The Political Power of Christian Right Women

[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now, we'll talk to the author of a new book called Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right. The author, Katie Gaddini, is a former evangelical Christian who was once a registered Republican. Now, she's a sociologist who researches right-wing Christian women.

She's a visiting scholar at Stanford, an associate professor of sociology at the Social Research Institute at University College in London, and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg Department of Sociology. She spent 10 years speaking to right-wing Christian women in communities like the one she came from, trying to understand how they ended up becoming such Trump supporters for one thing, and other things about their lives in politics. Professor Gaddini, congratulations on the book. Welcome to WNYC.

Katie Gaddini: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, are you a conservative Christian woman? What might others be misunderstanding about you? Maybe you're one of those who wants to repeal the 19th Amendment, the one giving women the right to vote. That's a bit of a movement now. For anyone else, if you have questions for our guest, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Call or text. Will you talk about yourself a little first, where and how did you grow up as it relates to what you researched for this book?

Katie Gaddini: Sure, so I grew up in Northern California. My dad was a Baptist minister. There are four other evangelical pastors in my wider family. When it came time to register to vote, I naturally voted Republican. That's what my family and all my friends were Republicans. I went to a conservative evangelical college, and that was my whole community.

I didn't really question the fusion between evangelicalism and conservative politics until later in my 20s when I left my community, and I moved to Boston for grad school and started to meet folks who were Democrats and who were not evangelical. It stopped making sense to me that it was naturally fused that to be a white evangelical in this country is to be a Republican. I started to untangle both of those different institutions, but also my affiliation with them, and the way that they are so merged in this country.

Brian Lehrer: If people are wondering if this book is a kind of attack against a culture you rejected, I know you would say it's not, but how would you like the people you write about to think of it?

Katie Gaddini: My aim going into this book and the research that informs it was genuine curiosity. I had lived out of the States for 12 years at this point and really wanted to know why these women would support Trump that is a different candidate than when I was in the Republican Party. I also wanted to know how they were getting so involved in politics. That curiosity drove the project. I also wanted to showcase women's voices.

There have been so many books and articles written about the Christian right and the Christian right under Donald Trump, and women's voices are often missing from those accounts. We don't hear from women themselves. They're seen as ancillary to the MAGA project. I hope that the women that I feature in my book would feel that I represented their stories accurately and truthfully and that the connections that I formed with them, which were genuine, came through, even though I'm doing it from a perspective as a scholar and not as a MAGA supporter myself.

Brian Lehrer: The title of the book again is Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right. For our less biblically inclined listeners, who is Esther?

Katie Gaddini: Esther is a queen in the Old Testament, also in the Hebrew Bible. She was married to the King of Persia. In the book of the Bible named after her, she was keeping the fact that she was Jewish a secret from the king. Then, when there was an order to kill all the Jews, she intervened and pled with the king to spare them. Interestingly, in that book, she says, "If I perish, I perish." She knew she was risking a lot by going to the king. Long story short, she ended up saving the Jews. There is a Jewish holiday named after her, Purim, which happens every year.

What's interesting about the quote, "If I perish, I perish," is that that is used a lot in right-wing Christian women's gatherings, activism, and rallies today. They transport the Old Testament story onto contemporary politics. They see themselves as the Esther figure, who is tasked with saving the nation from destruction or the nation's children from destruction. They're willing to risk everything to do it, and they would chant that phrase, "If I perish, I perish." That's how high they see the stakes, and that is how important they see their role in this story.

Brian Lehrer: What do they think they're trying to save the country from?

Katie Gaddini: It varies. Broadly, the left, the Democrats, what they call woke indoctrination, gender and sexual diversity, a cluster of different threats that they see as operating together that will cause the destruction of the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Destruction of the United States, and affect them personally because one might ask, "Well, how does somebody else, being gender non-binary or any of these other things, affect these Christian right-wing women? They can live how they want."

Katie Gaddini: When it comes to gender and sexual diversity, and this is pulling from a playbook that goes back to the '80s, there is a sense with right-wing Christian women and men that it's somewhat of a contagion, and that it won't just affect the individuals who are non-binary or who are LGTBQ, but that it could spread to their children and their communities as well. It has to be eradicated so that it can't reach into their Christian communities.

Brian Lehrer: Through your research, you divided this "army" into six groups. I'm just going to read out your list, and we'll go down it a little bit. College idealists, anti-feminist powerhouses, Black conservatives, MAHA, social media influencers, white suburbanites, and what you call Mama Bears. That's quite a diverse group across age, race, and class. What's a Christian conservative college idealist?

Katie Gaddini: I did most of this fieldwork at Liberty University, which is the country's largest conservative Christian college. I think their current enrollment is 140,000 students. That's online and offline, and I really wanted to find out--

Brian Lehrer: People of a certain age will remember Jerry Falwell, founder of that Christian right activist.

Katie Gaddini: Of course, and he was one of the architects of the Christian right. His legacy really lives on in Liberty today because it's become this factory. It was described to me by a conservative political consultant as a factory that is churning out conservative leaders. When I heard that, I thought, "I have to go here. I have to find out how this factory works in real time. I have to find out how women are involved in this factory, to what extent." What I found over my visits there is that, indeed, it is a training ground for future conservative leaders.

