Jankovic is not. Because Jankovic is Doug Wilson’s daughter. But you wouldn’t know that from this episode of a wildly popular podcast that received 60 million downloads in the last year alone.

Clark describes her guest as a “wife, mom of eight, and author of No Time to be Dumb,” who is joining her to discuss “practical, biblical guidance for teenage girls and their moms.” Clark’s interview with Jankovic is interspersed between episodes about how to get a “wedding glow” without Botox and what your baby’s cradle cap reveals about their health. Jankovic’s self-described Christian nationalist father is mentioned only in passing, as Jankovic refers to being raised as a pastor’s daughter. This is just another interview, Clark is telling her audience. Nothing else to see here.

Over the course of their conversation, Jankovic reiterates the main points of No Time to be Dumb, which I’ve written about here. In short: teenage girls are prone to being dumb, and must instead learn how to use their time wisely in order to prepare for their ultimate calling as wives and mothers.

There’s one particular part of this interview that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I’ll let you read it for yourself.

It’s abundantly clear that Clark has no idea how to handle this part of the conversation. She tries to get Jankovic to explain exactly what she means. “I guess I’m just trying to understand the motivation behind this,” she asks. “You think maybe it could open the door to like, lesbian behavior?” Jankovic waffles, mostly saying that young girls doing young girl things like holding hands and snuggling on the couch while watching movies is “weird” and opens the door to “foolishness.”

Finally, Jankovic gives a more concrete answer: “You shouldn’t be cultivating physical relationships when you do not have the covenantal boundaries on it.”

Jankovic won’t quite say it, but her meaning is clear to those who are well-versed in the language of the world of Christian patriarchy. In this world, the only intimate relationship girls and women are permitted to have are ones sanctioned by the movement itself. Single girls and women do not exist. You are either a member of your father’s household under his headship, or you are a member of your husband’s household under his headship.

Relationships between women have to be policed. Allegiance is owed to God and to man, in that order. Allegiance is not owed or given to women.

In Kiera Butler’s recent piece for Mother Jones on the world Doug Wilson has created in Moscow, Idaho, this kind of patriarchal ownership is made explicit. She talks to a young man identified as Eliot who is engaged to a young woman named Lucy, both children of Christ Church. This is what Eliot tells Butler about his soon-to-be wife.

Just this week, Doug Wilson featured a letter on his blog from a man asking how a husband can “firmly disagree, correct, or push back on something his wife is saying” without becoming either passive or sinful. “I admit wrongdoing if I have sinned against her and then ask for her forgiveness,” the man writes. “But she is saying what she needs more in the moment of apology is an acknowledgement of how my wrong-doing affected her emotionally.”

At the very end of his letter, the writer tacks on a question that might seem unrelated but certainly isn’t:

Wilson manages to avoid directly answering this question (“there is a lot here so I will just touch on the main points,” he responds). But he admonishes this anonymous letter-writer to “acknowledge any fault that God thinks you committed” and then pick a recurring issue where disagreements between the two are common. “Make a decision that you know will get resistance,” Wilson advises. “Without losing your cool, stick to your guns.” This letter-writer can feel free to apply this advice to his question about whether his wife’s relationships with other women should be curtailed.

All summer, I’ve been deep in the thick of interviewing former stay-at-home daughters for my upcoming book about how the world of Christian patriarchy trains young women to become submissive, compliant wives and mothers who transition seamlessly from serving their fathers to serving their husbands. I’ve heard the same thing over and over: what helped these young women break away from the world in which they were raised was the breaking of their isolation. Joining a new church, making a new friend, dating or even courting someone. The intrusion of some new person or experience into their world showed them that another life was possible.

Because another life is possible.

I’ve seen this question pop up all over social media over the last several weeks. If you’re a subscriber of this newsletter and your feed looks anything like mine, you’ve probably seen it too. Various proposed answers have ranged from they’ve all deconstructed to they’re all divorced to they’re just church ladies, chill to fates much worse.

I want to be clear that when I’m talking about tradwives (a term I don’t love, but use because it’s an internet colloquialism at this point), I’m talking about women who are adhering to the rules of the biblical patriarchy movement as instituted by men like Wayne Grudem, Bill Gothard, and Doug Phillips, among many others. Today’s tradwives don’t need to be familiar with these names in order to be influenced by the tenets they handed down. I’m not talking about all stay-at-home moms or all Christian moms or all stay-at-home Christian moms (because for all intents and purposes, that would be me—a recovering Christian and mom who works from home, writing this with one eye on the baby monitor).

I don’t have a new answer to add to the question of where did all the old tradwives go? But I do have a different question.

Where were the tradwives of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s instructed to go?

The increasingly elevated platform of the world of biblical patriarchy is rooted in books that I grew up reading as a child of the Christian homeschooling movement. Many of these books were written by the wives and mothers of that movement. It’s one such book that I’m here to tell you about today.

In 2007, Jennie Chancey and Stacy McDonald wrote Passionate Housewives Desperate for God: Fresh Vision for the Hopeful Homemaker.

Passionate Housewives was published by Vision Forum and endorsed by Martha Pearce, author of tradwife manual The Excellent Wife; Michelle Duggar; and Vickie Farris, whom you may better know as the wife of Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and man responsible for breaking down legal barriers to restrictions on homeschooling in America.

Chancey was the woman behind LadiesAgainstFeminism.com, a hub of antifeminist and pro-biblical patriarchy sentiment in the 2000s and 2010s. If the name “Stacy McDonald” sounds familiar to you, it’s because I’ve recently written about another one of McDonald’s books targeted at young girls, Raising Maidens of Virtue.

Many of the books written about biblical patriarchy in this era were directed to daughters, intended to inspire the next generation. But Passionate Housewives was a directive for the mothers.

This is what it taught.

A passionate housewife has to die to herself.

It’s a classic motto of the kind of evangelicalism in which I was raised: you have to die to yourself. I would say that Chancey and McDonald direct this admonishment towards wives and mothers, but they direct it at all women — because of course, in the world of biblical patriarchy, women are supposed to make the transition from daughter to mother with no room for any separate identity.

The authors take particular aim at what they call me-ology, which they seem to define as any pursuit or interest a woman could have that does not directly meet the needs of her husband and children. Even participating in church ministries fits Chancey and McDonald’s definition of a self-centered pursuit. “Serving our family is serving the Kingdom,” they write. “Serving our husband and our little ones is serving Christ Himself—and neglecting them so that we can pursue self interests is neglecting the Kingdom of God—and Jesus Himself!”

Women are particularly prone to this kind of self-interest, according to the world of biblical patriarchy. Naturally, a woman is to blame for this: “Ever since Eve ate of the forbidden fruit that she found ‘pleasant to the eyes’ and her husband Adam followed, man has been absorbed in an undying love affair with self,” Chancey and McDonald write.” If women are to blame for this transgression, then it only makes sense that they are to shoulder more of the burden in rectifying its insidious influence.

And how are women to correct this nature in themselves? By embracing biblical womanhood as defined by Chancey and McDonald. A passionate housewife “laughs when she hears rumors that she is an oppressed victim of a male-dominated dictatorship, because she knows that God’s will is perfect and His Word timeless,” they write. “We must die to self on a minute by minute basis.”

A passionate housewife doesn’t ask anything of her husband.

Chancey and McDonald open Passionate Housewives with the fictional story of a woman named Carolyn. She’s lounging about her house, clearly depressed (though this isn’t something the authors name). She resents her husband, she’s annoyed by their five children, and she doesn’t want to make dinner. She’s only a permanent homemaker because once she first became pregnant, her husband “insisted” she quit her job.

Carolyn looks out her window and spots her new neighbor, a stylish career woman named Leslie. “No doubt Leslie’s husband was taking her out to eat; maybe he even offered to cook dinner himself,” Carolyn imagines to herself. “She had heard on television that lots of men share the load at home these days! Some men agree that it’s only fair to split up the household chores. Carolyn’s husband wasn’t one of those men.”

All Carolyn needs to do in order to find her life appealing and fulfilling is practice complete and total submission to her husband — at least, that’s what Chancey and McDonald think. “Waiting for Mr. Right doesn’t mean holding out until ‘Mr. Mom’ comes along — you know, the guy who does all the dishes, sweeps, folds laundry, then babysits while his wife runs around with the girls,” they scoff.

The authors then provide an example of a woman they once provided counsel to who was having “difficulty” submitting to her husband. “She insisted, with more than a little indignation, that it was impossible to submit to a man who wasn’t even trying to meet her needs,” they tell their readers with (one imagines) a wry chuckle.

But Chancey and McDonald convince this young woman to submit to her husband. And they are successful. “She repented and purposed to submit to her husband regardless of his response or the amount of love and attention he showed her and the children,” they write excitedly. “Her husband eventually came around as he saw the slow and deliberate change in his wife. She called me excitedly each time he showed some small gesture of love and affection.”

Some small gesture of love and affection. A passionate housewife’s husband doesn’t need to perform any task so modern as [checks notes] making dinner or doing chores. But if you’re very submissive and very lucky, you might just get the tiniest kernel of love as a reward.

A passionate housewife doesn’t have any needs.

“I have never had a massage, visited a spa, or had a pedicure. At this point in my life, I simply don’t have the time or the inclination; and so far I haven’t had a breakdown, and I’m still able to remember my own name (most days),” the authors of Passionate Housewives tell their readers. “Please understand there is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these things, as long as we understand that we don’t need them to be content or healthy and that we aren’t somehow deprived if we don’t get them.”

Chancey and McDonald insist that there’s nothing wrong with taking care of yourself — just so long as you remember that you don’t actually need to take care of yourself and you aren’t deprived if you can’t take care of yourself. Are you exhausted from caring for small children? Are you shouldering the load of the household without any help? You can definitely take care of yourself, I guess, but just remember that you’d be giving into a selfish want rather than fulfilling an actual need!

“A young mother who is feeling tired and overwhelmed with her new duties as a homemaker may find comfort in the smooth and deceptive words of the crooning self-help teacher — especially if the teacher claims to be a Christian,” Chancey and McDonald warn their audience of probably tired and overwhelmed mothers and homemakers. “A wife whose husband is working too many hours, leaving her alone with the full responsibility of training up the children, might be a prime target for those who would sow discontentment and bitterness in her heart.”

A homemaker who wants rest isn’t just doing a poor job by failing to recognize that she doesn’t need rest after all — she’s susceptible to those who would try to turn her away from her family. Her failing is a moral and spiritual one.

A passionate housewife never asks for help.

One of the most important tasks with which the passionate housewife is charged is raising children. But not only can she not rely on her husband for assistance, she also can’t ask anyone else for help (in the words of , why even have kids if you let even one person help you with them?).

McDonald writes about an experience she had early in her journey of motherhood in which she leaves her toddler at a care program run by her church for a few hours. Immediately, she’s saddled with guilt, telling herself that she only brought her toddler to this program “so that I could have a day out — a day off — time for myself without the ‘burden’ of caring for my busy toddler.” (Mind you, McDonald has an actual newborn during this time, so it isn’t like she’s exactly getting a day off, but I digress).

What’s the solution to an existence that can never accept help? Chancey and McDonald warn their audience of engaging in “professional motherhood,” which they describe as “making organic fat-free baby food” and “washing cloth diapers,” because this level of engagement will just cause homemakers to burn out and return to their careers1. They bemoan that “young women are no longer trained by Mom to run the household because that would rob a girl of the ‘best years of her life.’” They excuse young mothers from the self-imposed pressure of needing to have a “quiet time” to pray and read Scripture in the early mornings (fair enough). And… that’s about it.

A passionate housewife helps her husband take dominion.

Biblical patriarchy is centered around the Dominion Mandate, the idea developed most prominently by Christian Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony that men and women together are charged with taking dominion over all aspects of society in order to reconstruct the world in the image of God. Well, men are charged with this task — women are there to help.

“Eve was Adam’s perfect complement, his crowning glory; she was created for the express purpose of completing and helping him to take dominion of God’s creation,” Chancey and McDonald write. “In all of her tasks, she seeks to further him as a man. His work of dominion is her work; she embraces his vision as her own as she promotes and enhances his life pursuits.”

The passionate housewife allows herself to be subsumed by her husband — better that than devoting your life to another man. “How could having a boss (other than my husband who loves, appreciates, and respects me, who knows my strengths and encourages my talents) have been better?” Chancey and McDonald ask. “Many women naively follow individualistic feminist thought right into the arms of corporate America. Instead of being servants to their families they become slaves to a system that cares nothing about them,” they write. First of all: okay, my anticapitalist queens.

Second, to insert myself here for a moment, I always feel a little odd writing about the beliefs and practices of tradwives because it’s not like I don’t get it. I always thought that I would want to work a demanding job that kept me out of the house, but an injury and subsequent disability I acquired in my mid-twenties disabused me of that notion. I’ve worked from home for years and I don’t see that changing. Now that I am a parent, I love being home even more than I thought possible. I genuinely love homemaking. I’ve been known to bake some sourdough bread from time to time. I want to have more children. I can honestly and without reservation say being a wife and a mother is the most rewarding part of my life.

But, of course, my husband also works entirely from home. We work different schedules, which affords us the great privilege of keeping our child home with us. We set up our lives this way on purpose. We have family nearby who can provide childcare from time to time. I have my own credit cards, bank accounts, income streams. I have two degrees. I grew up thinking that motherhood and womanhood had to look a certain way in order to secure God’s favor and was delighted to find that in fact I had always had agency over my own life.

That kind of agency does not exist for the passionate housewife. “I am always reminded that God has created me to be my husband’s helper — not a slave to my own whims or wishes,” Chancey and McDonald admonish their readers. “I don’t have to go out and earn money to keep a roof over our heads and come home to take care of the daily housekeeping tasks. My husband shouldn’t have to do double duty, either. When I am consistently and faithfully fulfilling my responsibilities, my husband is free to do the things he was created to do. There is no room for bitterness in this arrangement.”

Dear young wife and mother, if you do feel any bitterness towards your husband, then that’s your problem. After all, we have dishwashers and laundry machines now (this is literally an argument that the authors of Passionate Housewives make). What are you even complaining about?

A passionate housewife knows her calling is a holy one.

There is no real way to be a Christian woman in the world of biblical patriarchy unless you allow yourself to embrace its tenets. “The text of Scripture is straightforward and unequivocal: a woman’s duties are to be home-centered, and if we spurn this directive we cause God’s Word to be blasphemed,” Chancey and McDonald write. Working outside the home isn’t just a less-than-ideal family situation for these authors — it’s actual blasphemy.

“Being a keeper at home is a holy mission; it is a rewarding duty that we as women are to passionately undertake,” the authors of Passionate Housewives remind their readers. Wives and mothers are key supporting players in assisting the men of their world in taking dominion: “If we are faithful in bearing and training up our children, by God’s grace, over the next few generations, we will see a growing army for Christ — an army that will take dominion of the godless nations of the earth for the glory of God!”

Chancey and McDonald acknowledge that women might have unique gifts and talents (but as I heard so often from the world of biblical patriarchy while growing up: a gift is not a calling). “Left to gather dust in the corner is the notion that the Lord gives women gifts and abilities that will perfectly complete and help their husbands, creating strong, kingdom-building marriages and families for the glory of God,” the authors admonish their readers. Safer and better to let your own gifts gather dust.

A passionate housewife never tells anyone how she really feels.

According to Chancey and McDonald, one of the most important traits of a passionate housewife is the way she speaks about her husband. They cite the example of a woman identified only as Tracy D., who says this:

A wife in this world has to be careful what she tells other people about her husband. No matter what he does, no matter how “unwise” or how “unhappy” it makes you, if you are a wife in this world, keep quiet. God forbid anyone think poorly of your husband.

“We are encouraged to seek out women friends who can share our woes, listen to our marital problems, and commiserate over the difficulties of bringing up children,” Chancey and McDonald write, a warning coming. “Of course, there is a place for relationships between women, but these cannot be based upon gossip, family disloyalty, shared bitterness, or unwholesome intimacy.”

A passionate housewife holds other women at arm’s length. Her entire life is wrapped up in her husband’s. It’s him she has to defend, never herself.

A passionate housewife trains up the next generation.

So where exactly are the old tradwives? Their duties to their children and household fulfilled, do they have any kind of freedom? Don’t be silly: no.

“Many find that women whose children are grown leave home to pursue careers or outside interests and are too busy to instruct a young wife,” Chancey and McDonald write. “Young women need the instruction correction, and training of the generation that has gone before them. Older women need to give their time, wise counsel, and encouragement to the generation coming up behind them.”

Chancey and McDonald include an entire disclaimer at the end of their book about how much time writing Passionate Housewives took. Over the course of two years, they wrote this book together in fleeting moments in between caring for their large families. “Writing is not an occupation,” they reassure their readers, many of whom apparently wrote to them concerned that they were taking time away from their families in order to write this book.

