Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Christian University Students’ Attitudes to Gender: Constructing Everyday Theologies in a Post-Feminist Climate

Aune, Kristin; Guest, Mathew

Christian University Students’ Attitudes to Gender: Constructing Everyday Theologies in a Post-Feminist Climate Thumbnail


Authors

Kristin Aune



Abstract

This article explores how religion shapes approaches to gender amongst university students in the United Kingdom, focusing on how attitudes about gender interact with their Christian identities. Drawing from 68 semi-structured interviews conducted at five universities, the article identifies three main approaches Christian students adopt when asked how faith affects their views on gender: the individualized approach, the egalitarian approach and the conservative approach. The article outlines the permutations of these approaches, showing their points of similarity and difference, and argues that feminism, biological essentialism and notions of reasonableness or “cultural common sense” feature in all three, being integral to the gender discourse of “post-feminist” UK society. The article argues that religion functions as a resource in Christian students’ gender attitudes, alongside other resources such as friends or family, and is deployed to justify both egalitarianism and gender conservatism. Christian students are constructing “everyday theologies” that integrate religious resources with other social resources, generating divergent egalitarian and conservative interpretations, mirroring patterns in “post-feminist” UK society more generally.

Citation

Aune, K., & Guest, M. (2019). Christian University Students’ Attitudes to Gender: Constructing Everyday Theologies in a Post-Feminist Climate. Religions, 10(2), Article 133. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020133

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 18, 2019
Online Publication Date Feb 23, 2019
Publication Date Feb 23, 2019
Deposit Date Feb 25, 2019
Publicly Available Date Feb 26, 2019
Journal Religions
Electronic ISSN 2077-1444
Publisher MDPI
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 10
Issue 2
Article Number 133
DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020133
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1302363

Files

Published Journal Article (303 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).






You might also like



Downloadable Citations