Schlafly made gender central to an emerging evangelical political identity.

Evidence

Almost singlehandedly, Schlafly sabotaged the ratification of the ERA. In doing so, she also helped put gender at the center of an emerging evangelical political identity. To Schlafly’s supporters, the ERA was a religious issue. As one of her STOP ERA state workers explained, “Phyllis is a religious leader—perhaps the most powerful in the country today. Because it’s women who generally keep the family’s faith and it’s women who support Phyllis.” STOP ERA was “a religious war,” and that’s why they were winning. As women like Marabel Morgan and Elisabeth Elliot helped unify white Christian women around a shared domestic identity, Schlafly converted these women into political activists. Speaking directly to ordinary housewives across the nation, she endowed their quotidian lives with religious and national significance, uniting Catholic, evangelical, and Mormon women, women in the white middle and working classes—the women of the Silent Majority—in a common cause. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 171

Categorization

• XREF: This prefigures her central thesis that domestic gender ideology, not theology, unified white evangelicals politically — the continuity-not-hypocrisy argument. — connects to: Phyllis Schlafly conceived the cross-denominational religious right decades before Falwell — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 276
• SEED: The framing ‘STOP ERA as religious war’ plus Schlafly uniting Catholic-evangelical-Mormon women is a strong angle for how a gender platform, not doctrine, forged the Religious Right coalition.