Neither Chancey nor McDonald are public figures today. I don’t know what their lives are like. I do know what they said they wanted for their daughters. In the acknowledgements of Passionate Housewives, Stacy McDonald thanks her daughters like this.

“To my oldest three daughters still at home, Tiffany, Melissa, and Jessica, your help with the load of extra housework and working with the little ones this last month was the truest blessing of all. In you and your younger sisters, I see what I’m writing about. One day you will be godly keepers of your own homes.”

The tradwife is supposed to give and give and give to her husband and to her children and to every other woman in her life, except for herself. She is to give until there is nothing left. That’s where the tradwives are — or, at least, where they’re supposed to be.

“Just don’t give him a platform.”

I understand the sentiment behind this. It’s not like these men (for they are just men) represent the whole of the Christian faith. I grew up a good conservative Christian homeschooled girl in the era of Doug Phillips and Vision Forum, and I would never dare claim that Phillips’ tenets of biblical patriarchy somehow have a definitive claim on what it means to be a Christian man or woman.

Here’s the thing, though. If you wanted to know what Doug Phillips thought about whether or not women should vote or attend college, or which Confederate general he thought was the best role for men, you would have had to seek out that information. You would have had to attend one of the many homeschooling conferences that Phillips used to speak at in the 2000s and early 2010s. You would have had to order one of his lectures from the glossy Vision Forum catalogs. You would have had to read an entire book. You would have had to already know what you were hoping to find.

No longer. As self-described Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson pointed out in his interview with NPR this past week:

You can’t argue with the fact that Doug Wilson’s reach has greatly expanded over the past decade. That’s in part thanks to elevation by Reformed giants like John Piper and Southern Baptist leaders like Al Mohler, both of whom have lent their sizable platforms and credibility to him (just last month, Mohler appeared on Doug Wilson’s podcast). For a primer on just how the evangelical camp in America has bolstered Wilson, see ’s recent excellent breakdown.

I think it also has to be in part because there is now a larger audience who wants to hear what Wilson has to say. Wilson himself points out that he and his ilk have been toiling for decades and are now starting to see the fruits of that labor. While reports of Gen Z’s return to church have been somewhat exaggerated, it’s certainly true that there is at least an increased interest in religion among younger people — and now, to hear what a preacher like Doug Wilson has to say, they don’t have to track down a literal cassette tape (and some way to play it) from a homeschooling conference in 2009. They can just become one of his 100,000+ followers across social media platforms.

This isn’t to say that the Very Online is the Real World. I don’t think, for instance, that because Eric Conn (a pastor at Refuge Church in Ogden, UT and founder of New Christendom Press) believes girls’ education should be curtailed after the sixth grade so that they can focus on learning how to become wives and mothers that this is somehow now the default attitude across Christian America. But Conn is able to share these beliefs at the touch of a button with his 46,000+ followers on X alone. You used to have to order a niche book written by Geoffrey Botkin in order to get these kind of takes. Now, they are available for free every single day on Elon Musk’s internet.

And the platforms just keep growing. Christian nationalist pastor and New Christian Right founder Joel Webbon’s 113,000+ followers have led him straight to the Tucker Carlson show’s 17 million followers (Webbon accompanied a recent guest of Carlson’s, another Christian nationalist, and was pictured side-by-side with the titan of right-wing media). Dale Partridge has an audience of 600,000+ across social media platforms. These men pastor real churches in real cities attended by real families. Doug Wilson’s own platform has taken him all the way to the Pentagon.

The notion that I and other survivors of the world of Christian patriarchy and fundamentalism should simply stop talking about it is, at best, woefully misguided. My own personal platform pales in comparison to these men (this is my little plug for you to subscribe to my Substack!). There’s nothing I could post right now that wouldn’t be outdone in terms of sheer numbers by the men and the movement that I’m covering.

Where I do think this critique applies more sensibly is to the mainstream media outlets blithely covering Doug Wilson and his assorted allies. His recent interview with NPR’s Leila Fadel is an interesting one, but it’s also 42 minutes of Wilson being able to lie without repercussion, as points out. I would have loved to see NPR devote even a quarter of the time they spent on Wilson’s own words to the many, many survivors of Moscow, Idaho and the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

As wrote in her excellent recent piece after Wilson’s interview with NPR:

I remember being asked as a child by my parents why I was so angry about sin inside the body of Christ but not sin outside in the world. Shouldn’t I be more focused on condemning the sins of those who hated Christians, they asked? I don’t remember what prompted this question. Perhaps it was the downfall of Todd Bentley, the charismatic revivalist who was faking miracles and having an affair with his intern; perhaps it was the downfall of Doug Phillips, the man who brought a new version of biblical patriarch to the homeschooling masses and was later sued for sexual harassment and abuse. Perhaps it was any other one of the scandals that I can’t remember now because there have been so many and at some point, they start to blend together.

The answer for me has always been that these are my people and I feel a sense of responsibility to tell the truth about what I’m seeing. In other words: my circus, my monkeys. As a child of the religious right and the Christian homeschooling movement, I had the rare fortune of generally greatly benefitting from my educational upbringing while simultaneously getting spiritually and psychologically clobbered by fundamentalist and patriarchal theology. I am far enough removed from (gestures wildly to all of this) to be able to write and speak about it now.

So, why do I write about men like Doug Wilson? Why do I “give them a platform”?

First, I write this newsletter in order to help you understand the ways in which fundamentalist Christianity has sneakily shaped the world in which we live. This kind of Christianity has a reach that touches so many areas of American Christianity, from the policies our government enacts to the curriculum used in private schools to the way we put our babies to sleep.

Second, I write this newsletter in order to keep you informed about certain trends in American Christianity so that you can recognize them for yourself in your own churches and communities. If you hear young men in your church talking about Antelope Hill, or referencing an episode of the Haunted Cosmos podcast, you’ll know what they're referring to and consequently that they need other voices speaking into their life stat.

Third, I write this newsletter because I know that there are so many people like me who grew up in some way touched by the world of fundamentalist Christianity. We are all trying to understand exactly how and why we were raised in the way that we were. Perhaps we’re parents now feeling a new weight of responsibility. I hope that we can find each other here. If you’re a new follower, or if you’ve been around for a while, please take this as my invitation to introduce or reintroduce yourself in the comments.

I don’t plan to stop writing about the world and wide reach of fundamentalist Christianity anytime soon (and I have a whole entire book coming your way). I’m glad you’re along for the ride.

That is the gist of the commission’s 224-page report, which is heavy on heart-tugging stories of victims of (very specific types of) religious persecution and relatively light on policy recommendations. The recommendations this report does make are long-standing conservative priorities that feel almost shoehorned into compelling stories about (again, very specific types of) persecution of (very specific) faith communities.

I’ve read the report so you don’t have to (although I recommend that you do, and you can find the report here). Here are my major takeaways.

It’s impossible to talk about the Religious Liberty Commission’s report without talking about who exactly makes up this commission.

At the head of the commission is Dan Patrick, who has made it perfectly clear where he stands on the separation of church and state (it’s fake).

Then, you have Dr. Ben Carson, a multi-time Trump appointee. Dr. Ryan Anderson, president of a conservative think tank and author of such works as When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. Bishop Robert Barron, enemy of “wokeism.” Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who called Charlie Kirk a “modern-day St. Paul.” The Reverend Franklin Graham, son of Billy and long-time ally of President Trump. Allyson Ho, a prominent member of the Federalist Society. Dr. Phil McGraw, whom you might know better as simply television’s Dr. Phil. Eric Metaxas, the conservative radio host who once punched an anti-Trump protestor. Kelly Shackelford, president and CEO of a law firm dedicated to defending religious liberty. Paula White-Cain, Donald Trump’s personal pastor who once memorably prayed for “satanic pregnancies to miscarry.” A slew of current Trump administration appointees.

Finally, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, an Orthodox Rabbi and the sole non-Christian member of the Commission.

Perhaps you are noticing a pattern. Out of the 17 members of the Commission, 16 are conservative and Christian. 14 are white. 13 are male. For a commission that purportedly intended to “produce a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty in America” in order to “celebrate America’s peaceful religious pluralism,”1 one main religion is overwhelmingly represented.

The Religious Liberty Commission’s report cares about religious liberty because it cares first and foremost about religion.

“The Commission’s work began with acknowledging a simple but profound truth: religious liberty is essential because religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society,”2 the report begins. “When government authorities prevent religious individuals and perspectives from contributing to public life, they diminish the quality of freedom for all citizens. Yet, even today, some government authorities do just that. They wrongly claim that the Establishment Clause or ‘separation of church and state’ requires such erasure. Nothing could be further from the truth—the Constitution neither requires nor permits religious voices to be silenced.”3

The Religious Liberty Commission’s report exchanges Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state for the notion that bridges ought to be built between the two. Those bridges have already started construction in the era of a Roberts-led Supreme Court. The commission’s repeated emphasis on the idea that the separation of church and state does not appear in the Constitution is a blatant misreading of the Establishment Clause and willful disregard for decades of legal precedent, but it certainly isn’t surprising in our current era.

“Among our conclusions, we believe that safeguarding religious liberty requires more than defending legal rights after they have been violated,” the report continues. “It requires correcting misconceptions about the Constitution.”4 One of the first recommendations that the report makes is to require public officials who allege that someone under their supervision has improperly engaged in religious expression to provide a written explanation of that alleged violation within 30 days, explaining the charged based on a specific constitutional provision or other legal provision.5

But, of course, Lt. Governor Patrick has already made it quite clear that this is impossible to do. If the separation of church and state doesn’t exist… well, you can’t appeal to it any longer.

The Religious Liberty Commission’s recommendations are a laundry list of classic conservative priorities.

Out of a list of twelve overarching recommendations made in the report, the commission includes the recommendation to repeal the Johnson Amendment. The Johnson Amendment, the 1954 provision in the U.S. Tax Code that bars churches from endorsing political candidates, has been a target squarely in the sights of conservative Christians for decades. Its repeal was a Trump campaign promise.

“As a natural consequence of this provision, many churches tend to self-censor when it comes to crucial religious topics pertaining to the dignity of life, the sanctity of marriage, differences between sexes, religious freedom, and other theologically weighted issues the government perceives as partisan,”6 the report reads in defense of repealing the Johnson Amendment. The Religious Liberty Commission should probably tell this to the numerous evangelical churches I’ve attended in my life that have handed out explicit voter guides instructing congregants on how real Christians should feel about everything from who the President should be to whether they should vote yes or no on a housing bond.

The only example this report cites of the Johnson Amendment affecting (specifically Christian) houses of worship is an IRS investigation made into Dr. Robert Jeffress’ First Baptist Church of Dallas after the church hosted a “Celebrate Freedom” service and invited Vice President Mike Pence to speak while he was still in office. (An ally of President Trump for over a decade, Jeffress recently made waves for declaring that Trump understands what the Bible says about government better than the Pope.) The investigation was ultimately closed, as the IRS concluded that the church had in fact not actually violated federal law.7

But still, the commission advises that the Johnson Amendment needs to be repealed. It’s hardly the only conservative priority named in this report.

The commission also zeroes in on stories of students facing religious discrimination at their schools (“Elementary student Shea Encinas was bullied for standing up for his Christian faith when he was forced to read his peer a book that told him he could choose his gender,”8 for example). The solution is a classic conservative priority: “Ensure the constitutional guarantees of religious liberty and parental rights are enjoyed by families of all socioeconomic means by promoting a robust and universal system of school choice where funding follows the child.”9

Conservative support for school choice is longstanding and opens the door for federal funding to be directed not just towards private and charter schools, but also towards homeschoolers. Even the way in which public schools are discussed in this report is heavily influenced by the Christian homeschooling movement — they are referred to as “Government Run Schools,”10 which is how leaders in the world of Christian homeschooling have derogatorily referred to public schools for the past several decades.

If you speak the language of the world of Christian homeschooling, then you understand the implications of the repeated emphasis on “parental rights” throughout this report. Another recommendation made by the commission is for the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services to form a task force to propose actions to support parental rights related to education and healthcare and monitor the implementations of those actions (I will, on a side note, be fascinated to see who ends up making up this task force — if Michael Farris or another HSLDA leader isn’t on it, I’ll be shocked).

There are plenty of other conservative talking points scattered throughout the commission’s report as policy proposals — recommendations to appoint “courageous judges with proven records”11 (who will rule the way we want them to rule, so the subtext goes) or to investigate antisemitism on college campuses (there is no mention of Islamophobia in all 224 pages of this report). There are recommendations to issue “Know Your Rights” posters related to religious liberties in all kinds of public facilities, to create hotlines so that students, parents, teachers, and healthcare workers can report violations of their religious liberties, to continue to restore the retirement or re-enlistment eligibility of service members who declined the COVID-19 vaccine for religious reasons. There is also a recommendation to create a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty in order to recognize Americans who “stand up for religious freedom.”12 I wonder who will be the first to receive this award.

The Religious Liberty Commission’s first report is a testament to the Trump administration’s priorities when it comes to religious freedom. In the world ushered in by this commission, Americans are at their best when they are religious. The makeup of the commission and the policies advanced by this report are all in support of one kind of religion: a particularly conservative and fundamentalist form of Christianity that has dominated and will continue to dominate our politics.

I’m not writing about this commission’s report because I’m somehow opposed to the free exercise of religion. I am a Christian. I would like to continue to enjoy my own religious liberties. I am, in theory, not opposed to ideas like honoring citizens who fight for religious freedom. I am, in practice, deeply concerned about what exactly that will look like in the hands of an administration that put together a commission claiming to care about the preservation of religious pluralism while clearly preferencing one religion above all.

How did we get here? Let me set the scene.

New Christendom Press and Refuge Church are located in Ogden, Utah, a half-hour’s drive north from Salt Lake City, the seat of power for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. One out of every two residents of Ogden are formally recorded members of the LDS church, which I’m sure makes the members of Refuge feel as if they are in the persecuted minority (and I’m not saying this to poke fun at them — half of my own extended family belongs to the small Catholic community of Utah and I’ve heard plenty of stores of how excluded they felt by the broader Mormon culture while growing up — but, of course, I’m also not saying it to excuse them).

These are the players. First, there’s Brian Sauvé, the senior pastor of Refuge, the president of New Christendom, and the co-founder of St. Brendan’s Classical Christian Academy (which, as I recently pointed out, curtails girls’ education after the sixth grade so that they can focus on preparing to become wives and mothers). Then, there’s Eric Conn, the executive pastor of Refuge and the CEO of New Christendom. (Other speakers at New Christendom’s conference included Dr. Stephen Wolfe, the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, to give you an idea of the kind of crowd this conference attracts).

“What are we fighting for, saints? Some kind of radical utopia? Some crazy internet fever dream? Something extreme, fringe, cultic, and crazy? No. We’re at war for normal,” the conference’s website reads. What exactly does normal entail? As conference attendee Dale Partridge put it, “Christ was preached, bold stances were taken against effeminacy, Zionism, and liberalism.” So, that. In between sessions with titles like “The Productive Household,” “Zionism & The War for Normal,” and “Southern Presbyterianism & The Family,” conference attendees could participate in events like psalm singing, a business networking lunch, a family park day and a singles’ mixer to “mingle with based, Christian singles.”

What could have possibly gone wrong? Well, New Christendom invited a publishing company called Antelope Hill to sell its wares at their conference (and even included Antelope Hill as one of their sponsors). Founded by three active members of the white power movement, Antelope Hill publishes works by Adolf Hitler, Nazi propagandist Wilfrid Bade, and the far-right influencer Raw Egg Nationalist. As the publisher’s titles were pulled from Amazon and Barnes & Noble back in 2022, and considering that the company has offered discounts on its products to commemorate Hitler’s birthday, it’s hard to argue that anyone who knows anything about Antelope Hill doesn’t understand exactly what they’re doing.

The backlash was swift, and the backlash to the backlash followed in stride. Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) pastor Zachary Garris, a speaker at New Christendom’s conference, posted this on X and promptly turned off his comments:

I had a great time at the New Christendom Press conference. I met many godly Christians. It’s unfortunate a third-party vendor, known for books positive toward Nazi ideology, was permitted to sell books and promote resources out of step with our Christian beliefs. This is being used to smear the good people at the conference. Hopefully this will be addressed by those responsible. I have no interest in Nazism or associating with it. I believe that also describes those I met. Lots of families and young men zealous for Christ.

Eric Conn responded to the criticism that was levied against New Christendom from all directions by saying he was a victim of effeminate cancel culture, which, sure. He then chided those who thought he might wish to denounce any promotion of Nazism immediately by saying that he would be worshipping God, as it was Sunday, and would respond later to this entire mess (however, the Lord’s Day did not preclude him from continuing to post about how well the conference went).

