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Abstract

Nearly two hundred years and an ocean apart, Hannah More and Phyllis Schlafly occupied the same impossible set of roles: theologians, political influencers, organizers, founding mothers, and white feminists. What they shared most deeply, however, was evangelicalism. This essay argues that their life works require evangelicalism to be recast not as a stable denominational throughline, but as a reactionary religious revolution: a recurring form of conservative Christian mobilization that emerges when national security and Christian order are perceived as threatened by secularization, women’s expanding public authority, revolution, or global disorder. Read comparatively, More and Schlafly reveal how evangelical women turned apparent submission into public power. As theologians, they translated Divine Providence into a doctrine of social hierarchy and national destiny. As political influencers, they helped shape the legislative and moral battles of their respective eras. As organizers, they built grassroots movements through pamphlets, books, speeches, and campaigns that converted private piety into public action. As founding mothers, they helped produce sexual-purity movements whose effects long outlived them. As white feminists, they expanded women’s public authority while preserving patriarchy and advancing forms of female empowerment designed primarily for white women. Their stories expose evangelicalism’s revolutionary force: its ability to make hierarchy feel holy, reaction feel righteous, and women’s subordination look like power.

Author Biography

Taylor Valci (they/them) is a historian of twentieth-century White American Pentecostalism and evangelicalism, currently pursuing their Master of Arts in Religion at Yale Divinity School. Their work weaves personal and expert-witness testimonies into the fabric of their scholarly analysis across the fields of American Religious History, Critical Whiteness Studies, Queer Studies, American Studies, and histories of capitalism, colonialism, labor, and law. Moreover, a wide range of professional experiences, including work as a union organizer and researcher, paralegal at the National Labor Relations Board, nonprofit case manager in unhoused services, classroom history teacher, educational therapist, and certified disability benefits specialist, grounds Valci’s scholarship in human experience. In all that they write and create, Valci ultimately aims to center Liberation, for all people, from all systems of oppression, everywhere.

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