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Father, son, and the holy dollar: rebuilding the American Dream in post recessionary reality television and mommy blogging

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Father, son, and the holy dollar: rebuilding the American Dream in post recessionary reality television and mommy blogging

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FATHER, SON, AND THE HOLY DOLLAR: REBUILDING THE AMERICAN DREAM IN
POST RECESSIONARY REALITY TELEVISION AND MOMMY BLOGGING
by
Katherine Madden

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements of the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS—CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2016

Copyright 2016 Katherine Madden
ii

Dedication

To Sean

iii

Acknowledgements
This project is the result of giving and gifted mentors and an immensely
supportive family. First and foremost, Anikó Imre’s generosity, support, and
exceptional insight have been instrumental to the completion of this project. As I
continue my career in education, I will look to Anikó’s selflessness and compassion
as the exemplary in mentoring and teaching. I am in awe of her brilliance and I am
grateful that she has shared it with me for the betterment of this project. Next, I
would like to awknowledge Diane Winston, who has so generously introduced me to
the academic field of religion. You have brought opportunities to me that I have
never dreamed of and am entirely grateful for. I could truly sit and listen to you
lecture for hours because the depth of your knowledge in religion is unmatched. It
has truly been a pleasure getting to know you and work with you. Ellen Seiter’s
kindness and listening ear were instrumental in getting my feet on the ground with
this project. Your experience and knowledge were key in the formulation of this
dissertation. I cannot express how much I admire you as a person and as an
academic. I was first introduced to the work of Sarah Banet-Weiser as an
undergraduate at UC Irvine and I was in total awe of it. When I finally met you at
USC and was lucky enough to study under you I was not disappointed, in fact I was
even more inspired. You can not imagine how thrilled I was that you agreed to be on
my committee. I am beyond grateful for the guidance of these four powerhouses on
my committee. I would also like to thank David James and his early guidance.
Christine Acham and Alicia White have been incredibly helpful in guiding me
through the nitty-gritty of graduate school.
iv

Finally, there has never been a more supportive, encouraging, silly,
intelligent, and loving husband than mine. Sean, I love you more than you could ever
know. Miles, you are my greatest source of pride. I hope this makes you proud some
day. Being your mother is the greatest joy. To my siblings and siblings-in-law, James,
April, Robert, Kara, Joe, and Fred, your humor and joy are contagious. I love you all.
Jake, Dylan, and Jordan, I am so proud to be your aunt and I cannot wait to see the
impressive things you do with your lives. Bob, Mary, and Mike I am so grateful to
have married into such a loving family. Mom and Dad: I love you, I love you, I love
you! I am so proud to be the daughter of such kind, funny, smart, and positive
people. You are my biggest cheerleaders and without your encouragement I would
have never known I could go this far.

v

Table of Contents
Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................... vi
Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 1
Notes to Introduction ........................................................................................................... 25
Chapter 1: Reforming Toxic-Masculinity and Reframing Headship: The Post-
Recessionary Moral Project of Accountable Fatherhood in Reality Television ........... 29
Notes to Chapter 1................................................................................................................. 57
Chapter 2: “This is Just an Incredible God Thing”: Monetized Domesticity in Bottom-
Up Media ................................................................................................................................................. 61
Notes to Chapter 2................................................................................................................. 84
Chapter 3: Mompreneurs on HGTV: Conservative Christian Femininity in Home
Renovation Television ....................................................................................................................... 89
Notes to Chapter 3............................................................................................................... 119
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 124
Notes to Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 131
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................ 132

vi

Abstract
This dissertation will study the ideological conception of parenting and
Christianity in reality programs such as CBS’s Undercover Boss, and lifestyle
programs informed by the reality genre such as HGTV’s Fixer Upper that arise out of
the need to reconstruct the American Dream in post-recessionary culture. These
television programs, particularly the HGTV programming, are informed by
parenting vlogs and mommy blogs authored by Conservative Christian stay-at-home
parents. Public and domestic labor is collapsed into a singular effort to salvage the
heteronormative patriarchy that was allegedly destabilized by the recession.
1

Introduction
I arrived at Christian parenting vlogs through one of my closest friend’s
YouTube channels. We were raised a few houses apart in a quiet suburban cul-de-
sac in Northern California. Our court was populated by other large Catholic families
like our own, and I owe my idyllic childhood in part to the close friendships my
brothers and I shared with her and her three sisters. This friend of mine, a former
elementary school teacher, and her husband, a California Highway Patrol officer,
started their vlog in 2014 after three and a half years of failed fertility treatments.
With nearly 9,000 subscribers and a million views, the couple’s YouTube channel
features hundreds of vlogs chronicling their struggle with infertility. My dear friends
are among thousands of other hopeful parents-to-be (as well as parents) who
incorporate vlogging into their daily routine in order to connect with an audience
over issues pertaining to parenting, family life, and faith. What intrigued me about
my friend’s vlogging identity, is that since joining the YouTube community of family
vloggers, her and her husband have distanced themselves from the Catholic Church
and now attend evangelical services. In the process of failing to conceive a child,
they found comfort in other infertility and parenting vlogs and blogs, many of which
are authored by conservative Christians. I am by no means suggesting that these
vlogs are the sole reason for their conversion; I believe that there were other factors
at play. I have merely observed the comfort she has found in a community that has
effectually used vlogging to share their faith and family life with audiences ranging
in size from a few to millions. The couple is now joyfully in their third trimester, and
awaiting the birth of their son, and chronicling each intimate moment, from doctor’s
2

appointments and medical scares, to picking between nearly identical shades of blue
paint at Home Depot for their growing audience, which is mostly comprised of other
couples who battle infertility and find hope in their happy ending.
Vlogs such as my friend’s offer the possibility for stay-at-home parents,
mostly mothers, to monetize their time spent at home with their children, therefore
commodifying childrearing and domestic labor. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra
refer to this labor as the “new domestic economies of recessionary media,” in which
“women adeptly monetize domestic skills and resources.”
1
This labor, they argue, is
a variation on postfeminism, in which women rehearse normatively conservative
gender ideals in accordance with patriarchy. The intention of this dissertation is to
add to this discussion that new domestic economies of recessionary media rehearse
Christian gender norms to reconstruct the patriarchal family and reinvest in the
American Dream. Linda McDowell argues that the feminist movement of the 1970s
resulted in the feminization and restructuring of a post-Fordist workforce in which
labor became significantly undervalued and the labor market became increasingly
unstable.
2
Christianity provides the moral context for the neoliberal and post-
Fordist labor policies presented in post-recessionary media about gender, family,
and entrepreneurship by affirming normative gender roles.
The Great Recession of 2008 has informed the perception and status of
parenting, particularly in relation to the reconstruction of the American Dream after
the fallout of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression The
expository nature of reality television, in addition to the prevalence of cameras in
consumer devices, has informed cultural conceptions of privacy and participatory
3

citizenship. Social media and video sharing sites provide a platform for parents,
particularly women, to reclaim the childrearing narrative from media producers,
advertisers, politicians, and government institutions through the exhibition of their
day-to-day lives. Their Christian parenting is recycled back into reality and
mainstream programming and modeled as restorative for a nation in an ideological
crisis after the perceived cataclysmic blow that the recession delivered to male
hegemony.
When reconsidering the Marxist conception of the superstructure and base,
Raymond Williams proposes that the base has a much more fluid and dynamic role
in cultural production than Marx’s original conception allowed for. Williams
suggests that the cultural product is understood through the conditions of its unique
production: “I am saying that we should look not for the components of a product
but for the conditions of a practice. When we find ourselves looking at a particular
work, or group of works, often realizing, as we do so, their essential community as
well as their irreducible individuality, we should find ourselves attending first to the
reality of their practice and the conditions of the practice as it was then executed.”
3

The intention of this dissertation is to consider the content of these vlogs and reality
programs, while also reflecting on the causal systems of beliefs that result in their
production. The vlogs and reality programs are an artifact of Conservative Christian
thought insofar as they assert that a woman’s sanctity is provisional to her
domesticity, and that a man’s sacred obligation is to serve in headship. These
ideological edifices of gender normativity and virtue accord not only with the
religious institution that produce them, but also with advanced capitalist
4

sensibilities of their production. The content and aesthetic of these vlogs is
seamlessly cycled between user-generated and mainstream culture because the
conditions of the labor that produce them are conducive to post-recessionary labor
practices. The content of this media, women and men balancing family life with
work life, reflects the gendered undertones of post-recessionary hysteria
concerning the perceived threat to white male hegemony.
This dissertation will study the ideological conception of parenting and
Christianity in reality programs such as CBS’s Undercover Boss, and lifestyle
programs informed by the reality genre such as HGTV’s Fixer Upper that arise out of
the need to reconstruct the American Dream in post-recessionary culture. These
television programs, particularly the HGTV programming, are informed by
parenting vlogs authored by Conservative Christian stay-at-home parents. Public
and domestic labor is collapsed into a singular effort to salvage the heteronormative
patriarchy that was allegedly destabilized by the recession.
While these vlogs and reality programs promote non-normative gender
conceptions of parenting, in addition to the overwhelmingly normative gender roles
they uphold, such as men enjoying domestic duties and women loathing domestic
duties, their opposition is understood as conditional in the retooling of the American
Dream. Or to say their opposition demonstrates the flexibility of a culture
rebounding from an ideological crisis. As Todd Gitlin argues, “hegemonic ideology is
systematically preferred by certain features of TV programs, and that at the same
time alternative and oppositional values are brought into the cultural system, and
5

domesticated into hegemonic forms at times, by the routine workings of the
market.”
4

Neoliberalism can be understood as a complex political and cultural project
that promotes the growth of the private sector through laissez-faire economic
policies, deregulation, and the dismantling of public services. This is achieved by
emphasizing market principles such as competition, self-reliance, and
transformation, all of which can be seen as themes in reality TV. The reality genre, in
particular, reaffirms neoliberal policies and governing through its labor practices
and the production of content with conforming narratives and objectives. In the
reality programs, in particular, it is tacitly understood that while the recession
disrupts normative gender performance, the end goal of a rebounded economy
would suppress any such disturbances and realign gender roles within their proper
role within the American Dream.
In post-recessionary media, conservative Christian ideology services the
effort of restoring male headship. Why was the dominant use of Christianity in
popular media following the recession to shore up the foundational cracks of white
patriarchy rather than seize the opportunity to evaluate the ethics of late
capitalism? How does the medium of the message inform its ideology? Here I will
borrow from the work of Douglas Kellner, who argues that American television
content inevitably supports capitalism and is incapable of providing a meaningful
platform to discuss alternatives to capitalism because television was developed as
both a commodity and a tool to sell commodities.
5
The responsibility of television to
cater to the ‘public interest’ is fulfilled through its stabilization of capitalism.
6

6

Reality television amplifies the consumerist tendencies of television with narratives
manufactured to endorse commodities. In post-recessionary media, the reality
genre engages with the ideological debates raised during the economic crisis
concerning the growing class divide. This media features narratives that employ the
meritocratic ideology in which the American Dream is fabricated.
Neoliberalism
This project positions itself within the popular assertion that the Great
Recession represents the apex of decades of neoliberal governing, a rationale of
governing that aims to protect individual liberty and freedom through privatization,
self-reliance, laissez-faire economic policies, and a limited central government.
David Harvey argues that, after WWII, an agreement between labor and capital was
enacted to ensure employment and a social safety net for returning soldiers.
7

Through these reforms, and with the aid of unions and taxation, fair wages and
government programs for working and middle class laborers maintained the quality
of life promised to the post-war populace. Government and business leaders
endorsed these reforms as the economy grew until the 1970s.
8

According to Judith Stein, rising oil prices and economic competition from
Japan and Germany prompted the reevaluation of New Deal liberalism and global
trade policies.
9
In the years to follow, both Republican and Democratic leaders
endorsed policies that “affirm[ed] that capital freed from taxation, regulation, and
trade barriers would produce national and labor prosperity. The effects of such
policies in a global economy shifted resources away from manufacturing—the
‘tradables’—into finance and housing.”
10
Neoliberal policies reorganized existing
7

institutional arrangements, which included privatizing natural resources to reduce
taxes and increase efficiency, emphasizing competition between cities and regions
to encourage growth, and enabling mobility and trade between borders to lower the
value of commodities and labor.
11
Stein contends that, while these reforms
temporarily did what they promised, that is, they “allowed Americans to maintain
consumption despite stagnating wages and huge trade deficits,”
12
they ultimately
resulted in the “Age of Inequality.”
While Neoliberalism was framed as a utopian project to export the ideals of
capitalism abroad, it “has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital
accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some
instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite.”
13
.
Harvey argues that the utopian framing of neoliberalism as the economic
expression of capitalism “has primarily worked as a system of justification and
legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal,”
14
including
eliminating sectors of employment and social programs and safety nets. Thus the
ideological scaffolding supporting neoliberal policies depends on the collective
cultural investment in American exceptionalism to justify its existence. At the
cornerstone of American exceptionalism is the promise of individual freedom and
prosperity through meritocracy. Neoliberal policies reframe individual freedom as
personal responsibility. “While personal and individual freedom in the marketplace
is guaranteed, each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her
own action and well-being. This principle extends into the realms of welfare,
8

education, healthcare, and even pensions.”
15
Neoliberalism demands perpetual self-
care and self-regulation from its citizens.
This economic system employs meritocracy to absolve corporate and
government institutions from the culpability of income inequality. If a person is
unable to overcome systematic inequality, such as underfunded public education,
then “inequality is represented as a moral outcome,”
16
as inequality results from a
deficiency in individual merit and effort. The mythologized model-minority, who
pulls himself up by his bootstraps and out of the ghetto, perpetuates the neoliberal
principles of discipline and accountability. These practices rely on a belief that the
American Dream can be realized by anybody who is willing to “work hard enough.”
Lisa Duggan argues that neoliberalism “organizes material and political life in terms
of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity
and religion. But the categories through which Liberalism (and thus also
neoliberalism) classifies human activity and relationships actively obscure the
connections among these organizing terms.”
17
Leftist and multicultural political
groups were defunded after they were presented as divisive and un-American. The
scarcity of resources for leftist and cultural organizations pitted these groups
against each other, thus ending any alliances between them.
18
According to Jefferson
Cowie, individualism at the expense of collectivism is the defining characteristic of
the neoliberal era. “The social and political spaces for the collective concerns of
working people—the majority of the citizenry—dissolved from American civic life
when the nation moved from manufacturing to finance, from troubled hope to jaded
ennui, from the compromises of constraints of industrial pluralism to the jungle of
9

the marketplace.”
19
Cowie contends that the emergence of neoliberal policies during
the 1970s marked the “end of a historically elusive deal: the conscious, diverse, and
unified working class acting as a powerful agent in political, social and economic
life.”
20

The antipathy for multicultural and leftist groups embedded in neoliberal
policies engendered a nostalgia for whiteness and traditional gender roles.
21
Policy
reforms of the 1970s and 1980s reflected such nostalgia despite the efforts of
leftists. Robert O. Self argues that
Left-leaning reformers in this era recognized that the heterosexual male
breadwinner was an impoverished model for conceiving of a democratic
subject, a modem citizen. But they struggled mightily to bring into being a
political order based on anything else. The liberal left had defined its political
subject—one with varying gender, sexual, racial, and class inflections—in
ways that the political philosophy and institutions underlying American
democracy could not fully accommodate. The liberal left could win, within
limits, freedom to do as one pleased. But it could not win positive rights that
would make such freedoms meaningful to many, many Americans.
Meanwhile, Conservatives found themselves advocating a form of freedom—
market based, without government meddling—that was at the heart of that
very political philosophy.
22

The New Deal policies that resulted in fair wages, expanding infrastructure, and
social safety nets were retooled as “government meddling” and antithetical to
individual liberty and freedom. Limited government intervention into capitalist
policies resulted in a society unable to correct the defects of capitalism in the name
of “freedom.” What resulted was the distribution of wealth and resources to the top
and the maintenance of white male hegemony.
Individualism as an ideological framework encourages citizens to find
meaning through self-care, through consumerism—the fetishism of technology and
commodities at the cost of social relations. Finally, there lies a significant tension
10

between the binary of “possessive individualism” and a “meaningful collective
life.”
23
The seduction of neoliberalism, however, is that the solution to all of the
contradictions and tensions can be found in the market through incentivizing good
corporate behavior. The citizen consumer is promised the role of regulator of
cultural ideals. This argument, though, awards the vote to those with enough capital
to even have a choice in the marketplace.
Harvey invokes Antonio Gramsci’s critique of the bourgeoisie’s use of
‘common sense’ to align working class values to their own values in order to explain
the process by which neoliberalism was sold to the masses. This was done “through
the mobilization of cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country
or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists,
immigrants, strangers, or ‘others’).”
24
These values, beliefs, and fears are pushed as
common sense, thus “obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural
prejudice.”
25
Harvey argues that when the ruling class frames a political issue as
‘common sense,’ they make it difficult for anyone to challenge their stance on it. One
such account, among many, of politicians and business leaders invoking religion to
sway the masses, is Kim Phillips-Fein’s historical analysis of the oil tycoon J. Howard
Pew. Pew evoked Christianity to gain the favor of the working class in the
dismantling of New Deal reforms.
26

The founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, like Pew, invoked
Christianity to provide a moral backbone for neoliberal policies. In his book, Listen,
America!, Falwell claims that “the free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the
Book of Proverbs in the Bible. Jesus Christ made it clear that work ethic was part of
11

His plan for man. Ownership of property is biblical. Competition in business is
biblical.”
27
In the 1980s, the Republicans, on the other hand, were actively pursuing a
pro-business agenda and voting down consumer protection and labor laws to
appease the corporate-funded Political Action Committees that were bankrolling the
Party. This message, however, was not easily sellable to an electoral base of
laborers. “It was around this time that Republicans sought an alliance with the
Christian Right. The latter had not been politically active in the past, but the
foundation of Jerry Falwell’s ‘moral majority’ as a political movement in 1978
changed all of that. The Republican Party now had its Christian base.”
28
This new
relationship moralized the efforts of the Republican Party and big business. This
proved to be a winning combination, as President Reagan was elected to serve a
second term as president, and later his vice president, George H. W. Bush, would be
nominated for (and win) the presidency.
The most compelling aspect of this relationship between big business, the
Republican Party, and Conservative Christians is that these Conservative Christians
were “persuaded to vote against its material, economic, and class interests for
cultural, nationalist, and religious reasons.”
29
Harvey continues that it is “more
appropriate to replace the word ‘persuaded’ with ‘elected’ since there is abundant
evidence that the evangelical Christians (no more than 20% of the population) who
make up the core of the ‘moral majority’ eagerly embraced the alliance with big
business and the Republican Party.”
30
Harvey’s implementation of Gramsci’s theory
of common sense and these Great Men histories to make sense of citizens voting
against their best interest does not offer a satisfactory solution. This top-down
12

explanation results in an absence of agency in the working class and does not
recognize religion as its own system of making sense of the world. Neoliberalism’s
preoccupation with an all-powerful ruling class is its greatest shortcoming. Within
the logic of neoliberalism, there is no escaping the market, and ultimately the
market appropriates any cultural resistance. This explanation, however, assumes
that the market is the only system around which citizens organize their lives. Many
religious would argue that religion is the only system around which to organize
one’s life. Bethany Moreton offers a comprehensive history of Wal-Mart that
demonstrates the role of the Christian laborers, students, housewives, and grass-
roots activists in this alignment with conservatism.
In her ethnographic history, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of the
Christian Free Enterprise, Moreton attributes the success of Wal-Mart to its devoted
Christian laborers. Wal-Mart, Moreton argues, was established in the Ozarks, which
had a specific Christian tradition common to the Sunbelt. Moreton argues that these
Christian female laborers were compliant in replicating natural family orders in the
stores by allowing men to fill managerial roles. “Women—both employees and
customers—structured a unique social relationship that had no precedent in the
factory model of work. Middle-aged mothers in particular formed the stable
backbone for the workplace, training generations of male managers and providing a
reserve of service skills. Workers and customers alike brought rural, Protestant
family ideals into the workplace, changing the face of postindustrial America.”
31

Religious historian Robert Orsi, in writing about how his own relationship with
religion has informed his research, reflects on his religious family members, stating
13

that they “clearly think about their religion; to emphasize practice is not to deny
reflection. They also make choices, although they do so in the more modest sense of
choosing on the field of what is already given to them.”
32
Orsi’s reflection is useful in
thinking about the female Wal-Mart laborers of Moreton’s work. The choices they
have made in their employment reflect only the choices with which they have been
presented. They make sense of these choices the same way they make sense of the
rest of their lives: with religious ideology. Their decision to remain subservient to
men, both in their personal and professional lives, and replicate the Protestant
family structure in their place of work, reflects a religious ideology of male headship
that, while symbiotic with neoliberal policies, predates it by thousands of years.
Moreton adds that “well after the compassionate nuclear family had transformed
households in the booming metropolitan suburbs, many Ozarkers maintained this
sense of family as a productive unit, not primarily the vehicle for individual self-
actualization.”
33
This assertion demonstrates the imperfect relationship between
neoliberalism and Christianity. According to the former Wal-Mart employees that
Moreton interviewed, women laborers were proud of the family structure that was
holistically replicated in their Wal-Mart stores. Moreton argues that while the
service industry, known for women’s work, posed a threat to masculinity and the
structure of American labor, Wal-Mart became a space were these anxieties were
assuaged through the replication of the Protestant family structure.
Secularization had reshaped the American landscape. Overt Christian
traditions were being stripped from public spaces. Thus, according to Moreton,
entrepreneurs provided religious alternatives in private secular spaces for
14

Christians to make their presence known. If a good American is a good consumer,
then Christians needed a space where they could be a good Christian American and
a good Christian consumer. According to Moreton, Wal-Mart became a space for
Christians to maintain their values while participating in the new economy. “As long
as mass buying could mean producing humble products ‘for the family,’ as long as
men could perform women’s work without losing their authority, as long as front-
line service workers could derive dignity and meaning from their labors, the service
economy could survive its internal conditions.”
34
Wal-Mart, a bastion of neoliberal
ideals, reshaped the American industrial landscape because of the Christian culture
that the Ozarker laborers, not the necessarily the founders of Wal-Mart, instilled.
Moreton’s history offers a bottom-up account of the marriage between neoliberal
policies and Christianity.

