After the Civil Rights movement lost steam in the late 1960s, conservative Christians in the South regrouped and gained momentum by shifting their political agenda from defending racial segregation to promoting a biblically-ordained gendered hierarchy. Southern conservatives recast the ethic of masculinity to mute its historical connection with white supremacy. But they retained a belief in divine order and resisted arguments that reduced gender to a social construction. Conservatives found in the Bible a clear statement of how God intended to order society. Thus, conservatives decried efforts to pass an Equal Rights Amendment, fretted about sex education curricula, resisted women’s ordination, promoted “family values,” and denounced homosexuality. White southerners, freed from defending a Jim Crow system with shoddy moral underpinnings and evaporating support, turned their attention to issues with stronger scriptural mandate and numerous allies across the nation. By looking at various institutions (private schools, denominations, and the military), this dissertation uncovers the local battles that stimulated a broader shift in emphasis among conservative Christians. Defending biblical norms of gender and sexuality became the pre-eminent political task for late twentieth-century southern conservative Christians, and it enabled them to claim national political power.