The Equal Rights Amendment and Conservative Christianity
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The Equal Rights Amendment and Conservative Christianity
The struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) became an important intersection of religion, gender, family politics, and conservative activism in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s. Although the amendment initially attracted significant bipartisan support, opposition grew as conservative activists argued that constitutional equality based on sex could undermine traditional distinctions between men and women, alter family law, and weaken established gender roles.
Conservative Christian women became particularly important participants in this opposition. Rather than remaining outside political life, many organized campaigns, attended political conventions, contacted legislators, distributed literature, established advocacy organizations, and built networks around opposition to feminism and the ERA. These activities contributed to the broader development of the Religious Right and helped make questions involving marriage, motherhood, abortion, sexuality, education, and family authority prominent political issues.
The ERA and the Politics of Gender
Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 and sent it to the states for ratification. The amendment proposed that equality of rights under the law could not be denied or abridged by the federal government or the states on account of sex.
Supporters generally presented the ERA as a means of establishing constitutional equality between women and men. Opposition, however, increasingly focused on possible consequences involving family law, employment, military service, abortion, and distinctions between male and female social roles.
The resulting debate extended beyond the amendment's relatively brief constitutional language. It became part of a much wider disagreement over feminism, changing gender expectations, sexual politics, religious authority, and the structure of the American family.
By the end of the ratification campaign, these cultural and religious disputes had become inseparable from much of the political debate surrounding the amendment.
Conservative Christian Women and Anti-ERA Activism
Women were central participants in the movement opposing the ERA. Conservative activists argued that equality under the amendment could eliminate legal or social protections associated with women's traditional roles as wives and mothers.
Phyllis Schlafly became the most nationally visible anti-ERA organizer. Her STOP ERA campaign developed a network of activists who contacted legislators, organized locally, circulated publications, and presented opposition to the amendment as a defense of women, marriage, motherhood, and the family.
The movement complicates a simple interpretation of the ERA controversy as a political struggle between politically active feminists and politically passive traditional women. Conservative women were themselves organizers, speakers, writers, lobbyists, and institution builders.
Their activism demonstrated that traditionalist understandings of gender could motivate women to enter public political life rather than withdraw from it. Organizations and networks developed during the ERA controversy subsequently became important components of conservative political activism.
Competing Christian Definitions of Womanhood
Christian women did not hold a single position on the ERA. Evangelical women could be found on both sides of the amendment, and arguments about the ERA reflected wider theological disagreements concerning biblical interpretation, marriage, women's leadership, and relations between men and women.
Some conservative evangelicals increasingly emphasized male leadership or "headship" within marriage and the family. Within this framework, feminism was sometimes viewed as challenging a religiously grounded division of responsibilities between husbands and wives.
Other Christian women argued that religious faith was compatible with expanded legal and social equality for women. The ERA controversy therefore became an internal debate within American Christianity as well as a conflict between religious conservatives and secular feminism.
These disagreements contributed to broader disputes within Protestant denominations over women's ordination, sexuality, abortion, biblical authority, and family structure.
The LDS Church and Opposition to the ERA
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints became one of the most prominent religious institutions opposing the ERA. Church leaders publicly presented the amendment as a moral and family issue rather than simply a question of constitutional law.
Latter-day Saint women participated extensively in political mobilization surrounding the amendment. Religious networks helped organize opposition in Utah and other states and connected the ERA controversy with debates over abortion, homosexuality, family authority, and the changing position of women in American society.
The 1977 International Women's Year conferences became particularly important arenas of conflict. In Utah, large numbers of conservative participants challenged feminist proposals and opposed the ERA and several other elements of the emerging women's-rights agenda.
The resulting activism demonstrated how existing religious organizations and social networks could rapidly mobilize citizens around political questions involving gender and family life.
Sonia Johnson and Mormon Feminism
The conflict over the ERA also produced significant opposition within Mormonism itself. Sonia Johnson became one of the best-known Latter-day Saint supporters of the amendment and publicly challenged the church's political campaign against ratification.
Her activism brought questions of religious authority, individual conscience, feminism, and institutional discipline into national public discussion.
The controversy surrounding Johnson illustrated the competing obligations experienced by some religious women who supported gender equality while belonging to institutions whose leaders opposed the ERA.
Her experience also demonstrated that Mormon women were not politically or theologically uniform. The ERA dispute exposed substantial disagreements over how religious authority should relate to political participation and women's rights.
Evangelicalism, Family Values, and Political Mobilization
Among conservative evangelicals, opposition to the ERA increasingly became connected with a broader set of concerns involving abortion, school prayer, homosexuality, education, feminism, and perceived secularization.
These issues gradually became grouped under the language of protecting the family or promoting "family values." The family consequently became not merely a private or religious institution but an important organizing concept in conservative political activism.
The ERA controversy helped create networks among religious activists who previously might have concentrated primarily on churches, denominational organizations, or local concerns. Political campaigns encouraged cooperation among activists concerned with several different social issues.
