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Start Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
25-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
In 2019, the Trinity Broadcasting Network announced that it would premiere the first-ever inspirational talk show made by and for women: Better Together. The show was a critical piece of TBN's larger plan to modernize the evangelical network and its programming. Hosted by Laurie Crouch, the wife of TBN's president Matthew Crouch, Better Together features a rotating cast of Black and white women (including pastors, inspirational speakers, clergymen’s wives, and popular Christian entertainers) who gather each episode to talk about how to live a Christian life while navigating the problems and challenges of the modern world. The show itself is slickly produced and its episodes are designed to circulate easily on social media (particularly Instagram, on which many of these women have large followings.) In this paper, I will argue that Better Together serves as a site of identity formation and affirmation for evangelical women, and analyze how the show promotes a specific vision of evangelical womanhood predicated on "love" (the guiding principle for the show), "family values," and giving your problems back to God. I will focus particularly on the episodes produced during the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020 (including the special series "Talking to Your Children About Race"), which created a moment of rupture for the show's typically colorblind approach. Through textual and discourse analysis, I will reveal how Better Together translated discussions about racial justice into something palatable to the evangelical audience by weaponizing its ideal version of evangelical femininity.
Talking To Your Children About Race: TBN's Daytime Talk Show "Better Together" and Evangelical Womanhood
In 2019, the Trinity Broadcasting Network announced that it would premiere the first-ever inspirational talk show made by and for women: Better Together. The show was a critical piece of TBN's larger plan to modernize the evangelical network and its programming. Hosted by Laurie Crouch, the wife of TBN's president Matthew Crouch, Better Together features a rotating cast of Black and white women (including pastors, inspirational speakers, clergymen’s wives, and popular Christian entertainers) who gather each episode to talk about how to live a Christian life while navigating the problems and challenges of the modern world. The show itself is slickly produced and its episodes are designed to circulate easily on social media (particularly Instagram, on which many of these women have large followings.) In this paper, I will argue that Better Together serves as a site of identity formation and affirmation for evangelical women, and analyze how the show promotes a specific vision of evangelical womanhood predicated on "love" (the guiding principle for the show), "family values," and giving your problems back to God. I will focus particularly on the episodes produced during the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020 (including the special series "Talking to Your Children About Race"), which created a moment of rupture for the show's typically colorblind approach. Through textual and discourse analysis, I will reveal how Better Together translated discussions about racial justice into something palatable to the evangelical audience by weaponizing its ideal version of evangelical femininity.
Bio
Kayti Lausch is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Coe College. She received her Ph.D. in Film, Television, and Media from the University of Michigan in 2020. Her research explores the relationships between media, culture, politics, industry, and Christianity in the United States, and her work has been published in Television and New Media and Flow. Her current book project reconstructs the histories of evangelical television networks in the US in order to reveal their cultural, political, and industrial impacts.