That response came a day later in the form of an hour-long video, in which Brian Sauvé and Eric Conn mostly pat themselves on the back for their courage in waging the war for normal (again, whatever that means) and say that they “don’t have a problem” with what Antelope Hill publishes and characterize its texts as primarily “anti-Zionist.” The one element of Antelope Hill’s presence at the conference that they do fixate on is a flyer the publisher handed out, which thanked conference-goers for shopping “pro-white” and included a list of other white-owned businesses, which included a magazine that publishes some pornographic content and a business selling tarot cards. This was a bridge too far for Sauvé and Conn. For that — and that alone — they apologized.

Here is what I’m taking away from this incident. Antelope Hill did not show up to Ogden, Utah by accident. They knew that their books would be received warmly. They knew their books would sell. They knew the crowd of men drawn to a place like Refuge Church and an organization like New Christendom Press would be happy to purchase texts with titles like The Peasantry as the Lifeblood of the Nordic Race and Essential Speeches of Adolf Hitler and A New Nobility of Blood and Soil.

The Christian nationalism to Neo-Nazi trajectory is less a pipeline, more one of those water slides that drops you straight down into the depths. Once you start excluding people from your society on the basis that they aren’t the right kind of Christian, well, you do have to figure out what to do with them (in the words of one of New Christendom’s defenders, we need a Protestant Hitler).

Is this surprising? I don’t think so. But it is alarming to watch pure Nazi ideology spread through factions of the Christian right, and perhaps even more alarming to see people like Megan Basham blame “big evangelical leadership” for creating an environment that “will encourage certain sins,” as if embracing Neo-Nazism is a rational response to (as Basham states) watching a pastor “performatively wash the feet of Black people in church.”

This rot is evil and it is spreading. The dog whistle is a bullhorn.

Enter Raising Maidens of Virtue: A Study of Feminine Loveliness. Written by pastor’s wife and homeschooling mother Stacy McDonald in 2004 and reissued in 2013, the book was a Bible study of sorts intended to be used by mothers and daughters together. Promoted heavily by biblical patriarchy organization Vision Forum and sold in their catalog, Raising Maidens of Virtue was recommended for “maidens” starting at the age of twelve, but reviews of the book record homeschooling mothers using this book with their daughters as young as eight years old.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first read McDonald’s book, but I certainly wasn’t much older than twelve. This book came into my life even before the work of teenage sisters Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, authors of So Much More and de facto founders of the stay-at-home daughter movement, which preached that daughters should forego college and careers to stay home and serve their families — especially their fathers. Raising Maidens of Virtue helped pave the path for the extremes that stay-at-home daughters were supposed to aspire to reach, inculcating the younger daughters of the world of biblical patriarchy in the beliefs they were supposed to hold.

To hear McDonald tell it, the stakes for training up daughters are incredibly high. “We are in a battle for the hearts and souls of our children,” she writes in the first few pages of Raising Maidens of Virtue, a sentiment that certainly wouldn’t have been out of place in both fundamentalist and evangelical Christian parenting circles of the time (and frankly, of today). “Using false doctrine, false teachers, sensual temptations, and, in some cases, parental blunders, Satan is pulling children away from their families and creating much confusion in the church today,” she warns. “By God’s grace, we must win this battle—for the sake of our children, for the sake of future generations, for the sake of the church, and for the glory of God!”

This is what the girls of the world of Christian patriarchy are required to learn in order to become maidens of virtue.

Girls must learn that their worth is tied to their virginity.

It isn’t by accident that McDonald refers to daughters as “maidens” both in the title of her book and throughout its pages. She teaches her young readers that a maiden is another word for a virgin, but that somehow, referring to girls as either has fallen out of fashion. In McDonald’s world, maidens and virgins are interchangeable and daughters must always be both. “Is it that our contemporary dictionaries don’t have room for these outdated terms or is it that our culture embraces gender neutrality and spurns titles that signify innocence or purity?” she asks, and you can guess how she answers that question.

Of course, it isn’t enough to maintain what McDonald refers to as “physical” virginity. “A chaste maiden is consequently a virgin, but a physical virgin is not necessarily a chaste maiden,” she writes. “A truly chaste woman demonstrates purity—in thought, word, and deed, whether or not she is married.”

The primary reason to become a maiden (or virgin) of virtue was precisely so that you as a young girl would stand out from all those other girls. How many times growing up in the world of evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity were you told that you had to go against the grain, that you were set apart from the rest of the world? “Prove to the world that virginity is more than saving one single biological act for marriage: it’s a way of thinking, a way of living, a general state of being,” McDonald admonishes her young audience. “Instead of dressing like a dime-store floozy and singing about feeling like a virgin, you can show [other girls]… what it’s like to be a ‘maiden of virtue'.”

Girls must learn that their bodies are dangerous.

In language that could have been taken straight from the Modesty Survey, McDonald asks her young maidens to embark on a mission of modesty that places all the onus on them. “It is true that each man and boy is responsible to guard his own eyes, but a virtuous maiden doesn’t make it difficult for him,” she writes. “She should remain aware of her duty to remain true to her future husband, and be sensitive to the fact that any boy she meets is most likely someone else’s future husband.” McDonald bemoans the state of the way girls dress today, perhaps inadvertently revealing exactly how she thinks of them and how sexualized girlhood is to her: “Even tiny girls walk around in ‘hooker chic’ with jaded looks in their eyes, their innocence trampled upon by the media, pop culture, and peer pressure.”

The author offers plenty of warnings for her young readers about what might happen to them if they are not modest, honing in on the question of whether or not wearing jeans is acceptable. She gives an example from her own teenage years in which she wore a pair of jeans to school and heard boys making crude remarks about her — clearly a formative and traumatizing experience for the author, and understandably so. However, she shifts the blame almost entirely onto herself. “Looking back, I may have been able to solve my own problem by modifying my wardrobe,” she writes. “I couldn’t have changed the sinful hearts of those boys or their vulgar comments, but, if I would have known better, I could have avoided giving them anything to look at.”

She gives another example of what young maidens might unwittingly do by wearing jeans. “I remember one friend whose husband struggled with pornography,” she recalls. “In tears one day, she shared with me how she didn’t even want to go to church anymore (at least not with her husband) unless they were able to sit in the front row. She said she was tired of catching her husband staring at the backsides of the girls in skin-tight jeans in front of them.” You would think that the person at fault here would be the husband, but that isn’t so cut-and-dry for McDonald. Rather, she places the blame on girls in their tight jeans. What should those girls have done instead?

McDonald has some suggestions. First, she advises any young girl reading her book to wear a pair of jeans in front of her mother, walking around and asking her mother what she observes — and presumably, making changes to the way she dresses based on what her mother observes (suggestions include “wrap an oversized tunic around your waist” and “wear a dress over a pair of jeans”). Second, she asks her young readers to include their fathers in deciding what to wear: “Your dad is a man; so, remember, he probably has more insight into the way young men think.”

Girls must focus on their outward appearance.

To be a young maiden of virtue, you must be modest. But lest you think that you can get away with wearing some sort of sad, shapeless sack, think again: young maidens of virtue also need to make sure that they’re presenting themselves as recognizably feminine. “How can you be sure that people automatically know you are a girl when they see you from a distance, without revealing or accentuating your private feminine parts?” McDonald asks. She doesn’t explicitly say that girls should never wear pants, but she certainly walks right up to that line. “Young maiden, remember your call to chastity and embrace your God-given femininity,” she instructs her readers. “If you choose to wear jeans or pants, be discreet and be careful not to draw undue attention to your form.”

In this constructed world, a girl’s appearance is never about herself: it is only ever about someone else. “Discuss with your mother the importance of communicating Christ to others with your appearance,” McDonald instructs her readers. Take, for instance, how McDonald approaches basic hygiene. “A young maiden should develop good grooming habits,” she writes. Why? Certainly not for her own benefit, but because “she will be pleasing to God and to others now, and when she is grown and married she will be a blessing to her husband and children.”

Above all else, McDonald wants her readers to understand that if they dress immodestly (whatever that exactly means, as her prescriptions aren’t particularly specific), they are showing that they must not have any respect for themselves. She encourages her young audience to think about an immodestly dressed girl and ask themselves if they think that girl is a Christian or not. McDonald might preach about inward beauty, but she tends to judge on outward appearance.

Girls must learn to serve their families.

When I’ve written before about the tendency of families in the world of Christian fundamentalism to rely on their daughters for labor that exceeds the bounds of what is reasonable — taking on childcare duties like caring for newborns in the middle of the night, running all household responsibilities, or even homeschooling their younger siblings — I routinely get pushback. “Are you saying that siblings shouldn’t help out and do chores?” I’m often asked. I have to say, I think it’s pretty obvious in the context of what I’m writing about that this is hardly what I mean.

I say all this to give a disclaimer: I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with McDonald’s advice to daughters about how to develop strong bonds with their siblings. Of course that’s a good thing, something for which to strive. But you have to understand how this advice would be heard in this world: it’s being given to girls who are being raised in fundamentalist households, girls who are also being instructed that their role in life is to stay home and serve their families until their father gives them in marriage. That instruction is explicit throughout Raising Maidens of Virtue.

When McDonald recommends that her young maidens spend time with their siblings (“be willing to listen when your little brother wants to tell you about his rock for the fourth time,” or “color with your little sister,” or “spend time cooking, sharing chores, playing games, folding laundry, and singing or playing instruments together”), she isn’t just trying to encourage girls to have good relationships with their brothers and sisters. She’s advising the daughters of Christian patriarchy to embrace their destiny as caretakers of their siblings until they are given in marriage — and if they never marry, then their siblings are the only children they will ever raise.

McDonald then includes a section written by her teenaged daughter, Tiffany. I think it’s worth reading in full.

There was a time when I found myself wishing for a life God had not chosen for me. The babies began to become burdensome to me; they were no longer a joy to be around. It seemed that each day brought more messes and even more laundry to fold and put away. I thought it was the babies who were being grumpy, when in reality, it was I. Then this verse in Scripture struck me squarely in the head: Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth (Psalm 127:3-4). I began to think about what our family would be like without the four youngest children. Sure, the house would be cleaner, but would that really matter to me if I had to sacrifice my sweet little brother and sisters for a clean house?

As I sit back and review my journey, I realize that when I am content, a peaceful spirit covers me, and life seems to run smoothly, even if things aren’t going my way.

I don’t know anything about McDonald’s daughters today. I have no idea what kind of life Tiffany currently leads. But to watch her work through her own cognitive dissonance in these sentences is a certain kind of wrenching. There was a time I found myself wishing for a life God had not chosen for me, she says. She’s foreclosing on any possibility of a different life, already phrasing her desires in the past tense despite how young she is.

Girls must have one dream in mind.

To be a young maiden of virtue is to have one singular plan for your future. “If you have been raised to love God and respect His plan for families, then you almost certainly dream of some day marrying a godly husband who loves and protects you,” McDonald writes. “You also probably hope for plenty of babies to rock and cuddle. If you have been raised by parents with a healthy vision for future generations, you may plan to homeschool and faithfully train your own children in the ways of God night and day.”

As with virtually all directives in the world of Christian fundamentalism, individual choices are elevated to moral heights. Going to college or getting a part-time job run counter to being virtuous. “Shouldn’t you go to college in case you ever have to work?” McDonald asks. “Shouldn’t you get a part-time job somewhere to become independent and gain some experience in the workforce?” The answer, as expected, is a resounding no. Rather, she advises this: “If you are a Christian maiden and plan to be a wife and mother, shouldn’t you be working alongside your mother, focusing together on your goal of becoming this rare and precious jewel?”

Everything that a girl raised in McDonald’s world should aspire to do is always for the benefit of someone else; education is no exception. Whatever education she receives should prepare her to “make an impact on a humanistic culture at war with God,” specifically by equipping her to “be an intelligent, valuable help mate to her future husband and a competent, nurturing mother to her children.”

If a young girl wishes to “develop her mind” while she “honors and serves her father at home,” then as she prepares for her “likely future as a wife and mother,” she can participate in the following:

• Help in the family home business or ministry.

• Take correspondence or online courses.

• Help homeschool siblings.

• Pursue expertise in gardening, cooking, baking, or arts and crafts.

• Care for a sick relative or friend.

• Assist overwhelmed mothers.

“Ask God to make you willing to set aside your own goals and desires in exchange for His,” McDonald writes. “A strong desire to be a doctor or a seemingly God-given talent in math is not an indication of God’s will for you to have a career in medicine or engineering.” I remember reading those words in Raising Maidens of Virtue during my own girlhood and thinking of the dreams that I had, the talents of mine that were beginning to emerge. I was learning that what I wanted didn’t matter. My desires weren’t important. The only thing that mattered was God’s will for my life, and he (apparently) couldn’t have been clearer.

Girls belong to their fathers.

McDonald tells several stories throughout Raising Maidens of Virtue designed to help girls understand their place in the world — specifically, that their place is at their fathers’ side. She tells the story of a girl who doesn’t serve her family well, thus losing out on the attention of a young man who would have otherwise wanted to marry her. She tells the story of Dinah’s sexual assault in Genesis, framing it as a tragedy that could have been prevented if Dinah had remained under the protection of her father. She tells the story of her own daughters, who gave their father their hearts.

“In 2003, my daughters decided to give their father a special gift, one that symbolized their willingness to trust him with their hearts until the day he walked them down the aisle to entrust them to another in marriage,” McDonald writes. Together, she and her daughters pick out heart-shaped charms with a bar pin engraved with the last verse of the Old Testament:

And he will turn
The hearts of the fathers to the children,
And the hearts of the children to their fathers,
Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.

Each of McDonald’s daughters write short poems to their father. 17-year-old Tiffany tells her father, “Into your hands I lay my heart for you to watch and guard… until the day when with full blessing, you give my heart away.” 16-year-old Melissa tells her father, “This is my heart; I give it to you.” 13-year-old Jessica tells her father, “Here is my whole heart, not just a small part. I’m giving it all to you to keep as a treasure, though not forever. I’ll leave that up to you.” These are words of almost spiritual devotion and fervor.

This is the prayer that McDonald instructs her maidens to pray:

Lord, help me to remember to be thankful that You have made me a woman. Help me to rejoice in my creation always and never to spurn those things which are feminine. Help me to be a blessing to the men in my life—especially my father. If You have ordained for me to marry one day, then I pray that You will prepare me for my future husband and that you will bless and sanctify our children for generations to come. Amen.

McDonald encourages any daughter reading her words to follow in her own daughters’ footsteps and pledge her heart, her entire being, not to God but to man. A man. Her father. He will decide her fate.

I don’t know how Stacy McDonald feels about Raising Maidens of Virtue today. It isn’t currently promoted on her website — instead, she’s selling an e-book called Truth Drops: A Spiritual Protocol for Releasing Your Past with Essential Oils. “After seeking help from a licensed Christian therapist, she finally began to unravel and examine the irrational fears, painful memories, and unhealthy thought patterns that had become entrenched in her mind during her own difficult and complex childhood,” McDonald’s bio reads. “Stacy took what she was learning about neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to change) and combined it with her knowledge and years of experience with essential oils and Scripture.”

The only thing I have to judge McDonald by are her words. She has never retracted Raising Maidens of Virtue, as far as I can tell. When Doug Phillips resigned from Vision Forum in disgrace and was then sued for allegedly sexually harassing and abusing his nanny, a former stay-at-home daughter, McDonald had this to say (on the comment section of Doug Wilson’s blog, of all places):

“I realize that the fact [Doug Phillips] was a Christian leader compounds the influence he had over [the victim] emotionally, but she still owns her own sin… Without saying that any of her claims are untrue (because we can’t know), we should also consider the danger of empowering the perpetual victims out there by communicating that we should always and without question accept every claim of victimhood or abuse. Some ‘victims’ are not victims at all.”

There are hints of McDonald’s own girlhood scattered throughout Raising Maidens of Virtue — the boys who crudely remarked on her body, her own overwhelm once she began to have children. But she doesn’t linger on those experiences. To the maidens of the world of Christian patriarchy, her message is clear. Your minds and bodies and souls are not your own. Your girlhood is over.

Ladies in Waiting will tell the story of stay-at-home daughters, the original tradwives-in-training as shaped by the work of Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips, Vision Forum, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, and more. The story of the stay-at-home daughter movement is the story of how a group of talented teenage girls became the face of a cultic patriarchal movement that stripped them of their autonomy. It is the story of a wildly charismatic man who built his empire on the backs of stay-at-home daughters before setting his own life ablaze. It is the story of the daughters who could not stay at home any longer, who deserted their past lives and ran as fast and as far as they possibly could. And it is the story of the daughters who are still at home, waiting.

I started writing Ladies in Waiting in 2019 during my last year at Harvard Divinity School in a seminar class in which a small cohort worked on projects we hoped would become books someday. I wrote hundreds of pages about the world of Christian patriarchy while holed up in my apartment in the heart of Cambridge, not entirely sure what I would do with them but unable to stop writing. I’ve been haunted by the stay-at-home daughter movement since I was twelve years old poring over Vision Forum catalogs (the two pieces linked in this sentence are, in part, products of that seminar back in 2019). I set down this project for a few years — thinking, too optimistically, that there just wasn’t a need anymore to write about the patriarchal religion of my youth, that we had progressed enough to allow the warnings of the stay-at-home daughter movement to be relegated to the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine.

