Pop-culture humor about sexy wives became normalized evangelical piety in the 2010s

Evidence

It is hard to tell whether Will Ferrell or Mark Driscoll deserves more credit for the “smokin’ hot wife” phenomenon that swept through evangelicalism in the 2010s. In 2011, Baptist pastor Joe Nelms garnered national attention when he channeled Talladega Nights’s Ricky Bobby in his opening prayer at a NASCAR event, thanking God for his “smokin’ hot wife.” But praising God for sexy wives in prayers, sermons, and on social media had become common practice among a certain set of conservative evangelical pastors. One megachurch pastor posted a photo of his wife on Instagram captioned with a modified version of Proverbs 31: “her leather pants are like water to her husband’s soul.” For their part, women could attend Christian conferences to learn how to be “a hottie for your honey.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 450

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece — where modesty discourse regulates women’s dress, this shows the flip side where male lust is sacralized into worship of wives’ sexuality.
• CANDY: The Talladega Nights Ricky Bobby prayer opening a NASCAR event is a perfect, weirdly funny elevator anecdote.
• XREF: The reframing of Proverbs 31 — the virtuous woman as leather-pantsed sex object — parallels the same scripture-redeployment the reader tracks in moral panics over dress.