The Divine Institution: Interview with Sophie Bjork-James

Dr. Bjork-James is Assistant Professor of the Practice in Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has engaged in long-term research on both the US-based Religious Right and the white nationalist movement. Her work has appeared on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. She is the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (West Virginia University Press, 2020). She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) which provides an ethnographic account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-Civil Rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics.

Citation: Mohan, Urmila “The Divine Institution: Interview with Sophie Bjork-James.” The Jugaad Project, 1 June 2021, thejugaadproject.pub/sophie-interview [date of access]

Interview conducted on April 20, 2021. Edited for clarity. 

Urmila: I am with Sophie Bjork-James discussing her new publication, ‘The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family’, published by Rutgers University Press. Sophie, so glad to be with you today. Could you tell us a little bit about the research path that you followed behind this book and how perhaps earlier versions of the manuscript turned into this?

Sophie: Yeah, it was a longer process than I had hoped, but I think that is often the case for first books, especially since this research started as dissertation research while I was a graduate student at City University of New York. I did research in Colorado Springs that was written up as my dissertation and then I reworked the material for some time until I was finally feeling happy with it. And, it took some time to find a really great editor at Rutgers. I was happy to work with them for sure.

Urmila: Do you think that the path to writing this book was always clear in your mind from the beginning? Or did you have some kind of changes in between?

Sophie: You know, I think as academics we learn that there are many different kinds of writing that we do. And the first time, you know, the first time an undergraduate has to write a 25 page paper, it gets overwhelming right? Moving from the 5 paragraph essay, 25 page paper, you know, and then moving into a dissertation and then transferring it into a book. You have to learn new tools about how much you can say in each format. And, so I think I really struggled for a while about what makes the book different than a series of articles or a dissertation. And, finally learned that with a book you need an editor. You need someone who is providing feedback about the overall structure and that there is one main idea that structures the entirety of the manuscript so that you can explore different aspects of that. So, I ended up having to pull a number of what I first thought would be chapters from the book and put them in articles because they weren't really helping to add to the overall structure of the book.

Urmila: I think that's actually great advice for anybody going forward and not just for people trying to transform their dissertation into a book. When did you decide on the family as the core connecting idea in your book?

Sophie: So, I went into researching white Evangelicalism knowing that the family was a central, cultural form and framework. I was curious how it structured their everyday lives because I had been following the pro-family movement for some time and had been attending national religious right conferences for research, seeing how much they talked about the family and frame their movement as about protecting the family. So, I knew that it was politically salient. And, you know, the research really started out of this question about what allows for such political cohesion amongst white Evangelicals. They've been the largest voting bloc in the United States for decades with very little political diversity. They tend to vote around 78-80% for Republicans and very similarly have a particular political agenda that they support. I was really curious about what created that political unity.

And I've been listening to Christian radio podcast. So, ‘Focus on the Family’—it's hard to overstate its influence in global Evangelicalism but it's an organization that is headquartered in Colorado Springs where I did my research. And, at one point they had dozens of magazines and the radio programming that was heard by 240 million people a day. Their focus was on helping Christians in family life and defending the patriarchal family in politics. But, you know, it was not until I started attending megachurches and Bible study groups, that I came to see that the family was really not just a political focus, but that it actually stemmed from a theological emphasis on family life, that the symbolism of being specifically a husband and a wife with children was a social unit that represented a hierarchy, the central hierarchy of their church. So, the father was in an unequal relationship with the wife, and just as everyone is supposed to submit to Jesus and God, so wives submit to husbands, children submit to parents. It was these relationships with authority and submission that were the key way that people learned to live out their lives as Christians within this world. It meant that defending that family in the political sphere became widely understood as a way to defend God as well.

Urmila: If I was going to locate your book in the landscape of existing scholarship on this topic what is it that we can expect is new about this book? What is different?

Sophie: There are a number of things. There's a long history of research on white Evangelicalism that shows that white Evangelicals tend to see the world through personal relationships and not structures. And so, you know, they'll tend to see the solution to social problems is in building better, interpersonal relationships as opposed to changing social structure and economic structures. But most of that research doesn't explorer gender and sexuality in that framework. I think what my contribution shows is that there is one particular relationship model that is central to this world and that's heterosexual marriage. And so, it really centers gender concerns within this broader focus on relationships.