But that would not turn out to be the case. Whether it’s been the ascension of self-described Christian nationalist and patriarchal pastor Doug Wilson in recent months to unprecedented levels of influence over political leaders or the soaring popularity of tradwife influencers like Hannah Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm, the biblical patriarchy movement hasn’t gone away — it’s only shifted form and in doing so, expanded its reach. I see an entirely new generation of young women and men embracing the promises made by the world of Christian patriarchy, but I know all too well from the stay-at-home daughter movement that those promises can’t be kept. Ladies in Waiting will tell the story of Vision Forum’s meteoric rise and sharp decline, which provides a window into how Christian fundamentalism shapes the world we live in today while centering the gripping stories of former and current stay-at-home daughters.

I cannot stress enough that if you have read any of my articles on Substack or watched any of my videos that I create on TikTok and Instagram, you have directly contributed to the interest that I received from publishers and are the reason that this book is going to exist at all. I am incredibly grateful that you’ve found something in my work that resonates with you.

And now, I have two favors to ask of you!

First, I am in the process of gathering stories from those who grew up in the world of Christian patriarchy or considered themselves stay-at-home daughters, a group about which there is relatively little concrete data. Stay-at-home daughters in the world of biblical patriarchy have existed since at least the 1980s, and I would like to get a sense of the scope of this movement’s reach. I am also interested in learning about those who perhaps would not have fallen strictly into the category of “stay-at-home daughter,” but were influenced by the biblical patriarchy movement nevertheless. In order to provide people with a way to contact me and share their experiences, I’ve created a survey, which you can find and take here. If survey participants give explicit permission, I hope to share some of these stories in Ladies in Waiting.

Again, here’s the link to the survey: Ladies in Waiting Survey. Even if the survey doesn’t directly apply to you, I would greatly appreciate you sharing this survey far and wide so that it can reach as many people as possible!

Second, because I now actually have to finish writing this book during my toddler’s naps, I am probably going to slow down slightly on my writing here on Substack — but only slightly! I’ve been aiming (though not always succeeding) in giving you one new essay a week along with my “This Week in Christian Nationalism” series. I’m tentatively thinking that I’ll slow down to two essays a month but continue with weekly Christian nationalism updates (all bets are off if we go through another sleep regression, though — can it still be a sleep regression if your baby’s never once slept through the night?).

I’d love to know what you’re interested in reading from me during this time. Do you have particular topics you’d like me to look into, books you’d like me to deep-dive, questions you want answered? Do you have more questions about Ladies in Waiting, about the book proposal and submission process, or my current writing plans? Drop them all in the comments!

Thank you again from the very bottom of my heart. This book would not be happening without you.

There’s been plenty of build-up and media coverage in the weeks leading up to Rededicate 250. I’ve mentioned the event myself in installments of my series on Substack, This Week in Christian Nationalism, looking ahead with curiosity to what the event would entail. But in watching the livestream of Rededicate 250 (or at least as much of it as I could take) this past Sunday, I found myself primarily — and rather surprisingly — underwhelmed.

In that light, here are my takeaways from Rededicate 250.

The Trump administration can phone-in their support for white evangelicals without losing a single member of their base.

Empty seats were clearly visible as crowds milled in and out of the event all day. Rededicate 250’s website listed Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary Marco Rubio, and Secretary Pete Hegseth as special guests, but all three sent in brief and fairly perfunctory pre-recorded video messages. President Trump himself skipped the event entirely, opting to spend the day golfing in Virginia at his club. “I HOPE EVERYBODY AT REDEDICATE 250 IS HAVING A GOOD TIME,” he posted on Truth Social, and sent in a repurposed video message of himself reading from 2 Chronicles 7, which he recorded for a completely separate event weeks earlier.

And that’s all the members of the administration needed to offer for their base of white evangelicals to stay in line. If there was ever any doubt that the Republican party exists to enact Trump’s agenda — well, there shouldn’t be. Within 48 hours of Rededicate 250, both Senator Bill Cassidy and Representative Thomas Massie lost their primaries to Trump-backed candidates.

However, one key member of the current government did show up in-person, which brings me to my next takeaway.

The Trump administration is branding criticism of Christian nationalism as an attack on Christians as a whole.

Speaker of the House and noted Christian dominionist Mike Johnson spoke in person at Rededicate 250, but it’s his appearance on Fox News beforehand that drew my attention. “The naysayers who have created this new term ‘Christian nationalism’ as a pejorative, a derogatory term, are trying to silence the influence and voices of Christians, and I think that’s wildly inappropriate,” he told Fox anchor Shannon Beam.

Nevermind that Christian nationalism is hardly a new term (and was created almost a century ago by a right-wing preacher in the 1930s who viewed Christian nationalism in a positive light). Johnson is performing a rather obvious rhetorical trick: he is attempting to convince his audience of predominantly white evangelicals that if someone calls them Christian nationalists, then their voices as Christians are being silenced. Christian nationalism and Christianity become one and the same (though of course, they most certainly are not).

The American Christian right has been attempting to define what it means to be a Christian for decades in increasingly narrowing terms, with no room for anything besides this particular brand of dominionism. This faction has a friend in the Trump administration, and I suspect we will continue to see this kind of equivalence between Christian nationalism and Christianity taken as a talking point in the weeks and months to come.

But that’s not all.

There are cracks in the unity that the Christian right is attempting to project.

While much attention has been paid in recent weeks in the kind of Christian nationalism espoused by someone like Doug Wilson, who has deep ties to the current administration (thanks to the fact that Secretary Pete Hegseth is a member of a church in his denomination and has invited him to preach at the Pentagon), the Christian right’s embrace of nationalism hasn’t unified around him or his brand. Speaker Johnson is a member of the deeply conservative and fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention, but he shared the spotlight with figures like Lou Engle, a leading member of the New Apostolic Reformation.

is one of the foremost voices on the rise of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a loose movement of charismatic Christians who hold to the Seven Mountains Mandate. In covering Rededicate 250, Taylor wrote that those who belong to the NAR view this event as being of “incalculable spiritual significance,” a definitive turning point. “Speaking from the Rededicate stage today, Lou Engle called it a ‘hinge of history moment.’ For nearly 30 years they have been trying to enshrine certain narratives of American history and prophecies of American destiny. Today, high-ranking U.S. government officials are speaking NAR talking points from the National Mall,” he said.

The various camps of fundamentalist Christianity, from Doug Wilson to Dutch Sheets, will likely claim Rededicate 250 as a victory. They are both more and less aligned than you might think; both camps want to see their version of Christianity dominate culture, but it’s hard to see Paula White and Joel Webbon getting along. It’s worth remembering that there isn’t one unified vision for Christian nationalism on the right.

Finally, the Christian right’s attempt to claim persecution just isn’t landing.

Throughout Rededicate 250, multiple speakers made reference to the kind of persecution Christians face in America. Franklin Graham bemoaned that the American public square has supposedly removed the Bible from its midst, but given the fact that he did so on the National Mall at the express invitation of the President, it’s hard to take that claim very seriously.

Attendees themselves (like “Melissa Redpill,” who has an entire website dedicated to revealing “the wonderful truth about the End Times”) cited long lines and a protestor as the kind of “mayhem” that rededicating America to God will end (I certainly hope that’s true about the long lines part, because there’s a new bagel shop opening in my neighborhood this weekend and I do not want to sit in an hour-long line). Alas, the evangelical persecution complex is alive and well in Christian America.

What are your takeaways from Rededicate 250?

This week, a towering gold statue of Donald Trump was unveiled at the president’s golf course in Doral, Florida. The posture of the statue is intended to invoke the famous image of the president thrusting his fist into the air, as he did after the attempted assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Pastor Mark Burns, an evangelical member of Pastors for Trump, presided over the unveiling of the statue. “Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf,” he later posted on X (which is something you say when you definitely aren’t worshipping a golden calf). “This was not idol worship. This was honor. This was gratitude. This was patriotism.”

The statue was, of course, commissioned and funded by a group of crypto investors seeking to boost the profile of their memcoin, $PATRIOT.

Several major companies are sponsoring Trump’s celebration rededicating America to God. The upcoming Rededicate 250 event on the National Mall, which will include several far-right Christian nationalist speakers, has been planned and executed under the group Freedom 250. Sponsors for Freedom 250 include Mastercard, SAP, Deloitte, and Lockheed Martin.

This fall, Florida will roll out a new American history course that serves as a more conservative alternative to A.P. U.S. History. Governor Ron DeSantis has been battling for the last few years against the College Board, arguing that their Advanced Placement courses are too left-leaning. This new proposed course will focus on American exceptionalism and suggests the use of one singular textbook: Land of Hope by Wilfred McClay, a historian who teaches at the conservative Christian institution Hillsdale College. McClay wrote Land of Hope partially to counteract Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. The new course will also emphasize America’s Protestant religious heritage and suggest that students read religious texts. Given that Florida has set something of a standard for Republican education policy under the second Trump administration, other states may follow suit with a similar curriculum model.

Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson is ready for a fight. In a paywalled interview with Financial Times, Wilson is ready to “set the progressive agenda back half a century,” in his words. Here are the highlights.

On Trump: “My entire adult life, I’ve had respectable, squeaky-clean Republicans promise me the moon and then not do it. And he’s the first stinking Republican president who kept his promise… America has cancer. Trump is toxic, and I think he’s killing the cancer faster than he’s killing the rest of us.”

On the current administration: “We’re seeing hundreds of believers being appointed to staff positions in key places… and that’s gonna have an impact 40 years from now.”

On the public square: It “belongs to Jesus,” which means that Catholic processions adoring the Virgin Mary would be forbidden in Wilson’s ideal state.

On Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who attends a church in Wilson’s denomination: “When Hegseth talks as an avowed Christian… he’s talking about Old Testament warfare, certainly, but not holy war.” He further states that he trusts Hegseth, saying “it’s pretty clear to me… when he’s praying that our boys would shoot straight, what he’s actually praying for is that we would not bomb the girls’ school. He’s asking for us to fight the combatants and not the non-combatants.”

On whether or not he can influence Hegseth: “I am a public commentator, and I would feel free to write about how long [the war in Iran] is going on my blog, and I would be surprised if it did not make its way to Hegseth.”

On his alienating rhetoric: “You’ve got to say disreputable things that are outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse because that’s the only way you can get purchase to move the window at all… It’s provocative on purpose. But it’s also an argument, so I’m starting a fight. The people who are going to be most outraged by it are going to be soft, evangelical Christians… if I’m talking to any kind of professing Christian at all, I can win that fight in under two minutes.”

That’s all, folks! See you next week.

I attended my first meeting a week later in a large, rambling home in San Luis Obispo. The debate club had set up shop in a back room, rows of chairs facing a chalkboard. The room felt packed to me, although there were probably only fifteen or so other kids there. I was the youngest one and I looked it (I had already reached my peak height of 4’11, which I still am today at thirty-two).

As an ice breaker, we read tongue twisters, presumably to help warm up our voices and get us used to speaking to each other. I was assigned this one: The big black beetle bled blue blood. I stood up to read it and immediately mispronounced beetle. The big black BLEETLE, I said, and began to laugh hysterically.

I was the only one in the room laughing. I made it through the sentence after a few tries. By all rights, my painfully shy self should have walked out of that room and never returned.

But I did return. For six years, I threw myself ever-deeper into the world of homeschool speech and debate. It became the focal point of my life and the culmination of my homeschooling experience. This was by design, I would later come to learn. The speech and debate league I belonged to had been created to raise up communicators for Christ. We were members of the Joshua Generation who were going to change the world. We were going to take America back for Christ, or at least for the Republican Party.

That was what was supposed to happen, at least. What happened instead was better.

Founded in 2001, the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association (NCFCA) was a project of Michael Farris’ Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). Inspired by the work of Christian Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony, Farris founded and touted his organization as a highly reputable legal firm that would fight for the rights of all homeschoolers. This was technically true, but conservative Christian homeschoolers were and still remain HSLDA’s main focus.

Farris established a debate league because he wanted to train up a rising generation of Christian leaders who were ready to return America to her (in his mind) inarguably Judeo-Christian roots. These future leaders had to be smart, trained speakers. They were going to argue in front of the Supreme Court. They were going to run for local, state, and federal office and they were going to win. Maybe one of them would even be President someday. It should perhaps go without saying that most of these leaders were going to be men — but why not let the girls participate too? Someone had to be educated enough to homeschool the Joshua Generation’s eventual children, after all.

NCFCA offered two forms of debate: team policy, aptly named for its teams of debaters tackling issues of policy both foreign and domestic, and Lincoln-Douglas, in which individual students sparred over ethical matters in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. NCFCA also offered various speaking events: platforms, which were memorized, ten-minute speeches; interpretations, which were ten-minute performances of written works; and limited preparation, in which competitors would have a few minutes to prepare a speech on any number of topics ranging from theology to current events to random prompts.

In 2009, a year after I started participating in NCFCA’s tournaments, all of the homeschool speech and debate clubs in my home state of California broke away to form our own league: Stoa, named for the feature of Ancient Greek architecture at which people would supposedly gather to discuss pressing issues of the day. The reason for the split? The story told to me at the time was that after NCFCA announced they would hold their annual national championship at Bob Jones University, members of California clubs began to protest, given Bob Jones’ history of segregation and former ban on interracial dating. This post on the r/HobbyDrama subreddit goes into much greater detail on the split between the two leagues, but suffice it to say that this wasn’t the first time California had clashed with the NCFCA’s leadership.

Exactly how serious Stoa was about their original reason for this split is up for debate, given that just six years later in 2015, the new league hosted their own national championship at Bob Jones University in South Carolina. But for the years that I was part of Stoa, I never ventured outside of California for tournaments (except for one tournament — we’ll get there). I didn’t need to: during the competition season, which ran from January until May, there were tournaments nearly every other weekend up and down the Golden State.

With my long-suffering parents (who threw themselves into my new passion with equal devotion), I traveled to tournaments on high school and college campuses from San Diego to Santa Rosa, staying in hotels and on friends’ couches. I competed in both forms of debate and in every kind of speech category. I spent hours every day in the off-season preparing my speeches and debate cases and hours every day in the competition season at practices and driving to tournaments and poring over ballots once the tournaments were over. For a solid month before one national championship, I woke up daily at five in the morning to research and write for an extra two hours before starting the rest of my schoolwork. All of this is to say that I was a true believer, but I was perhaps not the product that NCFCA and Stoa wanted to create.

The world of homeschool speech and debate was supposed to train me to become a leader, someone who was going to surpass their peers and do great things for the God of America. “Even if dreams of generational greatness have dimmed in other quarters, they burn brightly in thousands of homeschooling families,” Farris wrote in The Joshua Generation. “These moms and dads truly believe that their children are called to be the leaders of the future.” I had examples a few years older than me: Lila Rose, who founded the anti-abortion activist group Live Action; Alex and Brett Harris, authors of Do Hard Things (and the Modesty Survey). There would be more alumni rising to prominence in the years to come: Madison Cawthorn, a former (Republican) congressman representing North Carolina’s 11th congressional district; David Eastman, a former (Republican) member of the Alaska House of Representatives (and member of the Oath Keepers militia who was present at the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack); Will Estrada, now Senior Counsel at Farris’ HSLDA.

But the broader world of fundamentalist Christianity to which NCFCA and then Stoa belonged had a different plan for its daughters. At a California homeschooling convention we attended every year, fundamentalist pastor Kevin Swanson once spoke on the topic of Heaven or Harvard? (You can guess which option he said parents should pick for their children). More specifically, he said that parents should encourage their sons toward fundamentalist Christian institutions like Patrick Henry College (also one of Farris’ projects) and their daughters toward marriage and motherhood. After his talk concluded, my mom (with her two college degrees) asked him if all daughters were really supposed to abstain from higher education. There might be some rare exceptions, he generously conceded.

For Homeschoolers Anonymous, one of my fellow alums wrote this of her experience in the world of homeschool speech and debate. “We were supposed to become world-changers and culture makers,” she said. “It didn’t take long, though, before I realized that my invitation to become a world-changer came with a caveat. While my male friends were planning and preparing for high-powered careers in politics and law, I was warned not to be unfaithful by ‘pursuing a career,’ any career at all.”

I lived inside a contradiction: drastically change the world for God and become a dutiful wife and mother confined to the realm of the home. I certainly had plenty of angst about that paradox, but the one place where I could be entirely free and as close to my truest self as possible was, ironically, the world of homeschool speech and debate.