Reality Television
Nick Couldry argues that “neoliberal rationality is reinforced not just by
explicit discourse but through the multiple ways in which the discourse and its
workings get embedded in daily life and social organization.”
35
Neoliberal paradigms
circulate beyond discourse and are realized through cultural products such as
television. Rose adds that “neoliberal rationality provides principles for organizing
action (in workplaces, public services, fields of competition, public discussion)
which are internalized as norms and values (for example, the norm of
entrepreneurial ‘freedom’) by individuals, groups, and institutions: in short they
become ‘culture.’”
36
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay argue that the cultural and
15

technological articulation of neoliberal rationalities is reality television. The
concentration of media ownership, and the reinvention of television’s labor
practices, regulatory policies, distribution flows, and content in the 1980s and
1990s, mirror the concurrent neoliberal strategies of governing.
37
According to
Ouellette, “as government becomes more privatized and dispersed, theories of
governmentality offer a useful way to conceptualize television’s power.”
38
The
development and popularity of reality television can only be understood within the
context of the governing strategies that accompany advanced capitalism.
This dissertation is situated within Robert Clyde Allen’s definition of the
multifaceted study of television as “the social experience associated with producing,
viewing, listening, talking about, reading about, being captured by, appearing on,
and being influenced and affected by television.”
39
This project will allign the
popularity of reality television with that of neoliberal policies and practices. Using
Ouellette’s framework, the way that reality television “validates or subverts
liberalism as an ideology” is less important “than how it catalyzes and acts upon
techniques and rationalities of governing.”
40
The intention of this project is to
demonstrate the authority that government, viewers, and private industry give
television to shape the logic of governing and citizenship.
Reality television is the product of a media industry in flux. Deregulation,
privatization, and the increased commodification of the television industry resulted
in the need for a malleable genre that is inexpensively produced and can easily
accommodate the integration of promotional content. According to Chad Raphael,
the format emerged in the late 1980s as networks were looking to cut costs in
16

programming in response to the need to fill the line-ups of new cable networks, the
rising popularity of the VCR, a progressively divided audience, advertising dollars
spread more thin, and rising corporate debt.
41
Annette Hill breaks the normalization
and popularity of reality television into three waves. The first wave in the 1980s
was the product of the move from factual and journalistic content to infotainment,
or factual content heavy on human interest, celebrity, and commercial narratives.
The second wave, which occurred in the 1990s, was informed by the popularity of
lifestyle programming or docu-soaps, which focused on home and garden television.
The third wave of the 2000s “was based on the success of social experiments that
placed ordinary people in controlled environments over an extended period of
time.”
42
Ted Madger argues that the success of CBS mega-hits Survivor and Big
Brother during the summer of 2000 proved to television executives that reality
television was both lucrative and enduring, resulting in the dramatic shift in
business models for the big three broadcast networks.
43

Neoliberal policies have opened borders for trade, thus resulting in the
concentration of distribution and production of content to few multinational
companies. Silvio Waisbord argues that the national and global privatization and
deregulation of airwaves has resulted in multinational corporations linking together
and standardizing content. The ever-adaptable reality format allows for the
integration of local and national customs and cultures within the standardized
content.
44
Media companies in need of content to distribute across mobile and
digital platforms domestically and internationally looked to reality television as
inexpensive programming that films quickly and easily incorporates advertising
17

content. Nick Couldry argues that the smartphone shaped the thematic content of
reality programming by reimagining “liveness” in television.
45
The proliferation of
smartphone camera technology, together with an abundance of reality television
content, redefined the cultural perception of surveillance. Mark Andrejevic argues
that “the promise deployed by reality TV is that submission to comprehensive
surveillance is not merely a character-building challenge and a ‘growth’ experience,
but a way to participate in a medium that has long relegated audience members to
the role of passive spectators.”
46
Smartphone technology compliments the
interactivity of reality television by allowing viewers to act as citizen consumers in
real time. In doing so, however, viewers are submitting to a culture of surveillance
by trading personal information for the right to participate. Bradley D. Crisold
chronicles the rise of reality television through the program Candid Camera as a
product of Americans becoming increasingly desensitized to surveillance as an
exercise of proper Cold War citizenship.
47
Post-9/11 American politics only further
anesthetized any remaining cultural sensitivity surrounding surveillance and
cemented the practice as proper citizenship.
Lynn Spigel argues that, in post 9/11 television, “pathos can often be an end
in itself; the spectator emerges feeling a sense of righteousness even while justice
has not been achieved in reality and even while many people feel completely
alienated from and overwhelmed by the actual political sphere.”
48
Reality programs
like Undercover Boss offer a similar relief for those estranged from the American
Dream. The program resolves the inequality of the corporate landscape with half-
acknowledgments from the one-percent. The catharsis of watching stand-ins for the
18

ruling class recognize the labor of distressed employees with bonuses and gifts was
powerful enough to propel the program to historically high ratings. Not dissimilar to
other reality programs, Undercover Boss endorses the neoliberal policies that the
genre developed alongside, as Ouellette argues.
49
Anna McCarthy argues that “far
from being a debased piece of mass cultural detritus, then, it would seem that reality
television is something of a privileged site, annotating transformations in the
institution of the individual (citizenship’s raw material) through its consolidation of
connections between three discursive apparatuses for the formation of citizen and
self: state, family, and cultural text.”
50
In reality programming, the family unit is a
microcosm of the state, where governing and reliance are modeled through familial
relationships. The fathers of Undercover Boss and the mothers of HGTV figuratively
and literally “refurbish” a nation left in tatters following the recession not just
through their labor in the public sphere, but chiefly through their labor in the
personal sphere.
Self-maintenance and self-reliability are the thematic bastions of reality
television. As Beverly Skeggs states, “self-responsibility and self-management thus
become key features of the ‘new’ reflexive self. ‘Reality’ television which
foregrounds the display of self-performance by ‘ordinary’ people doing ‘ordinary
everydayness’ with new levels of televisual representational play offered us the
perfect site for exploring self-making, self-legitimation and the supposed demise of
class.”
51
Proper citizenship is achieved primarily through the care and maintenance
of the self as opposed to the care and maintenance of the community. Brenda
Webber argues that the makeover subgenre within reality television is particularly
19

unwavering in its validation of neoliberal selfhood. “On these shows, selfhood links
to social locations and practices marked as normative, frequently designated
through images that connote upward mobility, heterosexuality, and consumer-
orientation, conventional attractiveness, ethnic anonymity, and confidence.”
52
The
preoccupation with the maintenance of the self rejects community growth in favor
of the growth of the individual. The individual, more so than the community, serves
as the facilitator of national growth and development in these programs.
Ouellette argues that, in the United States, citizens are burdened with the
responsibility of understanding their role without any formal guidance from the
state. Private industry has taken advantage of a deficiency in resources that directs
individuals towards community service by fashioning citizenship as a project of
identity formation through consumption and autonomy. “When citizenship
education is privatized television's instrumentality as a cultural technology is to link
practices of self-cultivation and self-fashioning to the lessons and tests of
citizenship.”
53
Ouellette adds that “by demonstrating for and with viewers the
techniques for taking care of oneself, reality TV supports the governmental
rationalities of self-reliance that have become so pivotal to the current stage of
liberal government.”
54

Christianity and Television
There has been much work done in the field of television studies to
demonstrate how Benedict Anderson’s theory of ‘imagined communities’ functions
in the space of television. Expanding Anerson’s theory of nation formation to
20

television, it is this notion—that television engenders community—that makes it an
ideal space to fill the void of community that a ‘spirituality of seeking’ cannot fill. In
the introduction to Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion, Diane
Winston offers that “television converts social conundrums, and metaphysical
questions into stories that explore and even shape notions of identity and destiny—
the building blocks of religious speculation.”
55
Winston adds that “television has
superseded church insofar as it is a virtual meeting place where Americans across
racial, ethnic, economic, and religious lines can find instructive and inspirational
narratives.”
56
In the tradition of ‘spirituality of dwelling,’ physical boundaries are
created that shelter communities from one another. Television, on the other hand,
crosses ‘racial, ethnic, economic and religious lines.’
In his book, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s, sociologist
Robert Wuthnow examines the practice of religion amidst the increased
secularization since the mid-century. Wuthnow argues that Americans have shifted
from a spirituality of dwelling to a spirituality of seeking.
57
A spirituality of dwelling
may be defined as practicing one’s faith within an organized religion, in a formal
space with ritualized activities, and alongside other parishioners. Wuthnow argues
that practitioners of this type of spirituality feel secure in the habitual activity
within a formal space. He adds that a spirituality of dwelling requires distinct
boundaries between sacred and non-sacred spaces. It is in this distinction between
holy and non-holy that the aura of the church, synagogue, or mosque is fashioned
and maintained. A spirituality of seeking, on the other hand, “emphasizes
negotiation: individuals search for sacred moments that reinforce their conviction
21

that the divine exists, but these moments are fleeting; rather than knowing the
territory, people explore new vistas, and they may have to negotiate among complex
and confusing means of spirituality.”
58
Spiritual seeking invites new and innovative
forms of worship, meditation, prayer, and reflection. Spiritual seekers can find the
presence of a higher being outside of formal institutions, including in media. Seekers
borrow from any number of religious practices to arrive at their own self-
fulfillment. Wuthnow argues that this form of spirituality is conducive to the
constant flow and movement of modern people between boundaries. In this form of
spirituality, there is a destabilization of community and an emphasis on the
individual and on choice. It is a spirituality of seeking that is more closely aligned
with the American ethos of consumerism, as seekers “shop” for religious practices
and evaluate those practices as they would any commodity on the market.
In his book, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer
Culture, Vincent J. Miller argues that “nostalgia” and “abstraction” are key
characteristics to a spirituality of seeking, and thus engender a cafeteria-style
mentality:
The dual dynamics of [nostalgia and abstraction] compromise the most
fundamental of these: a dissolution of the coherence of religions reducing
them into a palette of ‘cultural resources’ that can be employed in any
number of ways- even ways fundamentally at odds with the basic logic of
their original religious tradition. This fragmentation also divorces faith from
practice. Symbols, beliefs, and even spiritual disciplines become free-floating
cultural objects ready to be put to whatever use we desire
59
.

Miller, as well as Sarah Banet-Weiser in her book, Authentic(TM): Ambivalence in a
Brand Culture, argue that religious practices like yoga and meditation become
solutions to managing the stresses of capitalism and completely abstract from their
22

religious roots. Yoga and self-help have become symbols of the bourgeoisie. Well-
being is something that can be achieved through individual choice in the
marketplace. The right combination of stress management techniques, religious
practices, and consumer products becomes replacements for organized religion.
Ostwalt in his book, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious
Imagination, adds that the mega-church, while able to reach a broader audience,
restructures the Christian experience. According to Ostwalt, these changes include:
church leaders using market research to determine how to best give their message;
a restructuring of their internal organization to more closely resemble a business
(to manage such a large organization); an emphasis on entertainment in the
scheduling and programming; and a secularized theology that borrows from
popular psychology and self-help.
60
The mega-church further blurs the distinction
between sacred and non-sacred spaces, thus normalizing a spirituality of seeking
which conceptualizes media a key instrument in locating the divine.
According to Wuthnow, in the 1970s “religious leaders were eager to make
spirituality popular, to keep it relevant, and to adapt to changing times. They
became entrepreneurs, borrowing the tactics of bureaucrats and advertisers. They
learned how to market religion, and they taught the faithful to become
consumers.”
61
Jean Comaroff argues that these commercial edifices were erected
during “an age of widespread deregulation. At a time when, under the sway of neo-
liberal policies many states have relinquished significant responsibility for
schooling, health, and welfare—in short for the social reproduction of their
citizens—religious organizations have willingly reclaimed this role.”
62
Comaroff
23

adds that the “luxurious mega-churches flourish on the new frontiers of the post-
industrial economy of the American West”
63
and, in referring to journalist Jonathan
Mahler, are the new town square and a surrogate government.
64
In Sacred
Subdivisions, Justin G. Wilford studies Rick Warren’s iconic mega-church, Saddleback
Church. Wilford explores the multifaceted and secular uses of Saddleback, from
offering job training to staging presidential debates. The mega-church attempts to
give purpose to the fragmented post-industrial space by providing social programs
that appeal to each member of the nuclear home, “where at least some of their
differentiated, fragmented, and delocalized social roles can be reintegrated.”
65

Comaroff argues that neoliberalism results in “disarticulated flows of bodies” that
“governments are increasingly less able or willing to regulate.”
66
Mega-churches are
very much willing to regulate these bodies and give them the community that
neoliberalism dismantles. Additionally, social programs sponsored by the church
offer “compassionate” alternatives to the anti-welfare policies of neoliberalism.
Jason Hackworth makes the case that nongovernmental organizations bridge the
distance in conserve anti-welfare policies and evangelicals, thus making the
potentially blasphemous anti-welfare diatribes of politicians palatable.
67
Hackworth
states that
Narratives that weave together an evangelical identity with a neoliberal
politics are enormously useful for building political coalitions. Indeed one
might argue that this particular set of narratives – those dealing with welfare
– has been responsible for keeping the Republicans in power from the early
1980s until very recently. One might also argue that such narratives can only
mask inherent contradictions that currently seem to be splintering the
Right.
68

24

The marriage between neoliberal policies and conservative Christianity is
undoubtedly volatile. Subsequently, media is a useful tool for smoothing out the
inherent inconsistencies between the two ideologies.
Julia Lesage argues that media with a bent towards conservatism and
Christianity seeks to reconstruct daily life. Lesage states that this media “relies on
familiar, ideologically coded expressions, phrased in terms that have lasting
symbolic value in the United States. In particular, conservative perspectives on
social issues constantly shift the discussion to the plane of the ‘small world’—that of
individual moral will and the family.”
69
The discursive strategy of reducing larger
social and political issues to its influence on the family unit efficiently fosters the
neoliberal project of individualism and interferes with meaningful reflections on
difference. Linda Klintz reflects on this media, stating that “within the logic of the
commodified image and the rhetoric of simplification, the psychic working-through
that might allow people to mature and deal with disruption, foreignness, and
mortality, are short-circuited not only by absolutist values but by a social imaginary
defined by profit.”
70
Klintz contends that the combination of the consumerism of
media and the over-simplification of cultural complexities in media pandering to
conservative Christians, results in the promotion of neoliberal values. Conservative
Christians continue to transform the media landscape as evident in post-
recessionary media. In the words of Heather Hendershot, “evangelicals would prefer
not to poach on mass culture, making it entirely evangelical. In other words, if
evangelical media producers and consumers constitute a ‘subculture,’ it is one that
aspires to lose its ‘sub’ status.”
71

25

Notes to Introduction

1
Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an
Age of Austerity (Durham: Duke UP, 2014).
2
Linda Mcdowell, "Life without Father and Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-
Fordism," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16, no. 4 (1991),
doi:10.2307/623027.
3
Raymond Williams, Raymond Williams on Culture & Society: Essential Writings,
ed. Jim McGuigan (London: Sage, 2014), 16.
4
Todd Gitlin, "Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television
Entertainment," Social Problems 26, no. 3 (1979): 254,
doi:10.1525/sp.1979.26.3.03a00020.
5
Douglas Kellner, "Network Television and American Society," Theory and Society
10, no. 1 (1981): 37, doi:10.1007/bf00209562.
6
Ibid.
7
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005).
8
Ibid.
9
Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in
the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
10
Ibid, xii.
11
Harvey.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid, 19.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid, 65.
16
Toby Miller, Makeover Nation: The United States of Reinvention (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2008), 140.
17
Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the
Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 3.
26

18
Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change
(London: Sage, 2009), 29.
19
Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
(New York: New Press, 2010), 369.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid 30
22
Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the
1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 13-14.
23
Harvey, 69.
24
Ibid, 39.
25
Ibid.
26
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from
the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 46.
27
Jerry Falwell, Listen, America! (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 13.
28
Harvey, 49.
29
Harvey, 50.
30
Ibid,
31
Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free
Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 51.
32
Ibid, 18.
33
Ibid, 51.
34
Ibid, 89.
35
Nick Couldry, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism (Los
Angeles: SAGE, 2010), 12.
36
Ibid.
37
See Jennifer Holt’s Empires of Entertainment for a thorough study of the
deregulation of media in the 1980s and 1990s.
27

38
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and
Post-welfare Citizenship (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008), 8.
39
Robert Clyde Allen and Annette Hill, The Television Studies Reader (London:
Routledge, 2004), 1.
40
Ibid, 16.
41
Chad Raphael, "The Political Economic Origins of Reali-TV," in Reality TV:
Remaking Television Culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: New
York University Press, 2004), 126.
42
Annette Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (London:
Routledge, 2005), 24.
43
Madger, Ted. “Television 2.0,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, ed. Susan
Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 142.
44
S. Waisbord, "McTV: Understanding the Global Popularity of Television Formats,"
Television & New Media 5, no. 4 (2004): doi:10.1177/1527476404268922.
45
Nick Couldry, "Liveness, “Reality,” and the Mediated Habitus from Television to
the Mobile Phone," The Communication Review 7, no. 4 (2004),
doi:10.1080/10714420490886952.
46
Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched 2 See all also
Andrejevic’s iSpy (2007) for the relationship between surveillance and digital
media.
47
Clissold, Bradley D. “Candid Camera and the Origins of Reality TV” in Reality TV:
Remaking Television Culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: New
York University Press, 2004).
48
Lynn Spigel, "Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11," American
Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2004): 254, doi:10.1353/aq.2004.0026.
49
Ouellete.
50
A. Mccarthy, "Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of Suffering," Social Text 25,
no. 4 93 (2007): 19, doi:10.1215/01642472-2007-010.
51
Beverley Skeggs, "The Moral Economy of Person Production: The Class Relations
of Self-performance on ‘reality’ Television," The Sociological Review 57, no. 4 (2009),
doi:10.1111/j.1467-954x.2009.01865.x.
52
Brenda R. Weber, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2009), 5.
28

53
Ouellette, Laurie. Better Living Through Reality TV, 16
54
Ibid.
55
Diane H. Winston, Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion (Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 2.
56
Ibid.
57
Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 9.
58
Ibid, 4.
59
Vincent Jude Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a
Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004), 84.
60
Conrad Eugene Ostwalt, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious
Imagination (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 62.
61
Wuthnow, 12.
62
Comaroff, 20.
63
Ibid.
64
Comoroff referencing Jonathan Mahler’s “The Soul of the New Exurb.”
65
Justin G. Wilford, Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of
American Evangelicalism (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 113.
66
Comoroff .
67
Jason Hackworth, "Compassionate Neoliberalism?: Evangelical Christianity, the
Welfare State, and the Politics of the Right," Studies in Political Economy 86, no. 1
(2010): 103, doi:10.1080/19187033.2010.11675027.
68
Ibid .
69
Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage, Media, Culture, and the Religious Right (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 44.
70
Klintz, 136.
71
Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative
Evangelical Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13.
29
Chapter 1: Reforming Toxic-Masculinity and Reframing Headship: The Post-
Recessionary Moral Project of Accountable Fatherhood in Reality Television

In the fallout of the recession, tales of out-of-control egos and debauchery on
Wall Street littered the 24-hour news cycle and popular press. Cocaine and alcohol
abuse, as it turns out, is rampant in the global banking sector. As one banker
elaborates in a CNN Special Report:
In my office there were three guys who would regularly go AWOL for three
or four days, and of course the wives would worry and would be ringing
everybody. People would be trying to get hold of them but you kind of knew,
‘they're alright, they're just in a bar somewhere, on cocaine, and they'll turn
up in a few days looking ashamed and promising they won't do it again, for a
week.’
1

These narratives of reckless bankers were juxtaposed with that of white middle-
class families being evicted from their homes, thus suggesting their revelry was to
blame for the subprime mortgage crisis. Tales of expensed strippers, high-end
escorts, and sex parties
2
further contributed to a popular recessionary argument
that “masculine vices played a dominant role in fomenting the crunch.”
3
Popular
media presented an argument that a particular type of toxic masculinity rampant on
Wall Street was at odds with the lifestyles of everyday Americans on Main Street, as
evident in a 2009 Time magazine cover story depicting the scribbled-out face of a
white businessman (See Figure 1). The once aspirational male figure of high-
powered businessman was satirized in the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street and
vilified by groups like Occupy Wall Street (See Figure 2).
Both the Time magazine cover and the Occupy Wall Street protest exemplify
a broader paranoia in popular culture and political speech that the end of men, or,
30
more precisely, hegemonic masculinity, was at hand. Journalist Hanna Rosin
declared in her 2012 bestseller The End of Men that the “modern economy is
becoming a place where women hold the cards.”
4
Rosin deftly makes the argument
that masculinity is intrinsically tied to the economy, an idea supported across
studies of masculinity.
5
Stewart M. Hoover and Curtis D. Coats argue that
“traditional roles and pejoratives have been thrown into question by a combination
of forces in the labor markets, in the cultural success of the women’s movement, and
in the political success of multiculturalism.”
6
As Hoover and Coats contend, the crisis
of masculinity is a “discursive crisis” in which “the ability of men to make judgments
about others [and] express their ideas without fear of contradiction or nuance” has
been lost since the mid-twentieth century.
7
In this chapter, I contribute to this
argument that the Great Recession exacerbated the erosion of influence of white,
upper-class, heterosexual men, or what is understood as hegemonic masculinity in
normative culture. I contend, however, that reality programs like Undercover Boss
worked to restore this erosion.
Mike Donaldson defines hegemonic masculinity as a “personal and a
collective project, and is the common sense about breadwinning.”
8
The breadwinner
figure has been primarily political. Jane Lewis argues that “policy makers treated it
as an ‘ought’ in terms of relationships between men and women, and in many
countries it served to underpin both social policies that assumed female dependence
on a male wage and family law, which made the same assumptions about the
marriage contract in terms of stability and the nature of the contribution made by
men and women in families.”
9
Donaldson adds, in his definition of hegemonic
31
masculinity, that “while centrally connected with the institutions of male
dominance, not all men practice it, though most benefit from it. Although cross-class,
it often excludes working-class and black men.”
10