I'm also trying to parse out how race and gender are co-articulated in this world view, because, you know, a lot of times the racial component of this movement is ignored by scholars of religion. I've been to enough religious right conferences to see there's often more people of color speaking than in the audience. It's a very, very white movement. They've been working on becoming more racially diverse, but it has remained very, very white. And, you know, the origins of that movement really came about in as a wave to challenge desegregation. Like the earliest national Christian organizations emerge in fighting attempts to desegregate private Christian schools and then immediately turned into the ‘Moral Majority’, which was the first national, religious right organization.

Race and religion in the United States are co-constitutive, they're very difficult to separate. I consider myself to be a race and gender scholar and I look at those as inseparable. And, so I was really focused on what role does race play in this movement in terms of everyday life. You can see it writ large in terms of the politics of that movement but I was really curious about how what appears to be non-political, non-racial framings of the family are actually steeped in very racialized histories.

Urmila: Can you give us an example of how something that's seemingly innocuous has a racial history?

Sophie: When I first started doing research in mega churches, I was really surprised at how little overt conversations about politics there were. I had expected that pastors would be talking very explicitly about being anti-abortion and anti-LGBT rights, etc. and talking about voting and that was very rarely the case in the churches I studied. There are people who would mention abortion in passing as something that was important to be opposed to. But it wasn't in church. Church was seen as a place to talk about family and to build a relationship with God. But what I came to see after attending hundreds of Sunday sermons at large churches was that almost every single time a pastor would translate Biblical stories into stories about his own experience with his family. He talked about his children, he talked about his wife, tension with his in-laws or, you know, stress about taking his kids to McDonald's on a Sunday afternoon.

The pastors are always male. There's a lot of rules against females preaching to at least two men. Women can often preach to other women but not on the main stage in church. So, there's this gender structure and they would often invoke their family as a way of translating Biblical stories into everyday relevant life. On the one hand, it seems like he's talking about his own experience but the broader effect is that it reinforces this idea of a Christian life lived in the family. It has to be a heterosexual and patriarchal world. Not only just to be a Christian but to grow up to be a healthy adult, you need heterosexual parents. And that becomes the norm that any deviation from is not ideal.

What we see in the history of the United States is that Christians use their ideas of the nuclear family as a way to set themselves apart from First Nations peoples who have very different kinds of family forums. The family, the nuclear family, the patriarchal family has always been seen as a Christian good connected to private property. And it's often been connected to whiteness. It's how whiteness has been defined, right? And we can think about this in many different ways, even in the story ‘Little House on the Prairie’, a tv show framing a family as the embodiment of whiteness and not of a multiracial world. It also means that anything that is supposedly disruptive of the patriarchal family can be seen as something to be opposed. So, there's a number of Evangelicals that say, Black Lives Matter is pro-abortion, and, so will oppose Black Lives Matter, or just relegate issues of racial inequality as though they are not central. Nothing is as important as defending the patriarchal family, because that becomes the centerpiece of a Godly life, and the best way to end poverty or to address poverty is to have more people get married. As a result, the reality of the United States as a place rife with institutional racism gets obscured.

As a social scientist I know that if we look at basically any measure of inequality from how likely one is to be born preterm, how likely one is to die giving birth or to die as an infant, how long someone is expected to live, how likely they are to get an advanced degree, how much wealth they will accrue over their lifetime—if we look at basically any measure of inequality we can see that racism still structures the United States and benefits white Americans. It disenfranchises Black, Native, Latina people in this country, and that reality is completely obscured in a world that basically says that the solution to all problems and the way to embody God in the world is to defend the patriarchal family. It's a way to ignore or put in the background this broader world of social inequality and to foreground personal relationships. Which when you actually translate that into policy ends up benefiting white Americans, especially middle-class and upper-class white Americans.

Urmila: I've always wondered about this for the rest of us who live in the US but do not really encounter white Evangelical Christians the way you did in your research. I wonder what is the takeaway for those of us who want to understand how social interactions work in the US, why there seems to be an inability to connect structural and institutional forms of racism, whether it's in the government or whether it's in your workplace, with this notion of family? Do you think that there could be a connection between what you observed in a profoundly faithful community to somebody who might be ‘culturally Christian’ while not really belonging to the Evangelical community?