Becoming part of a speech and debate league that spanned California (and eventually roped a few other West Coast-adjacent states into joining) gave me the closest thing to what I imagine would have been a semi-normal high school experience. I would characterize my homeschooling journey as a generally positive one for my education (although my science education was, shall we say, wanting — partially because I had textbooks written by Young Earth Creationists and partially because I was allowed to quit Chemistry three chapters in simply because I hated it). I was great at talking to anyone older or younger than myself (I hate to play into stereotypes, but this does tend to be true of homeschoolers). However, socializing with my peers was a different story.

But once I joined the world of homeschool speech and debate, I was part of a community. Not instantly or overnight, but I was welcomed into something that allowed me to engage with people my own age in a way I never had before. Our tournaments sometimes took place on Christian high school campuses over weekends or spring breaks, which meant that I would spend full days roaming with my friends from building to building across campus. Perhaps we could have been mistaken for students there ourselves, had we not all been (somewhat ridiculously) dressed in business attire.

This isn’t to say that the strong hand of fundamentalism didn’t reach into the world of homeschool speech and debate. Women often weren’t allowed to pray at the start of tournaments, even if they were running the entire show. Judges, often the fathers of other participants, would write on my ballots that my (extremely modest) skirts were too short or my (extremely loose) pants were too unfeminine. It was taken for granted that you would never defend abortion in a round of debate or put another team in a position in which they would have to do so. There was all the homophobia and sexism and racism that you would expect to find in an environment like this, in which those beliefs were normative.

But the fact that we were participating in debate as an activity meant that there was space for me, for the first time in my life, to push back against nearly anything. That shaped me, gave me my mind. I learned that I didn’t have to accept what someone told me as true. I learned that an appeal to authority didn’t mean that authority was right. I learned that there were so many different ways people had thought over the centuries about God. I’ll never forget spending a year diving into the depths of U.S. tax policy and realizing that conservative economic policy was… bad. I learned too to mold myself to my environment. I tried to always be the most gracious, the kindest. I gave the speeches I thought everyone around me — fundamentalist and evangelical Christian parents, primarily — would want to hear. All the while, I was learning what I said didn’t matter (or at least, it wouldn’t be heard) unless I was able to say it well.

The last year I competed, something snapped inside of me just a bit. I was starting to branch out beyond the world of homeschool speech and debate. We had moved south to San Diego a few years earlier. I was doing theatre out in the community (and are not debate kids just theatre kids of a different ilk?). I was making friends who were different from me and I loved them for that. The cracks in my foundation were splintering further and I was enjoying the process.

That year, I gave speeches about how we should maybe stop being quite so hateful to LGBTQ+ people. In my favorite category, dramatic interpretation, I performed a ten-minute version I created of The Laramie Project, Moisés Kaufman’s documentary-style play about the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard. So many parents told me I could not perform this piece. When pressed, they said it wasn’t “appropriate,” and it was unclear whether or not that was because they didn’t want their children to hear about a crime so horrific or because they didn’t want their children to learn that gay people existed in the first place. My vindication was that I (sort of inexplicably, given my audience) won every tournament I competed in with that piece, including my last national championship.

That last national championship was held in the evangelical belly of the beast: Focus on the Family’s headquarters in Colorado Springs, the one time I ever ventured outside of California for a competition. I was there for an entire week. I think back on that week and what sticks in my mind is not that I felt like I was becoming a leader for God on the journey to retake America. No, I felt like a relatively normal teenage girl. I woke up early every morning to get ready with painstaking precision. I had breakfast with my friends in the hotel lobby, a cafeteria of sorts. I was late to rounds, thanks both to Starbucks runs and the fact that Focus on the Family’s classrooms were so obscurely marked. I linked arms with my girls and skipped down hallways. I shit-talked other non-California debaters with my teammates. I spent one afternoon sobbing in my hotel room over a boy who truly could not have cared less if I lived or died (and now I can’t remember his name). Most of all, I talked and talked and talked and everyone, all of these adults who otherwise held so much authority, had to listen to me.

It’s almost unbelievable how much I owe to the world of homeschool speech and debate. I met my two best and oldest friends in that world, one at the start of a tournament bright and early in the morning and one on an awards ceremony stage late at night (I’m texting both of them right now as I finish writing this). I met my husband in a debate round, the first time I’d ever tried Lincoln-Douglas debate. I’d been roped into competing and hadn’t prepared much, but by some miracle and good fortune (and the fact that my well-honed speaking style disguised my lack of substance), I went into the third round of that tournament undefeated. So did Peter, which meant we were matched against each other. He was a far more successful and established debater than I was at that point, and I am sure he was horrified to be debating someone so new, thinking (reasonably) that he must have done very poorly in his first few rounds. It should probably go without saying that he won that round and I was immediately in love.

Michael Farris can say whatever he wants about what his speech and debate league was supposed to accomplish, the great leaders for Christ it was supposed to raise up. My memories of the world of homeschool speech and debate are of impossibly nerdy teenagers coming into their own identities, finding their voices, realizing that there was perhaps much more to the world than what they had been told. I was trained to communicate for Christ, or at least communicate for the Christian leaders who wanted to execute a very specific set of goals. I was supposed to take those speaking skills and get to work. I took them and did something better: I became my own person. I think I got the better end of the deal.

Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the U.S. State Department has embraced explicit Christian messaging and iconography. An analysis of the State Department’s social media presence by The Intercept found that posts honoring Passover, Good Friday, and Easter included imagery of Christian crosses alongside references to “Christ’s sacrifice” and the Resurrection. The Intercept’s analysis found that there was a clear, marked departure in messaging from the State Department, not only from the Biden administration but also from the first Trump administration. In 2020, the State Department celebrated observances like Juneteenth, Chinese New Year, Ramadan, Yom Kippur, and Kwanzaa, among others. In 2026, the Department’s posts have been limited to Jewish and Christian holidays. This is part of an ongoing trend of federal departments using their social media presences to promote certain ideologies (take, for example, the Department of Labor using rhetoric on its social media accounts similar to Nazi slogans earlier this year).

A businessman affiliated with the world of Doug Wilson is attempting to purchase a town. As Oregon Public Broadcasting reported in this story (which is well worth your read), Camden Spiller, CEO of Maddox Industrial Transformer, is strategically and openly purchasing properties and developing land in the aptly named Battle Ground, Washington, a rapidly growing town located thirty miles north of Portland. OPB confirmed that more than a dozen corporations controlled by Spiller have purchased more than thirty properties in Battle Ground over the last half-decade. One of those properties is a church built specifically for a pastor named C.R. Wiley, who is affiliated with Doug Wilson’s Canon Press and who has described his church’s theological tradition as one that provides “resources to govern unbelievers.” This isn’t the first time a church community has tried to expand its reach into a town (think, of course, of Doug Wilson’s influence over Moscow, Idaho, or Bill Johnson and Bethel’s power in the town of Redding, California). It certainly won’t be the last.

The Trump administration’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias within the Federal Government has released its first report. To no one’s surprise, the task force highlights protections for a specific kind of conservative Christianity that veers towards religious nationalism. You can read the full report here, but here are some of the actions that the task force highlights as having been implemented in order to eradicate bias towards (basically exclusively conservative) Christians:

• In tandem with the White House, many federal agencies are now operating their own Centers for Faith or have designated Faith Liaisons to “build partnerships with the faith community” and “recommend changes to policies, programs, and practices that affect the ability of faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship to serve families and communities.”1 These agencies include the Departments of Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, and State.

• The State Department is reviewing “multiple allegations of harassment and mistreatment of homeschool families,” as well as conducting a “comprehensive view of all homeschool policies” to determine whether “more flexibility can be offered to avoid any infringement on religious freedom.”2

• The Department of War is “fostering faith in the Pentagon”3 by holding worship services open to military and civilian personnel. The task force highlights the inclusion of conservative Christian leader Franklin Graham but does not mention the fact that Doug Wilson and other CREC-affiliated pastors have preached at these services.

Conservative political, military, and religious leaders will participate in President Trump’s event rededicating America to God on the National Mall on May 17, 2026. As Jack Jenkins reported for Religion News Service, leaders from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to House Speaker Mike Johnson to pastors like Jack Graham and Jentezen Franklin are all slated to speak at the all-day event, “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving.” I’ll be paying close attention to this event, so stay tuned for more thoughts on this to come.

That’s all, folks! See you next week.

In 2007, Alex and Brett Harris (the younger brothers of Joshua Harris of I Kissed Dating Goodbye fame and sons of Gregg Harris, a founding father of the Christian homeschooling movement) launched the Modesty Survey. They were best known at that point for their book Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations and corresponding “Rebelution” movement, which argued that adolescence was a manufactured American vacation from responsibility, a prolonged childhood that did no one any good. They founded their movement in order to encourage young people to do difficult things (an optimistic, if rather unspecified, goal).

One of those difficult things young people — or, at least, young women — were supposed to do was remain modest. In order to facilitate that goal, the Harris brothers created a survey through which over 1,750 “Christian guys” as young as 12 and as old as 50 submitted nearly 160,000 answers to 150 questions about what they considered modest for “all Christian girls” and what they considered “stumbling blocks,” a term as vague as it was threatening. The Modesty Survey was endorsed by evangelical leaders from Nancy Leigh DeMoss to C.J. Mahaney to Albert Mohler. Naturally, the results of the survey were released on Valentine’s Day.

I didn’t find the Modesty Survey until years later, when I was perhaps sixteen years old. I had attended what I thought was going to be a presentation by Alex and Brett Harris hosted by a local church but what turned out to be a prerecorded webinar from the brothers. After listening to their talk, I went straight to TheRebelution.com and found the Modesty Survey. I pored over the survey’s results in my bedroom before leaving for my homeschooling group’s weekly speech and debate club meeting (this should really give you some indication of what I was like in high school). I was aghast to learn that even though I would have considered my style of dress modest, 1,750 Christian guys begged to differ.

The full results of the Modesty Survey have been scrubbed from The Rebelution’s website, which closed its virtual doors in 2024, but thanks to the Wayback Machine and the many blogs that covered the survey for the many years that it was available online and widely circulated, most of those results are still at least somewhat accessible. I wholeheartedly understand the desire to distance yourself from something you created as a teenager and have precisely zero interest in dragging the Harris brothers themselves into any discourse regarding something I imagine they’d like to leave in the past. The reason I’m writing about the Modesty Survey at all is because there have been times when I wondered if perhaps I had imagined the survey altogether, if it had appeared in my mind as some kind of manifestation of the shame I carried with me around the fact that I had a body at all.

But the Modesty Survey was unfortunately and undeniably real. This is my best attempt to cobble together what the survey looked and felt like for those of us who let it inscribe itself on our hearts.

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First, the Modesty Survey started with an admonition from the “Christian guys” who attempted to write the rules for the girls in their lives. In order to add your name to the Modesty Survey petition, asking girls to consider abiding by its dictates, Christian guys had to sign their names to the below statement:

As a Christian guy with a deep appreciation for feminine modesty, I hereby affirm and commend the following biblical truths to my sisters in Christ:

• Please, approach the survey as a resource, not a list of rules.

• Always honor your parents above the results of the survey. (Ephesians 6:1-3)

• Seek personal feedback on your attire from the godly men and women in your life.

• Remember, modesty is first and foremost a matter of the heart, not the wardrobe.

• Faithfully pursue the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit. (1 Peter 3:4)

• Let your good works outshine your outward appearance. (1 Timothy 2:10)

• Dress for the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31)

While the start of this petition pays some lip service to the notion that modesty is a matter of the heart and what truly matters is the contents of one’s heart, you wouldn’t know it from the rest of the survey. Virtually every question in the survey focuses on some aspect of physical appearance. According to the Harris brothers, the survey questions themselves were sent in by young Christian girls and women who wanted the opinions of their brothers in Christ. This was later used by the brothers in a defense of the survey — after all, these girls wanted to know what their brothers in Christ thought about whether they should be able to wear halter tops or lay down on a couch or give them a hug (yes, these were all questions from the survey).

And who exactly were those brothers in Christ? The below graph displays the age range of “Christian guys” who participated in this survey. Teenagers and grown adults alike weighed in on what they thought the girls and women lives should be wearing.

The survey itself covered an exhaustive list of categories — everything from “swimsuits” to “layering” to “posture/movement.” Respondents were presented with a statement (as in the example below, “Jeans are generally immodest, even if they aren’t tight”) to which they could give one of five responses: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, or strongly agree.

As the Harris brothers explain in the screenshotted survey result above, the majority of men who responded to this particular question disagreed that jeans are generally immodest, even when they aren’t tight. But I don’t know if many girls who interacted with the survey felt entirely reassured knowing that 22.5% of respondents (385 Christian guys!) lent their endorsement to the notion that the mere reminder of the fact that girls have legs as displayed in loose denim could pose a “stumbling block.”

Before you could get to the survey results themselves, you’d first be directed to read a few responses from the young men who took the survey and wanted to give their sisters in Christ some additional admonition. One anonymous young man wrote the following:

“If you look at the survey results you will find that 99.9% of the guys take full responsibility for themselves, and don't expect women to cover every inch of skin — they're just asking for help. The honest truth is this: We're not telling you what to wear — we're just telling you what we, as guys, have to guard against. It is God's Word, your own heart and conscience, and your parents and godly friends who should help you decide what to do about it.

Another “Christian Guy, Age 20” shared his thoughts on the Modesty Survey, which the Harris brothers linked at the top of the survey results:

“Let’s be honest. We’re men, and we’re responsible for ourselves. We’re responsible for our thoughts, for our lusts, for our character. We won’t be able to blame the girls when we’re called to give account for it in the judgment day. We won’t be able to say like Adam, “The woman you made…”. In fact, the Bible warns us that if our eyes are causing us to offend, it would be better to pluck it out than to allow it to lead us astray. Now you girls don’t want that to happen… please?”

Yet another “strong Christian young man” offered the following:

“You don’t have to hide the fact that your house has a roof or that you are a woman. You don’t have to build a nine-foot wall or wear a gigantic paper bag over your body. But you do have to do what you can to protect the lives of your guests and the purity of your brothers (the Modesty Survey should be a great help with that). In this, you are protected.”

The mixed messages of the Modesty Survey couldn’t have been clearer. Boys and men were entirely responsible for their own behavior, but they desperately needed women’s help. Boys and men weren’t supposed to blame girls for their thoughts, but you wouldn’t actually want them to have to pluck out their eyes, would you? This was for your own good, your own protection.

But the results of the Modesty Survey also made it clear that there was no winning, no way to truly ever fulfill the dictates of modesty as handed down by the men behind this survey.

The nameless, faceless respondents behind the results of the Modesty Survey were in virtually unanimous agreement that they noticed whether or not a girl dressed modestly, as one of the first questions in the survey reveals. They were watching and judging all of the specifics that were to follow.

The respondents to the survey were also in near-unanimous agreement that they wanted their future wives to be modest.

The survey results got granular quickly. I don’t think it should surprise anyone that in the era of intense skinny jeans popularity, 76% of the survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that skin-tight jeans were a stumbling block (on a side note, the more I write “stumbling block” in this piece, the more it sounds like absolutely nothing to me — the equivalent of calling something “problematic” without any follow-up).

To the question of whether skirts were more modest than pants, the survey respondents disagreed — but only at first glance. 43% of respondents to the Modesty Survey disagreed that skirts were more modest than pants, paving the way for girls to wear pants (hooray, I guess?). Yet that means over half of the survey respondents felt skirts were more modest than pants. What’s a girl to do with a result like this? It would have been all too easy for a young woman reading this survey to conclude that she should err on the side of caution and throw out pants altogether if the concern truly was the wellbeing of the souls of her brothers in Christ.

Of course, those skirts would need to meet a certain length, as 58% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that skirts that fell to any length above the knee were immodest (it shouldn’t be surprising that 93% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that mini-skirts were uniformly immodest).

More rules for skirts ensued — for example, any slit that went above the knee was immodest (as 71% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed). But wearing a slip wasn’t a solution, as 34% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that seeing a girl’s slip through the slit in her skirt was also a stumbling block.

Here is a selection of further results from the Modesty Survey, though this doesn’t capture the full extent of what the survey covered (my thanks to this blog which catalogued the results before they were taken offline).

• 21.2% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that shirts or dresses with cap sleeves are immodest (I’m mostly just impressed that these respondents knew what cap sleeves were, but also: really?).

• 22.5% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it is a stumbling block to see a girl lying down, even if she’s just hanging out on the floor or on a couch with her friends.

• 34.4% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that v-neck shirts or dresses are a stumbling block, even if they aren’t revealing.

• 37.3% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that seeing a girl take off a sweatshirt is a stumbling block, even if she is wearing a modest shirt underneath.

• 41.8% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that a tankini with shorts (a tankini! with shorts!) is still immodest.

• 47.5% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that a purse with the strap diagonally across the chest draws too much attention to the bust.

• 48.6% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that even modest pajamas are inappropriate for a girl to wear in public.

• 51.3% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it is a stumbling block for a girl to sit with her legs spread apart.