The recession threatened the employment, savings, and homes of poor and
middle-class Christians and non-Christians. Yet, during the Recession, aside from
the brief Occupy Movement of late 2011, there has been a noticeable lack of
representation in the primetime reality programming of the broadcast networks of
civil criticism, outrage, and protest despite the American Dream’s shattered façade.
My argument is that conservative Christianity has so influenced American culture
that Recession-era popular media served to shore up the foundational cracks of
white patriarchy rather than seize the opportunity to evaluate the ethics of late
capitalism. Douglas Kellner argues that, because television has been developed as
both a commodity and a tool to sell commodities, it is so deeply rooted in capitalism
that it often lacks the ability to offer a nuanced reflection of capitalism or of
alternatives to capitalism.
11
American broadcast television fulfills the “public
interest” stipulation by “transmitting ideologies necessary for stabilizing
capitalism.”
12
The persistent maintenance of capitalism contributes to a millennial
capitalism which “presents itself as a ‘gospel of salvation’ that supersedes any
storefront operator to become itself a discourse of possibility.”
13
In these reality
programs capitalism corrects its own defects. Reality television exaggerates the
consumerist nature of television with its malleable narratives built to push products
and through the endorsement of the genre’s contestants and participants. As
Wheeler Winston Dixon argues, “the future of commercial social intercourse thus
32
belongs to those who strive for, and conform to, an increasingly rigid series of
specifications, dictated by a universe of images whose existence is justified only by
their effectiveness as a medium of commerce.”
14
Post-recessionary reality
programming normalizes consumerist discourse and makes possible a world where
even Donald Trump can become the presidential candidate for a political party
desperate to reclaim white patriarchy.
As articulated in the introduction, the recession prompted thousands of
women to take on more of the financial burden in their families in response to their
partners’ unemployment or underemployment. Parallel to the gendered shift in the
workforce was what Hoover and Coats identify as a critical moment for hegemonic
masculinity: the unprecedented 2008 election in which the electorate was the “most
racially and ethnically diverse in U.S. history, with nearly one-in-four votes cast by
non-whites.”
15
Despite a newly emboldened electorate of women and people of
color in the American political system, however, broadcast reality programming
continued to populate the primetime schedule with wealthy white men fashioned as
the resolvers of the recession. CBS’s Undercover Boss, ABC’s Secret Millionaire,
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and Shark Tank, and NBC’s The Apprentice and
Celebrity Apprentice all feature primarily white businessmen in a traditional
“headship” role reaffirming the status quo, despite the radical dialogue about power,
wealth, and capitalism happening in the political sphere.
The extension of conservative Christian ideology into the mainstream can be
tracked in contemporary media, particularly in reality television, which exemplifies
the spread of the ideology in the commercial industry. ABC, NBC, and CBS found
33
both critical and popular success with reality programs that lionize corporate
America and the white, patriarchal structure that supports it. It would appear
counterintuitive that the broadcast networks’ Recession-era reality programs,
which positioned wealthy CEOs as heroes to the poor, enjoyed such great success
when millions of Americans were losing their jobs. Just as extraordinary is the
validation these programs give to the white patriarchal headship so distrusted by
the growing political movement, Occupy Wall Street. These pro-corporate shows,
like most Recession-era popular media, do not question the notion that a free
market is ethical; as a result, they promote this notion by adopting formal and
stylistic characteristics reminiscent of Christian media, as well as by featuring
Christian CEOs or millionaires who explicitly practice their faith. To explain why a
viewer suffering from Recession-era woes would tune into shows such as these, I
borrow from the work of historian Bethany Moreton, who, in her study of Wal-Mart
and the organic replication of male headship in its organizational structure, posits
that commercial and corporate America often reflect the populace’s moral and
religious ideology.
16

The methodologies I will deploy include conducting a formal analysis of
CBS’s Undercover Boss while situating it within the reality television genre, as well as
a consideration of the unique economic, cultural, and religious ideologies that shape
its production and development. I will situate this program within the trajectory of
conservative Christianity from the fringes to the mainstream. Undercover Boss, like
the above-mentioned reality programs, appropriates conservative Christianity while
validating white patriarchal order for the purpose of “giving testimony” to
34
neoliberal policies, such as the privatization of social welfare, the focus on the
individual over the community, the perpetuation of an unregulated free market, and
an emphasis placed on consumer culture.
The belief that free markets are the economic expression of Christianity has
been a long-standing principle among conservative Christian institutions. It was not
until the early 2000s, however, that the once outlying sentiments of the Prosperity
Gospel movement became common in the nation’s largest Christian congregations.
The recession challenged the tenets of Prosperity Gospel and the free market in
which so many Christians and non-Christians alike have placed their faith. The rise
of Prosperity Gospel yielded preachers like Joel Osteen, who at the time of this
writing can still be found on nightly television, sermonizing that God wants
believers to be rich. According to Kate Bowler, “the Prosperity Gospel cannot be
conflated with fundamentalism, pentecostalism, evangelicalism, the religious right,
the so-called black church, or any of the usual suspects (though it certainly overlaps
with each).”
17
Bowler contends that prosperity gospel does coincide with theological
conservatism, yet lacks the organization of conservatism. Bowler adds that “the
prosperity gospel lacks the semblance of this well-oiled institutional machinery,
leading many observers to conclude that its celebrities operate as theological and
institutional independents, rising, persisting, and falling haphazardly.”
18
Prosperity
celebrities like Osteen, Oral Roberts, TD Jakes, and Creflo Dollar cross theological
bounds because they share a common engagement with American capitalism. David
Van Biema and Jeff Chu contend that the movement was “propelled by Osteen's 4
million-selling book, Your Best Life Now.” Van Biema and Chu add that the
35
prosperity gospel “has swept beyond its Pentecostal base into more buttoned-down
evangelical churches, and even into congregations in the more liberal Mainline. It is
taught in hundreds of non-Pentecostal Bible studies.”
19

Popular culture icon Oprah Winfrey has appropriated these messages and
further normalized the ideology in mainstream media. In an interview with the
online non-denominational forum on religion, Patheos, Kathryn Lofton claims that
“the only way religion—and religious belief—works for Oprah is if it is safely
couched within a girl-power democracy and capitalist pleasure.”
20
These reality
programs showcase charismatic high-powered men who embody a man-power
democracy and capitalist pleasure at a moment when the perception is that both
capitalist pleasure and man-power are in jeopardy. Religion and therapeutic
spirituality operate in these programs as they do in the Oprah universe:
“Christianity isn’t about Christ’s apocalyptic vision or the memorization of creeds;
it’s about a friendly guy named Jesus and his egalitarian message. As long as you can
spend, feel good about yourself, and look good, your religious beliefs will be
tolerated on Planet O. The spiritual supplies the incorporated optimism, the
redemptive certitude, and the millennial promise of late-capitalist America.”
21

Within the girl-power movement, Oprah is the guru of consumerism. With her
unique amalgamation of spirituality and Christianity, Oprah’s motivational
discourse soothes the guilt-ridden, late-capitalist soul. In the particular iteration of
conservative white patriarchal masculinity in the U.S., the only purveyor of moral
compasses is Christianity. Figures like Osteen and the business leaders featured on
the broadcast networks’ post-recessionary reality programming infuse Christianity
36
with their solutions for how to fix America. Christianity thus becomes compulsory
with nationalism, patriotism, and masculinity.
In an interview on Oprah’s Next Chapter, Oprah asks Osteen about his
preaching: “Some of the criticism is that you preach Prosperity. I was reading some
of the critics, and I was thinking, ‘Well, why would you, why would anybody criticize
you for preaching prosperity, because what kind of God wants you to be poor and
miserable?”
22
Osteen nods in agreement, and responds, “That’s the way I feel as
well. I mean, I don’t know who would say, you know, that you are not supposed to,
you know, leave your children better than you were before.” Osteen goes on to say
that prospering also means coming to have a healthy mind and body. He adds that
“there is a belief that you are supposed to suffer more and be poor and to show your
humility. I just, I just don’t see the Bible that way. I see that God came to, you know,
Jesus died that we may live an abundant life and be a blessing to others. I can’t be a
big blessing to people if I am poor and broke and depressed and I don’t feel good
about myself.” Osteen supposes that people experiencing scarcity of financial
resources are also experiencing scarcity of motivation and productivity and
therefore social worth. His response to Winfrey suggests a belief that the wealthy do
the most good for their families, communities, and nation.
When questioned about the tendency towards messages of prosperity in his
ministry, Osteen often uses his roles as a father and breadwinner to defend himself.
On his and wife Victoria’s blog on the Lakeside Church website, Osteen states that
one of the greatest lessons he learned from his own father was that “God doesn't
want you to be dependent on a handout, a discount or leftover bread.”
23
Osteen adds
37
that “it says in Deuteronomy that God gives us the power to get wealth. There are
seeds in you right now that can bring abundance: gifts, talents, skills, ideas,
creativity, favor.” Osteen’s ministry propels neoliberal designs on selfhood and
accountability and dissuasion against welfare. Osteen adds that “you may need some
kind of assistance right now. But if you'll have this attitude and keep pressing
forward, before long, instead of taking a handout, you'll be giving a handout. Instead
of borrowing, you'll be the lender! Don't settle where you are; don't settle for lack.
Press forward past a lack mentality and switch over to a blessing mentality!”
24
The
bootstrap metaphor runs deep throughout his and his wife’s blog posts, and often
invokes the responsibility of fathers to be providers and as a defense for amassing a
fortune.
Concurrent to the growing popularity of the Prosperity Gospel in Christian
churches is a retrenchment into biblical male headship, or the belief that men and
women have natural roles, and that it is the role of the man to be the head of the
household. Christian denominations in which both male headship and messages of
prosperity are intertwined, such as Pentecostal, Evangelical, and Charismatic
Christianity, are “the most dynamic and fastest growing sector of Protestant
Christianity worldwide.”
25
It has spread “throughout the world in urban and rural
areas, among emerging middles classes and, most spectacularly, among the poor, it
has been deeply engaged by many populations that otherwise remain only
peripherally of tenuously involved with other global cultural forms.”
26
Joel Robbins
argues that these particular doctrines have spread feverously on a global scale
because of the specific formations of gender, politics, and economics that are
38
essential to these denominations. These doctrines bolster indigenous forms of
patriarchy by “[reconfiguring] women’s understanding of their own positions.
Women converts see themselves as obedient primarily to God.”
27
These
denominations provide a moral context for patriarchy and promise an eternal
reward for obedient women. These denominations have been instrumental in
spreading conservative political thought. For example, these denominations
promote “individuals as opposed to structural solutions for social problems and
leaves its followers without models for an ideal earthly society on which to base
political action.”
28
In line with the slant towards individualism is the moralizing of
late capitalism. In regions like Latin America, the traditional Christian message of
“redemption through suffering has been lost”
29
and replaced with
entrepreneurialism and consumerism. In regions plagued with poverty, a traditional
Protestant work ethic cannot combat the systemic inequality preventing upward
mobility. Neotraditionalist groups like the Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family
promote headship via national networks.
As Sally K. Gallagher argues, “headship plays a strategically important yet
largely symbolic role in the lives of ordinary evangelicals. While husbands retain the
status of head of household, the roles of evangelical men and women in decision
making, parenting, and employment demonstrate that, for the most part, evangelical
family life reflects the pragmatic egalitarianism of biblical feminists while retaining
the symbolic hierarchy of gender-essentialist evangelicals.”
30
Male headship is,
therefore, primarily symbolic because pragmatically the evangelical household is
egalitarian, as Gallagher and Hoover and Coats’ studies suggest. The recession and
39
the resulting focus on male unemployment and the failures of men in leadership
positions threatened the discursive and symbolic power of male headship in the
public sphere. Since headship is primarily symbolic, any decay in the
representations of male headship is therefore an absolute threat to the ideology.
This supports Hoover and Coats’ theory that “[mainstream] media symbols seem to
provide a much stronger and more meaningful imaginary of the masculine with
which to talk about masculinity and to construct plausible and aspirational
narratives of the self.”
31
The large volume of conservative Christian media watch
groups and critics reflect the profound investment that the conservative Christian
institution has in patriarchal and heteronormative “decency” in media portrayals.
The particular fusion of male headship and prosperity gospel that permeated
conservative Christian institutions in the latter half of twentieth century resulted in
a theological investment in neoliberal policies and ideology. According to the
Prosperity Gospel movement, if an individual fails to be financially successful, it is
not the fault of corporate America or the government. Rather, his failures stem from
a strained or nonexistent relationship with God. This notion is related to
neoliberalism, insofar as failure rests not in the inefficiencies of leaders or policy,
but in the insufficiencies of the citizen. Lisa Duggan, David Harvey, Wendy Brown,
Robert W. McChesney and other researchers of neoliberalism define the concept as
a complex political and cultural project that promotes lassiez-faire economic
policies at the cost of social services, thus resulting in a redistribution of wealth to
the top.
32

40
The fatherhood initiative adopted by the Obama administration and
implemented through community groups and churches echoes Osteen’s sentiments
by advising poor black fathers to take responsibility for their families. The Office of
Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships describes the program as a “national
fatherhood tour to hear directly from local communities about how we can come
together to encourage personal responsibility and strengthen our nation’s
families.”
33
Nikolas Rose argues that strategies of welfare govern through society,
but advanced liberal strategies of rule, such as the Fatherhood Initiative as I argue,
“ask whether it is possible to govern without governing society, that is to say, to
govern through the regulated and accountable choices of autonomous agents –
citizens, consumers, parents, employees, managers, investors – and to govern
through intensifying and acting upon their allegiance to particular ‘communities.’”
34

This initiative presupposes that poor black fathers and their lack of responsibility is
the problem, as opposed to systematic failures that account for absent fathers, such
as limited employment prospects in disenfranchised communities, endemic racism,
and a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates black men. By
placing the blame on the individual and regulating fatherhood as opposed to welfare
initiatives, the state governs “without governing society.”
Laurie Ouellette argues that television is a useful medium in normalizing
such governmental policies or thought processes. Ouellette argues that with much
intensity, “popular reality TV has taken up and regularized post-welfare grammars
of choice, personal responsibility, and self-empowerment and applied them to a
whole range of ‘problems’ that encompass everything from obesity to housecleaning
41
to ineffective parenting.”
35
Reality TV normalizes limited welfare and self-
accountability through sheer redundancy and repetition in the reality format.
Ouellette adds that “reality TV’s techniques for achieving ‘happiness and fulfillment’
via the management and care of the self overlap with the contemporary reasoning of
welfare reform, not least because it is television’s commercialism – its allegiance
and accountability to the ‘free’ market – that authorizes its ability to intervene
socially.”
36
Programs like Undercover Boss reiterate the idea that the market will
correct itself by showcasing corporations who, for the sake of the program at least,
correct any (superficial) injustices in their organizations by rewarding slighted
employees. Undercover Boss features organizations ranging from restaurant chains
like Cinnabon to the Nestlé subsidiary Gerber, to the Cities of Cincinnati and
Pittsburgh and the University of California in Riverside, thus conflating and equating
the practices of for-profit and non-profit institutions. These shows foster an illusion
of corporate reform, but in fact singularly promote the businesses and their leaders
who have laid off thousands of employees during the recession. This and other
reality programs do not actually serve as a useful forum for change, but instead
bolster capitalism in decline. Undercover Boss takes great care to reform the image
of these companies and often does so by painting their leaders as both religious and
attentive fathers and employers.
Reality programming undoubtedly has opened the door to the representation
of minority voices. Some reality programs challenge existing stereotypes of
minorities while others reaffirm stereotypes. Bravo’s Thicker Than Water, BET’s The
Sheards, Oxygen’s The Preachers of LA, and TLC’s The Sisterhood all feature wealthy
42
African Americans who have prospered as pastors, pastor wives, or gospel singers.
While Undercover Boss has featured minority business leaders, the program
overwhelmingly features white male leaders lending a helping hand to
disadvantaged and (disproportionately) minority employees. The most successful of
these programs, The Preachers of LA, has spurred five different spinoffs and
prompted a rebranding of the Oxygen network to capitalize on its success.
According to a Hollywood Reporter article, the cabler will abandon its Live Out Loud
branding when it shifts to target modern young women and tell stories that reflect
authentic and relatable characters. The youngest-skewing of the women's networks
by eight years, Oxygen posted year-over-year growth among all key demographics,
including women 18-34 (up 7 percent) and women 18-49 (up 5 percent).”
37

Oxygen’s niched marketing campaign towards a female demographic isolates these
programs from a wider mainstream audience. Niche marketing attracts like-minded
audiences and restricts content from reaching audiences diverse in thought.
Motioning to Theodore Adorno’s concept of identity thinking, Mark Andrejevic
states that niche programming is “the attempt to eliminate difference that results in
the subsumption of the external world to what is already known.”
38
Therefore, these
reality programs featuring wealthy and intact black families cannot challenge white
patriarchy to the extent that Undercover Boss reaffirms white patriarchy partly
because of the difference in the marketing of the two different programs.
Undercover Boss premiered after Super Bowl XLIV in 2010 to the widest
audience in the television industry. According to Sue Westcott Alessandri, networks
take advantage of the massive audience of the Super Bowl to promote their own
43
brand and push their programming.
39
The Super Bowl also endorses unadulterated
American Nationalism. In describing the relationship between nationalism and the
Super Bowl, Michael R. Real states:
North American professional football is an aggressive, strictly regulated team
game fought between males who use both violence and technology to gain
control of property for the economic gain of individuals within nationalistic
entertainment context. The Super Bowl propagates these values by elevating
one game to the level of a spectacle of American ideology collectively
celebrated. Rather than mere diversionary entertainment, it can be seen to
function as a ‘propaganda’ vehicle strengthening and developing the larger
social structure.
40

Undercover Boss as a postgame premiere fits ideologically with the Super Bowl,
particularly during the recession.
Kyle Green and Madison Van Ort surmise in their study of commercials
during the 2010 Super Bowl that while “the discursive terrain of the so-called crisis
of masculinity has emerged in other cultural and political arenas, in 2010 the crisis
overtly pervaded a substantial portion of the Super Bowl programming.”
41
These
commercials echo the sentiments of the Super Bowl as a whole, and not
coincidentally the following episode of Undercover Boss. In Green and Van Ort’s
formal analysis of the Super Bowl commercials, they contend that a Career Builder
ad “amplifies men’s anxieties and semiotically links them with the failing economy,
in which solving the crisis of masculinity will also renew faith in the corporate
world.”
42
A Dodge Charger ad “ultimately pins the crisis of masculinity on women
and changing gender roles.”
43
These claims echo Sarah Banet Weiser’s study of
recessionary branding, which states that branding and marketing during the
recession “reimagines the global economic crisis as one that was inevitable – but not
because of the downward spiral of corporate greed or misuse of funds, but because
44
this is what Americans do: they ‘fix things.’”
44
These adds tap into the cultural
anxieties that Undercover Boss is premised on. “Fix things” is the promise of
Undercover Boss and it is done by restoring male headship.
In addition to portraying “personably responsible” fathers, the theme of self-
accountability is central. As a part of his argument that Undercover Boss promotes
corporate personhood through the personification of the CEO, John McGlothlin
states that even though the program highlights the drudgery of the low-level
worker, it ultimately normalizes labor practices that “extend beyond calls for self-
discipline.”
45
McGlothlin continues:
Undercover Boss invites a consideration of the collusions between popular
culture and contemporary capitalism that extend beyond their mutual
approval of individualism. In its reliance upon sentiment to facilitate the
dissemination of capitalist ideology, the show reinforces critical work within
affect studies that has established the dexterity of capitalist institutions in
exploiting emotive states to perpetuate dominant production and labor
relations.
46

