Faithful Dissent: The Feminist Counterpublic on the Margins of Evangelicalism

Abstract

This dissertation is a historical and ethnographic study of digital post-evangelical feminist communities in twenty-first century United States. From 2004-2024, politically progressive Christian women authors and their actively engaged readers co-created religious communities in and through blogs, books, social media, podcasts, digital newsletters, and platforms. Feminists who disidentified with conservative white evangelicalism because of their inclusive theologies and progressive political ideologies created communities of resistance and contestation with like-minded co-religionists. Rejecting dominant views of gender, race, and sexuality that permeated the political Religious Right and white evangelical institutions, this group held to a progressive form of Christianity. Drawing on textual examination of digital media, participant-observation at digital and in-person events, and seventy-five semi-structured interviews, I argue that post-evangelical feminists used digital media to construct a counterpublic that resisted conservative evangelicalism by employing evangelical practices. Twenty-first century women authors, including women marginalized by race, leveraged digital and social media to become religious leaders in online spaces. These digital communities were both a haven away from the dominant evangelical public and spaces to formulate resistance to it. At the same time, digital religious communities did not replace in-person religious communities but rather served as off-ramps from evangelicalism and bridges to more progressive communities. This study reveals the promises of new media for theological minorities within religious traditions, as well as their limitations.