• 57.4% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that showing a bra strap, even unintentionally, is a stumbling block.

• But 65.4% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it is a stumbling block when a girl reaches into her shirt to adjust a bra strap. Damned if you show a bra strap, damned if you fix it.

• 70.4% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that showing any cleavage is immodest.

• 71.3% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that seeing even an inch of skin between the bottom of a girl’s shirt and her pants is a stumbling block.

• 71.6% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the lines of undergarments, visible under clothing, cause guys to stumble. (What would the fix here be — not wear underwear? I can hardly imagine the survey respondents would have found this a fitting response. You can see the impossible and contradictory positions this survey placed girls in).

• 74.9% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the way a girl walks can be a stumbling block.

• 84.7% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that a girl’s physical posture and/or position can be a stumbling block.

The detailed questions making up the Modesty Survey culminate in two questions that have always stood out to me.

75% of respondents to the Modesty Survey agreed or strongly agreed that they had less respect for an immodest girl than a modest one. A former moderator on the Rebelution’s forum, Shaney Irene, wrote for Homeschoolers Anonymous about her experience with the Modesty Survey and spoke specifically to the matter of respect. “Many guys admitted to losing respect for girls who didn’t live up to their ideas of modesty, feeling ‘disgusted’ or ‘angered’ by these same girls, and even going so far as to say, ‘She loses her right to ask guys to stop looking at her like something to be had,’” she said.

Those ideas of modesty extended far beyond anything that a girl could do to cover up her physical presence. Nearly all the survey respondents agreed that even a modestly dressed girl could still be a “stumbling block” to them because of her (unspecified) “attitude and behavior.”

As Shaney Irene wrote of the Modesty Survey, “Perhaps the biggest and most disturbing problem is that we gave a platform to guys just because, well, they were guys. We had no way of knowing whether the respondents had a healthy understanding of their own sexuality, knew the difference between attraction and lust, truly respected women, etc. We gave legitimacy to the idea that they had a right to speak about women’s clothing choices simply because they were male.”

The Modesty Survey and the purity culture in which it lived made our bodies dangerous. It fundamentally altered the dynamic of the relationships any of us could have, regardless of our gender, with men, women, and ourselves. It presented a series of rules that no one could have possibly lived up to and then damned you for breaking them.

The night I read the results of the Modesty Survey, I went to my speech and debate practice draped in the most oversized sweatshirt I could find (to cover up the fact that I was wearing skinny jeans, the only kind of jeans I owned) and then sweated through it all night (because the mere act of taking that sweatshirt off would have, according to the survey results, presented a stumbling block). I shrank away from physical contact with any of my male friends. I made myself as small as possible.

That is the legacy of the Modesty Survey.

This week, conservative political and spiritual leaders are reading the Bible. America Reads the Bible is an initiative of Christians Engaged, which is a ministry of the Family Policy Alliance Foundation, a consortium of conservative lobbying groups brought together by (who else) James Dobson and Focus on the Family in the early 1990s. Everyone from Lance Wallnau to Scott Turner to Pete Hegseth is participating in this week-long livestreamed read-through of the Bible from start to finish, with President Donald Trump reading a particularly pointed passage: 2 Chronicles 7:11-22, which is often used by evangelical Christians to justify remaking America into an explicitly Christian nation in order to secure the favor of God.

Texas can now place the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. On Tuesday of this week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said that the Texas law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools does not violate the First Amendment, which in all likelihood sets the stage for a battle over this issue before the Supreme Court. But as reported, the language of the Ten Commandments that Texas wants to use isn’t even found in any version of the Bible. Rather, it’s a significantly edited rendition of the Ten Commandments that Texas has created. “It might be inspired by the Bible, but it’s not actually the biblical text,” he says. “If you literally ripped the Ten Commandments out of your Bible and taped them to a classroom wall in [the states that now require the Ten Commandments to be posted], the actual words from the Bible would be in violation of the law!” Texas creating their own state-sanctioned religious text is quite the precedent to set.

Doug Wilson was thoroughly shot down on Piers Morgan’s program, Uncensored. Is this the most news-worthy item? Debatable. But was it incredibly satisfying to watch Tim Miller and Wajahat Ali pick apart Wilson’s ideology and make him answer for what he is normally able to simply post online to a sympathetic audience. “I have no problem attacking wolves in sheep’s clothing,” Ali told Wilson. “I have no problem attacking a man who wrote that American slavery was mutually harmonious between the slave and master. That’s you. I have no problem attacking a man who proudly says he wants to do away with the 19^th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. I have no problem attacking a man like yourself who sits here incoherently supporting an incoherent, unwinnable, illegal war in Iran.” For his part, Wilson finally responded on his blog six days later to say that “not giving a rip is a fruit of the Spirit,” which I think pretty much sums up his view of the world.

For more reading on this incident, I highly recommend ’s recent piece — she’s been at the forefront of reporting on the abuses that have taken place in Doug Wilson’s orbit for years.

The Trump administration is targeting the Southern Poverty Law Center. This week, the Department of Justice announced an indictment against the SPLC, alleging that the civil rights nonprofit organization lied to donors about paying confidential informants to infiltrate hate groups. The SPLC has denied all charges, and this isn’t the first time the group has been the target of right-affiliated groups who have accused the center of being anti-Christian for their attacks on groups like Turning Point USA and the Family Research Council. The SPLC may be the first progressive nonprofit to come under fire from the administration’s Justice Department, but it almost certainly won’t be the last.

President Trump’s approval ratings have remained steady with American Catholics, despite his ongoing feud with Pope Leo XIV. Fox News conducted three polls in February, March, and April of this year in partnership with Democratic and Republican research firms. In February, 52 percent of Catholic voters approved of Trump’s job performance (compared to a 43 percent approval rating from all registered voters). That number slipped to 48 percent from Catholic voters in late March, at the height of Trump’s clash with the Pope — however, it rebounded to a 51 percent approval rating for Catholic voters by mid-April. Given how significant Catholic voters are as a bloc, it will be interesting to see if these numbers hold, particularly as Catholic teaching continues to run up against the plans of the Trump administration.

That’s all, folks! See you next week.

In the ad, splashed across the brand’s social media platforms, ballet dancers rehearse on a stage together. Neeleman steps into frame to watch them, opening her coat and placing a hand on her visibly pregnant belly. On this stage, I learned to be strong, her voiceover tells us. And despite what some people think, that strength never leaves you. It prepares you.

Neeleman then stares us down from the front porch of her Utah farmhouse, a glass of (presumably raw) milk in her hands and an American flag flying beside her. This all leads us to a product: Ballerina Farm’s “Farmer Protein Powder,” now available in five flavors.

I’ve been thinking about this ad again in the light of two book releases this month: ’s debut novel Yesteryear and ’s Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online. Burke’s novel follows a tradwife influencer (her “Yesteryear Ranch” a clear stand-in for “Ballerina Farm”) who wakes up to find herself living in the reality of the 1800s farm-life fantasy she’s been selling online. Latifi’s book is a journalistic deep-dive into the harrowing world of growing up on-camera as the children of parent (predominantly mom) influencers.

Much like her counterpart Natalie Heller Mills in Yesteryear, Hannah Neeleman attracts a certain kind of online chatter and snark that veers awfully close to devotion. Some people think Neeleman is glamorizing the oppressive lifestyle of tradwives. Some think of her as a trapped victim of a patriarchal system (there’s always someone in her comments asking if her husband has taken her on a vacation to Greece yet). Some used her pregnancy as an opportunity to decry large families; others have used it to bemoan America’s falling birth rates. (As far as I can tell, no one is asking if her protein powder has lead in it, as so many of these products do, so maybe I can start that discourse).

I have no interest in opining on what Neeleman’s life is like behind closed doors. The one concrete thing we know about her supersedes anything else: she is an influencer. She is selling a lifestyle and she is using her family to do it. She is able to do so quite easily in a culture that treats children as the ultimate commodity.

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In Like, Follow, Subscribe, Latifi speaks directly to influencers who feature their children on camera. When she asks them questions about why and how they share their children — if they’re concerned about their children’s privacy, if they’re worried about making their children feel as if they have to perform on demand — nearly every parent insists that they’re different, that they’re the exception to the exploitative rule.

But one mom influencer turned marketing manager that Latifi speaks to is remarkably candid about how the sheer amount of money at stake for these families shapes their decisions. “Over the years, I’ve known people who have had more children because those brand deals are really lucrative,” she told Latifi. “I’ve definitely been in circles with certain influencers where they’re all of a sudden adding a fourth or fifth child. Or before their baby’s even here, they already have brand deals lined up and what they can get and how they can get their nursery paid for now.”1

In a world in which the global baby products market grew to $361.2 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach $575.8 billion by 20332, children are a valuable resource. “Imagine choosing to bring another entire person into the world for brand deals,” Latifi writes. “It’s almost unbelievable—except I’ve heard it from several different sources who have spent their professional careers in the influencing industry.”3 The younger those children are, the more audiences and brands alike are interested. As one mom influencer told Latifi, “It’s a thing of saying, ‘You know what? This was a great ride. Now my kid is six years old and no one cares as much. You know, maybe we should have another baby and get these brand deals going.’ ”4

I am not saying Hannah Neeleman is having children for the sole purpose of building her personal brand. I am saying that she introduced her ninth child — a unique soul, a person created in the image of God — to the world in an ad for a $69 bag of protein powder, the selling point of which seems to be that it contains bovine colostrum and comes in the flavor Creamy Chocolate. She dropped both this ad and the news of her pregnancy shortly after a barrage of negative headlines about how Ballerina Farm halted sales of their signature raw milk several months after health inspectors found high levels of bacteria in the product.

After that Ballerina Farm ad was posted, I made a video pointing out the similarities between Neeleman’s usage of her child as part of her brand and the Quiverfull movement, which encourages Christian couples to have as many children as possible in order to help build the kingdom of God on earth. Plenty of people descended into my comments to let me know that actually, Neeleman is Mormon and certainly wouldn’t subscribe to Quiverfull ideology, it’s purely a coincidence that Mormons just happen to have big families! Nothing else to see here, folks!

I obviously don’t think that Hannah Neeleman is a strict adherent to the kind of Quiverfull ideology that arose out of fundamentalist Christian circles in the 1980s and 1990s. I doubt she’s got a copy of Mary Pride’s The Way Home: Beyond Feminism Back to Reality or that she purchased any products from Vision Forum in its heyday. But much like the way in which Bill Gothard’s umbrella of authority meme has spread far beyond the boundaries of his Institute in Basic Life Principles (take, for instance, this message preached by one of the most popular evangelical ministries in this country), the tenets of the Quiverfull movement have seeped into the culture of white evangelical Christianity in the United States (and yes, I am including Neeleman’s Mormonism within that culture).

We are living in the first few generations of people who do not, strictly speaking, need to have children for economic reasons. As the Heritage Foundation recently noted in their Saving America by Saving the Family plan, which proposes various policies to increase the number of children born to married heterosexual couples, “Many of the past incentives to have large families are gone. For instance, far fewer Americans live and work on farms in 2025 than they did in 1825 or 1925. Few married couples now think of the labor potential of children on a farm or in the local coal mine.” The authors of that report sound nearly wistful for the days gone by in which families produced large numbers of children as farm hands (or as collateral in a world of high infant mortality rates).

By contrast, having children in 2026 (at least in America, the only place I can speak from experience about having children) often places families at an economic disadvantage. Plenty of people more qualified than I have broken down the difficulty and expense of raising children in this country; I don’t think anyone is really debating, at this point, whether or not having a child in the U.S. is costly in more ways than one.

So, why have children? What are children for?

The Quiverfull sect has been more than happy to offer answers to those questions. The biblical patriarchy movement sparked by men like Doug Phillips demanded that families have as many children as possible, arrows that filled a quiver and could be wielded in the battle for the soul of America. In practice, there was very little regard for any other concern — the health and stability of the family, the mother, the children themselves. As a daughter raised in a Quiverfull family, explains how children raised in these households are born into labor. “No one benefits when children are expected to shoulder their younger siblings’ emotional, spiritual, educational, and physical well-being,” she writes, detailing how the daughters of this world take on raising, disciplining, and even homeschooling their younger siblings. “This is what is happening in Quiverfull families. Children—particularly eldest daughters—are required to serve as surrogate parents. This disrupts healthy attachment between parents and their children, does a disservice to younger siblings, and most importantly—it destroys the caregiving daughters.” After all, if you have an entire quiver full of arrows, some of those arrows can be expendable.

If the Quiverfull movement offers parents one reason to have children, influencing offers another. For both sets, more children translates into more wealth of all kinds. In Like, Follow, Subscribe, Latifi is realistic about how the financial rewards of influencing can be truly life-changing. She gives an example of one influencer with over 300,000 followers on Instagram. “Though she’s considered pulling back from influencing, she knows there’s no other job in which a single mother of five with only a high school education could make half a million dollars a year,”5 Latifi writes. “I wonder if, when people rage against influencer parents, what they’re really raging against is the system that offers so few opportunities for advancement besides the commodification of the self. All you have to do is post.”6

These two paths to wealth creation — have children for the glory of God, have children for the securing of brand deals — have married to create a new line of work entirely: tradwife influencing.

The world of biblical patriarchy has always preached that a woman’s place is in the home, but it has made allowances for her to work within those confines. Many of the authors featured in the catalogues produced by Vision Forum were women. Take, for instance, Stacy McDonald, the author of the 2013 book Raising Maidens of Virtue: A Study of Feminine Loveliness for Mothers and Daughters. A homeschooling mother and pastor’s wife, McDonald was able to promote her writing to Vision Forum’s world precisely because she was writing to other mothers. For a more recent example, look at Tilly Dillehay’s Wife School, the online course that the homeschooling mother and pastor’s wife is clearly recording in her living room seemingly in the moments between caring for her children. This kind of woman’s work is acceptable, older women quietly teaching the younger.

Now, the command to have as many arrows in your quiver as possible can be paired with the demands and rewards of a capitalistic system all too happy to consume children as created content. If Ballerina Farm’s $70 million in e-commerce sales (and this is now an outdated number) is any indicator, tradwives are good for business. But in both the Quiverfull world and the world of family influencing, children are inherently and increasingly alienated from their parents. Their lives become products that they themselves do not own — they are a future conservative politician, they are an ad for a diaper brand.

In Yesteryear, tradwife influencer Natalie experiences that sense of alienation from her own children. She loves them “effortlessly and distantly,”7 she says — the anesthesia she receives while giving birth to her second-born keeps her “miles away from this child.”8 When Natalie decides that she wants to start posting her life online, crafting an image of herself that can sell, she tells her husband:

“I want another baby,” I said to Caleb, over Samuel’s furious cries. “And I want to take a picture.”9

In Like, Follow, Subscribe, Latifi speaks to the hired help that exists off-camera (which Natalie also has in Yesteryear). “It was just so disconcerting that I saw how quickly a kid who barely has grasped potty training is so aware of my phone, of a camera, how to smile, how to pose,” a nanny for an influencer family told Latifi (the family, of course, never revealed to their audience that they had a nanny at all).10 The mother of a Quiverfull family may outsource the work of raising her children in similar fashion to her oldest daughters. They may be only eleven or twelve years old when they are required to get up in the middle of the night to soothe an infant brother or administer spankings throughout the day to a toddler sister.

In both families, the child is held at arm’s length from the parents in order to preserve a certain kind of fiction. One doula for a vlogging family told Latifi that the family based their content around their hundred-acre farm when in actuality, they lived on just a few acres. “You would not know that from watching their page,”11 she said.
Ruby Franke, another Mormon mom influencer, portrayed an idyllic life online with her family of six children before she was charged with six counts of felony aggravated child abuse, for which she is now serving out a thirty-year prison sentence.

Yesteryear contains a much-hyped twist which I certainly won’t spoil for you here. I’ve seen some rather gleeful chatter online about Natalie getting exactly what she deserves, about how Burke pokes fun at the online tradwife movement. But I personally didn’t find much of that in Yesteryear. I was far more compelled by the portrait of a woman who only is able to finally experience some form of love towards her children when the cameras are cut, when she isn’t trying to have more children, when she forgets herself entirely.

I’m sure Neeleman and her Ballerina Farm will continue to be subject to the kind of perpetual online discourse that casts her simultaneously as heroine, villain, oppressor, and victim. Through every social media storm she’s faced, Neeleman has continued to post. Nearly every post the influencer has shared on social media since the birth of her ninth child contains two elements: her one-month-old baby, whom she still hasn’t given a name, and her trademarked Bone Broth Hot Cocoa.

Whatever her children will make of it all someday is their story to tell.

Surely, at this point, you’ve seen the AI-generated image of President Trump as Jesus that he posted and then deleted. I wrote here about whether or not this moves the needle of white evangelical support for the president (spoiler: no). It’s important to talk about this photo in its proper context: the president’s ongoing fight with Pope Leo XIV. As J.D. Vance says the Pope should be more careful when talking about theology, Catholic voters — who are far more split when it comes to supporting Republicans, Trump securing 55% of their vote in the 2024 election — are certainly paying attention. However, white evangelical voters may actually see attacks on Catholics in a positive light.