As Rose states, while not conspiratorial, television is an effective tool in promoting
advanced liberal polices.
The March 2010 Undercover Boss episode, “Herschend Family
Entertainment,” featured CEO Joel Manby. A cutaway to a desk nameplate featuring
the humanizing nickname, “Joelster,” tells the audience that, in addition to being a
CEO, Joel is a fun guy. According to the episode’s introduction, Herschend Family
Entertainment is the largest family owned theme-park company in the United
States, and is valued at over $300 million dollars. The company manages twenty-
two themes parks, including the treasure of Tennessee, Dollywood. Not two
minutes into the episode, Joelster reveals that he was raised in poverty and battled
45
alcoholism, but managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps through his desire “to
provide for my family” coupled with the Christian values of Herschend Family
Entertainment. Manby states that he places a “huge priority on being with my kids,
but it hasn’t always been that way. I made huge mistakes as a dad and a leader.”
Manby continues his autobiography in stating that “I actually feel like I was called to
come to this company. My own religious belief and Christian values and ethics, it
helped me get through a really rough period of my life. And Herschend
Entertainment is owned by a Christian family, so they try to bring faith principles
into the workplace. I relish that.” With the aid of a fake beard and a haircut, Joelster
is “unrecognizable” as CEO and joins the trenches of his not-so-amused amusement
employees, who are still reeling from the massive recessionary layoffs that Joelster
admits to in the introduction.
Before he goes pseudo incognito, he crosses in front of a bronze statue placed
prominently in the Herschend Entertainment headquarters lobby of Jesus washing
the disciple Peter’s feet. The camera lingers on a close up of the statue as it is lit with
a heavenly glow from behind. (See Figure 4) On the statue is a plaque with the title
“Divine Servant” and “Mark 10: 43-45 | John 13 4-17” inscribed below it. In an
interview with Christian Broadcasting Network, Herschend Entertainment co-
founder, Jack Herschend, states that “our leadership goes through a great class on
servant leadership. And those who graduate get a beautiful statue of Christ washing
the feet of His disciples.”
47
The CBN reporter concludes the interview with a nod to
the Prosperity Gospel, stating that “following [Christian] principles has really paid
off -- financially, and more importantly, spiritually.”
48
When the statue appears on
46
Undercover Boss, the camera is positioned slightly below and is panning up. These
visual cues aggrandize the Christian symbol while the soft backlighting creates an
ethereal atmosphere. The glorification of Christian iconography is pervasive on
Undercover Boss. (See Figure 5)
The Christian faith of David Kim, CEO of Mexican fast food chain Baja Fresh,
was highlighted throughout his entire 2011 episode. First he is shown holding
hands with his children and wife in prayer before he goes “undercover.” In a later
scene, an employee who happens to be a Hispanic immigrant reveals to Kim the
hardships he has faced being raised without a father. Kim asks if they can pray
together. They link arms, and the employee offers the CEO a blessing and asks for
God’s protection over Kim before the audio fades out and transitions to a voiceover
of a tearful Kim. The camera cuts to a close-up of the arms linked and then cuts to a
wide shot obscured by the back of a car. (See figure 6) This distance and obstruction
following the close-up suggests that the prayer is sacred and deserves reverence,
something not often awarded in reality television. Christian iconography has been
ever-present in film and television and, as Diane Apostolos-Cappadona argues, it
functions as “the affirmation of the truth claim espoused by the filmmaker.”
49
In
Undercover Boss the argument is clear: upper management and elected officials are
not to blame for the recession.
There are rare moments in which the program alludes to the fallacy of the
self-made man mythology, such as when Kim is seen praying in a church, In a
voiceover he states “Yes, I had to work very hard in my life, but there is [sic] a lot of
people that work very hard in their life that has [sic] not been as blessed as I am.”
47
These moments are rare, and when they occur, they are overshadowed by the
substantial emphasis the show places on the CEO’s own bootstrapping backstory.
The emphasis on bootstrapping, particularly told through immigrants, endorses
neoliberal welfare reform while promoting the model minority myth. David L. Eng
argues that the model minority myth renders Asian Americans “invisible, colorless,
and compliant” in white culture.
50
While this episode highlights a minority CEO, the
model minority narrative, using the language of Eng, racially “castrates” him.
The conservative 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network covered
the Baja Fresh Undercover Boss episode in a segment titled “‘Undercover Boss’ Not
Shy About His Faith.” The title alone invokes the conservative myth that religion is
being shut out of both the political and cultural spheres by “politically correct”
liberals. Before introducing a package on Kim, Pat Robertson states that “plenty
have watched the CBS, a very popular program, called Undercover Boss, I thought it
was terrific, and then they were thinking of pulling it off, then by popular demand its
back and going stronger.”
51
I can in fact find no evidence that CBS was ever planning
on cancelling Undercover Boss, but by introducing the segment in this manner,
Robertson suggests that CBS executives do not feel as warmly about a show that he
finds morally superior. Robertson feeds the myth that there is a cultural hierarchy
constantly at odds with conservative Christianity.
In the package, the CBN reporter crouches down near the curb in front of the
Baja Fresh establishment where Kim and his employee prayed, and says that “the
unforgettable and unscripted moment happened here right outside this Baja Fresh
restaurant in Cypress, California. David Kim sat down here on the sidewalk to have a
48
conversation with employee Anthony Abinuman. It was a conversation that ended
with a poignant prayer.”
52
The reporter points to the curb before kneeling next to it.
Then he sits on the curb, heightening the importance of Kim’s presumed act of
cultural revolt by praying on national television. (See Figure 6) The package then
cuts to an interview with Kim in which he states that “right after the show, it’s the
amount of people we got in the thousands, tens of thousands of people who emailed
us, wrote us talking about finally somebody can come on national television, on
primetime and have the courage and the boldness to talk about Christ.”
53
After he
speaks, the camera cuts to the actual letters written by Christian viewers and a
dramatic reading of them, with a soft, maudlin piano track in the background. The
package concludes with Kim’s wife, also a North Korean immigrant, who in tears
states that “I have always been grateful for the missionary [sic] who came to our
country, a very primitive country, who sacrificed their lives [sic] and really talk
about gospel [sic]. That is the thing that I am most indebted to.”
54
Throughout the
package, there is a reoccurring persistence that prayer and Christianity is shut out of
popular television, despite evidence suggesting the contrary.
In the introduction to Undercover Boss, a male voice booms that “Americans
are worried about the economy. Many of them wonder if our corporate and elected
leaders have the answers to our problems.” The introduction then cuts to a white
man in a tie slamming shut the door of a private jet. His race, gender, and attire nods
to the white patriarchal structure of corporations and elected office. While the
program alludes to popular dissent, it ultimately undermines it by validating the
operational and ideological infrastructure of capitalism. Each program is resolved
49
through the CEO promoting selected employees and often gifting those employees
with thousands of dollars, new cars, and even new houses. There is rarely, if ever, a
structural change to the participating organizations. The superficiality of the
resolution improves the image of the corporation, but brings nothing to the
conversation of corrupt leaders and systematic inequality. Christianity and Christian
iconography serve to endorse the politics of Undercover Boss by providing an
ethical context.
According to TV By The Numbers, the website dedicated to reporting and
analyzing television ratings, the premiere of Undercover Boss following the Super
Bowl was the most viewed television premiere since 1987 with 38.61 million
viewers.
55
Undercover Boss went on to win the 2012 and 2013 Emmy awards for
Outstanding Reality Program, solidifying its status as quality television. The
program’s format originated in Britain and has since been exported to Poland, the
Netherlands, Italy, Germany, France, Canada, Austria, Israel, and Australia. The
American version, which is in its seventh season and has been renewed for an eighth
season, has been exported to thirty countries and has run in syndication on
American television networks TLC, OWN, and CNBC. The popularity of the program
domestically and internationally suggests that it has tapped into the values and taste
of viewers and the industry.
While the Christian values integrated into the programming may or may not
be unique to the American version and may or may not be lost on international
viewers, they are critical in the reception of the domestic audience. Undercover Boss
endorsement of white businessmen in a traditional “headship” role taps into the
50
post-recessionary fear that hegemonic masculinity was on the decline, an anxiety
echoed by conservative Christianity. Undercover Boss along with the other
primetime broadcast reality programming reaffirmed the status quo, despite the
radical dialogue about power, wealth, and capitalism happening in the political
sphere during the recession. These reality programs feature high-powered men who
embody a man-power democracy and capitalist pleasure at moment when the
perception is that both capitalist pleasure and man-power are threatened.

51

Image 1
52

Image 2
53

Image 3
54

Image 4
55

Image 5
56

Image 3
57
Notes to Chapter 1

1
Anon, "Confessions of a British Banker," CNN, November 3, 2014, accessed August
12, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/03/world/asia/hong-kong-banker-
drugs/index.html.
2
Linette Lopez, "Four Crazy Wall Street Party Stories From A Former Banker
Relieved To Be Off The Street," Business Insider, August 20, 2012, accessed August
12, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/four-crazy-wall-street-party-stories-
from-a-former-banker-2012-8.
3
Robert Peston, "Why Men Are to Blame for the Crunch," BBC News, July 29, 2009,
accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/07/why_men_are_t
o_blame_for_the_c.html.
4
Hanna Rosin, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (NY, NY: Riverhead Books,
2012), 14.
5
For example, see Arthur Brittan’s Masculinty and Power, Susan Bordo’s The Male
Body, Stan Deetz and Dennis Mumby’s “Power, Discourse, and the Workplace.” Lynn
Segal’s Slow Motion.
6
Stewart M. Hoover and Curtis D. Coats, Does God Make the Man?: Media, Religion,
and the Crisis of Masculinity (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 8.
7
Ibid, 154.
8
Mike Donaldson, "What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?," Theory and Society 22, no. 5
(1993): 645, doi:10.1007/bf00993540.

9
J. Lewis, "The Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model: Implications for Work and
Care," Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 8, no. 2 (2001):
153, doi:10.1093/sp/8.2.152.
10
Ibid, 645-5.
11
Douglas Kellner, "Network Television and American Society," Theory and Society
Theor Soc 10, no. 1 (1981): 37, doi:10.1007/bf00209562.
12
Ibid.
13
Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011), 22.
58

14
Wheeler Winston Dixon, "Hyperconsumption in Reality Television: The
Transformation of the Self through Televisual Consumerism," Quarterly Review of
Film and Video 25, no. 1 (2007), doi:10.1080/10509200500541132.
15
Mark Hugo Lopez and Paul Taylor, "Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse
in U.S. History," Pew Research Centers Hispanic Trends Project RSS, April 30, 2009,
accessed August 12, 2016, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/30/dissecting-
the-2008-electorate-most-diverse-in-us-history/.
16
Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free
Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
17
Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 4.
18
Ibid.
19
David Van Biema and Jeff Chu, "Does God Want You To Be Rich?," Time,
September 10, 2006, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1533448,00.html.
20
Thomas S. Kidd, "The Prosperity Gospel of Oprah Winfrey," Patheos.com, March 9,
2011, accessed August 12, 2016, http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-
Resources/Prosperity-Gospel-of-Oprah-Winfrey-Thomas-Kidd-03-09-2011.
21
Lofton, 50.
22
Oprah Winfrey, prod., "Pastor Joel Osteen Discusses Sin and the Path to God," in
Oprah's Next Chapter, OWN, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.oprah.com/own-oprahs-next-chapter/pastor-joel-osteen-discusses-
sin-and-the-path-to-god.
23
Joel Osteen, "Overcoming a Lack Mentality," Joel Osteen Ministries (blog), February
27, 2015, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.joelosteen.com/Pages/Blog.aspx?blogid=9234.
24
Ibid.
25
Jose Casanova, "Religious Associations, Religious Innovations, and
Denominational Identities in Contemporary Global Cities," in Topographies of Faith:
Religion in Urban Spaces, ed. Irene Becci, Jose Casanova, and Marion Burchard, 435.
26
Joel Robbins, "The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity,"
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. Annual Review of Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2004): 118,
accessed August 12, 2016, doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093421.
59

27
Ibid, 133.
28
Ibid, 136.
29
Paul Freston, "Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History," Religion 25, no. 2 (1995):
132, doi:10.1006/reli.1995.0012.
30
Sally K. Gallagher, Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life (New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 2003), 84.
31
Hoover and Coats, 164.
32
See Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality, Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism,
Brown’s Undoing the Demos, and McChesney’s People Get Ready are just but a few
examples of the vast literature on the effects of neoliberalism on the global and
American economy and society. This work is greatly influenced by Michel Foucault’s
study of liberal governmentality in the late-eighteenth century, particularly The
Birth of Biopolitics.
33
"Promoting Responsible Fatherhood and Strong Communities," The White House,
accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ofbnp/policy/fatherhood.
34
Nikolas S. Rose, "Governing Advanced Liberal Democracies," in Foucault and
Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, ed.
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas S. Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
35
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and
Post-welfare Citizenship (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008), 73.
36
Ibid.
37
Leslie Goldberg, "Oxygen Orders Seven New Series, Sets Network Rebranding,"
The Hollywood Reporter, April 8, 2014, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/oxygen-orders-seven-new-series-
694415.
38
Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 41.
39
Sue Westcott Alessandri, "Promoting the Network Brand: An Exploration of
Network and Local Affiliate On-Air Promotion during the Super Bowl, 2001–2006,"
Journal of Promotion Management 15, no. 1-2 (2009),
doi:10.1080/10496490802306871.
60

40
Michael R. Real, "Super Bowl: Mythic Spectacle," Journal of Communication 25, no.
1 (1975): 42, doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1975.tb00552.x.
41
Kyle Green and Madison Van Oort, "“We Wear No Pants”: Selling the Crisis of
Masculinity in the 2010 Super Bowl Commercials," Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society 38, no. 3 (2013): 695, doi:10.1086/668618.
42
Ibid, 716.
43
Ibid.
44
Sarah Banet-Weiser, "Branding the Crisis," in Aftermath: The Cultures of the
Economic Crisis, ed. Manuel Castells, J. M. G. Caraça, and Gustavo Cardoso (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 119.
45
John Mcglothlin, "In Good Company: Corporate Personhood, Labor, and the
Management of Affect in Undercover Boss," Biography 37, no. 1 (2014),
doi:10.1353/bio.2014.0004.
46
Ibid.
47
Mark Martin, "Christian Broadcasting Network," 'Silver Dollar' Family Strikes Gold
with Godly Values, December 12, 2010, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2010/December/Silver-Dollar-Family-Strikes-
Gold-with-Godly-Values-/.
48
Ibid.
49
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, "Iconography," in The Routledge Companion to
Religion and Film, ed. John Lyden (London: Routledge, 2009), 461.
50
David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2001), 24.
51
"'Undercover Boss' Not Shy About His Faith," in 700 Club, CBN, accessed August
12, 2016, http://www.cbn.com/tv/1396513320001?mobile=false.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
55
TV by the Numbers “Undercover Boss Marks Biggest New Series Premiere Since
1987”
61

Chapter 2: “This is Just an Incredible God Thing”: Monetized Domesticity in
Bottom-Up Media

“Oh my gosh, you guys, I pulled up the views again. We’re like twenty-two
minutes in this hour, and it’s already beat the last hour. So we’re at twenty, over
twenty-two thousand views in twenty-two minutes. Can you believe that? Oh my
gosh, it’s really happening! This is nuts!”
1
Christian vlogger Sam Rader exclaimed
while mugging for the camera as his wife, Nia, sits giggling on the couch next to him
while patting her pregnant stomach. The vlog titled, “WE'RE GOING VIRAL!!”, was
posted in reaction to their preceding vlog, “HUSBAND SHOCKS WIFE WITH
PREGNANCY ANNOUNCEMENT!”, which went viral after the couple posted it on
their YouTube channel, “Sam and Nia,” in August 2015. The viral video featured Sam
revealing to his wife that she was pregnant after he had collected and tested urine
that she had left in the toilet.
Three days later, the couple posted a video of themselves sitting on their bed
and weeping as they revealed that they had miscarried; they admit that they had
never actually confirmed either the pregnancy or the miscarriage with a doctor. Sam
begins the vlog by solemnly addressing the camera. “I told Nia, I said God is ready to
use us in a huge way,” he says. Nia then explains that she was overjoyed to have
been pregnant and cites their previous two videos as evidence of her joy. She states
that she now understands what a profound loss a miscarriage can be and that she
will forever shoulder this loss with all grieving mothers. Sam adds, “I just hope this
video continues to be a way for God to shine His light to the world through us. This
is a time when especially the U.S. needs that light and God knew that. And this video
62
is just getting so big. We never imagined this could happen to us, but this baby came
along, made us happier than we remember.”
2

Sam and Nia are a part of a growing number of Christian vloggers, bloggers,
and craftsmen who use their pregnancies and children to attract viewers and
customers to their sites. Nearly a year after going viral, the Sam and Nia Channel has
634,029 subscribers and a total of 153,684,333 unique views. The duo has been
posting daily vlogs since 2014, when a video of themselves eagerly lip-synching to
the Frozen soundtrack as their disinterested daughter sits in the background made
its rounds on parenting and lifestyle blogs. The day after the couple posted the vlog
announcing their miscarriage, and only a few days after going viral, Sam posted a
vlog telling his wife in the middle of a Legoland gift store that he would be quitting
his job as a nurse to pursue vlogging full-time. The vlogs are shot by either Sam or
Nia; the director, as it were, extends the camera out in front of the family as they
navigate their domestic life. Sam carries on a conversation with his wife about his
soon-to-be-ending nursing job, and then after a jump cut (one of many in their
videos), he addresses the camera directly, and says, “I was going to quit my job
before all of this happened. This is just an incredible God thing that has happened to
our channel. A huge spike in, like, this career that we have started, an absolute
blessing. This is so incredible.”
3
After their first viral hit, the Frozen video, Sam said,
“I’ve always had a dream to be famous.”
4
Following the miscarriage, Sam tweeted
that their unborn baby’s purpose must have been to bring views and new followers
to their account. “Our tiny baby brought 10M views to her video & 100k new people
into our lives. She turned our life around & brought us closer together.”
5
The
63
comment unleashed a wave of criticism, which Sam and Nia have deflected by
claiming that their account’s primary purpose is to spread the word of God.
6

In an August 2015 video titled, “THE IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY VLOGS!”,
posted amidst the going-viral of their pregnancy video, Sam explained the intentions
of their blog to new viewers and subscribers:
We call our fans on the Sam and Nia Channel ‘fanBASIC’. It’s a play on words
with fan base. BASIC is an acronym for Brothers and Sisters in Christ. We
understand that not all of you are believers in Christ, but we do this because
this is what we want for you. Here on our channel, this is a part of our
mission for God. In order to have the most fulfilling life possible, you need to
have Christ in your life.
7

Heather Hendershot argues that “today’s conservative evangelicals want to engage
with the wider culture because they think their belief system is the truth—indeed
the only hope for mankind—and they want to share their reality with others. Media
can help accomplish this task.”
8
Hendershot argues that Christian media is
overwhelmingly more personal than political, but it is impossible to ignore the
political undertones in even the most personal moments. In the case of Sam and Nia,
their vlogs could not be more personal, ranging from topics of ingrown toenails to
their toddler’s first ride on a bike without training wheels, to the loss of a pregnancy.
Yet one cannot watch these videos without reflecting on Conservative Christian
beliefs regarding marriage, pregnancy, and gender norms. For the purpose of this
chapter, I will look at how these videos both personalize and moralize the post-
Fordist labor realities of a post-recessionary economy.
Sam and Nia exemplify a much wider trend in post-recessionary culture of
Christian entrepreneurs who have monetized pregnancy and domestic labor
through creative venues like YouTube, Etsy, Instagram, or their own personal blogs,
64
in an effort to promote, but also make possible, the conservative Christian family
lifestyle they desire. Sam and Nia have not left a single box unchecked, as they are
active on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook; Nia even sells her homemade wreaths
on Etsy. There are countless Christian families who are using children, family
homes, spouses and their family lifestyle to give credibility to their brand, but also
to a Christian doctrine that advocates for stay-at-home mothering. A theme running
throughout this media is the gratitude the vloggers express for being able to spend
the extra time with their children because of the flexible schedule that their
entrepreneurial lifestyle awards. The perpetual gratitude moralizes the
“individualization of our working lives.”
9
A post-Fordist economy, “which is
characterized by destabilized employment, the concomitant rise of casualized and
contract-based work, and the logic of flexible specialization,”
10
is framed in these
sites a blessing for mothers who want to fulfill their calling as Christian women and
care for their children while also having a career that helps support their families.
Young Christian creatives repackage the conservative Christian lifestyle for their
devoted audiences. In the process, they provide a moral context of Christian family
values to a DIY economy by establishing it as family-friendly, despite the reality that
jobs in this arena require around-the-clock labor. Moreover, very few succeed, and
there are limited safety nets in place for those who fail.
Pregnancy functions in these blogs as a prolonged narrative with big reveals,
such as the baby’s sex, the baby’s name, and the baby’s nursery.
11
I will build on the
argument posed by Imogen Tyler in her essay, “Pregnant Beauty: Maternal
Femininities under Neoliberalism,” that “the emergence of pregnant beauty signals
65
the deeper commodification of maternity under neoliberalism, a process which is
shaping maternal experience and contributing to lived gender inequalities.”
12

Expectant Christian families who use the experience of pregnancy to legitimize and
expand their business are in the process of providing a Christian moral context to
the inherent gender inequality of commodifying the pregnant body. Furthermore,
the Christian complementarian ideology that is inherent to these projects excuses
the inequalities of a DIY economy.
13
The labor is usually performed by women, and,
building upon the work of Brooke Erin Duffy and Emily Hund, the mothers often
reflect that the DIY labor they are performing allows them to be at home raising
their babies, where God desires them. I do not think it is a coincidence that two of
the most successful family vlogs, Sam and Nia and the Shaytards, are mostly shot
from the perspective of men, unlike the majority of Family vlogs, which are shot and
maintained by women. The expository nature of this content borrows from the
larger trends of blogging, reality television, and undoubtedly the chronicling of
celebrity pregnancies in tabloid media.