Sophie: That's a really insightful question. A lot of Americans will define themselves as Christian but only come to church for Christmas and Easter. And then there's even a larger group of Americans that don't identify as Christian but will still celebrate Christmas and Easter even if they're not going to church because it's culturally something that they've learned. Clearly, the nuclear family is a part of that. If we take a step back and also bring in political economy, I think the nuclear for the nuclear family emerges with the birth of Protestantism. During a time of the Industrial Revolution there is the forging of capitalism and the nuclear family emerges as a way to organize society and transfer property in a way that's far less messy than an extended family where there's not a clear hierarchy or it can be spread out. And so that cultural formation provides the foundation for a lot of the US approaches to family life, right? That comes from Protestantism and Evangelicals have kind of latched onto defending the family in response to both changing racial demographics, changing religious demographics as well as neoliberalism, and just escalating economic inequality. That kind of Protestant family has become a foundation of a lot of our cultural life. Probably even amongst people who would not identify as Christian anymore.

Sophie: I’d just also like to add that there's this other aspect of individualism. It's such an individualistic culture and we really understand the family as a private good in the United States—as something to achieve. But it's something that's also your responsibility. We're one of the few industrialized countries in the world to offer zero guaranteed maternal maternity leave. Zero. It hasn't even been officially debated in Congress for decades. You know, questions about, universal child care or support for children, you know, continue to be debated. There's a way that parenting has been privatized that I find very deeply problematic. And it's surprising to me how there's not more criticism and demand for support for families in the political realm in terms of universal childcare or more tax breaks for parents, more support for schools, etc.

Urmila: I think you're absolutely right. Did you notice that in the community in which you were doing the research, were people actually doing the opposite of what we see? Was it the opposite of a private good? Were they actually supporting each other and is that why they're so closely knit?

Sophie: Undoubtedly, there's a way that the Church plays an incredibly important role in supporting families and supporting parents. The thing is, if you get hundreds if not thousands of people together who are tithing to the same place. That Church has a lot of resources, it has a big space, it can have free day care, free resources for home schooling parents, you know, someone will be offering free karate classes or free photography classes, or free educational programming. There's a lot of support and there's a lot of networking but in a very homogeneous way. So, it's people within your own church that you're forming relationships with. Often in my interviews, I would ask people what percentage of their friends they thought were Christian. And almost everyone said, “Oh, well, it's kind of embarrassing, but probably about 95 to 99% of my friends are all Christian.” They celebrate what they call Christian fellowship which is basically spending time around other Christians. And I think that really helps to reinforce this worldview.

Urmila: There's one thing you mentioned about young Evangelicals, and you also kind of take great care to say that there are new things happening in terms of their consciousness, and we still have to wait and see how that plays out? And you mentioned that they go on world trips, they travel, they see other cultures, and the question of other people's poverty becomes a way for them to acquire some kind of self-consciousness or some idea of the world. When they see the world, are they seeing it from a very specific moral or theological angle? Is this poverty of the ‘other’ being seen from a particular angle that perhaps someone like me would not be aware of?

Sophie: That's a great question. So, within the kind of strains of Evangelicalism that I studied, many people believe that the goal for them is to basically to wait till their time ends on Earth and bring Jesus back so that everyone who is saved goes to heaven. One of the ways that's understood is that Jesus will not return until everybody on the planet is prophesied to, that everyone hears about Jesus and then has the choice of whether or not to convert. So that's one of the views that people held. But Evangelizing is one of the central tenets of Evangelicalism and so doing specifically international missionary work is very important. One of the churches that I studied had 10,000 members and one year they actually sent over 1000 people in short term mission trips internationally. A lot of people are doing this and I found that experience can create many different impacts on people. Some of them can very much be like tourists where they're just kind of going and experiencing and observing poverty in a different national context and not having it transform their theology at all. But I did find a number of young people had gotten to know people who are living in poverty and suddenly when their parents are saying, for instance, gay marriage is the worst issue facing the world today they question whether it really is worse than poverty. And then there's a lot of them that would start questioning, well, why do I get to live in this in very comfortable, middle-class world where I have the option to travel, where I have access to clean water versus how some other people are living in poverty and don't have many options for mobility. I found that a number of younger people were starting to really question the kind of religious right politics and criticizing it as a really narrow way to defend a white middle-class lifestyle. They are articulating a more global politics rooted in social justice. It was still rooted in this kind of conservative Christian faith but a very different framework than the religious right politics which is very much attached to Christian nationalism and American exceptionalism. So, a lot of these younger people are reframing their relationship with their faith in politics.

Urmila: You mentioned that with these young people, they still are rooted in a theological outlook on the world. Do notions like sin and redemption still motivate them?