Tennessee will now refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” in all official state documents. This week, Tennessee’s General Assembly voted to change all official references to the region to the biblical name “Judea and Samaria.” The bill itself, HB 1446/SB 1663, states that the “ideological and cultural conflict over Judea and Samaria represents a broader civilizational struggle between Judeo-Christian values.” One of the activists who testified in favor of the bill was Laurie Cardoza-Moore, the host of the NRB show Focus on Israel who has worked with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to make the Hebrew Bible a requirement in Florida’s public schools.

Viktor Órban, the Christian nationalist prime minister of Hungary, was defeated. Hungarian voters overwhelmingly rejected Órban, ending his sixteen-year reign. To learn more about exactly how Órban attempted to shape Hungary into the image of his own Christian republic, read Mark Silk’s breakdown here. The story I find even more fascinating in the wake of this loss is the revelation by his replacement that the former prime minister was directly funding the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Apparently, Órban had been diverting Hungarian taxpayer funds towards CPAC for years, which incoming prime minister Péter Magyar will halt and investigate.

Mark Driscoll will preach at President Trump’s “Rededicate 250” event on the National Mall on May 17. Driscoll built Mars Hill into a massive megachurch of the 2010s before resigning under investigation from the church’s elders — Mars Hill collapsed soon afterwards, which has been well-documented (see this excellent article from right after the event by Ruth Graham, as well as Mike Cosper’s podcast on the matter). Trump’s plan to “rededicate America to God” during the 250th anniversary of this country’s founding is another matter entirely, which I’ll be watching closely.

That’s all, folks! See you next week.

Denunciation was swift and cut across political boundaries. This is perhaps the first time that Doug Wilson, Joel Webbon, Megan Basham, and I have all been in agreement: the image is obviously blasphemous. It depicts Trump dressed in the stereotypical robes of Christ. In one hand, the president holds a glowing orb of light. The other hand reaches out presumably to heal a patient. A woman holds her hands up in prayer. A nurse, a soldier, and a veteran (I think, although the AI-generated text on his hat is garbled, to say the least) gaze beatifically on the president, his light emanating towards them. In the background are symbols of America: the Statue of Liberty, the stars and stripes, bald eagles, fireworks, and I guess some kind of horned flying demon?

As of midday on Monday, April 13, the image has been deleted from Trump’s Truth Social account. The New York Times reported that “while receiving a McDonald’s food delivery to the Oval Office, the president told reporters that he posted a photo that depicted him as a robed, Jesus-like figure because he thought it had depicted him as a doctor.” Which, sure, if doctors routinely heal people by emitting glowing light from their hands. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better,” he said.

We’ve been through this song-and-dance any number of times over the past decade. Trump does something that his core base of white evangelicals theoretically should find offensive enough to move the needle of their support for him (everything from the many sexual assault allegations leveled against him to his post of yet another AI-generated photo of himself as the Pope after Francis’ death last year). A state of mild panic ensues on everyone’s social media timelines. Trump gives some sort of explanation that pacifies evangelicals. They return to their full-throated support of him — because of abortion, they usually claim, although the majority of white evangelicals cited immigration as their most important voting issue heading into the 2024 presidential election. You can take that for what it’s worth.

It’s already happened with Trump’s (weak!) explanation that he thought he was just innocently reposting a picture of him as a doctor doing Red Cross (my guy, let’s be serious). Megan Basham retweeted1 his explanation. “He just addressed it. Now, whether one finds his explanation compelling or not is up to them. But it was good that he addressed it,” she replied to another commenter. Allie Beth Stuckey is back on board: “I do believe that he didn’t think of this as a depiction of Jesus when posting,” she tweeted. “Still, there has to be more care and discernment there” (basically, we all just need to have more empathy for the president). As pointed out, several Trump acolytes posted what was clearly a copy-and-pasted set of talking points.

The only question I really have at this point is this: does anyone in the evangelical camp care enough to make any meaningful change in their beliefs or behavior? Is there a bridge too far? It was, after all, not even two weeks ago that the president’s spiritual advisor, Paula White, compared Trump to Jesus during an Easter event at the White House.

“Jesus taught so many lessons through his death, burial and resurrection. He showed us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice,” White said. “And Mr President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you. God always had a plan: On the third day, he rose, he defeated evil, he conquered death, hell and the grave. And because he rose, we all know that we can rise. And sir, because of his resurrection, you rose up. Because he was victorious, you are victorious. And I believe that the Lord said to tell you this: because of his victory, you will be victorious in all you put your hands to.”

It’s hardly surprising that Trump is posting photos of himself imagined as Jesus — his own personal pastor is essentially telling him that he is Jesus. For Paula White, the resurrection of Christ matters only so much in that it teaches us leadership lessons. It shows us, or it specifically teaches our president, that he will be victorious in whatever he does. I saw some muffled outcry around White’s speech several days ago, and those same people are the ones decrying this latest photo posted by Trump. They quieted down after White’s speech and they’re already quieting down after this photo. They’ll be sure to mildly criticize whatever blasphemous statement or action the president does next and then it’s back to business as usual.

Of course, there have been bridges too far for many evangelicals, but those folks are simply leaving the camp entirely. According to a study by the Public Religion Research Institute, the number of self-identified white evangelicals in the U.S. dropped from 23% of the population in 2013 to 13% of the population in 2023. But white evangelicals also have the best retention rates, which have been improving since 2016. In 2016, white evangelicals were retaining 66% of their flock; by 2024, it was 76%. The white evangelicals who remain are entirely bought in to their brand and their belief system, which has inextricably tied itself up with the Trump presidency.

I have been thinking recently about the first half of 2016, a blissfully ignorant time for me because I was out of the country for my last semester of college studying abroad in Oxford, England. Occasionally, a well-meaning and befuddled Brit would ask me what was going on with the U.S. presidential election and I would shrug my shoulders. Not my problem right now, I would think.

Then, I came home. I watched, as we all did, Trump rise in the polls. I assumed that the people in my life were as put off by his behavior as I was, that he did not align with any of the good Christian values I had been taught my entire life (I was too young to directly remember Bill Clinton’s impeachment, but I certainly imbibed the lessons). I assumed that everyone I knew would be voting for some third-party true evangelical candidate.

I remember the exact day the Access Hollywood tapes dropped. I was listening to an NPR segment about the news of the day. As the hosts criticized Trump for his (truly appalling) behavior, a family member of mine chimed in. “I can’t believe you’re listening to this,” they said, almost quivering with anger. “They’re saying such awful things about such a great man.” Oh nooooo, I thought. Something has changed and I’m not sure what.

In fact, nothing changed. Everything is exactly the same. This is how the evangelical industrial complex was always designed to work.

If you want to read more about Paula White…

J.D. Vance spent this week campaigning in Budapest on behalf of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Órban. “Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy, for truth and for the God of our forefathers?” Vance asked Hungarian voters at a rally. Órban’s “Christian nationalist rule” has been well-documented over his sixteen years in power, but the prime minister’s government seems headed for a potential major loss. The election, which will take place on April 12, 2026, will have major ramifications for the future of Christian nationalism in Europe and beyond.

Politico’s profile of the Methodist pastor who performed Órban’s wedding and baptized his children is a fascinating read. Gábor Iványi told Politico that Órban’s Christian nationalism “has nothing to do with the Bible, with the essence of the Bible.”

The Utah State Board of Education is starting to implement H.B. 312, which mandates that public schools teach the Bible in social studies classes. The bill does not mandate specific materials to be used, leaving the decision of what should be taught up to local school districts. However, the law does require that schools teach students as young as third-graders certain passages from the Bible that are “cited or alluded to in founding documents,” as well as Bible stories that “shaped colonial American political thought.” Clifford Rosky, a law professor at the University of Utah, told the Salt Lake Tribune that this bill is “asking Utah public school teachers to stand up in front of their class — even third graders — and say: ‘This is what the Bible says, and here are all the different things that people think it means.’”

A former Trump administration official said Christians must impose their will and interpretation of Scripture on all other Americans. William Wolfe, who served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon and a Director of Legislative Affairs at the Department of State, is currently the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership. During a sermon he gave at Bethel Church in Petersburg, West Virginia, Wolfe said this.

“We are going to impose it upon you. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just if it lines up with God’s standards. And I am going to enforce my morality on you, inasmuch as our morality is God’s morality.” According to Wolfe, “Christians should have the courage to say, ‘This is how we’re going to run our town, this is how we’re going to run our county, this is how we’re going to run our state, and this is how we should run the United States of America — by legislating the morality that we can find in the Bible.’”

One-third of Americans believe that the United States is or should be a Christian nation, and women are just as likely as men to believe in Christian nationalism. The Public Religion Research Institute conducted more than 20,000 interviews with U.S. adults and found that 56% of Republicans either actively adhered to Christian nationalism or sympathized with statements like “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

Of course, this means that two-thirds of Americans are either skeptical or outright reject the doctrines of Christian nationalism.

The creators of Project 2025 have a new plan for the American family. For Sojourners, I wrote a piece published this week on the utter failure of imagination that is the Heritage Foundation’s Saving America by Saving the Family policy report. Heritage’s plan pays lip service to policies that empirically have been shown to drive family growth and stability, such as paid parental leave and flexible working schedules, but frustratingly does not include actual policy recommendations for these proposals. Instead, on the docket for Heritage are covenant marriages, the success sequence, and reducing access to higher education — especially for women.

Christian fundamentalism continues to play an important role in the U.S.’s foreign policy. This week, WBUR featured an excellent interview with Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism and Robert Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute on the rise of an extremist form of Christianity. They speak insightfully about the influence of Christian nationalism on the U.S. military, discussing the religious background of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (his ties to Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, his pastor, Brooks Potteiger, his direction of the Chaplain Corps, and more). To read the transcript of that interview, click here.

That’s all, folks! See you next week.

The Heritage Foundation brought you Project 2025 in order to completely transform the U.S. federal government. Now, it’s rolling out a new plan to save the American family.

To ring in 2026, the conservative think tank that provided the blueprints for the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and President Donald Trump released a new 168-page policy plan titled Saving America by Saving the Family. The Heritage Foundation’s plan claims that its goal is to encourage more “fertile” men and women to marry younger and have more children. But curiously, this plan for America’s families recommends programs like marriage boot camps and“community rest” laws, not policies that have been empirically shown to encourage family growth and stability—such as the expansion of paid parental leave and flexible work schedules.

The exclusion of these policies isn’t accidental. Heritage certainly must know about the familial benefits of expanding paid parental leave and flexible work schedules. For instance, its plan cites Hungary as a shining beacon of hope, claiming that it is one of the few Western countries that has successfully increased its birth rate. This isn’t entirely false: Hungary’s total fertility rate did increase to 1.61 in 2020 before falling again to 1.39 children per woman in 2024. But what Heritage fails to even acknowledge in its plan is that Hungary provides six months of state-funded, fully paid maternity leave, with the option for mothers to take up to three years of unpaid additional leave, as well as two years of paid child care benefits. If Hungary’s fertility rate is increasing, and if Heritage wants the same thing to happen in the U.S., why wouldn’t it highlight these pronatal policies in Hungary?

The answer: because Heritage is playing a different kind of game. D.C.’s premier conservative intellectual institution intends to preserve a very particular kind of family, hoping to fit as many families as possible into its mold. By “saving the family,” Heritage doesn’t just mean increasing fertility rates (considering its plan specifically denounces federal funding for IVF treatments). Rather, Heritage uses the language of protecting and providing for children to push through long-held conservative policy goals that target just one category of the nuclear family: women.

To read the rest of the piece, click here.

I’ve been in quite the writing crunch lately for an exciting project in the works, so thank you for your patience with me as I adjust my publishing schedule. I’m wavering right now between one and two weekly articles, depending on some deadlines I’m trying to meet/how much sleep my toddler allowed me to get.

More to come later this week! As always, thank you for your readership and your support.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he has no formal theological training, Doug Wilson represents the future of the religious right in America. He pastors Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and formed the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) in 1998, a network that now boasts over 160 churches. He came to national prominence in 2004 after organizing a conference at the University of Idaho that featured his tract, Southern Slavery As It Was, which offers a defense of the Confederacy. He returned to national headlines in 2020 after holding maskless services during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and hasn’t left those headlines, most recently preaching at the Pentagon at the invitation of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a member of a CREC church.

A self-described Christian nationalist, Wilson preaches the gospel of dominion: followers of Christ are to focus less on converting souls and more on angling for powerful positions in government, commerce, the courts, and media in order to re-establish America as a society created by and for Christians. “God has not called us to sit around in the world. He has called us to study it and subdue it,” he once wrote in a book that has been on my mind lately, Federal Husband.

In her memoir A Well-Trained Wife, which chronicles her escape from the world of Christian patriarchy, Tia Levings recalls how Doug Wilson’s teachings fueled the abuse she experienced in her marriage. When Levings’s husband Allan discovered books like Wilson’s Federal Husband and Reforming Marriage, he took Wilson’s words and lived by them.

“[Wilson’s books] said a man needs help, and the woman needs to help. That’s her job, her created purpose. She’s his ‘helpmeet.’ On his own, man’s unsuccessful. He can only function to his full capacity with a capable, amiable woman helping him along the way. And she’ll only be happy if she surrenders and serves him,” Levings wrote. “Allan took all that he learned and issued new rules with tighter, more defined lines. Under the surface, anger brewed. He wanted me to call him ‘my lord.’ Wear only dresses. Cover my head with a scarf to show submission and modesty. And he wanted me to stop showing anyone what I’d written or made, such as a forum post or a scrapbook, unless I’d shown it to him first.”1

The Christian nation that Doug Wilson wishes to usher in is fundamentally patriarchal and relies on the submission of women. Anyone who wants to understand where the conservative Christian movement is headed needs to understand what Wilson teaches and the devastating real-world impacts it has already had on the women and girls who have been raised and shaped in his orbit.

In Federal Husband, Wilson lays out his plan for husbands and wives. That husbands have and must wield authority over their wives is a given. The amateur theologian claims that “the doctrine of male headship is set down for us in Scripture.”2 Although Wilson goes on to say that he believes men and women are equal in their worth in the eyes of God, he places them on fundamentally unequal ground by making men take charge of their wives’ behavior. If a wife commits a sin, Wilson says, her husband is the one who carries responsibility: “All such sinning occurs in the context of a covenant and within the realm of the federal head’s responsibility,” he writes. “When a wife understands that her husband is responsible and knows that he assumes this responsibility willingly, she will be more responsible as an individual.”3

What exactly does it mean for a wife to be more responsible? Wilson gives us examples of an irresponsible wife, as perceived by her husband: “He may be distressed over her spending habits, television viewing habits, weight, rejection of his leadership, laziness in cleaning the house, lack of responsiveness to sexual advances—whatever.”4 In that “whatever” is tied up anything Wilson’s audience of husbands would like to read into the term, giving them room to identify whatever habits or actions of their wives they personally dislike as irresponsibility and even sin.

Consequently, when a wife does something her husband doesn’t like (such as, in Wilson’s laundry list of examples above, reject his sexual advances), that husband is given a game plan to follow by Wilson. First, the husband must repent of his failure to properly lead his wife. “He should then make clear what his expectations are for her in the future,” Wilson instructs. “He does this, without rancor and without an accusative spirit, until she complies or rebels.”5

It should nearly go without saying that in the patriarchal order Wilson wishes to establish, women are led into the realm of the home and told to stay put. “The Bible teaches that a woman’s fundamental orientation is to be domestic,”6 he writes. Of course this means that working outside of the home is not up for debate: “If a man is not capable of providing his wife with food and clothing, then he is scripturally disqualified to be a husband,”7 Wilson reprimands.

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All of this is done in service of the Christian’s ultimate purpose (at least, in the eyes of Doug Wilson): to take dominion over the created world and specifically over America herself. “Adam was created to tend the garden and to exercise dominion over the earth. Eve was created to help him do this,” Wilson explains. “[The husband] needs a companion suitable for him in the work to which God has called him. He is called to the work and must receive help from her. [The wife] is called to the work through ministering to him. He is oriented to the task, and she is oriented to him.”8

In Reforming Marriage, Wilson makes it clear to both wives and husbands that there is only one dominant party in a marriage. “Arguing with the fact of the husband’s headship in the home is like jumping off a cliff in order to quarrel with the law of gravity,”9 he writes. The women of Doug Wilson’s world are to take this in stride. “If she understands the Bible, she knows that she was created to be dependent and responsive to a man,”10 Wilson says of the women who will make up his ideal patriarchal society.