Blogging, Vlogging, and Cyber-neoliberalism
In his book, The Digital Sublime: Myth Power and Cyberspace, Vincent Mosco
explains that many Internet experts envisioned the end of the Cold War and the
acceleration of cyber technology as the end to politics, science, and economics as we
knew it. These experts argued that “constraints once imposed by scarcities of
resources, labor, and capital would end, or at least loosen significantly, and a new
economics of cyberspace (a ‘network economics’) would make it easier for societies
66
to grow, and especially, to grow rich.”
14
Yet, despite the imagined potential for
utopia, the social and economic change they envisioned has not materialized.
Instead, the field has replicated the advanced capitalist policies in which it was born.
“The difference between the audience commodity on traditional mass media and on
the Internet is that in the latter case the users are also content producers; there is
user-generated content, and the users engage in permanent creative activity,
communication, community building, and content production.”
15
The often
underpaid or unpaid labor of the masses to generate content for sites like YouTube
or Instagram yields a profit for the owners of these platforms, which rarely trickles
down to the media creators. Andrew Ross argues that this economy echoes the era
prior to industrialization “when the careful and laborious nurturing of relationships
with wealthy and powerful names were sources of considerable worth.”
16
Ross
argues that the affective currency of shares and likes “has replaced the wages of
industrialization” and “by far the most substantial rewards are allocated, on an
industrial basis, to those who build and maintain the technologies of extraction, who
hold the system’s intellectual property, and who can trade the aggregate output of
personal expression as if it were a bulk commodity.”
17
Jodi Dean makes a similar
argument that bloggers are paid in little more than publicity for exposing
themselves and, in the case of these vlogging parents, the lives of their children.
18

The affective labor of those who participate in the production of user-generated
content are sacrificing their time and privacy while the owners of these media
sharing platforms accumulate wealth. For the producers of these vlogs, blogs, and
67
Etsy sites, however, they are dealing in a currency that goes beyond mere publicity
and wages; they are performing the work of God.
A 2012 episode of Anderson Cooper’s now-defunct daytime talk show,
Anderson, which focused on the making of “easy money,” featured the Shaytards, a
Mormon family whose daily vlog has garnered 4,429,051 subscribers, a total of
2,382,922,141 views, and endorsement deals with Foot Locker, AT&T, Kia, Kodak,
Google, Sanyo, A1, and GE.
19
The family’s knickname is in reference to a leotard the
family’s patriarch, Shay Carl, wore in an early video. Cooper opened the segment by
saying, “Have you ever wondered how some people make money off of a viral video?
You see all of those videos on YouTube, there are some people actually making
money on YouTube. Here’s what happens, this year YouTube invested over one-
hundred million dollars into its contributors, which created a new kind of mogul, the
YouTube millionaire.” Cooper’s subsequent introduction of the Shaytards as “the
first family of YouTube” mythologizes YouTube success stories. Despite the reality
that the majority of its content producers are performing affective and underpaid
labor, YouTube goes to great lengths to publicize their success stories.
20

The aesthetics, content, and format of Mormon stay-at-home mothers’
mommyblogs have greatly influenced blogging and vlogging communities.
Mormons, in general, have been so prolific in their blogging that the “portmanteau,”
“Bloggernacle,” has been created in acknowledgement of their abundant presence.
21

In a September 2013 vlog titled, “ARE THE SHAYTARDS CHRISTIAN???”, Shay Carl,
addresses the camera as he shaves in preparation for visiting their local temple in
Idaho in preparation of their son leaving for his mission (see Figure 1). “Like I have
68
said before, [Mormonism] is the answer to the question, ‘Why are you guys so
happy? Something seems different about you guys.’ [Mormonism] is the basis for me
and Collette’s relationship, for my relationship with my kids, for all of that.”
22
Shay
Carl reminds the viewer that they will die one day and perhaps they should look into
the Mormon faith before that day comes. Shay then bounces around the house
saying goodbye to his children before he and his wife leave for the temple.
In the Mormon faith, there is a strong push for genealogy and record
keeping.
23
In the book of Mormon, Joseph Smith commands: “And again, let all the
records be had in order, that they may be put in the archives of my holy temple”
24

The former president of the Church of Latter Day Saints, Spencer W. Kimball,
stressed the importance of journal keeping by arguing that even the most mundane
of details will help generations to come get to know one another so that in eternity
everybody will be familiar. “Begin today,” Kimball states, “and write in it your goings
and your comings, your deeper thoughts, your achievements, and your failures, your
associations and your triumphs, your impressions and your testimonies. We hope
you will do this, our brothers and sisters, for this is what the Lord has commanded,
and those who keep a personal journal are more likely to keep the Lord in
remembrance in their daily lives.”
25
Kimball encourages his flock to journal with an
optimistic and positive tone, stating that journals should be triumphant. Kimball’s
recommendations for journaling help to explain the rosy outlook in Mormon
mommyblogs and family vlogs. Kimball adds that “the truth should be told, but we
should not emphasize the negative. Even a long life full of inspiring experiences can
be brought to the dust by one ugly story. Why dwell on that one ugly truth about
69
someone whose life has been largely circumspect?”
26
In an address to the
graduating class of Brigham Young University in Hawaii, church elder Russell M.
Ballard advised the graduates that blogging is an excellent way to chronicle their
day and spread the Mormon message to people outside of the church.
27
“May I ask
that you join the conversation,” stated Ballard, “by participating on the Internet,
particularly the New Media, to share the gospel and to explain in simple, clear terms
the message of the Restoration. Most of you already know that if you have access to
the Internet you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be
true.”
28
In the case of the Mormon church, blogging is a directive from the elders and
leaders of the church.

The Conservative Christian Lifestyle
The Americana backdrop of a carefree suburban lifestyle permeates this
media. Justin G. Wilford argues that “the home is an ideal setting for evangelical
performances because it is a foundational environment for postsuburban identity
and thus one for authentic, intentional action.”
29
The staging of the home serves as
evidence for a Christian life well-lived: “In the postsuburban home, prayer becomes
more intimate, singing becomes more authentic, fellowship becomes more
emotional, and scripture becomes more relevant.”
30
These videos do what churches
cannot; they provide the emotion and intimacy of the home to contextualize
Conservative Christian ideology. Vlogs featuring Christian mothers at home with
their children doing the work of God personalize the female experience in a way that
male pastors preaching from a pulpit cannot. Wilford argues that home, in the
70
evangelical performance, is an “endlessly adaptable tool for working on the self.”
31

In these videos, women (and men) often comment and reflect upon mundane
chores.
After Sam posted the video in which he states that he would be quitting his
job to vlog full-time, social news and entertainment site, Buzzfeed, posted an article
that questions the veracity of Sam and Nia’s original pregnancy claim and suggests
that the entire event, including the miscarriage, was possibly staged in order to
grow their fan base. The Buzzfeed article cites “their cheerfulness in their video the
day after they said they miscarried, combined with Sam’s glee at finally having
enough success to quit his job,” as reason for questioning their motivations. Two
days after the Buzzfeed article was published, Sam and Nia posted a vlog in
response. Sam addresses the camera as he sits on his front porch; his two children
splash in a kiddie pool behind him (see Figure 2).
It seems as though the media out there, all the articles being written
about us, are trying to put us in a bad light for the most part. And I feel
like those are the ones that represent the world. And it makes me think of
the verse John 15:19. ‘If you are of the world the world will love you as its
own. But because you are not of the world but I have chose you from the
world, the world hates you.’ I just think that’s so amazing. ‘Because I
chose you, the world hates you.’ So we’re hated. I mean God told use we
were going to be hated. So what we are seeing is God’s will being played
out for our lives as Christians. We are being persecuted somewhat. And,
um, this is what God told us is going to happen so I can’t help but let it
excite me every time I read these articles.
32

Sam rehearses the familiar narrative, popularized during the Culture Wars, of a
secular media elite shutting Christianity out of the public sphere.
33
As Rhys H.
Williams argues, “many of the conservative political activists have been particularly
successful at attacking the ‘cultural elite’ that supposedly governs the fine arts and
71
universities worlds—worlds from which many Americans do in fact feel
estranged.”
34
Sam is appealing to a class of people whose conception of morality is
not replicated in either the political and cultural spheres.
The media production of cultural and political conservatives has flourished
in user-generated spaces like YouTube; and as Henry Jenkins argues, paradoxically,
those who feel the most alienated by mainstream media have been the most
successful at seeing their content cycled back into the mainstream. “Ironically,
perhaps the biggest success story in niche media production has been the
emergence of alternative spheres of popular culture reflecting the tastes and
ideologies of cultural conservatives, the very groups who are also working to
impose those ideological norms onto mainstream media through governmental
regulation of media content.”
35
Chip Berlet argues that “since Christians have a
mandate to spread the gospel of Christ throughout the world, there is a powerful
motive to be on the cutting edge of new information technologies.”
36
Berlet cites the
1980s and ’90s as a particularly prolific period of bottom-up conservative media
production as technology became increasingly user-friendly. Undoubtedly the
ubiquity of cameras and video sharing sites since the mid-2000s contributes to the
vast quantity of Conservative Christian families, like the Raders, who broadcast the
mundane of their day-to-day lives and promote themselves as an alternative to
mainstream media.
These families draw heavily from secular reality television and vlogs in the
production of their media. Hendershot’s book, Shaking the World for Jesus, looks to
the ways evangelicals appropriate secular media for their own message. In a
72
passage that echoes Sam’s earlier sentiment, Hendershot argues that “to be ‘in’ but
not ‘of’’ the world is to engage with people outside of the evangelical belief system,
and hopefully lead them into that system, without becoming more like the outsider
yourself. Today’s conservative evangelicals want to engage with the wider culture
because they think their belief system is truth—indeed the only hope for
humankind—and they want to share this reality with others.”
37
Hendershot later
adds that “examination of evangelical media reveals the complex ways that today’s
evangelicals are both in and out of the world. This is not a value judgment;
evangelicals have not simply ‘sold out’ or been ‘secularized.’ Rather, evangelicals
have used media to simultaneously struggle against, engage with, and acquiesce to
the secular world.”
38
Robert Wuthnow makes a similar, but broader, argument in
After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. “Compared with societies that
have a longer history with secularity,” he states, “the United States is in the throes of
major transition. They are not marching steadfastly into a secular age, but are
reshaping deep religious traditions in ways that help make sense of the realities of
their lives.”
39
Additionally, conservative Christians are engaging with secular media
not only to evangelize but also to support their families. Domestic Christian
laborers, therefore, must employ their faith to give moral purpose to their post-
recessionary labor.
The complex balance of walking the line between secular and evangelical
culture was tested in the month following the Rader’s viral pregnancy video when
Sam’s name appeared among those listed as customers of Ashley Madison, the
online dating site for married or committed individuals.
40
In a now private video,
73
the duo swiftly responded, stating that both God and Nia had already forgiven Sam’s
sin. Sam eliminates any suspicion that fame or secular media have changed him by
clarifying that “this was before [he] got on to YouTube.”
41
He then adds that “the
account was open out of fleshly desires and just sinful curiosity. Some of you are
questioning my faith and me being a Christian and doing this and I guess what some
people don’t understand is we’re all broken, even Christians. We come to God as
broken people and He has sent Jesus on the cross to save us from those sins.” In her
book, Between Jesus and the Market, Linda Klintz speaks to the rhetorical advantage
of evoking the Christian belief that God sacrificed his only son: “He gave up his own
child for us, and in the postmodern context, in which people are struggling to keep
families intact, this is the most moving, powerful sacrifice one could imagine.”
42

According to People magazine, the Raders were asked to leave a blogging
conference, following the Ashley Madison scandal, after Sam got into a physical
altercation with a fellow conference attendee who questioned the veracity of their
miscarried pregnancy.
43
The altercation resulted in a media blackout until they
announced, once again, that Nia was pregnant. A new pregnancy awarded the
Raders a new opportunity to reclaim their domestic authority because, as Klintz
argues, “the child proves to be the key to reconstruction and legitimation of sacred
gender and the kind of politics that collapses family, religion, and patriotism into the
same highly sensual configuration.”
44

74
The DIY Economy
The labor produced by Christian YouTubers, Sam and Nia, is undoubtedly
creative and a product of a post-recessionary economy, which makes necessary
domestic and creative labor. In his revision of The Rise of Creative Class, Richard
Florida speaks optimistically to the potential of an evolving labor market: “A great
stumbling block in the United States has been the huge rise in inequality, the
bifurcation of the labor market between higher-skilled, higher-wage Creative Class
jobs and lower-skilled, lower-pay Service Class jobs in fields like food preparation,
home health care, and retail sales, where more than 60 million Americans work, 45
percent of the labor force.” Florida adds that “this stark divide in economic
prospects has been exacerbated by the deems of so many once high-paying Working
Class jobs. The only way forward is to make all jobs creative jobs, infusing service
work, manufacturing work, farming, and every other form of human endeavor with
creativity and human potential.”
45
The burden to learn new creative skills, however,
is often placed on underpaid and undereducated labor in order to adapt to a
changing economy. Florida does not take into account the role of unpaid domestic
labor in the economy, and the particular demands that a post-recessionary economy
places on domestic labor to become monetized; already taxed domestic laborers
must acquire creative skills to supplement their household incomes.
The economic value of domestic laborers has been associated historically
with their ability to support the economy through their consumptive practices.
46

Elizabeth Nathanson argues that “recessionary postfeminist femininity comprises
an identity informed by a logic of consumption as production. Such a conflation of
75
consumption and production is a component of user-generated convergence culture
more generally.”
47
Doreen Jacobs argues that statistics reported by organizations
like Etsy and the Hobby Association indicating that the DIY movement is both
lucrative and growing obscure the fact that the profit does not go to the laborers,
but rather to the crafting supply chains.
48
Similarly, the vloggers of the previous
section are ultimately supporting the consumer technology and video sharing
industries. The “DIY movement advocates for a different engagement with work that
circumvents global mass-production, mass-marketing and passive mass-
consumption.”
49
Yet, the consumption and production practices the movement
attempts to circumvent are ultimately insurmountable, and domestic labor is again
tied to traditional consumptive practices. Imogen Tyler argues that “within a
neoliberal society the ability (and desire) to work and to spend are key measures of
value and ideal neoliberal subjects cooperate with their subjectification within these
markets (and compulsive consumption and workaholism are symptomatic
pathologies.)” The DIY movement requires the laborer to be both a workaholic and
to compulsively consume in order to produce a product. In this sense, the movement
is a complete recapitulation of neoliberalism. In her study of recessionary fashion
blogs, Elizabeth Nathanson argues that “blogs produced by fashion-forward
‘everyday girls’ celebrate the potential for the individual to become a successful
entrepreneur through online work in consumer culture, offering a means to
reconcile postfeminist identities with recessionary anxieties by transforming
shopping into a kind of pleasurable work.”
50
In the case of theses of the vlogs and
76
these Instagram accounts, it is not just shopping that is transformed, but domestic
labor as well.
The Instagram account, handlettereddesign, serves as a marketing channel
for the hand lettering and calligraphy business of two mothers and best friends, Lisa
Funk and Addi Robinson. The duo sell original prints of hand lettered quotes,
inspirational sayings, and Bible verses. The “About” section of their webpage states:
“We are both Moms of young kids and fill the majority of our days changing diapers,
going to sports practices, getting messy playing with our littles and having a lot of
fun. At night or during nap time, we love lettering as much as we can.”
51
They
describe the labor of their hand lettering business as only secondary to the labor
they perform as mothers. A common sentiment of these businesses is that their
labor is performed while their children are either taking a nap or have gone to bed
for the evening, suggesting that every minute of a mother’s day can be and should be
filled with labor to be a productive member of not just the household, but of society.
More often than not, the women that populate these Instagram accounts and Etsy
stores are in their early to mid-twenties. While their childless counterparts of a
similar age are entering the workforce, these women are just starting their families
and seem eager to define themselves as both mother and businesswoman. Tyler
argues that “young motherhood is constituted as a ‘failed femininity,’ in relation to a
specific neoliberal femininity determined by economic productivity and
flexibility.”
52
Tyler adds that “the idealization and celebration of youthful maternity
in the figure of pregnant beauty may appear anachronistic,”
53
as a young mother has
not fully realized herself as a neoliberal and postfeminist subject. The Instagram
77
account for Hand Lettered Design features images of their products alongside
images of their own children, like hundreds of other Instagram accounts of
mompreneurs (see Figure 3). A video uploaded to their account shows one of the
mothers sketching out letters in the foreground while her baby plays in the
background. This video establishes her “neoliberal femininity,” which is determined
by her “economic productivity and flexibility.” The mother is able to fulfill her
calling to motherhood as a Christian, because of her ability to adapt and her self-
reliance, thus making her the ideal neoliberal subject.
Angela McRobbie argues that the young working-class is choosing self-
employment in the creative field “as an escape from the inevitability of
unemployment, or in preference to an unrewarding job in the service sector.”
54

Creative domestic work is often performed by young female laborers with young
children; this suggests not only that the young working-class seeks to avoid
unemployment, but also that there is a lack of flexibility for parents working in the
service industry.
55
Jane Waldfogel argues that “in the United States and Britain,
there is a ‘family gap’ between the wages of mothers and other women. Differential
returns to marital and parental status explain 40%-50% of the gender gap. Another
30%-40% explains women’s lower levels of work experience and lower returns to
experience.”
56
The lack of progress towards closing the gender pay gap pushes
women to explore alternative methods of income that bypass a system that does not
guarantee equal pay for equal work. In her article, “Reflections on Feminism,
Immaterial Labor and the Post-Fordist Regime,” McRobbie stresses that the rise of
immaterial or affective labor is connected to the rise of a post-Fordist economy:
78
“Where women’s centrality to contemporary production could mark out the
contours of a new form of gender power, this political potential is decisively pre-
empted by the intense forms of biopolitical governmentality which constantly
address women and their bodies (through media and magazines in particular) so
that earning power is inextricably tied up with consumer culture and the promises
of personal satisfactions therein.”
57
While women are leading the DIY movement,
the tying of women to the movement through their pregnant bodies or their role as
mother restricts the potential for women to demand a more equitable income, when
the flexible schedule and the time they are able to spend with their children should
be payment enough.
Nicole Dawkins, in her study of the DIY movement in a post-recessionary
economy, argues that “the desire for pleasurable, creative work—exchanged for
what might otherwise be felt to be unstable, precarious, and even exploitive work—
provides an interesting vantage point to explore the parallels and interpenetrations
of post-Fordist labor and postfeminist politics.”
58
Dawkins argues that ultimately the
conflation of labor and pleasure and the emphasis on self-reliance in DIY culture
“reproduces” neoliberal rationalities, while the stressing of self-fulfillment and
choice as opposed to necessity or imposition reproduces postfeminist rationalities.
In the online women’s magazine, XX, contributor Sara Mosle asserts that sites like
Etsy have not yet proven to be an avenue for earning a living income, and are in the
business of selling an unachievable lifestyle. “What Etsy is really peddling isn’t only
handicrafts,” she states, “but also the feminist promise that you can have a family
79
and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still
having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career.”
59
Mosle goes on:
The average age of an Etsy seller, according to the site’s 2008 survey, is 35—
women’s prime childrearing years. Nearly 60 percent have college degrees,
and 55 percent are married. The average household income is $62,000—well
above the national mean. In other words, the Etsy.com seller is often a
married woman with (or about to have) young children, with a higher-than-
average household income, and a good education. These should, in sum, be
highly employable women. So, what are they doing, often pursuing hobbies,
or working only part-time, on Etsy?
60

Mosle’s question assumes not only that the labor market is in fact capable of
supporting these women, but also that many of these women have an ideological
investment in monetizing a conservative Christian lifestyle that prefers that they are
home to care for their children and spouse. These women are not simply in it for the
income, but are simultaneously trying to fulfill their Christian obligations as women.
Bethany Moreton’s study of women laborers of Wal-Mart in her book To Serve God
and Wal-Mart found that often the women laborers of Wal-Mart felt invested in their
career because of the perceived Christian values in their workplace, despite the low-
wage work.

Conclusion
Conservative Catholic radio talk show host, Hugh Hewitt, argues in his book,
The New Media Frontier: Blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting for Christ, that Christian
blogs and vlogs are the only bright spot of the hellscape that is the Internet, with all
of its jihadists and porn. Despite the large digital footprint of Christians in new
media, and the importance Christians place on new media as a tool for
evangelization and worship, this media often goes unaccounted for in media studies.
80
The feminist blog, Jezebel, posted a video in 2010 in which members of the
Brigham Young University sketch comedy group, Divine Comedy, proudly sing what
life is like for BYU women to the tune of Katie Perry’s “California Gurls.” One lyric,
for example, states that “for girls at the Y, the most common degree is an MRS.
degree (bachelor of young wife science).”
61
A follow-up post on the liberal Salon
blog noted that there was a flood of self-described feminist women who fanatically
read Mormon mommy blogs.
62
In one such comment, reader BrookeD admits:
“I read about 5 different blogs by Mormon women every day. (I am not Mormon)
The life that they portray on these blogs are just lovely, they have lovely homes,
picture perfect kids, loving super attentive husbands, and things seem very
normal and calm. (I love the blogs, btw) However, watching this video, I realized
how much of what I read daily is subtly geared toward many things in this video.
Especially the getting married, having babies, and the layered shirts.”
63

BrookeD’s revelation illustrates the subtle ways in which these Christian creatives
are repackaging and effectively selling conservative Christian ideology to a willing
audience. As Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green argue, “there is an implicit
and often explicit proposition that the spread of ideas and messages can occur
without users’ consent and perhaps actively against their conscious resistance;
people are duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling
content.”
64
Perhaps it is not that audiences are duped, but that the content speaks to
them in ways not necessarily intended by the producer. In the case of the content
produced by the Christian DIY laborers, they produce content that speaks to the
economic and domestic realities of a post-recessionary economy. There is limited
support for parents and families in traditional careers, and these parents bring to
life the realities of choosing an alternative, albeit not much simpler, path.

