My dissertation examines the rich and unexpected connection between religion and beauty pageants. The story is one of competing expectations: a cultural script that dominated pageants and a Christian script that, at various times, paralleled, contradicted, and mimicked culture. I explain why southern Christians found the public forum of pageants attractive in spite of tensions between pageant culture and the traditional mores of southern life. For predominantly conservative, evangelical (and attractive) southern women, pageants offered pleasure, prizes, purpose, and performance unrivaled in other spheres. Moreover, pageants did so in a way that left southern patriarchy unthreatened. I argue that the competing and cooperating scripts led southern Christian women not only to participate in pageants, but also to praise God for their experiences throughout the process. Pageants, for many women, were religiously sanctioned events in which baring one’s body was acceptable. My goal is not to prove that the Miss America pageant is somehow inherently religious, but rather that the Christians who participated in the pageant were dealing with multiple expectations from church and culture that dictated, influenced, and explained their experience. In addition, I examine the relationship of southern churches to pageantry, noting the ease with which churches post-1965 welcomed pageantry as an environment well-suited for the evangelistic efforts of beautiful, talented Christian women. By telling the story of Christian women in a gendered and sexualized arena, I hope to emphasize not the potential hypocrisy inherent in Christian participation, but the flexibility of gender roles and religious mores. My work encourages Christians to embrace a more morally responsible view of gender, subtly urging the church and the wider culture to consider the costs of pageantry in the modern world.