What exactly does it mean for a wife to be dependent on and responsive to her husband? Doug Wilson offers several strict rules. Wives are to bear children and care for them. “A wife must not complain in her fruitfulness,”11 he admonishes. “It is the wife’s duty to submit to the will of God and gladly bear children for her husband.”12 Wives are to be industrious in the home. “Industry in the home means hard work in cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, and so forth,”13 he writes. “It is possible to disobey God through neglect of the dishes.”14 Wives are to meet all of their husbands’ sexual needs. “This involves more than just being ‘willing’ whenever ‘he wants it’; it involves being a responsive lover,”15 Wilson orders. “It is obviously lawful for a godly husband to admire, kiss, taste, and caress his wife wherever he pleases.”16 Wives are to be disciples of their husbands, filtering everything she learns through his chosen lens. “She should not make this duty of his [to teach her] superfluous by going elsewhere for the instruction,”17 Wilson reminds wives and husbands alike.

What if differences arise in the marriage? Wilson instructs husbands and wives to handle any issues they might have together in private, away from prying eyes. “Never let anyone into your home when there is no harmony there,”18 he writes. “Never go anywhere else when you are out of fellowship.”19 If a husband decides that his wife has done something to fall out of his favor, he is able to keep her home until he decides that the problem has been resolved.

In Wilson’s world, this isolation is framed as protection. “When a daughter has a father who is jealous for her purity, he watches out for her interests,” he writes. “And when such a father gives his daughter in marriage to a man worthy of the position, the new husband promises the father that he will be equally jealous. So when a godly woman submits to her husband, she is being liberated through godly male protection.”20

The message to women in the orbit of Doug Wilson is clear: submit yourself to the authority of a man or suffer the consequences. “Women inescapably need godly masculine protection against ungodly masculine harassment,” he writes in another one of his books, Her Hand in Marriage. “Women who genuinely insist on ‘no masculine protection’ are really women who tacitly agree on the propriety of rape.”21

In 2025, CNN’s Pamela Brown visited Wilson in his kingdom of Moscow, Idaho. You may have seen a clip from this interview in which Wilson distastefully describes women as “the kind of people whom people come out of” and says that it doesn’t take much “talent” to reproduce. Brown returned to Wilson’s world for an episode of The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper entitled “The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” for which she and her team embedded with a community under Wilson’s umbrella and spoke to survivors of the world of his particular flavor of Christian patriarchy. The hour has been rescheduled twice in the wake of Paramount’s purchase of Warner Brothers, the parent company of CNN. “It’s imperative that CNN be sold,” President Trump said last year. “The Rise of Christian Nationalism” finally aired on Sunday, March 22. The voices of survivors are being given a platform and it is up to us to listen to their warnings.

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But Federal Husband and Reforming Marriage were published nearly three decades ago. Doug Wilson hasn’t exactly been hiding the ball on his beliefs. And this isn’t the first time that survivors of his world have spoken out. In 2021, journalist Sarah Stankorb reported on the experiences of women sucked into Wilson’s Christian nationalist orbit for Vice (“kirkers,” as they are often referred to by those in the know). “Ex-kirkers describe a punitive community in which women are told they must defer to church leaders and cannot say ‘no’ to their husbands, men are taught to strictly control their homes, and those who speak out can be isolated and harassed,” Stankorb writes.

In her piece, Stankorb documents the story of a young woman, Jean, who joins Wilson’s congregation and marries a kirker—Wilson officiated their wedding. After the birth of their first child, Jean’s husband sexually assaulted her. Years into her abusive marriage, Jean went to several pastors at her church, a plant of Wilson’s Christ Church, and asked for their help. She was met with rejection. “These pastors told me a wife is not allowed to tell her husband no,” Jean recalled.

This is the world to which Doug Wilson wishes to confine women. He can bluster his way through equivocations—for instance, in his interview with Pamela Brown, he sidesteps the question of whether he’d like to strip women of the right to vote by saying that he’d simply like to have only the heads of households vote. If a single woman is the head of her own household, then of course she can vote, he says. But Doug Wilson’s idealized Christian nation is one made up of the kind of patriarchal families he describes throughout Federal Husband and Reforming Marriage. He’s clear that the man is the head of the home, the leader of his wife, the creator and shaper and master of her world.

In the world that Doug Wilson wants to usher into existence, women do not vote. They bear their husband’s children, they cater to his needs, they learn only from him. The world Wilson wants for women is a terribly small one in which husbands have the luxury of raising their eyes to God and wives have the responsibility of keeping their eyes fixed on their men. I do not believe this is the world God wants for his daughters, but it is the world that Doug Wilson’s religious right wants to create.

Obviously, you don’t have to have personal experience with To Train Up a Child to find it distressing. You also don’t have to have children yourself to find violence against children deeply upsetting. I don’t have a personal history that involves To Train Up a Child (a copy of it was on my bookshelves growing up, but I don’t think any member of my family ever cracked its spine); however, its tenets became a part of fundamentalist and evangelical parenting culture. Train your child, or else they’ll turn degenerate. Tell them you love them while you physically discipline them, so that they know what God is like.

However, I do have a child at the age the Pearls would absolutely have me start “training” him (they’d probably tell me I would be starting too late, as he’s already fifteen months old). This isn’t the first time I’ve read To Train Up a Child, but my current reading of it is colored by my experience of early motherhood. That is to say: right now, it feels like the worst book I have ever read.

Because To Train Up a Child teaches fundamentalist Christians how to abuse their children.

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In the world of fundamentalist Christianity, children are arrows in a quiver.

There is a reason that Michael and Debi Pearl speak of training rather than teaching children. As subscribers to an authoritarian and fundamentalist form of Christianity, the Pearls do not view children as autonomous, independent human beings with their own personalities, dislikes, and preferences. Rather, they are extensions of their parents, arrows in a quiver ready to be weaponized in the war for the soul of America.

Consequently, children must be trained from birth.

“Most parents don’t think they can train their little children,” the Pearls write to introduce To Train Up a Child. “Training doesn’t necessarily require that the trainee be capable of reason; even mice and rats can be trained to respond to stimuli. Careful training can make a dog perfectly obedient. If a seeing-eye dog can be trained to reliably lead a blind man through the dangers of city streets, shouldn’t a parent expect more out of an intelligent child?”

This is the goal for the Pearls: that they produce children who are entirely obedient, submitting themselves to the will of their parents. “If parents carefully and consistently train up their children, their performance will be superior to that of a well-trained, seeing-eye dog,” they promise the parents who are reading this book.

In the world of fundamentalist Christianity, parents have to train their children or the consequences are eternal.

Imagine a parent in this community who is on the fence about the extreme techniques that the Pearls recommend throughout To Train Up a Child. The Pearls have anticipated this parent’s misgivings and has a warning for them: unless they train their child, their child is certainly on their way to hellfire.

“Use of the rod is not optional with a Bible believer. It is God’s design for proper training,” the Pearls admonish their readers. “The eternal souls of your children are at stake.”

Moreover, the Pearls promise parents that their techniques will work quickly. “Most children can be brought into complete and joyous subjection in just three days,” they reassure their audience of parents. The unambiguous goal of this parenting style is to make children fully subject to the will of their parents.

This is how the Pearls recommend you begin to train a child beginning to crawl (in this specific example, the baby is eight months old). First, place an object that the baby would want to grab at in a place where they can reach it. When they inevitably reach for it, tell them no. When they reach for it again, switch their hand. “They will pull back their hand and consider the relationship between the object, their desire, the command, and the little reinforcing pain,” the Pearls write. “It may take several times, but if you are consistent, they will learn to consistently obey, even in your absence.”

Insisting on immediate obedience is posited as something that benefits the child’s eternal soul, but the practical reality is that it benefits the parents in the here-and-now. For large fundamentalist families, these kind of training techniques become essential to managing multiple children (as has written about in more detail here).

“If you expect to receive instant obedience, and you train them to that end, you will be successful,” the Pearls promise. “It will take extra time to train, but once the children are in general subjection, the time saved will be extraordinary.”

In the world of fundamentalist Christianity, children are inherently sinful and manipulative from birth.

To Train Up a Child instructs parents to begin training their children right from the start. “Crying because of genuine physical need is the infant’s only voice to the outside world, but crying in order to manipulate others into constant servitude should never be rewarded,” the Pearls write in reference to newborn babies. “It causes one to understand where the concept of a ‘sinful nature’ originated.”

“As infants grow, they learn to manipulate their surroundings,” the Pearls explicitly state. “Because of its resemblance to adult behavior, the self-centeredness of infants has all the appearances of a vice. They soon learn that they can have their wants met as well as their needs. So they ‘go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies (Psalm 58:3).’”

In the world of fundamentalist Christianity, parents and children are set against each other immediately. A mother isn’t supposed to trust herself with her newborn; she isn’t supposed to respond intuitively to the cry of her infant. Rather, she’s to view her baby with doubt and suspicion. She’s to believe that her baby is merely crying out of a“want” instead of a “need.”

In the process, she’s both learning and teaching her children that only their most basic needs are ever to be met. What they want doesn’t matter.

In the world of fundamentalist Christianity, pain is the primary teacher.

The world constructed by this authoritarian form of Christianity is a small world that operates in binaries, devoid of imagination. In this world, children are either trained or they go to hell. All manner of pain is justified in order to prevent this outcome.

To illustrate this, the Pearls tell the story of one of their daughters who learned how to crawl up the stairs before she was a year old. They didn’t want her to climb the stairs, and so this is what they did.

“For her own good (and our peace of mind), we attempted to train her not to climb the stairs by coordinating the voice command of “No” with little spats on her bare legs,” they write. “The switch was a twelve-inch long, one-eighth-inch diameter sprig from a willow tree. Such was her fascination with climbing, that she continued to climb, ignoring the spankings. Spanking is supposed to work, but it seemed that, at her young age, her little brain couldn’t maintain the association. So, out of desperation, I laid the switch on the bottom step. We later observed her crawl to the stairs and start the ascent, only to halt at the first step and stare at the switch. She backed off and never again attempted to climb the stairs, even after the switch was removed. She had assumed the association of the painful switch to the stairs and my command. I had communicated to her my will and my resolve.”

(I too have a baby who was fascinated by the stairs in our house. I taught him how to climb the stairs, one at a time — just going up at first, and then eventually going down backwards, feet first, then knees, then feet again. We’d move up and down the stairs together for hours. Now, he moves up and down the stairs safely and easily).

No option like this exists in the world created by the Pearls. Instead of (for instance) installing a baby gate (the normal option!), they jump immediately to the use of a switch that so terrifies their daughter she won’t go anywhere near it. It’s training or degeneracy, pain or chaos.

“Any spanking, to effectively reinforce instruction, must cause pain,” the Pearls write, going on to offer increasingly nauseating specifics. “It is most effective to strike a light rod against bare skin, where nerves are located at the surface. A surface sting will cause sufficient pain, with no injury or bruising. Select your instrument according to the child’s size. For the under one-year-old child, a small, ten- to twelve-inch-long, willowy branch (stripped of any knots that might break the skin), about one-eighth inch in diameter is sufficient. A one-foot ruler, or its equivalent in a paddle, is a suitable substitute. For the larger child, a belt or a three-foot cutting off of a shrub is effective.”

What else can I possibly say here? The only thing scrawled in my notes at this point in my read-through of To Train Up a Child is these people are evil, so fucking evil.

In the world of fundamentalist Christianity, training children needs to happen in secret.

Throughout To Train Up a Child, the Pearls discourages “public” training for what seems like obvious reasons (they reference the ever-feared homeschool boogeyman, Child Protective Services, as a looming entity ready to take children away from their parents for the smallest offense). “Except where the very smallest children are concerned, training at home almost entirely eliminates the need for public discipline,” they write. “Yet, should the need arise in public, be discreet with your discipline, and then go home and re-train in that area of behavior so that you and the child will not be placed in that difficult situation again.”

The Pearls acknowledge that there might be some people who take their methods and go too far with them (one shudders to think of what these authors might consider “too far”). “These individuals are capable of using what has been said about the legitimate use of the rod to justify ongoing brutality to their children,” they write. But in the same breath, the Pearls reprimand those who would shy away from using these techniques. “They do not understand the Christian heart,” they say. “Having never experienced it, they cannot fathom the self-restraint and love that motivates true Christians.”

Children who are raised under the rules of To Train Up a Child learn about love. They learn that it it is always tied to pain and that the more a person inflicts pain on them, the more they are loved.

In the world of fundamentalist Christianity, power dictates relationships.

Fundamentalist, authoritarian Christianity encourages its members to see the world in binary terms. You are either a sinner or you are saved; you are either destined for heaven or for hell. It is no surprise that all relationships in this world are governed by strict power dynamics that allow no room for debate.

For example the Pearls teach parents to not only train their young children, but to teach their older children how to discipline their younger children. “In a home where only parents enforce obedience, siblings will never like each other, and older children will despise their little brothers and sisters,” they write. “A practical arrangement is that when two kids are together, one should be in charge.”

These pronouncements are drastic and clear: without allowing older children to discipline their younger siblings, these siblings will never like each other, will never get along. It makes sense that fundamentalist parents attempting to control large numbers of children would accept both these dynamics as fact and the Pearl’s advice as God-given wisdom.

Of course, the same advice from the Pearls applies to the relationship between parents and children. They give the example of a child who is punished by his father and cries for his mother, his source of comfort. They instruct the mother to “give him one or two licks on his exposed ankles or legs while commanding, ‘Obey your Father.’” Once again, mothers are told not to trust their instincts. If the father of a fundamentalist family disciplines his children in a manner that makes his wife uncomfortable, she has to submit to his judgment.

The only allowance the Pearls make for mothers who fear their husbands are disciplining their children too forcefully is to tell them to do it themselves. “While he is away, demand, expect, train for, and discipline the children to give you instant and complete obedience,” they instruct. “When Father comes home, the house will be peaceful and well-ordered. The children will always obey their father, giving him no need to discipline them.”

The light at the end of the tunnel, the reward for the work of child-training, is not only that children will exhibit perfect obedience but that they will have instilled within them the fear of God. Not the “modern rewriting of fear as respect,” the Pearls scoff — the literal trembling fear of God, as represented to a child through his parents.

In the world of fundamentalist Christianity, training your children teaches them who God is.

The Pearls are right on one count: children learn about God through the actions of their parents. “When a child is young, his parents are the only ‘god’ he knows,” they write. “As he awakens to Divine realities, it is through his earthly father that he understands his heavenly Father.” What kind of God are the children of fundamentalist Christianity encountering?

The Pearls tell what they think reads as a humorous anecdote of a small girl who is caught in some kind of misdeed. She “turned her backside to her parents, pulled her diaper down, and gave herself three slaps on the bare bottom,” they write. “The offering, though cute, was not accepted. The lawgiver must administer this kind of chastisement in order to effectively remove guilt. A child knows but one lawgiver—his parents.”

The God that the children of fundamentalist Christianity are meeting is one who punishes with pain because of how deeply he loves (how many times have we heard that God loves us so much that he tortured his own child?). To a child of this world, God takes physical form not in the body of his son, but in the child’s parents. They represent God to him.

This is what the god of the fundamentalist child is instructed to do verbatim by the Pearls in order to cleanse that child of evil.

“When the time comes to apply the rod, take a deep breath, relax, and pray, ‘Lord, make this a blessing to my child. Cleanse him of ill temper and rebellion. May I properly represent you in this chastisement.’ Unless all else fails, don’t drag him to the place of cleansing. Part of his training is to come submissively. However, if you are just beginning to institute training on an already rebellious child who runs from discipline, and he is too disturbed to listen, then you must constrain him. If you have to sit on him to spank him, then do not hesitate. And hold him there until he has surrendered. Prove that you are bigger, tougher, more patiently enduring, and are unmoved by his wailing. Hold the resisting child in a helpless position for several minutes, or until he is totally surrendered. When you administer the rod, tell him to bend over on the bed or couch. Slowly begin to spank.”

I’ve been thinking about this one particular day two years ago while I’ve been (slowly, agonizingly) working my way through writing this piece. I was seven months pregnant and I tagged along with my husband to his work event in Malibu; I spent the day wandering around the town and the neighborhoods and the beaches and the campus of Pepperdine. I remember how cool and misty the morning was and how hot the day turned, how slowly (and sweatily) I climbed up and down the stairs that take you down to the sand and up to the hills.

I don’t know why exactly I’ve been thinking so much about this day. I think it’s because I remember in that very solitary day feeling how lucky I was, pregnant after years of trying. How present this tiny in-utero baby felt to me (as he kicked at my lungs). The thought of bringing him into the world only to harm him felt unfathomable to me then and unfathomable to me now.

“You should even be able to take a nap and expect to find the house in order when you awake,” the Pearls say. Well, consider this, Pearls: I don’t want to do that. I don’t want a child who is subject to me. I’m not his ruler. I’m sustaining him, always devoured and never consumed. I don’t know if I represent God to him, but he certainly reveals God to me.

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If you want to read more about Debi Pearl…