These networks became increasingly important during the development of organizations associated with the emerging Christian Right.
The Southern Baptist Convention and Changing Evangelical Politics
The ERA debate also intersected with changing theological and political divisions within the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical institutions.
Arguments involving feminism and women's roles overlapped with controversies concerning women's ordination, biblical authority, abortion, homosexuality, and the proper structure of Christian families. As these controversies developed, gender became increasingly connected with larger debates over evangelical identity.
The politicization of family life therefore involved more than a single constitutional amendment. Questions that had often been debated primarily within churches and families became subjects of national political organization.
By defining family structure and gender roles as matters with broad consequences for American society, conservative activists helped make social and religious questions increasingly important within electoral politics.
Grassroots Mobilization and the Emerging Religious Right
The anti-ERA movement provides an important example of grassroots political organization during the rise of modern American conservatism.
Activists used churches, newsletters, women's organizations, personal networks, public meetings, state conventions, lobbying campaigns, and direct contact with legislators. These organizing methods enabled relatively decentralized groups to influence state-level ratification battles.
The ERA campaign also brought together several overlapping constituencies. Conservative Protestants, Latter-day Saints, Catholic abortion opponents, Republican activists, and other social conservatives did not necessarily share identical religious beliefs, but many found common political ground around questions of gender, sexuality, abortion, and family structure.
Those alliances helped establish political relationships that extended beyond the ERA itself.
From Anti-ERA Activism to the Christian Right
The fight over the ERA formed part of a larger transformation in American conservative politics during the 1970s and early 1980s. Religious conservatives increasingly developed organizations capable of participating in elections, lobbying legislators, communicating with large numbers of supporters, and influencing party politics.
The amendment was one of several issues contributing to this mobilization. Abortion, school prayer, gay rights, feminism, education, and concerns about secularization also encouraged conservative Christians to become more politically active.
The ERA controversy was therefore both a struggle over constitutional equality and a training ground for activists who would continue participating in conservative politics after the ratification campaign ended.
Organizations, communication networks, political strategies, and ideological arguments developed during these campaigns became part of the infrastructure associated with the modern Christian Right.
Family Values as a Political Identity
One of the enduring developments associated with anti-ERA activism was the emergence of "family values" as a powerful political framework.
Opponents often portrayed the ERA and feminism as part of a larger transformation affecting marriage, parenthood, sexuality, and relations between women and men. Supporters of the ERA disputed many of these claims and argued that legal equality did not require abandoning families or traditional personal choices.
Nevertheless, the political framing proved effective at linking several issues that might otherwise have remained separate. Abortion, women's employment, education, homosexuality, pornography, religious liberty, and parental authority could all be discussed within a common language centered on protection of the family.
This framework became increasingly significant in conservative Christian political organizing during the following decades.
Conclusion
The Equal Rights Amendment controversy played an important role in the political mobilization of conservative Christianity in the United States. Opposition to the amendment brought religious beliefs about gender and family life into direct interaction with constitutional politics and helped create networks linking conservative women, evangelical Protestants, Latter-day Saints, anti-feminist organizations, and other social conservatives.
Women were central to this process. Conservative Christian activists demonstrated that commitment to traditional gender roles did not necessarily imply political inactivity. Many became highly effective organizers precisely because they believed that feminism and the ERA threatened institutions they considered essential to family and religious life.
At the same time, the controversy revealed substantial disagreements within Christianity. Evangelical and Mormon women supported as well as opposed the ERA, producing debates about biblical interpretation, religious authority, conscience, marriage, and women's leadership.
The ERA campaign thus became more than a dispute over constitutional language. It was part of a broader reorganization of American politics in which gender, religion, family, sexuality, and cultural change became increasingly interconnected political issues. The organizations and alliances strengthened during this period contributed to the subsequent development of the modern Christian Right and helped establish family-centered social issues as an enduring part of American political debate.
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Conservative Women, Anti-Feminism, and the Anti-ERA Movement
[“A Threat to the Family”: Phyllis Schlafly and the Construction of Negative Group Identity | Christopher Howell | University of South Carolina Scholar Commons | 2025]
Examines how Schlafly's anti-ERA campaign helped construct a broader "pro-family" political identity and mobilized people who viewed feminism and changing gender roles as threats to established social arrangements.
[Women of the Religious Right: Feminine Conservatism and Opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment | Heather Olmez | University of Chicago Knowledge | August 2023]
Examines how conservative Christian women mobilized against the ERA during the 1970s, emphasizing traditional gender roles, motherhood, the military draft, abortion, and the nuclear family while developing influential grassroots political networks.
[Anti-Feminist, Pro-Life, and Anti-ERA Women | Ronnee Schreiber | The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism | 2017]
Surveys conservative women's activism surrounding abortion, feminism, and the ERA, including Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye and the development of organizations that mobilized women around traditional-family politics.
Mormonism, the LDS Church, and the ERA
[Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist | Christine Talbot | University of Illinois Press | 2024]
Studies the LDS feminist who publicly challenged her church's opposition to the ERA and became a nationally prominent figure in the conflict between Mormon authority, feminism, and political activism.
[“Patriarchy Is a Sham”: A Short Biography of Sonia Johnson | Christine Talbot | Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist, University of Illinois Press | 2024]
Reconstructs Johnson's religious background and emergence as an ERA activist, helping explain why Mormon involvement in the amendment became a national controversy.
[“Well, I'm About to Find Out”: Disciplining Mormons, Disciplining Feminism | Christine Talbot | Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist, University of Illinois Press | 2024]
Examines disciplinary authority within Mormonism and Johnson's challenge to church leaders during the ERA campaign.
[“A Compromise with Integrity that It Simply Cannot Afford”: The Gendered Ethics of Revelation, Religion, and Politics | Christine Talbot | Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist, University of Illinois Press | 2024]
Explores conflicting understandings of religious authority, political participation, conscience, and gender during the LDS Church's involvement in ERA politics.
[“The Woman’s Movement Has Discovered a New Enemy—the Mormon Church” | Natalie K. Rose | Academic chapter | 2020]
Investigates conflict between feminists and the LDS Church during the ERA ratification campaign and the way Mormon political organization became increasingly visible within national debates over women's rights.
[The Politics of Family Values: 1972–1981 | J. B. Haws | The Mormon Image in the American Mind | 2013]
Examines how debates over the family, feminism, and the Equal Rights Amendment affected Mormon political engagement and the changing relationship between Latter-day Saints and American conservatism.
["The ERA Is a Moral Issue": The Mormon Church, LDS Women, and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment | Neil J. Young | American Quarterly | September 2007]
Studies the LDS Church's participation in anti-ERA campaigns and argues that Mormon women played an important role in mobilization in Utah, Nevada, Virginia, and other states, helping connect religious conservatism with the emerging New Right.
[The Silent Majority: Conservative Perception, Mobilization, and Rhetoric at the Utah State International Women's Year Conference | Jenny Lynn McGee Harris | Brigham Young University | 2005]
Studies the large conservative turnout at Utah's 1977 International Women's Year conference and the religiously influenced opposition to the ERA, abortion, homosexuality, and federal social programs.
Evangelical Christianity, Gender Roles, and the Christian Right
["In the Beginning Was the Word": Evangelical Christian Women, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Competing Definitions of Womanhood | Chelsea Griffis | Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies | 2017]
Compares evangelical women who supported and opposed the ERA, showing how disagreements about biblical authority, gender roles, marriage, and women's leadership contributed to divisions within American evangelicalism.
[The Politicization of Family Life: How Headship Became Essential to Evangelical Identity in the Late Twentieth Century | Anneke Stasson | Religion and American Culture | 2014]
Explores how male headship became increasingly important to conservative evangelical identity during the ERA controversy and how opposition to feminism helped transform theological debates about the family into political issues.
[The Spiritual Is Political: The Modern Women's Movement and the Transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention | Laura Joy Foxworth | University of South Carolina | 2014]
Argues that debates over feminism, women's ordination, abortion, homosexuality, and the ERA contributed to the Southern Baptist Convention's movement toward conservative political activism.
["Heal Their Land": Evangelical Political Theology from the Great Awakening to the Moral Majority | Joseph D. Harder | University of Nebraska-Lincoln | 2014]
Places evangelical opposition to the ERA within a larger religious-political worldview that also addressed abortion, school prayer, gay rights, national defense, and perceived secularization.
[The Grassroots Campaign to Save the Family | Daniel K. Williams | God’s Own Party | 2010]
Traces the rise of conservative evangelical political activism around the family, abortion, homosexuality, education, and the ERA and connects these campaigns to the formation of the modern Christian Right.
ERA Campaigns, Political Mobilization, and State-Level Politics
[The Equal Rights Amendment Campaign and Its Opponents | Jane Mansbridge | The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism | 2017]
Examines both ERA supporters and opponents and the political, organizational, and cultural dynamics that turned what had initially enjoyed bipartisan support into one of the most divisive social issues of the 1970s.
[From Soft-Sell to Hardball: The Evolution of the Pro-Equal Rights Amendment Campaign in South Carolina, 1972–1982 | Laura Joy Foxworth | University of South Carolina | 2011]
Examines South Carolina's failed ratification campaign and provides state-level context for understanding the conservative and religious opposition faced by ERA advocates.
[The Equal Rights Amendment Reconsidered: Politics, Policy, and Social Mobilization in a Democracy | Donald T. Critchlow and Cynthia L. Stachecki | Journal of Policy History | 2009]
Reassesses the ERA campaign by examining political institutions and social movements, including the successful organization of conservative activists who transformed public debate over gender equality.
[Conservative Thought and the Equal Rights Amendment in Kansas | Marjorie Swann | Kansas State University | 2008]
Uses letters to Kansas legislators and other sources to investigate grassroots opposition to the ERA, particularly conservative ideas connecting Christianity, family hierarchy, gender roles, and national stability.
