Instructions for God’s Gift: Emotional Management in the Cultural Transmission of Evangelical Sexuality

Abstract

Drawing on a comparative study of evangelical premarital counseling programs, I analyze how the leadership construct sexual discourses that reimagine and reify existing views about sex and how to feel about it. Situated within evangelicalism’s emotional regime that conceptualizes unmarried believers in a sexual battleground and married couples in a playground, engaged couples occupy a liminal position where they must engage in emotion work to relearn how to think and feel about sex. Comparing the sexual discourses at each program— sexuality as a behavior and sexuality as embodied—that inform leaderships’ advice to couples beginning to make this transition, I find that how they talk about sex has consequences for how they imagine people should manage their emotions.