| White conservative Protestants (fundamentalists, evangelicals, charismatics, and Pentecostals) in the early twenty-first century United States construct for themselves a religio-cultural identity by which they hold themselves to be at once both identified with the American mainstream and removed to the cultural margins, at once both the keepers of a traditional Christian America and the ideological outcasts of modern plurality and secularity. Based upon in-depth interviews and in-home observations with fifteen home-schooling families, I explore the creation of such an outside-yet-inside, white conservative Protestant cultural identity as accomplished by white conservative Protestant home-schooling parents. Using the notions of practice and performativity, I argue that their religious identity emerges through the pragmatic organization of their practices of educating, parenting, and home-keeping. I analyze their diverse practices as the deployment of three, more general schemes of action: unification, privatization, and gendering. I explore the ways in which they practice: the unity of family, education, and their Christianity (chapter 2); the individualization and the domestication of religion, education, and female labor (chapter 3); and the distinction of gender as a differentiation of authority and of laboring activity (chapter 4).;As they do their Christianity by such pragmatic means, they also do their racial, class, and gender selves. Specifically, I argue that the unity of faith, family and education practiced by these families, as well as their claim to privatized self-determination, makes and marks their whiteness in opposition to the racial and religious diversity of public education and to the more social identification of racial 'others.' I also read the privatization both of education and of female labor in home-schooling families as the co-production of conservative Protestantism with middle-class identity. Lastly, I understand the domestic authority and domestic labor of home-schooling mothers to produce not only the difference between two genders but also the difference between conservative Protestants and other Americans. Conservative Protestant home-schooling families make for themselves a religious identity of distinction, even as they are embedded in the social structures of racial, class, and gender stratification. |
