Moral Re-Armament, “Sound Homes,” and Familial Unity as an Antitheory of Power

This article uses a case study of Moral Re-Armament (MRA), a twentieth-century Christian social movement, to explain how family remains a durable element of American political culture. When groups or political actors criticize—or theorize—dominant models of family life as too restrictive on individual members, especially women as mothers and children, defenders of the heteropatriarchal family step in to assert that the family is really a site of unity among members. As one such defensive movement, MRA idealized families as harmonious, offering what I call an “antitheory” of power dynamics within the family. This antitheory counteracts previous critiques of the family by absorbing and deploying elements of their critique. Such discursive repurposing makes new political formulations possible, and, in the case of MRA, the antitheory of familial power allowed the movement to apply its insights about the need for unity among workers and industrialists as America entered the Second World War. In conclusion, I show how this discursive innovation created space for the twinned defenses of “family values” and free market capitalism among neoliberals in the second half of the twentieth century.