Some sections sell leather baseballs, black “ GOD BLESS TEXAS” banners, and copies of Chip’s best-selling book on entrepreneurship, “Capital Gaines.” In other areas, muffin tins and bundt pans are on display, and Jo’s beatific face shines from the covers of cookbooks.
“What they sell does play into the evangelical world view-family, domesticity, rugged manhood.” Many of the shopping spaces in the Silos appear to be curated by gender. “It’s not so much what they do-it is how they are perceived,” she told me. But their brand, for Barr, seemed to be an example of the way ideas about women’s domesticity pervade American Christianity. The Gaineses have never publicly advocated complementarianism Chip has written about embracing his “supporting role” in light of his wife’s dynamic leadership. The ideology promotes the notions of Biblical manhood and womanhood, conceptions of how proper Christian men and women should comport themselves, which are ostensibly based on scriptural teaching, and tend to encourage women’s submission to men. This aesthetic, perhaps unintentionally, has resonances with the evangelical notion of complementarianism, the concept that, though men and women have equal value in God’s eyes, the Bible ascribes to them different roles at home, in their families, and in the church. The Gaineses’ brand often seems to valorize aspects of traditional gender roles. “It’s like Waco’s Disneyland,” Barr said. We walked past a line of hungry tourists waiting outside a bakery that sells pastel-frosted cupcakes, and by boxwood hedges studded with lavender. One afternoon in May, Beth Allison Barr, a medieval-history professor at Baylor University, who studies the role of women in evangelical Christianity, visited the store on a kind of research trip. In 2017, a market-research blog found that they were some of the most popular celebrities among faith-based consumers. The Gaineses have built a commercial empire called Magnolia, by selling the trappings of a trendy, Christian life style. The silos form part of an open-air mall erected by Chip and Joanna Gaines, the husband-and-wife stars of “Fixer Upper: Welcome Home,” a popular reality show. In the past several years, two battered cottonseed silos in Waco, Texas, surrounded by food trucks selling sweet tea and energy balls, have become a pilgrimage site for Christian homemakers from around the country, among others.
0 kommentar(er)