81

Figure 1
82

Figure 2
83

Figure 3
84
Notes to Chapter 2

1
Sam Rader and Nia Rader, "We’re Going Viral!!," Sam and Nia (video blog), August
6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiknIo5N2IU.
2
Sam Rader and Nia Rader, "Our Baby Had a Heartbeat!," Sam and Nia (video blog),
December 31, 2015, accessed August 11, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTVui7Ff-68.
3
Sam Rader and Nia Rader, "Telling My Wife I Quit My Job!," Sam and Nia (video
blog), August 9, 2015, accessed August 11, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFUsFv4Fwhg.
4
Kelsey Miller, "Even If Sam & Nia Did Fake It, What Does Our Reaction Say About
Us?," Refinery 29 August 16, 2015, accessed August 11, 2016,
http://www.refinery29.com/2015/08/92311/sam-nia-pregnancy-miscarriage-
hoax-bias.
5
Sam Rader, Twitter August 9, 2015, accessed May 1, 2016, www.twitter.com.
6
Aditi Roy et al., "Christian Vloggers Sam and Nia Rader Have No Regrets Posting
Family Videos," ABC News, August 25, 2015, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/christian-vloggers-sam-nia-rader-regrets-
posting-family/story?id=33291322.
7
Sam Rader and Nia Rader, "THE IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY VLOGS!," YouTube,
August 15, 2015, accessed August 12, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqpPeBRmwjo.
8
Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative
Evangelical Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pg. 11.
9
Melissa Gregg, "The Normalisation of Flexible Female Labour in the Information
Economy," Feminist Media Studies 8, no. 3 (2008), accessed August 11, 2016,
doi:10.1080/14680770802217311.
10
Duffy, Brooke Erin and Emily Hund, “Having it all” See also, Andre Wigfield’s Post-
Fordism, Gender, and Work and Linda McDowell’s “Life without father and Ford” for
a study of how the economic restructuring in post-Fordist economies reconfirms
gendered labor.
11
Allie Jones, "A Guide to the Christian Vlog Community Where the Biggest Blessing
Is a Baby," Gawker, August 14, 2015, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://gawker.com/a-guide-to-the-christian-vlog-community-where-the-bigge-
1723334784.
85

12
Imogen Tyler, "Pregnant Beauty: Maternal Femininities under Neoliberalism," in
New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity, ed. Rosalind Gill and
Christina Scharff (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011),
23.
13
Priscilla Pope-Levison’s essay “Separate Spheres and Complementarianism in
American Christianity” and Sally K. Gallagher’s “The Marginalization of Evangelical
Feminism” both offer thoughtful reflections of how women navigate
complementarianism beliefs in the modern Evangelical practice.
14
Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004), 4.
15
Christian Fuchs, "Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet," The
Information Society 26, no. 3 (2010): 192, doi:10.1080/01972241003712215.
16
Andrew Ross, "In Search of the Lost Paycheck," in Digital Labor: The Internet as
Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 13.
17
Ibid, 18-19.
18
Jodi Dean, "Whatever Blogging," in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and
Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 127.
19
Irena Slutsky, "Meet YouTube's Most In-Demand Brand Stars," Advertising Age
Digital RSS, September 13, 2010, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://adage.com/article/digital/meet-youtube-s-demand-brand-stars/145844/.
20
Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, The YouTube Reader (Stockholm: National
Library of Sweden, 2009).
21
Krista Kapralos, "Mormon Bloggernacle Is No Choir," Religion Dispatches, June 19,
2009, accessed August 11, 2016, http://religiondispatches.org/mormon-
bloggernacle-is-no-choir/.
22
Shay Butler, "ARE THE SHAYTARDS CHRISTIAN???," YouTube, September 04,
2013, accessed August 12, 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgwodehtWEI.
23
See Leonard J Arrington and David Bitton’s The Mormon Experience: A History of
the Latter-Day Saints and Terryl L. Givens By The Hand of Mormon.
24
D&C 127:9
25
Spencer W. Kimball, "President Kimball Speaks Out on Personal Journals - New
Era Dec. 1980 - New-era," President Kimball Speaks Out on Personal Journals - New
86

Era Dec. 1980 - New-era, accessed August 12, 2016, https://www.lds.org/new-
era/1980/12/president-kimball-speaks-out-on-personal-journals?lang=eng.
26
Ibid.
27
Kapralos.
28
Russell M. Ballard, "Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church,"
Www.mormonnewsroom.org, December 15, 2007, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/using-new-media-to-support-the-
work-of-the-church.
29
Justin G. Wilford, Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of
American Evangelicalism (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 166.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.
32
Sam Rader and Nia Rader, "RESPONDING TO HATE COMMENTS!," YouTube,
August 14, 2015, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF_DBFt5ax8.
33
See Todd Gitlin’s The Twilight of American Dreams, Ronald William Dworkin’s The
Rise of the Imperial Self, and James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars for examples that
look to media as a site for a moral divide. Rhys H Williams argues in his edited
collection Cultural Wars in American Politics that academics and media producers
have perhaps overly invested in the idea that cultural wars are a crisis because of
their own role in the production and dissemination of ideas.
34
Ronald William. Dworkin, The Rise of the Imperial Self: America's Culture Wars in
Augustinian Perspective (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996), 5.
35
Henry Jenkins, "The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence," Int J Cult Stud
International Journal of Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (2004): 5,
doi:10.1177/1367877904040603.
36
Chip Berlet, "Who Is Mediating the Storm," in Media, Culture, and the Religious
Right, ed. Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998), 261.
37
Hendershot, 11.
38
Ibid.
39
Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), II.
87

40
Anna Chan, "Sam Rader Admits He Had Ashley Madison Subscription: Christian
Vlogger Says Wife Nia Has Forgiven Him," Us Weekly, August 22, 2015, accessed
August 12, 2016, http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/sam-rader-
admits-he-had-ashley-madison-subscription-2015228.
41
"Viral Pregnancy YouTuber Admits to Having Ashley Madison Account," YouTube,
August 22, 2015, accessed August 12, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVFmxDHsE_g.
42
Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-
wing America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 30.
43
Maria Coder, "Sam Rader Admits He Got Physical with Another Vlogger Before
Being Thrown out of Convention – but Denies Making Threats," PEOPLE.com,
August 24, 2015, accessed August 12, 2016, http://www.people.com/article/sam-
rader-christian-vlogger-kicked-out-vlogger-fair-conference-violent-threats.
44
Ibid.
45
Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (New York: Basic Books,
2012), xiv.
46
See Shannon Hayes’ Radical Homemakers, Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV, Elaine
Tyler May’s Homeward Bound, Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor’s Surviving the
Duldrums, and Eugenia Kaledan’s Mothers and More
47
Elizabeth Nathanson, "Dressed for Economic Success," in Television and
Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time for Mother, ed. Elizabeth Nathanson, 138.
48
D. Jakob, "Crafting Your Way out of the Recession? New Craft Entrepreneurs and
the Global Economic Downturn," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society
6, no. 1 (2012), doi:10.1093/cjres/rss022.
49
Ibid.
50
Nathanson, 137.
51
"About," Hand Lettered Design, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.handlettereddesign.com/about.html.
52
Tyler, 22.
53
Ibid.
54
Angela McRobbie, In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music (London:
Routledge, 1999), 27.
88

55
Steven K. Wisensale’s book, Family Leave Policy, studies the development of the
Family Leave Policy in the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act. Single parent and
low-income families are most vulnerable in the case of child care issues or illness.
56
Jane Waldfogel, "The Family Gap for Young Women in the United States and
Britain: Can Maternity Leave Make a Difference?," Journal of Labor Economics 16, no.
3 (1998): 505, doi:10.1086/209897.
57
Angela Mcrobbie, "Reflections On Feminism, Immaterial Labour And The Post-
Fordist Regime," New Formations 70, no. 70 (2011): 72,
doi:10.3898/newf.70.04.2010.
58
Nicole Dawkins, "Do-It-Yourself: The Precarious Work and Postfeminist Politics of
Handmaking (in) Detroit.," Utopian Studies 22, no. 2 (2011): 262,
doi:10.5325/utopianstudies.22.2.0261.
59
Mosle, “Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy”
60
Ibid.
61
BYUDivineComedy, "Provo, UT Girls - BYU Divine Comedy," YouTube, December
03, 2010, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84u5k4bboU4.
62
Emily Matchar, "Why I Can’t Stop Reading Mormon Housewife Blogs," Salon,
January 15, 2011, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.salon.com/2011/01/15/feminist_obsessed_with_mormon_blogs/.
63
Emily Matchar, "Why I Can’t Stop Reading Mormon Housewife Blogs," Salon,
January 15, 2011, Comments, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.salon.com/2011/01/15/feminist_obsessed_with_mormon_blogs/.
64
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and
Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 18.
89
Chapter 3: Mompreneurs on HGTV: Conservative Christian Femininity in
Home Renovation Television

Married couple Chip and Joanna Gaines, before they were hosts of HGTV’s
Fixer Upper, owned the home décor store, Magnolia Market, in Waco, Texas. The
store closed in 2010, just trailing the nadir of the Great Recession of 2008. The
recession, which decimated the home industry, was not cited as the reason for the
store’s shuttering. Instead, Joanna “testifies” that God spoke to and advised her to
close her business so that she could better focus on raising her two small children. “I
really felt like God was saying, ‘Hey, I want you home. I want you raising these
babies at home at this age,’” Gaines recounts in a testimonial video for Baylor
University’s alumni magazine. Gaines attributes her later success with HGTV and her
newly reopened Magnolia store to her obedience to God. She tells the story of the
promise God made to her when she and her husband were closing the doors to
Magnolia Market: “I hear God say very clearly, ‘Joanna, trust me with your dreams.
I’m going to take Magnolia further than you could have ever dreamed. Trust me.’”
Joanna has constructed a personal narrative of dutiful wife, mother, and believer
through the failure of her first business during the worst economic downturn since
the Great Depression of the1930s. Instead of failed business owner she is a
successful wife and mother.
Gaines, like countless other women, had to revise her career plans in the
years following the Great Recession. Gaines’s narrative is free of any financial
uncertainty or distress over her failed business. Instead, she constructs a brand
around her retrenchment into domesticity. Her narrative advances the idea that her
90
career kept her from her children. After the recession, she has built a career in what
Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra call the “new domestic economies of recessionary
media,”
1
a variation on postfeminism in which “women adeptly monetize domestic
skills and resources”
2
to support themselves and their families “without threatening
patriarchal norms.”
3
I add to this discussion that new domestic economies of
recessionary media distinctly employ a Christian ethos of gender norms to
reconstruct the patriarchal family and reinvest in the sanctity of home-ownership.
Consequently, because the myth of the American Dream is entwined with the
promise of home-ownership, the recession’s decimation of the housing industry
jeopardized a collective investment in exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is
composed of the promise that, unlike other countries, there is a large and
prospering middle class who can afford to house, educate, and provide for their
families. Common among American conservative Christian denominations is the
professed moral authority on family values and these values are concomitant to a
stable familial home. In an interview with Wacoan magazine, Gaines credits God for
her interior design skills adding, “As a mom, I want my home to feel like home. More
than I want it to be beautiful, I want my kids to just love being home. I want them to
settle well there.”
4
The underpinning of Christianity in post-recessionary media
about gender, family, and entrepreneurship reinforces neoliberal policies by
providing a moral context. Gaines’s retrenchment into domesticity, following the
failure of her business and the subsequent building of her new business, is part of a
larger trend in the post-recessionary period: the reinforcement of mommy culture
through the praise of women who prioritize motherhood and domesticity.
91
The recession shifted the dialogue on gender and as the collapse in the
construction and manufacturing sectors disproportionately displaced male laborers
two to one
5
, thus triggering the popularization of the term mancession.
6
The
extraordinary job loss threatened the American narrative of a male breadwinner at
the center of the heteronormative family. While women make-up nearly forty-eight
percent of the American workforce, patriarchy privileges the male earner.
7
Not only
does the loss of the male breadwinner threaten the prosperity of the nation, but it is
also a threat to the solvency of its patriarchal Christian foundation. The subsequent
cultural response to a threat against the patriarchal American social fabric was vast.
Drawing from anti-feminist rhetoric, the post-1970s influx of women in the
workforce was quickly pinpointed as a possible culprit for the bottom dropping out
of the US economy. “Recession narratives of this kind mobilize resentment in the
name of righting gender imbalance and yet have proven increasingly compelling to
an American culture seeking to understand how the bottom could have fallen out
quite so precipitously.”
8
One such response was the softened, non-threatening
female laborer, the mompreneur.
This chapter explores the post-recessionary identity of “mompreneur” as an
extension of the idealized hyper-feminine Christian mother and wife. The identity of
the “mompreneur” draws on traditional Christian beliefs that women’s labor should
be contained to the home and secondary only to her marriage and the rearing of her
children. In the years following the Great Recession, HGTV has foregrounded
mompreneurs in their home design programs. Ken Lowe, CEO of HGTV’s parent
company, Scripps Networks Interactive, attributed HGTV’s record-breaking ratings
92
to the move towards programming with a family-oriented focus.
9
Scripps Network
credits Fixer Upper as one of the main reasons why HGTV has reached the one
billion dollar revenue mark, a first for one of their cable networks, which includes
Food Network, DIY Network, Travel Channel, Great American Country, and the
Cooking Channel.
10
In this chapter, I analyze HGTV programming in the years
following the Great Recession for the purpose of tracking the popularity of the
renovation genre in tandem with the growth of the new domestic economies. HGTV
utilized Christian talent and ideology to construct a post-recessionary narrative of
intact heteronormative family structures in the aftermath of the “mancession.” The
HGTV programs Home by Novogratz, My Big Family Renovation, and Fixer Upper all
feature Christian women who have built successful careers, but whose success is
obscured by the focus placed on their roles as wife and mother. While the first two
programs I discuss had limited success compared to Fixer Upper, all three programs
are indicative of HGTV’s commitment to developing programing featuring
conservative Christian women who, for the sake of the HGTV narrative, prioritize
motherhood over their careers.
Studies on lifestyle, makeover, renovation, and home design television have
often approached the subject through the lens of neoliberalism. Such studies include
Brenda Webber’s Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity, John McMurria’s
“Desperate Citizens and Good Samaritans: Neoliberalism and Makeover Reality TV,”
and Laurie Ouellette’s Better Living Through Reality TV. In her article, “Lifestyling
Britain: The 8-9 Slot on British Television,” Charlotte Brunsdon discusses the move
away from documentary news and towards infotainment in 1990s Britain as a result
93
of the popularity of lifestyle programming. Brunsdon contends that even though
these programs are overtly consumerist, they are redeemable because they often
feature diverse families and individuals. “Much lifestyle programming,” states
Brunsdon, “should be welcomed as relatively accomplished, contemporary, secular
and socially extensive entertainment texts. Good, ordinary television for a nation
that has a different disposition towards television but that is also struggling to
understand itself as full of difference.”
11

Unlike their British equivalents and their flagship series House Hunters,
HGTV’s turn towards family-centered and narrative-driven makeover television
instructs the viewer on proper citizenship by modeling patriarchal family structures
thriving through their consumerism and homeownership. The emphasis on a
present maternal figure also instructs the viewer on proper motherhood for the
working mother maybe: The emphasis on the stay-at-home mother instructs the
viewer on how an income-producing woman can also follow her proper gender
role.. HGTV’s dream home includes marble counters, French doors, and an
entrepreneurial mommy. In the hyper-idealized worlds of HGTV home renovation
programming, the Christian family is the restorative solution to the destruction of
the housing industry and the implied destruction of the heteronormative family and
family values. Images of decayed Main Street in decay, foreclosed homes, displaced
families, and the unemployed saturated post-recessionary media. HGTV capitalized
on resulting insecurities by projecting intact and flawless Christian families coming
together to restore dilapidated homes, a symbolic solution to the national crisis.
Nowhere is the metaphor more apparent than in the final shot of the opening credits
94
for My Big Family Renovation. Standing in front of an aging home, the father holds
the sledgehammer with ease with his supportive wife while their children wear
protective gear to shelter them from the destruction. The smiling family has come
together to rebuild the American Dream.
When developing new programming for HGTV, Allison Page, General
Manager for HGTV and DIY Network, states that "we are looking for that perfect
combination of aspirational and attainable."
12
HGTV has extended aspirational living
beyond flagship programs like House Hunters and Design on a Dime, which focus on
home buying and home improvement, to include the family unit and a particular
type of femininity and mothering as aspirational. As Ruth McElroy states, “Property
TV,” or programming that focuses on the buying and selling of homes, “in making
the domestic national, sutures the making of home to the making of the nation, and
more broadly to the making and negotiation of national belonging.”
13
Considering
the recession’s impact on the housing industry, property TV is critical in the
maintenance of national values. The destabilization of the housing industry
jeopardized the storybook promise of a middle-class lifestyle afforded to anyone
willing to believe in the American Dream. Homeownership is fundamental to an
aspirational middle-class lifestyle and associated with the individualism of a
Protestant work ethic. In discussing the role of a Protestant work ethic in home
ownership, John P. Dean states,
For many families of modest income, homeownership today represents a step up
into middle-class respectability. But middle-class aspirations in our society are often
supported by the Protestant ethic: higher status and standard of living are
individual responsibilities; they are the result of hard work, thrift, ingenuity, and
self-denial; property is viewed as the fruit of individual effort, and its accumulation
is supposed to reflect moral integrity and reliable work habits.
14

95

The Christian moralism of the American Dream and the emphasis on
homeownership is rooted in the same Puritan pursuit of individual autonomy.
15
The
restructuring of HGTV programming to focus on Christian families rebuilding
America is, therefore, an intuitive –response to the recession for a network looking
to tap into American family values and connect those values with home ownership,
maintenance, and remodeling.
HGTV’s transition to more narrative based programming reinforces the role
of traditional heteronormative family structures in the rebuilding of the nation.
Classic HGTV programs like House Hunters and Love it or List it cycle through
different families and individuals as they seek out their dream house. The narrative
of these programs focuses primarily on the suspense of which house will they pick
and whether it will have the granite counters and stainless steel appliances that the
owners wanted. Occasionally a B plot develops leaving the audience questioning if
the homebuyers’ marriage will survive the house hunt, but the successful
purchasing of the home in the conclusion resolves any remaining tension. As Shawn
Simpach states, HGTV programming “normalizes, routinizes, and naturalizes the
facts and practices of investing in domestic property, by displaying and
narrativizing, through sheer repetitive volume.” The redundancy of narrative
outcome emphasizes the importance of home buying ad nauseum. HGTV, according
to Simpach, “allows the ideology of domesticity to not simply underlie the
commercial programming but to be visualized, made accessible, imaginable, and
desirable, associating home with comfort and achievement, on the one hand, and
with labor and investment, on the other.”
16
The influence of the reality genre on
96
HGTV’s post-recessionary lineup has been to integrate the narrative of a singular
family throughout an entire series, thus exemplifying a particular familial lifestyle in
addition to homeownership.

