Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from a three-year project exploring childhood and family life within British evangelicalism, this paper examines contested ideas of maternal agency and authority across different forms of evangelicalism, and how these relate to contemporary discourses on parenting.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from a three-year project exploring childhood and family life within British evangelicalism, this paper focuses on contested ideas of maternal agency and authority across different forms of evangelicalism and how these relate to contemporary discourses on 'parenting.' Sociologists and anthropologists have described an 'intensification' of both parenting and motherhood in recent years, in which childrearing becomes a more labour-intensive, demanding task, while it is also no longer seen primarily as a social obligation, but as a source of meaning, offering a claim to happiness (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995, Hays 1996, Faircloth 2013). The history of Puritan and evangelical parenting manuals suggests that this 'intensification' has a longer history within some forms of Protestant and evangelical Christianity than in contemporary culture. However there are also particular shifts in contemporary evangelical understandings of parenting. Where in Victorian evangelicalism, the role of the mother was privileged, my research draws attention to how greater attention is today given to the role of the father, and within conservative evangelicalism, we see a countercultural effort to re-inscribe male and paternal authority within both the home and church. Through describing the moral norms and politics of the family articulated in parenting courses and seminars in a conservative evangelical and a charismatic evangelical church in London, this paper addresses how these changing understandings of parental roles are shaping maternal identities and experiences within both settings, and explores the questions of authority and agency implicated in this.