Clothed With Strength And Dignity: How Evangelical Women are Re-Claiming and Re-Constructing the Evangelical Church in the Blogosphere

Much has been written on the significance of the religious web log or “blog” in the past decade,
especially as its growing popularity among authors and readers alike has coincided with the continued
decline in institutional church attendance in the West (see Cheong et al, Corrigon et al, Campbell, and
West). However, much less has been written on the significance of religious blogs authored by women,
and particularly those that are written from a standpoint of cultivated ambivalencei
toward the doctrines and practices of their religious traditions; a phenomenon that is especially poignant for feminist
scholars to consider given the historical tendency for patriarchal religious institutions to marginalize
and delegitimize women's voices (Bammert 155; Gallagher 215; Steiner-Aeschliman and Mauss 248).
To that end, it is further pertinent to consider the growing popularity of religious blogs authored by
women in North America who identify as evangelical Protestant—a Christian tradition that remains
largely (albeit not exclusively) committed to the value of patriarchal authority within and outside the
institutional church, even (and especially) while some mainline Protestant denominations have been
adopting the value of gender equality both at the institutional and doctrinal levels (Steiner-Aeschliman
and Mauss 248; Keller and Ruether xxxviii-xxxix). This exploratory study accordingly employs
feminist Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate a purposive selection of religious blogs that are
authored by evangelical women and written from a standpoint of cultivated ambivalence.