Quiverfull Media and Home by Novogratz
The home design docuseries 9 by Design premiered on the Bravo Network in
April 2010. The show was named for New York City designers and developers
Robert and Courtney Novogratz and their seven children: Wolfgang, Bellamy,
Tallulah, Breaker, Five, Holleder, and Major. The couple describes themselves as
“fun, hip, and artsy”
17
, as if that is not already evident in the inventive names of their
children. The reasonably frazzled family’s Roman Catholic faith is evident
throughout the series; a priest lives with them for a short time, and we see one of
their children baptized. The couple is often disorganized and overwhelmed by the
financial responsibility of raising seven children and owning a business. Their
lifestyle is presented as extreme, chaotic, and somewhat charming.
9 by Design followed the success of reality shows featuring large families,
such as TLC’s Kids by the Dozen (2007), John and Kate Plus 8 (2007), and 19 Kids and
Counting (2008). While the Novogratz family is more liberal than the Duggars,
HGTV’s less nuanced treatment of them, after the show moved networks and was
renamed Home by Novogratz, is far less progressive than Bravo’s. The Bravo series
has a serial format and follows the family as they navigate running a business and
balancing family life while they prepare for the birth of their seventh child. The
couple openly discusses childcare concerns, distributing parental duties, financial
97
distresses, and finding a balance between work and family. In one episode they
search for a nanny, admitting that they could not have their careers without hired
help. The show is intimate: we see Robert and Cortney brushing their teeth and
arguing over their schedules (See Figure 1). The production value, while high,
utilizes handheld cameras that follow the family around, adding to the chaotic feel of
the show. The HGTV program, Home by Novogratz is more polished and streamlined.
The episodic format does not allow for family strife. The children only appear at the
beginning and end of each episode, but are featured prominently in the opening
credits (See Figure 2). In the first scene of the first episode, “Surfing Sisters
Rockaway Beach Home,” the couple sits at the kitchen table helping their children
with their homework. Cortney states via voiceover that “when you have seven kids
and you run your business from your home, you are always busy.” This mention of
busyness is the extent of any discord present in the HGTV program.
In 2012, shortly after the premiere of Home By Novogratz, HGTV Senior Vice
President and General Manager, Kathleen Finch, spoke with Variety regarding the
push for more character-driven programming like Novogratz: “Characters are what
really build a brand like ours. We have a face to put on the Today show; we have a
face to put on the cover of a magazine.”
18
At the time, HGTV was only months away
from launching HGTV Magazine. In addition to the marketing and advertising
advantages, the influence of reality television is evident in HGTV’s move towards
more narrative-based and character-driven programming as opposed to the mostly
DIY-based programming. The exhibition of the private lives of the professionals
featured on HGTV works to erode a distinction between labor and the private
98
sphere. Unlike Bravo’s more nuanced observation of working motherhood, HGTV’s
exposition of effortless working motherhood contributes to the cultural myth of
having it all. It is not enough for Cortney Novogratz to be a successful home flipper;
in Novogratz she must also prove that she is an exceptional wife and mother. Her
credibility hinges not only on the success of her career, but also on her maternal
aptitude. Furthermore, HGTV’s talent is comprised overwhelmingly of practicing
Christians, a fact often overlooked in their programs. While not focusing on the faith
of the hosts gives them a generic appeal, HGTV decontextualizes the style of
mothering in their programs and further normalizes white Christianity as “generic.”
9 by Design, along with other “female skewing” programs on Bravo, was
designed to fill the void left by Project Runway’s jump to Lifetime.
19
Frances
Berwick, general manager of Bravo, stated that “we expect [9 by Design] to appeal to
our core viewers, the affluent, educated 18- to 49-year-olds.” Berwick added,
“people will come into the office the next day and say, 'Oh my God, did you see that
show with those fabulous designers and their seven kids?'”
20
The imagined audience
of wealthy, employed, and educated women aligns with what HGTV’s president,
Finch, calls the network’s “core audience: home-owning, up-scale, college-educated
women.”
21
While it may appear curious that both Bravo and HGTV envision
audiences of well-educated career women for the Novogratz programming, it is part
of a larger trend towards featuring a Quiverfull lifestyle through postfeminist
discourse on choice. Or to say that mothering an abundance of children is solely in
control of the woman and is empowering.
99
The Quiverfull movement, widely associated with the Duggar family of TLC’s
19 Kids and Counting, gained national notoriety when the show premiered as a
special in 2008. This Evangelical movement rejects all forms of birth control,
including the rhythm method, which distinguishes its teachings from those of the
Catholic Church. What further separates it from Catholicism is that 98% of sexually
active American Catholic women between the ages of 18 and 44 have used a method
of contraception outside of natural family planning, despite church doctrine.
22

Likewise, while the Mormon Church also promotes large families, members are
open to the use of birth control.
23
All three denominations cite Psalm 127 as
rationale for their beliefs regarding reproduction: “Lo, children are a heritage of the
Lord; and the fruit of the womb is his reward… Happy is the man that hath his
quiver full of them.”
24

While the Novogratzes are practicing Catholics, most of their co-religionists
no longer have large families. Unsanctioned use of birth control has lowered the
average number of children per American Catholic family to 2.3, only slightly higher
than the national average of 2.1.
25
When the Religious Right took on the issue of
abortion as a political maneuver to “change the dynamics of the presidential election
and force the Republican Party to the right on the issue of cultural politics,”
26
the
pro-life position was considered an about-face for Evangelicals Southern Baptists
are evangelicals , who for years had been ambivalent about the issue. Some were
suspicious of anti-abortionists because the Catholic Church played a large role in
movement.
27
Others believed the decision should be left to the individual and not
legislated by the government. The union of conservative Catholics and evangelicals
100
in the pro-life movement required conservative Protestants to rethink their stance
on reproductive rights. The Quiverfull movement formed in the 1980s, shortly after
evangelicals coalesced around pro-life politics. The National Catholic Reporter has
this argument been made by anyone else?? argues that the Quiverfull movement is
one product of the alliance between Evangelicals and Catholics. Prior to joining
forces with the Catholic Church for political activism in the pro-life political
movement, Evangelical views on abortion were mixed. The politics of the religious
right spurred the rise of fundamentalist reproductive practices in evangelicalism.
The Quiverfull movement, while practiced today primarily by fundamentalist
and/or evangelical Christians, resonates with a secular audience as it “tap[s] into
preexisting cultural anxieties that link heterosexual marriage and reproduction to
national security.”
28
In other words, the abundant reproduction of Americans
ensures both a robust workforce and soldiers for the military. Quiverful media
therefore taps into the general post-recessionary anxiety surrounding the future of
the American family and ergo the nation by offering a contrary narrative of families
abundant with seemingly well-cared for children being raised in exceptionally
patriarchal families.
Sarah Banet-Weiser writes in reference to a surge in hyper-masculine
advertising following the recession that “since hegemonic masculinity invokes the
working man, the threat to this discursive formation not only jeopardizes the
centrality of the masculine figure in nationalist rhetoric (the fear of the soft
American), but is also construed as a threat for the future prosperity of the
nation.”
29
Quiverfull media, like the Levi’s campaign that Banet Weiser speaks of, are
101
both products of post-recessionary anxiety regarding the fate of the male
breadwinner. In Quiverfull programs like 19 Kids and Counting, men are the
undisputed head of the household and dictate the lives of their wives and children,
particularly their daughters. Women’s “willing” submission to their husbands is
framed within the postfeminist discourse of choice.
As Brenda Webber states in Reality Gendervisions, postfeminism presupposes
“the political, social, familial, and sexual mandates of the women’s movement
primarily have been met and therefore are no longer germane to present-tense
concerns.”
30
Webber adds that postfeminism is in direct response to the principles
of second-wave feminism of the 1970s, “considering both the practices and the
politics of ‘women’s libbers’ to be too extreme. As a consequence, some strains of
postfeminism have embraced many of the social conditions against which second-
wave feminism rebelled, , including ideological not just ideological some were real
such as being blocked from certain jobs/careers pressures for young women to
eschew careers and stay at home as wives and mothers.”
31
The title of Quiverfull
activist and leader Mary Pride’s book, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to
Reality, evokes not just hostility towards second-wave feminism, but also nostalgia
for a prefeminist era.
While Robert and Courtney Novogratz are not part of the Quiverfull
movement, they were Bravo and HGTV’s response to a lifestyle television landscape
preoccupied with Quiverfull families. The amount of large families in lifestyle
television relative to the actual number of these families presents a skewed reality
with potential political ramifications, particularly surrounding working
102
motherhood. This movement threatens the progress of second-wave feminism. The
Quiverfull movement adopts a postfeminist language of choice in regards to
reproduction and submitting to male subordination. Quiverfull champion Mary
Pride states, “We have a choice in slavery to self-indulgent sin or slavery to God.”
32

Pride could perhaps present this “choice” in less bleak terms, but considering the
movement’s obsession with doomsday narratives, optimism is perhaps not their
forte.
When the Quiverfull movement borrows postfeminist language by using the
word “choice” when framing their patriarchal beliefs, they “must be taken seriously
because of their potential effects on feminist gains in issues such as reproductive
rights and workplace equality. The potential for such effects becomes more urgent
when we consider the increasing media attention enjoyed by the Quiverfull
movement in recent years.”
33
HGTV’s answer to the popularity of Quiverfull media,
Home by Novogratz, featured a liberal Catholic family with seven children. While the
family does not come close to practicing the patriarchal Christianity of the Duggars,
HGTV’s treatment of Cortney Novogratz promotes a Christian perspective of
mothering that Novogratz admits is in fact not possible with the success of her
career.

Mommyblogging and My Big Family Makeover
In addition to borrowing concepts from other networks in the search to find
more narrative- and family-based programming, HGTV has sourced their
programming through user-generated media, looking to blogs and Instagram
103
accounts authored and curated by women to find inspiration and talent for their
programming this sentence is hard to follow. Can you break it into two? Utah
resident Andy Meredith recounts that HGTV contacted him and his wife, Candis,
after a producer took notice of Candis’s Instagram account, @oldhomelove. Candis
documents their renovations of 19
th
century homes alongside pictures of their six
sons and baby daughter. The Mormon couple recounts that producers told them
they had been looking for a large family to feature on the network when they found
their Instagram account. Their show, Old Home Love, debuted on both HGTV and DIY
network in 2015, thus further demonstrating HGTV’s trend of featuring
conservative Christian families on their network.
Fixer Upper and My Big Family Renovation were also sourced from blogs.
34

HGTV’s sister network, Food Network, developed one of their most successful
programs, The Pioneer Woman, from Ree Drummond’s popular blog of the same
name. The series features Drummond, one of the largest landowners in Oklahoma,
on her family ranch. We see Drummond cooking meals for her family, community,
and church, while also planning homeschooling activities. Paula M. Salvio argues
that The Pioneer Woman “relies on a fundamental difference between men and
women that is materialized through the representation of food preparation and
taste” make this two sentences? through what Salvio describes as “a re-
domestication of women by selling them the past.”
35
Gender essentialism is not
unique to The Pioneer Woman, but indicative of the many blogs picked up by Food
Network and HGTV and which represent a conservative and Christian lifestyle.
104
Not all audiences are receptive to the re-domestication of women. The
Pioneer Woman has inspired three parody blogs: Pie Near Woman, Marlboro Woman,
and The Pioneer Woman Sux. On Pie Near Woman a Barbie doll is used in place of
Ree Drummond (see Figure 2) as the author satirizes Drummond’s idealized
construct of domesticity while mimicking Drummond’s signature perkiness, stating,
“What about Jesus? Did I tell you that I love Jesus? Because I totally, totally DO! And
so does my demographic! You know what’s weird?!? The more my demographic
loves Jesus, the more I LOVE JESUS!”
36
These parody accounts are perceptive to the
insincerity of building an empire off of a particular type of conservative domesticity
that obfuscates the use of outside domestic laborers such as nannies and
housekeepers.
Henry Jenkins notes that “ironically, perhaps the biggest success story in
niche media production has been the emergence of alternative sphere of popular
culture reflecting the tastes and ideologies of cultural conservatives, the very groups
who are also working to impose those ideological norms onto mainstream media
through governmental regulation of media content.” While mommyblogging, as
mentioned in the previous chapter, is a potentially radical act for patriarchal forms
of motherhood, when adapted for television, maternal dissent is replaced with
marital bliss. Thus, the potentially radical act of mommyblogging is neutralized
when the predominately patriarchal Christian themes are incorporated back into
mainstream media, in particular the home renovation genre.
HGTV discovered blogger Jen Hatmaker after her 2013 blog post, “Worst End
of School Mom Ever [sic],” went viral. The post was shared nearly 50,000 times to
105
Facebook directly from her blog, and was featured on the “What’s Trending”
segment of NBC’s Today. In the viral post, Hatmaker’s satirical lament details the
lack of enthusiasm she has for her children’s education towards the end of the
school year: “I haven’t checked homework folders in three weeks, because, well, I
just can’t. Cannot. Can. Not. I can’t look at the homework in the folder. Is there
homework in the folder? I don’t even know. Are other moms still looking in the
homework folder? I don’t even care.” Hatmaker continues her rant: “I feel like any
sort of school energy required at this point is pure oppression, like the universe is
trying to destroy me.”
37
This sort of honest dialogue on the difficulty of mothering is
familiar discourse on mommyblogs. As Mary Friedman argues, blogging allows
women to reclaim the narrative of their experience from the so-called experts, thus
allowing for a space where women control the dialogue on motherhood, a space that
feminists like Adrienne Rich have sought.. Friedman states that “given the
reluctance of many women to expose modern motherhood as an unsustainable
condition, the anonymity that many mommybloggers take up provides one of the
few contexts in which a more authentic maternal voice that describes the difficulties
of mothering can emerge uncontested.”
38
What is often unacknowledged in
scholarly discussions on mommyblogs is that conservative Christian mothers author
a large number of these blogs. Considering that Christians view motherhood as “a
woman’s access to salvation vis-à-vis Mary,”
39
Hatmaker’s public dissatisfaction
with motherhood (that is, outside of private spaces like prayer groups) has made
her a divisive figure.
106
Hatmaker is a Christian author, speaker, missionary, and pastor with her
husband Brandon at the nondenominational Austin New Church in Austin, Texas.
Hatmaker’s first post, and the many that follow, follow the adoption of two of her
children from Ethiopia. Another common thread throughout her posts is religion. In
the “About” section of her blog, she states, “I love Jesus. I am absolutely that girl. I
feel so tender toward Him that sometimes I think I'll die.”
40
While all posts speak
highly of Christianity, Hatmaker is often critical of fellow Christians, stating,
“morality and voting records to the exclusion of weightier matters like justice and
transformation, a suspicious amalgamation of the American Dream and Armed
Forces, a me-and-mine stance as opposed to you-and-yours, persistent defensive
posture, treating unchurched or dechurched people like enemies instead of future
brothers and sisters in Christ.”
41
Hatmaker actively works to separate herself from
the Religious Right in her blog posts, but has relied on these groups for speaking
opportunities and media appearances. She also often employs their common
narrative of exclusion from popular media when discussing why she accepted
HGTV’s proposal for a television show stating, “It is so rare for a family like ours to
find influence in a space like this. It’s so rare. And we just thought this is an
opportunity and we are so hopeful that we represented God well and that we loved
each other well and we had a blast doing it.”
42
The conservative Christian narrative
of exclusion from popular media is as Jenkins argues a myth, considering the success
the group has found in popular media, never mind the persistence and banality of
conservative Christian ideology throughout national discourse.
43

107
Hatmaker does, however butter her bread on both sides, remaining complicit
with while critical of conservative Christianity. A Christian pastor and blogger,
Danny Franks, complained about Hatmaker’s influence on his wife. When
Hatmaker’s show was announced, Franks wrote, “I secretly wish that if Jen were
going to be on a reality show, it would be as a special guest on Shark Week, but
without a protective cage, if you get my feeding frenzy drift. The Holy Spirit
whispers to my heart how very, very wrong that is.”
44
Franks clearly enjoys a very
particular type of misogyny based on his description of his wife and daughter in his
blog’s “About Me” section, which is written in the third person, “He also makes a life
as the husband of an out-of-his-league hottie and the dad of three cool sons and one
sweet princess.”
45
When Hatmaker’s husband Brandon gleefully shared Franks’ post
on his own Facebook page, countless men agreed with the blog’s sentiment.
Traditional Christian women have taken issue with Hatmaker’s frankness as
well. In the Her-meneutics: Christian Women. Cultural Comment section of the
popular Evangelical online periodical, Christianity Today, commentator Megan Hill
calls the confessions of mommybloggers “the worst trend ever” stating,
“Increasingly, we think that only someone who has failed can understand our
failure. We believe only the woman who was not a virgin on her wedding night can
speak to sexual temptation and only the woman whose children are rebellious can
understand the difficulty of parenting teens.” Hill states that Christian parents
should instead ask themselves, “Have I been impatient with my children? I must ask
for grace to be patient tomorrow. Have I been unkind to my husband? I must seek to
love him better next time.”
46
Thus, Hatmaker, while an overwhelmingly
108
conservative figure, has used her blog as a space to house complicate conversations
about the practice of Christianity and as a space to articulate her struggles with
motherhood. Her persona in her HGTV program, however, is significantly different
than the one she has constructed in her blog. How are the two personas different?
Despite the promise of HGTV executives that all of their talents are experts
and professionals in their field, the Hatmaker duo does not have any home
renovation experience, aside from the husband’s marginal handiness. In Hatmaker’s
words, when HGTV first contacted her they said, “We really think that your family
can translate to the HGTV family.”
47
Thus suggesting that Hatmaker is featured on
the program to showcase her persona as a mother rather than her expertise of a
home trade. In the opening scene of the first episode, the camera shows Hatmaker’s
hands typing on a Mac keyboard. As the camera pans to her face, a voice-over says:
“I’m Jen Hatmaker and I’m a mom.” We then see different scenes of her family life:
her encouraging her children as they paint, her in the kitchen serving her children,
her and her husband kissing. The voiceover continues: “I married my husband
Brandon almost twenty years ago. He’s a motorcycle-riding pastor with some
serious DIY skills. Before we knew it we had three amazing kids and we’re adopting
two more. And our awesome four bed, two bath, 2400 square feet house started
feeling way too cramped, believe it or not.” Hatmaker goes on to apologetically
explain that they need to find a bigger house to accommodate the family: “Here is
our wish list: six bedrooms, I know obnoxious, at least two bathrooms, hangout
space for our kids and their friends, a master bedroom on the first floor, an office
space for me, and an open layout between the kitchen and the living room. And our
109
budget? We want to be all in for under $400,000.” Just prior to this voiceover,
Hatmaker’s children are knee-deep in clothing and toys on the floor of their
bedrooms, throwing items around as they dramatically demonstrate their need for
more space.
Hatmaker authored the Christian book, 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against
Excess, in 2012, two years prior to the debut of her HGTV program in 2014. In this
Amazon Best Selling book, Hatmaker and her family identify seven areas of excess in
their lives (food, clothes, spending, media, possessions, waste, and stress) and each
month focuses on reducing each area. For example, during the clothing month, they
each only wore seven articles of clothing throughout the month. The description of
the book reads as follows:
American life can be excessive, to say the least. That’s what Jen Hatmaker had
to admit after taking in hurricane victims who commented on the
extravagance of her family’s upper middle class home. She once considered
herself unmotivated by the lure of prosperity, but upon being called “rich” by
an undeniably poor child, evidence to the contrary mounted, and a social
experiment turned spiritual was born.

Hatmaker’s sheepish tone and apologetic language is a possibly a result of authoring
a book just two years prior on eliminating excess by living a life of asceticism. In a
promotional video for the corresponding Bible study program for 7, Hatmaker
urgently exclaims, “Jesus was really clear that our positions will steer our hearts!”
Emphasizing each word, Hatmaker continues, “We just have to be brave enough to
believe Jesus at his word!”
48
Clearly, the bravery had worn off by the time HGTV
approached Hatmaker about filming a show that would involve her selling her home
for a larger, designer home.
110
When questioned for a profile in Christianity Today, Hatmaker said, “”When
Brandon and I sat down together with the quiet of our own minds and the counsel of
our closest friends and family, we thought, for whatever reason, we have the chance
to have a place in a world we never had access to.” Hatmaker weighed the cost of
hypocrisy against the opportunity to evangelize through the HGTV program.
Hatmaker adds, “I have no idea what God will do with it or through this show, but I
hope that it makes him (sic) more famous.”
49

Historian Catherine A. Brekus has argued that “the United States is one of the
most Christian countries in the world, with more than 80 percent of the American
people identifying themselves as Christian. It is also one of the most capitalist
countries in the world, with an economy built on seemingly endless desire for
goods.”
50
Brekus further argues that the tension between capitalism and Christianity
is in the conceptualizing of selfhood. Reconciling the privileging of individualism,
choice, and freedom with the Christian principles of sacrifice, generosity, and
common good has, as Brekus and sociologist Robert Wuthnow argues, transformed
the practice of Christianity in the US towards that of seeking and self-care.
51

Hatmaker’s plan to evangelize through HGTV is therefore not that radical
considering the network’s promise for self-improvement to their viewers. As
Wuthnow argues, the practice of Christianity has transformed from a spirituality of
dwelling, like traditional cathedrals or chapels or the sanctuary of the home, to a
spirituality of seeking, in which religious and spiritual views are acquired through
practices of consumption and shopping. HGTV’s slogan, “Home Starts Here,” echoes
this cultural transformation of spaces of dwelling reduced to their commercial
111
utility. Therefore, it is reasonable for Hatmaker to envision HGTV as a safe space for
evangelization, considering the connections between consumerism and Christianity.
Ultimately the very aspects of Christian practice in late capitalist culture that
Hatmaker was critical of in her blog and her books is neutralized through HGTV’s
never ending directive to consume. Her blogging persona as an unruly Christian
woman is replaced with her HGTV persona of housewife and curator of consumer
goods to improve her domestic life. The soul of HGTV is rooted in the post-war
promise of utopia through consumer goods and home improvement, or the
American Dream, which ultimately is not compatible with a Christian woman
resisting her domesticity and questioning Christianity’s conversion towards
consumption.

Home Renovation and Fixer Upper
The home renovation genre has flourished in the years following the Great
Recession along with makeover television in general. Television scholars Laurie
Ouellette and James Hay argue, “The spirit of personal reinvention endemic to the
current spate of makeover television has gained visibility and social currency as
part of the reinvention of government as a decentralized network of entrepreneurial
ventures on the one hand, and the diffusion of personal responsibility and self-
enterprise as ethics of ‘good’ citizenship on the other.”
52
The themes of self-
enterprise have a theological connection to the practice of conservative Christianity
in late capitalism, which privileges the individual over the community. As Hay
argues the neoliberal themes of self-enterprise, self-actualization, and self-
112
investment are part of a larger moral economy to manage the insecurities of
homeownership after the collapse of the housing market.
53
Theologically, the home
improvement and makeover genre echo Christian themes of being reborn,
resurrected, or revitalized.
Sermoncentral.com, a primarily Evangelical resource for free sermons, is the
self-reported largest sermon database with over 150,000 sermons. It also is the
most popular site of its kind with 250,000 visitors each week.
54
On SermonCentral
there are 118 sermons that make mention of the popular ABC makeover reality
series Extreme Makeover and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The site even
featured a series of sermons dedicated solely to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in
which each sermon focuses on a particular room (i.e. the living room, the family
room, etc.) in need of a makeover. A sermon titled “Extreme Makeover: Master
Bedroom” authored by David Sloane, a pastor from Mountain View Baptist outside
of Denver who would later resign from his ministry after an anonymous tipster
alerted his church of prior child molestation convictions
55
, begins, “God has created
men & women in such uniquely different ways!” Sloane continues by comparing
women to computers saying, “As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find
yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it” and then comparing men
to computers saying, “In order to get their attention you have to turn them on!”
56

The sermon concludes that if a marriage is to be renewed, then submission is the
only answer. Sloane’s sermon is emblematic of the nostalgia for gender essentialism
and female submission that HGTV is responding to.
113
In an interview explaining the surprise success of Rehab Addict staring single
make two sentences mother Nicole Curtis with female viewers, Kathleen Finch
offered insight into HGTV’s policing of motherhood by stating “[Rehab Addict] was
an incredible hit, but when we started to look at who was watching, it was both men
and women. It was an interesting opportunity. (We thought) let’s try [Curtis] on
HGTV and see if women like her. They did.’”
57
DIY Network, which Finch describes
as their male-skewing network, had aired Rehab Addict for its first five seasons
because it was originally thought that women viewers would not relate to (until
recently) single mother Nicole Curtis. Curtis is markedly different than the other
HGTV personalities. She is private, does the actual construction work for her
renovation projects, (unlike other HGTV women who primarily do the decorating,)
and she is not outwardly religious.
HGTV’s current top-rated program Fixer Upper and its star Joanna Gaines are
the culmination of what the network has been building up to for the past ten years.
Gaines emphasizes her Christian motherhood, while also decorating homes that her
husband renovates. Her children are featured throughout each episode as she tends
to their needs while overseeing major renovation projects and runs a multimillion
dollar home décor business. Its season four premier on February 9
th
, 2016 was the
highest rated telecast on cable in 9:00 PM – 10:00 PM time slot, making it the fifth
highest ratings that HGTV has ever received.
58
Gaines has inspired a cult following
with countless memes and products on Etsy that read “Joana Gaines is my spirit
animal” or “In a world full of Kardashians be a Joanna Gaines”.
114
HGTV monetizes Christian motherhood in the name of restoring a weary
post-recessionary audience nostalgic for the perceived morality of a prefeminist era.
HGTV’s unrealistic and unachievable representation of working motherhood
undermines policy reform affecting paid maternity and family leave, equal pay, and
women’s labor rights in general. Their appropriation of conservative Christian
motherhood bolsters a retrenchment in heteronormative ideology in post-
recessionary television.
Fixer Upper’s Chip Gaines has stated “The impact [Billy Graham] has had on
my life is immeasurable.”
59
The televangelist had employed Gaines’s mother, and
when Chip was in college he was close friends with Graham’s grandchildren and his
son-in-law, Danny Lotz. While Graham ‘s religious stance was explicit in the books
and films that his empire developed, Gaines and his wife are stealthily integrating
Christian ideals into their home design program. HGTV promotes their lifestyle as
aspirational. According to Gaines, “[Lotz] was influential in showing me how to live
out my faith, even in a secular environment.” Graham transformed the role of
religious figures in media and now his ideological legacy continues in less
conspicuous ways, serving as a reminder that even HGTV is not impervious to
serving as a pulpit.

