everyday relational life, and situate Christian morality within idealized visions of American history.
To examine these patterns at scale, I employ novel computational text analysis of a growing corpus of award-winning Christian Fiction novels using topic modeling and LLM-assisted annotation to identify thematic content and portrayals of divine action. Initial findings revealed that contemporary Christian Fiction diverges sharply from the apocalyptic, politically charged variety popularized by the Left Behind series. Instead, the norm is predominantly female authors who construct a God that intervenes lovingly in individual lives within a domestic, complementarian social order, naturalizing the gendered and nationalist assumptions embedded in evangelical deep stories. Historical romance, the genre's dominant form, further embeds these assumptions within nostalgic portrayals of historic American life. This paper builds on these initial findings to offer the first large-scale sociological analysis of Christian Fiction, using an expanded corpus and deeper thematic analysis to theorize how evangelical women's storytelling constructs the nostalgic cultural infrastructure of contemporary Christian nationalism.

Author

• Brian Wilson Haggard, Cornell University