Sophie: When you think about politics, what does that mean? Is politics really just, you know, stay out of my life except for defend the nuclear family, or, does the state have a responsibility towards ending poverty? You know, the ideas of sin and redemption and eschatology are still really central. So, for example, I found that most of the people that I interviewed and got to know in Colorado, like the majority of white Evangelicals, they denied the reality of climate change. They didn't talk about it other than to make jokes about Al Gore or to comment on, “Oh yeah, look how much snow there is out there, where's the climate change now?” It was a thing that was to be made fun of to dismiss. There was very little concern about the environment articulated by pastors or individual congregants, but the group of people that I did find who were advocating environmentalism, some of them even talking about climate change, were also talking about this idea that when Jesus returns, it would happen here on Earth, and that the earth itself would be made. This is what is called the lifeboat theology where most white Evangelicals believe that the earth is a place of sin, it’s doomed. We’re only passing by before we get to a greater place somewhere else which is heaven, and that that leads to widespread dismissal of environmental concerns. So, it's not that these younger Evangelicals who are advocating environmental concerns are throwing away their theology, they're just understanding it in a different way and that different theology is leading to different politics.

Urmila: When it come to the influence of media are we on the outside getting only a really small sliver of it? Because we're not immersed in this, we don't really understand the power that this constant immersion of rightwing media has on people.

Sophie: It’s hard to overstate the role of all forms of media in this world. When I was doing my research, I was living in Colorado Springs. I had a car and it took me 20 minutes to drive from my apartment downtown to one of the large churches. And I was driving a lot! And every time I was driving I was listening to Christian radio and sometimes there would be stories about the family. Sometimes there'd be, you know, kid’s stories or sometimes there'd be a sex therapist talking about the importance of pleasure in a heterosexual marriage, but most of the time it was politics and they would be talking about Israel and they’d be talking about what they called the ‘bathroom bill’ and the importance of opposing rights for transgender people. It was an incredible contrast for me after hearing these sermons which were, “Oh, I shouldn't get mad when I'm driving my wife to Walmart.” These very personal anecdotes versus the Christian media which was all about conservative politics.

In the last decade social media has become much more divisive and I think is in the process of reshaping Evangelicalism to become even more extreme in some ways, especially now there's been inroads by QAnon. This kind of widespread conspiracy that reframes politics not as a battle of different ideas, but as a battle between good and evil. You know, thinking about the pandemic and saying that any attempts to address the pandemic to reduce the casualty rates of the pandemic, that's evil, that masks are evil, and vaccines are evil. And that conspiracy has made significant inroads into white Evangelicalism. So, I think forms of media are very important in terms of political cohesion and the increasing radicalization of this movement.

Urmila: And the last question, what we could possibly take away with us to understand what we're dealing with right now in our pandemic world? For instance, social inequity has suddenly becoming a revelation for so many people whereas it has been a reality for others for so long. How would you like to speak to that based on your research?

Sophie: I try to find common ground in many ways between my research and this issue but I also really struggle with this question. There was this one time I was in a Bible study group with a bunch of young Evangelicals and in every bible study group you go around and people ask for things that they want to have prayed for and good things that have happened. So during one Bible study group a young woman said, “I need you to pray for my friend's father who is living in a trailer and had a heart attack and doesn't have health insurance and really needs a lot of prayer.” Now, I grew up in the States, but I've lived in Canada and Scotland and I've had guaranteed healthcare from the government in living in different places. And so, I started talking about my own experience. About moving from Canada to New York city as a graduate student where I didn't have health insurance and just a different reality. That's a political choice that we're making as a society. I tried to bring up some of this critique and it was just dismissed. They couldn't understand. And you know, there's other situations where white Evangelicals would say things like, well, we don't really have poor people in the United States compared to other places, people are doing really well. There is this misrecognition of reality that is fostered in these communities that makes it very hard to understand. You see the structures that are shaping their lives and that are creating these systems of inequality.

I am hopeful that there are more, especially young, people wanting to have those conversations and young people who are specifically wanting to bring up questions about race and racism. And I think that that's going to be happening more even amongst conservative, white Evangelical communities. But I think that there is going to be a lot of work to do. And I think what I would say is that we could also start thinking about how we can talk about racial inequality, racism as well as LGBTQ issues, as moral issues, you know, as rights of people to their own livelihoods and lives, even if those are different than what we understand. And that inequality actually is a moral issue. And I think that that's might give us some possible inroads.

Urmila: Thank you. Sophie. It's been wonderful talking with you. I know we haven't had a chance to touch on many of the issues you talked about in your book. I assume people will just buy a copy of your book and read it for themselves. But thank you so much for talking with me.

Sophie: Thank you. Thank you so much for your great questions.