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In 1998, the Manhattan Theatre Club’s staging of Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi ignited protest and virulent condemnation from various religious and politically conservative groups which eventually led to the cancellation of the play’s production. This led to a barrage of criticism from the national theatre, gay, and civil rights communities and free speech advocates, including the ACLU and PEN, which issued a press releases about the cancellation that decried censorship and acquiescence by the theatre to neo-conservative religiously political groups. As swiftly as the cancellation, the Manhattan Theatre Club reversed its decision and the show resumed its rehearsal schedule. Although the critical reception of the play was mostly negative, the political controversy surrounding its production testifies to the fact that a contemporary play in America dealing with both religious and gay themes is still economically risky, radical politically, and worthy of critical rhetorical analysis. This work aims to fill that gap by providing an in-depth investigation of the tangled rhetorical history of Corpus Christi. First providing an account of the controversy surrounding the 1998 production of Corpus Christi, this work then gives a historical and cultural analysis of McNally’s career and corpus of work leading up to the play’s contentious staging. Second, a full account of the play’s critical reception is given through a close analysis of the rhetorical responses to the work from the Christian Right and the more secular community that supported the play’s production. Third, the American Christian Right’s vitriolic rhetorical response to the play is indicted as homophobic hate speech. Fourth, how McNally’s play repudiates the rhetorical violence perpetrated by the Right against gays is revealed. Finally, the last two chapters examine how the rhetoric of the play speaks directly to its queer audience. Chapter five reveals the rhetorical and meta-theatrical conversion strategies employed by McNally in Corpus Christi to proselytize his expansive message of Christ to his gay audience. Ending the work, chapter six examines McNally’s rhetorical reclamation of the Christ figure from the Right as a means of sacralizing homosexuality as a religious identity and homosexual love and sex as a spiritual act.

This dissertation examines one of the most counter-intuitive southern responses to the rise of the Christian Right. Texas Baptists made up the largest state association of Southern Baptists in the country. They were theologically conservative, uniformly uncomfortable with abortion, and strident in their condemnation of homosexuality. Yet they not only rejected an alliance with the Christian Right and the Republican Party, but they did so emphatically. They ultimately offered a more robust critique of the Christian Right than even many of their secular counterparts. While their activities might seem surprising to contemporary readers, they were part of a long and proud Baptist tradition of supporting the separation of church and state. On issues like organized school prayer, government regulation of abortion, and private school vouchers, they were disturbed by the blurring of lines between church and state that characterized the Christian Right as it emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Texas Baptists were also uncomfortable with the backlash against integration and sought to promote racial justice in any way they could. While many southerners adopted a politics of cultural resentment, Texas Baptists often worked for racial justice and promoted interracial cooperation. They also fought the move towards economic conservatism in the South. From their campaigns to raise the welfare cap in Texas to their promotion of Lyndon Johnson's Community Action Programs, Texas Baptists defended government activism to alleviate poverty. They embodied a very different economic ideology than that of the ultraconservative southerners who have dominated the scholarship of southern politics after 1960. On all of these issues, the experience of Texas Baptists challenges prevailing ideas about southern political change. Their story is one that undermines the notion of a unified evangelical reaction to the racial, economic, and political changes that swept the South (and the nation) after 1960. It should give pause to those who have assumed that the alliance between Southern Baptists and the Christian Right was inevitable or unavoidable and force us to reconsider the complexity of southern evangelicalism.

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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

The Christian Right has been a major contributor to the policy process since the 1980s, helping shape the national agenda by illuminating a number of social issues and influencing elections with strong grassroots campaigns. For political scientists, Christian Right organizations provide a rich source of information for studying interest group activity, electioneering, and general political theory. In particular, their efforts to lobby various policy issues such as prayer in school, education, abortion, and traditional marriage, has caused them to become a distinct coalition of advocacy groups, and the focus of much research by many scholars. However, as we advance into the twenty-first century, new biotechnology-related issues have emerged that challenge Christian Right organizations and their values. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the involvement of the Christian Right between 2001 and the beginning of 2009 in legislative debates regarding stem cell research policy, and attempt to distinguish its effective and non-effective lobbying strategies, and the general perception of its influence. This study addressed three research questions. First, to what extent do Christian Right organizations participate in the legislative process regarding stem cell research? Second, what is the perceived influence of its lobbying activities on federal stem cell research legislation? Third, in what ways does the Christian Right engage in lobbying legislators on stem cell research legislation? Within these broad research questions, the following subsequent study objectives were pursued: 1) learn about the reasons for the Christian Right’s influence or lack of influence; 2) understand the goals of its advocacy efforts; 3) learn about its use of outside and inside lobbying strategies; 4) better understand the approach used by Christian Right organizations in lobbying legislators who were undecided about a particular stem cell research legislation; 5) learn about the kind of rhetoric it used; and 6) find out what, if any, forms of coalition building it engaged in as part of its advocacy efforts. In addition, this study examined why legislators voted against the majority of their political party when it came to stem cell research legislation. The epistemological approach for this study was qualitative. Data consisted of verbal responses to semi-structured questions during telephone interviews with representatives from Christian Right organizations, advocacy groups that support the expansion of stem cell research policy, former legislators, and current staff members. In addition to the in-depth interviews, data was also obtained through organizational and government documents. Finally, this dissertation analyzed the Christian Right and its participation in the development of stem cell research legislation through the lens of the advocacy coalition framework. In doing so, the study captures of the essence of the stem cell debate and the role of the Christian Right within it, and offers a new theoretical framework for examining the Christian Right.

Using ten sermons from five prominent and politically active evangelical megachurch pastors taken from the 2016 presidential campaign season, this case study utilizes frame analysis to understand the political relevance of modern evangelical sermonizing. An inductive frame analysis allows the concept of a collective action frame to be observed as a process and for patterns to emerge from the source text. Within these sermons, ministers offer self-identifying evangelicals a vocabulary with which to understand and describe their own identity. In this context, the Bible is a powerful cultural symbol that represents an allegiance to traditions that are framed as the bedrock of American exceptionalism. The boundaries that are drawn and vociferously maintained in this sample emphasize exclusion over inclusion, especially in terms of salvation and righteousness, which can emotionally motivate action. In an election year, this sample demonstrates how evangelical identity is mobilized as an electoral force.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal