Although Tebaldi gives the name "Liberty Belle" as the author of the romances discussed, this is an error and the romance author's name is Liberty Adams (Goodreads, and archived here). In addition, it should be noted that the works are novellas and that at the time of publication Adams, at least under this name, had only published the three works discussed in this article.
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While frequently explored in terms of opposition – to abortion or to gay rights – this chapter instead looks at what kind of sex the Christian nationalist wants. It looks at this through Christian romance novels and sex manuals as key building blocks of Christian nationalism. Sex manuals and romance novels began to flourish in the late 1970s, during the Reagan Era, which led to the rise of the religious right. They continue today through marriage manuals, romance novels, and now a growing market for romance novels and films on Christian sites such as Hallmark and Pure Flix.
Christian sex manuals, romance novels, and films provide compelling advertising for the values of Christian heteropatriarchy, selling this hierarchy as a loving family, and White racial capitalism as an idyllic suburban home. (168)
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Complementarianism in sexual relationships is also portrayed in the world of Christian romance novels, which frequently feature a tough feminist protagonist who learns to embrace submission and femininity and through this finds love. Often these tropes are explicitly politicized and include conversion to Christianity or conservative sexual politics through these stories of romance and love. In this section, I focus on one particular set of books close to the contemporary iteration of American Christian nationalism: the MAGA Hat Romances by Liberty Belle. (175)
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The first book in this series, Ladies First, takes Christian romantic tropes of conversion and uses these to narrate a woman’s conversion not to Christianity but to Trumpism. In this book, Rikki, a feminist PhD, meets a big-trucked, tall, thick, strong man as she is covering a Trump rally for her blog. When antifa comes to violently beat the pacific and surprisingly diverse Trump crowd, her sexy patriot rescues her. She later lies and says that Trumpists are racists to impress her grad school friends. But Rikki recants her lies when she realizes she has fallen for this big hunk of all-American manhood.
This book clearly shows the embodied semiotics of complementarianism – Rikki is tiny and blonde, described as a “spunky half-pint” suggesting small and girlish, while her lover is big and tall, ideally masculine, muscular, and enormous, again showing attraction as maximal gender difference. Shown as first a feminist, she has blue hair and black lipstick, which she rinses off in a symbolic conversion, a kind of baptism, once she realizes she has fallen in love with the Christian nationalist Trump supporter. She converts from feminism to true love, from hating Trump to accepting her man’s far-right politics. All of this occurs against the backdrop of the American flag.
Although Tebaldi gives the name "Liberty Belle" as the author of the romances discussed, this is an error and the romance author's name is Liberty Adams (Goodreads, and archived here). In addition, it should be noted that the works are novellas and that at the time of publication Adams, at least under this name, had only published the three works discussed in this article.
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