The Faithful Citizen: Popular Christian Media and Gendered Civic Identities

For decades, American popular media have instructed audiences about their roles and significance in the public sphere. In The Faithful Citizen, rhetorical critic Kristy Maddux argues that popular Christian media not only communicate avenues for civic engagement but do so in profoundly gendered terms. Her detailed interrogation of popular Christian movies, books, and television shows--the Left Behind series, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, Amazing Grace, 7th Heaven, and the blockbuster The Da Vinci Code--exposes five competing models of how Christians should behave in the civic sphere as their gendered selves. What emerges is a typology that insightfully reveals how these varying faith-based models of engagement uniquely shape public discourse and influence the larger picture of contemporary politics.