Evangelical households tracked national economic trends despite anti-work rhetoric

Evidence

By the 1990s, the male breadwinner economy was largely a thing of the past. Since the 1960s, male blue-collar work such as construction, manufacturing, and agriculture had been in decline, shrinking from approximately half of the workforce to less than 30 percent at the end of the 1990s. Over that same period, sectors that employed pink-and white-collar women—areas such as health care, retail, education, finance, and food service—expanded to well over half of the workforce; by 1994, 75 percent of working-age women worked for pay. Despite their rhetoric, evangelicals were not immune to these economic trends; among conservative Protestants, rates of dual-income households began to approach the national average. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 352

Categorization

• QUESTION: This throws the ‘complementarian breadwinner’ ideology into tension with lived dual-income reality — worth chasing how the ideology survived that gap.