115

Figure 1
116

Figure 2
117

Figure 3
118

Figure 4
119
Notes to Chapter 3

1
Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an
Age of Austerity (Durham: Duke UP, 2014).
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid, 26.
4
Megan Willome, "Chip and Joanna Gaines," Wacoan: Wacos Magazine, 2014,
accessed August 12, 2016, http://www.wacoan.com/woty/chip-and-joanna-
gaines/.
5
A Balance Sheet at 30 Months: How the Great Recession Has Changed Life in
America (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2010), accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/06/30/how-the-great-recession-has-
changed-life-in-america/.
6
Negra and Tasker
7
"Women's Bureau (WB) - Quick Facts on Women in the Labor Force in 2010,"
Women's Bureau (WB) - Quick Facts on Women in the Labor Force in 2010,
November 2009, accessed August 12, 2016,
https://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/qf-laborforce-10.htm.
8
Suzanne Leonard, "Escaping the Recession?," Media and Culture in an Age of
Austerity Gendering the Recession, 2014, 54, doi:10.1215/9780822376538-002.
9
George Szalai, "Scripps Networks CEO Touts Record Ratings, Millennial
Audiences," The Hollywood Reporter, December 8, 2015, accessed August 12, 2016,
https://www.yahoo.com/movies/scripps-networks-ceo-touts-record-ratings-
millennial-audiences-162916087.html.
10
George Szalai, "HGTV Becomes Scripps' First $1B Revenue Network," The
Hollywood Reporter, February 23, 2016, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/scripps-hgtv-tops-billion-dollars-
868679.
11
Charlotte Brunsdon, "Lifestyling Britain," Essays on a Medium in Transition
Television after TV, 2004, doi:10.1215/9780822386278-004.
12
Kimberly Stevens, "For Home-improvement Show Hosts, a Paradox," Los Angeles
Times, September 6, 2014, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://www.latimes.com/home/la-hm-home-show-hosts-20140906-story.html.
120

13
R. Mcelroy, "Property TV: The (re)making of Home on National Screens,"
European Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2008),
doi:10.1177/1367549407084963.
14
John P. Dean, "The Ghosts Of Home Ownership," Journal of Social Issues 7, no. 1-2
(1951): 59, doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.1951.tb02222.x.
15
Richard J. Ellis, American Political Cultures (New York U.a.: Oxford Univ. Press,
1993), 8.
16
Simpach, Shawn.
17
"The Novogratz," Husband and Wife Team Cortney and Robert Novogratz Are THE
NOVOGRATZ, accessed August 12, 2016, http://www.thenovogratz.com/.
18
Jon Weisman, "HGTV Pushes Personality with Series," Variety, September 20,
2011, accessed August 12, 2016, http://variety.com/2011/tv/news/hgtv-pushes-
personality-with-series-1118043136/.
19
Daniel Frankel, "Bravo Keeps Its Focus on Femmes," Variety, April 15, 2009, 303rd
ed., sec. 7.
20
Jon Lafayette, "'Design' on Bravo," Television Week, 28th ed., sec. 9.
21
Paula Hendrickson, "HGTV at 20: Building for the Future While Staying True to
Core," Variety, October 14, 2014, accessed August 13, 2016,
http://variety.com/2014/tv/spotlight/hgtv-at-20-building-for-the-future-
1201329028/.
22
Guttmacher Institute, “Guttmacher Statistic on Catholic Women’s Contraceptive
Use”
23
The Church of Later Day Saints, Handbook 2: Administering to the Church.
24
Psalms 127:3
25
Benjamin Wormald, "Chapter 3: Demographic Profiles of Religious Groups," Pew
Research Centers Religion Public Life Project RSS, May 12, 2015, accessed August
13, 2016, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-3-demographic-
profiles-of-religious-groups/.
26
Daniel K. Williams, God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 120.
27
See Daren Dochuk’s From Bible Belt to Sunbelt and Daniel K. Williams God’s Own
Party
121

28
Andrea Terry, "My Quiver Is Bigger than Yours: Metaphor, Gender, and Ideology
in Quiverfull Discourse.," Journal of Communication & Religion 37, no. 3 (Fall 2014):
100.
29
Sarah Banet-Weiser, "’We Are All Workers: Economic Crisis, Masculinity, and the
American Working Class," in Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of
Austerity, ed. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (Durham: Duke Up, 2014).
30
Brenda Webber, Reality Gendervision (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
31
Ibid.
32
Mary Pride, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality (Westchester, IL:
Crossway Books, 1985).
33
Terry, 103.
34
When I was a casting intern for High Noon Productions, the production company
behind House Hunters, Fixer Upper, and other HGTV shows, I was instructed to start
with social media to discover new talent for the network, but I was always given
very narrow parameters to search. In one instance I was instructed to find a host
with a background in motivational speaking for a program on a different network.
To test the boundaries, after a day of scouring blogs, I presented the casting director
with one black and one disabled blogger, both of who had the appropriate
backgrounds. I was sent back to the drawing board.
35
Paula M. Salvio, "Dishing It Out: Food Blogs and Post-Feminist Domesticity,"
Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 12, no. 3 (2012),
doi:10.1525/gfc.2012.12.3.31.
36
"About," Pie Near Woman, section goes here, accessed August 13, 2016,
http://www.pienearwoman.com/about/.
37
Jen Hatmaker, "Worst End of School Year Mom Ever," Jen Hatmaker, May 30,
2013, accessed August 13, 2016,
http://jenhatmaker.com/blog/2013/05/30/worst-end-of-school-year-mom-ever.
38
Mary Friedman, "On Mommyblogging: Notes to a Future Feminist Historian,"
Journal of Women's History 22, no. 4 (Winter 2010).
39
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the
English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 114.
40
Jen Hatmaker, "About," Jen Hatmaker, accessed August 12, 2016,
http://jenhatmaker.com/about.htm.
122

41
Jen Hatmaker, "And Then the Conference Uninvited Me to Speak," Jen Hatmaker,
accessed August 13, 2016, http://jenhatmaker.com/blog/2013/03/18/and-then-
the-conference-uninvited-me-to-speak.
42
CBN, “Jen Hatmaker: Renovating Your Life and Faith”
43
Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-
wing America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
44
Danny Franks, "Jen Hatmaker Ruined My Marriage," Danny Franks, August 25,
2014, accessed August 13, 2016, http://dfranks.com/2014/08/25/jen-hatmaker-
ruined-my-marriage/.
45
Danny Franks, "About," Danny Franks, January 29, 2014, accessed August 13,
2016, http://dfranks.com/about/.
46
Megan Hill, "The Very Worst Trend Ever," Her.meneutics - Christianity Today, July
8, 2013, accessed August 13, 2016,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2013/july/very-worst-trend.html.
47
"Jen Hatmaker: Renovating Your Life & Faith," CBN.com, accessed August 13,
2016, http://www1.cbn.com/700club/jen-hatmaker-renovating-your-life-faith.
48
"The 7 Experiment - Bible Study Book," LifeWay: Your Source for Bible Studies,
Christian Books, Bibles, and More..., accessed August 13, 2016,
http://www.lifeway.com/Product/the-7-experiment-bible-study-book-
P005515741.
49
Kate Shellnut, "Jen Hatmaker Brings Her 'Super-Christian' Family onto Reality
TV," ChristianityToday.com, March 19, 2014, accessed August 13, 2016,
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/march/jen-hatmaker-brings-her-
super-christian-family-onto-reality.html.
50
Catherine A. Brekus, "The Perils of Prosperity: Some Historical Reflections on
Christianity, Capitalism, and Consumerism in America.," in American Christianities: A
History of Dominance and Diversity, ed. Catherine A. Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
51
Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).
52
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, "Makeover Television, Governmentality and the
Good Citizen," Continuum 22, no. 4 (2008), accessed August 13, 2016,
doi:10.1080/10304310801982930.
123

53
James Hay, "Too Good to Fail: Managing Financial Crisis Through the Moral
Economy of Realty TV," Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 4 (2010),
doi:10.1177/0196859910390028.
54
"About SermonCentral.com," Sermon Central, accessed August 13, 2016,
http://www.sermoncentral.com/article.asp?article=About_Us.
55
Electra Draper, "Ex-pastor Hopes That Resurfacing of ’86 Conviction Will “set Me
Free”," The Denver Post, August 18, 2008, section goes here, accessed August 13,
2016, http://www.denverpost.com/2008/08/18/ex-pastor-hopes-that-resurfacing-
of-86-conviction-will-set-me-free/.
56
David Slone, "Extreme Makeover: Master Bedroom," Sermon Central, July 2004,
accessed August 13, 2016, http://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/extreme-
makeover-master-bedroom-david-slone-sermon-on-marriage-commitment-
71984.asp.
57
Hendrickson, “HGTV at 20.”
58
"HGTV's FIXER UPPER Shatters Previous Ratings with New Episode," Ratings
World, February 12, 2016, accessed August 13, 2016,
http://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwtv/article/HGTVs-FIXER-UPPER-Shatters-
Previous-Ratings-with-New-Episode-20160212.
59
Joy Allmond, "How God Used Billy Graham to Influence 'Fixer Upper' Family," Billy
Graham Evangelistic Association, October 29, 2015, accessed August 13, 2016,
https://billygraham.org/story/how-billy-graham-brought-the-gospel-home-to-
chip-and-joanna-gaines/.
124
Conclusion
This project sought to understand how a post-recessionary economy
informed the way Christianity was invoked in reality television-influenced media.
How is Christian discourse in media informed by the economic conditions of a post-
recessionary culture? In what ways does the mode of this discourse inform its
religious conviction and ideology? This project illustrates a similar trend, in both
top-down broadcast and cable programming and bottom-up YouTube vlogs, of
invoking a set of beliefs common among Conservative Christians to rationalize the
policies of late capitalism.
As a working mother, I am sympathetic to the parents mentioned in these
pages who must care for their children without the benefit of the generous parental
leave that I was fortunate enough to have received when I gave birth to my son. I
think back to Orsi’s belief that individuals are thinking and knowing, but whose
choices are limited by the options they are provided. In this project, I sought to
apply the same rationale to the subjects of my research; their religiosity does not
indicate a lack of rationality or that they are without critical reflection and
awareness. However, these subjects are making choices under particular
circumstances that dictate particular outcomes. The Christian mothers that I write
about have invested in an ideology that privileges their role as a mother above all
else. They are also raising children in a late-capitalist culture and economy that
demands a dual income, but offers little support for such households. These
conditions have produced Christian mothers who use the tools made available to
them to assuage their guilt-ridden conscience while they financially support their
125
families. Similarly, there are Christian fathers who believe that they must assert
themselves in the midst of a post-recessionary economy that threatens their biblical
right to headship. This study is not a judgment on these individuals, but a reflection
on how these people have used media and religion to make sense of the Great
Recession of 2008.
In the first chapter, I looked at the critically and commercially successful
ABC, NBC, and CBS reality programs that celebrate corporate America and the white,
patriarchal structure that supports it. Counterintuitively, the broadcast networks’
Recession-era reality programs, which positioned wealthy CEOs as heroes to the
poor, enjoyed great success when millions of Americans were losing their jobs.
These programs validate the white patriarchal headship called into question by
groups like Occupy Wall Street. These pro-corporate shows, like most Recession-era
popular media, do not question the notion that a free market is ethical; as a result,
they promote this notion by adopting formal and stylistic characteristics
reminiscent of Christian media, as well as by featuring Christian CEOs or
millionaires who explicitly practice their faith.
In the second chapter, I explored the bottom-up post-recessionary media that
overtly unifies neoliberal thought with Christianity. Christian entrepreneurs have
monetized pregnancy and domestic labor through creative venues like YouTube,
Etsy, Instagram, or their own personal blogs, in an effort to endorse and financially
support the conservative Christian family lifestyle. Young Christian creatives
repackage the conservative Christian lifestyle for their devoted audiences. In the
process, they provide a the ethics of Christian values to a DIY economy by
126
establishing it as family-friendly, despite the reality that these jobs demand around-
the-clock labor. Additionally, careers in this field have a high-failure rate, and there
are limited safety nets in place for those who do fail.
The third chapter explored the post-recessionary identity of “mompreneur”
as an extension of the idealized hyper-feminine Christian mother and wife. This
identity is the product of the vlogs and blogs of Chapter 2, but has been
appropriated for television. The televisual version works even harder than the social
media version, yet somehow also have even more time for her children. The identity
of the “mompreneur” draws on traditional Christian beliefs that women’s labor
should be contained to the home and secondary only to her marriage and the
rearing of her children. HGTV foregrounded mompreneurs in their home design
programs in the years following the Great Recession, and found record-breaking
success with the ultimate Christian mompreneur, Joanna Gaines’s Fixer Upper. This
chapter linked the popularity of the renovation genre in post-recessionary media
with the growth of the new domestic economies. HGTV utilized Christian talent and
ideology to construct a post-recessionary narrative of intact heteronormative family
structures in the aftermath of the “mancession.” The HGTV programs Home by
Novogratz, My Big Family Renovation, and Fixer Upper all feature Christian women
who have built successful careers, but whose success is obscured by the shows’
focus on their roles as wife and mother. Fixer Upper and the other HGTV programs
represent the network’s preoccupation with programming featuring conservative
Christian women who prioritize motherhood over their careers, or at least do so in
front of the camera.
127
Post-recessionary media contains a common theme: that Christian parenting
is the model solution for all recessionary woes. This media envisions a nation in an
ideological crisis after the perceived cataclysmic blow that the recession delivered
to male hegemony; within the Christian family, “men can be men” again and “women
can be women.” Sarah Banet Weiser argues that “work is not only the (material and
symbolic) center of the current global economic crisis, and concomitant rapidly
accelerating unemployment rates, home loan foreclosures, and more general
deindustrialization and declining value of real wages; it also centers the figuring of
traditional American male identity as the primary breadwinner in an imagined
heteronormaive family.”
1
The idealized Christian family features individuals
fulfilling traditional gender roles, thus making it the perfect site for envisioning the
way out of a recession; a recession that was characterized as a problem for
masculinity.
I would be remiss if I did not comment on the similarities between the
framing of the men on Undercover Boss and the framing happening in the rebranding
attempts of Republican presidential nominee and former reality television star,
Donald Trump. Trump’s relatively well-adjusted children have been paraded in
front of the media as a counter to the flagrant bigotry, misogyny, and jingoism that
have defined the Trump campaign. Trump’s children act as “character witnesses”
2

for a man who is otherwise defined by his wealth, ego, ostentatiousness, and
intolerance. Since America is preoccupied with the heteronormative Christian
family, it makes good political sense for Trump’s children to situate him in his role
as father in the nuclear family unit. Let us not forget, however, Trump’s tenuous
128
relationship with his Christian faith, and his children’s acknowledgement of his
absence during their youth.
3
Reality is obscured by the emotion that
heteronormative parenthood evokes.
Sara Ahmed argues in her book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, that power
relations withstand cultural resistance because of an emotional investment in social
norms.
4
To be counted as part of the national collective “is to feel rage against those
who threaten not only to take the ‘benefits’ of the nation away, but also to destroy
‘the nation,’ which would signal the end of life itself.”
5
Ahmed adds that “emotions
provide a script” for belonging in the nation and opposing “those others who
threaten to take the nation away.”
6
During the recession, heteronormative
patriarchy became the “benefit” that “others” were threatening to take away. This
particular benefit is indeed one of the defining and withstanding characteristics of
national identity. It is this benefit to which Trump refers when he says he wants to
“Make America Great Again.”
Henry A. Giroux argues that “neoliberal policies that promote the cutthroat
downsizing of the workforce, the bleeding of social services, the reduction of state
governments to police precincts, the ongoing liquidation of job security, of low-
skilled workers, and the emergence of a culture of permanent insecurity and fear
hide behind appeals to common sense and alleged immutable laws of nature.”
7

Giroux later adds that religion silences dissention and nurtures an ideological and
political sphere that is not conducive to democracy. Giroux invokes George Soros,
who states that “religious fundamentalism comes together with market
fundamentalism to form the ideology of American supremacy.”
8
The moral authority
129
of the United States is unremittingly tied to its democracy, capitalist economy, and
Christian values. Alas, democracy is what is at stake when capitalism and religion
mix.
In Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, William E. Connolly argues that
the foremost threat to democracy is a paradoxical evangelical-capitalist resonance
machine. “First, it threatens the world, as its very emergence teaches us about the
ubiquitous role that spirituality of some sort or the other always plays in state-
capital institutions. Second, its leading members are often resistant to thinking
about new conditions of being; but they are engrossed in turning them back through
the micropolitics of the everyday life.”
9
These small-scale political interventions
into the domestic sphere regulates difference and dissent.
The Trump presidential nomination by the Republican Party marks an
important transition in American politics and culture. Senator Ted Cruz’s failure to
take the Conservative Christian vote from Trump suggests not necessarily a decline
in the influence of the voting block, but instead represents the climax of emotional
politics. A recent article in The Atlantic suggests that conservative Christians feel as
if their values are under assault; they are being silenced, and the media is against
them.
10
The post-recessionary media that I discuss in this dissertation feeds into
these very perceptions. Trump’s lambasting of political correctness, the very quality
that makes him so appealing to this block, foreshadows the cataclysmic effects his
policies would have on education, media, and social programs. Richard T. Hughes
argues in Christian America and the Kingdom of God that “when Christians embrace
the myth of Christian America but refuse to question the nation when it behaves in
130
ways that are alien—even hostile—to the Christian faith, they implicitly transform
their religion into a highly destructive force that erodes justice for the poor and
threatens the peace and stability of the world.”
11
When Christians, as Hughes states,
“take their cues from imperial considerations and then justify their political
behavior with appeals to the Bible and their religion,”
12
they undermine not only
democracy, but their religious beliefs as well. “In this radically perverse scenario,
Jesus and the religion that bears his name now sanction war instead of peace,
oppression instead of reconciliation, and greed instead of selfless giving.”
13
This
Trump moment is the product of decades of neoliberal policies fortified with
Christian principles and normalized with the aid of the media. The neoliberal media
discussed in this dissertation demonstrates this very process.

131
Notes to Conclusion

1
Sarah Banet-Weiser, "’We Are All Workers: Economic Crisis, Masculinity, and the
American Working Class," in Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of
Austerity, ed. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (Durham: Duke Up, 2014), 82.
2
Maggie Haberman and Jennifer Steinhauer, "Introducing Her Father, Ivanka Trump
Is Character Witness," The New York Times, July 21, 2016, accessed August 13,
2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/donald-ivanka-
trump.html.
3
Emily Jane Fox, "A Scientific Explanation of How Donald Trump's Kids Turned Out
(Relatively) Normal," The Hive - Vanity Fair, May 12, 2016, section goes here,
accessed August 13, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/05/donald-
trump-kids-normal.
4
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 12.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the Age of
Greed (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 7.
8
George Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy: The Costs of Bush's War in IRAQ
(New York: Public Affairs, 2004).
9
William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008), 67.
10
Jonathan Merrit, "Why Do Evangelicals Support Donald Trump? A Pastor
Explains," NPR, February 25, 2006, accessed August 13, 2016,
http://www.npr.org/2016/02/25/468149440/why-do-evangelicals-support-
donald-trump-a-pastor-explains.
11
Richard T. Hughes, Christian America and the Kingdom of God (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2009).
12
Ibid.
13
ibid.
132
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Creator Madden, Katherine (author)

Core Title Father, son, and the holy dollar: rebuilding the American Dream in post recessionary reality television and mommy blogging

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 09/26/2016

Defense Date 08/23/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American Dream,christianity,conservative Christianity,DIY culture,feminism,headship,media,mommy blogging,neoliberalism,new media,OAI-PMH Harvest,Parenting,patriarchy,reality television,recession,Religion,television,vlogging

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Language English

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Advisor Imre, Aniko (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Seiter, Ellen (committee member), Winston, Diane (committee member)

Creator Email katherine.madden@jesuithighschool.org,wag.katie@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-305647

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