There is very specific instances and opportunities that are presented to young men and women to learn political skills, to make the right connections, to go to law school, Liberty has its own law school, and to really reach the top echelons of power. Whereas historically, this was the pipeline for young men, women are hugely important to the pipeline today. In fact, there are women-specific areas of this youth pipeline. They want to train up young women to become leaders. This is a massive shift from the '70s, '80s, and even '90s.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "The degree of dedication that some evangelical conservative women have to the cause, such that they would give up their own right to vote, makes me wonder about the degree of influence evangelical white Christian men have on the vision of what it means to be a good woman. Does your guest have any thoughts or findings in this area?" Do you understand the question?

Katie Gaddini: Yes, so this is actually one of the views that I came across a lot from people outside these communities, which is that a lot of the political engagement, but also the visions of what it means to be a woman, were coming from the men in these women's lives. I knew from my own experience in conservative evangelicalism that that wasn't necessarily true. Indeed, I found in nine years of research that that wasn't holding true. A lot of the women I met take their inspiration from womanhood directly from their interpretation of the Bible.

They take it from other women, more visible women, who are either in pop culture or in law or even in the church. They take it from each other. They inspire each other with what it means to be the right kind of woman. Another big shift I noticed, because my research goes back to 1970, is that today's conservative Christian women are really ambitious. They see themselves as having a pivotal role in politics, whereas women in the past were much more cagey about that and much more hewing closer to these traditional roles of stay-at-home motherhood. That seems to have softened.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "What I don't get, if the Esthers want to be tradwives and some are against women having the vote, then why are they out and about involved in politics, not homekeeping house and taking care of children?" Interesting question.

Katie Gaddini: I have to say I did not encounter any women who are supportive of removing women's right to vote. That was not something I came across. I also have to say I didn't just study evangelical women. I started off wanting to study them, but I ended up expanding to look at mainline Christian and Catholic women as well. What I found when I got into the field was that different denominations of Christian women are organizing together politically and casting aside their denominational differences.

The idea of repealing the 19th Amendment, I know this has got a lot of traction recently, especially in the news. This is not an idea or an endorsement that I came across in my research. Women might ascribe to traditional gender roles like stay-at-home motherhood and homeschooling, but they never advocated for women to lose the right to vote.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. All right, back to the six groups that you cited. Another one is anti-feminist powerhouses, but you write that some Christian conservative women do embrace a version of feminism while others do not, right?

Katie Gaddini: Yes, this was something that was really surprising for me. I knew about the anti-feminists from the '70s and '80s, Phyllis Schlafly, Beverly LaHaye, who were so involved in public politics under the banner of opposing feminism. Yet, today, women I met and interviewed and analyzed who are in holding office and are more public roles sometimes even called themselves feminists. They would call themselves conservative feminists, MAGA feminists.

They really wanted to be clear that they had a different version of feminism from liberal feminism, but they were inching closer than I had seen in decades to reclaiming that term for the conservative side and saying, "Hey, feminism is not just the purview of the left. We can be feminists, too. We can be pro-life feminists, and we can be MAGA feminists even." That was a really interesting distinction was the relationship with feminism and how it's changed, especially women who are in powerful roles.

Brian Lehrer: Tradwives is not one of your six categories of the people you found and interviewed. Why not?

Katie Gaddini: This was another decision that arose because of the fieldwork data that I received. I went into the study really led by curiosity, as I mentioned. I covered 28 states, 9 years, over 85 interviews. I really wanted to see what was out there before circumscribing what it looked like to be a right-wing Christian woman today. In all of that fieldwork, only one woman told me she followed an influencer who I would classify as a tradwife.

Instead, the women that I met were looking toward other social media influencers like Allie Beth Stuckey, Candace Owens, Alex Clark for inspiration on how to live, how to be a mother, Christian living, but also politics. One of the distinctions is the classic tradwife archetype is largely aesthetic and aspirational, and they don't necessarily platform-explicit partisan politics, even though they certainly uphold gender and sexual norms aligned with the GOP, whereas the influencers that the women in my study told me about and who I later ended up studying have much more explicitly political content. They also themselves advocate for women being in the public sphere and are vocal about not being tradwives.

Brian Lehrer: Dominic in the Bronx, you're on WNYC with Katie Gaddini, author of the new book Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right. Hello, Dominic.

Dominic: Hi, guys. Good morning, Brian. As you might know, I'm a regular pain in the butt. I wanted to ask. This is fascinating. Did Katie have a chance to ask these students and some of the professors at these evangelical universities? What did they think about the fact that they were an activist campus, indoctrinating their students into a certain political thing?

I teach at CUNY, and we are woke as hell. We teach history. We teach English and math. We include all of our students, most of whom are immigrants and people of color. Brian, I don't even hide my politics. They're on my sleeve. I wonder, it seems like in the evangelical here, it's the opposite. That sounds like identity politics. I wonder how they balance that. It's activism rather than education. Did you get a chance to talk to them about that?

Brian Lehrer: Professor Gaddini?

Katie Gaddini: Thanks, Dominic. That's a great question. I actually ended up going to an event one evening. The women that I had grown quite close to at Liberty suggested I go. They said it was one of their favorite professors was speaking, was an evening event, and this was two days after Trump was elected in 2024. This was a history professor. I fully expected that she would make her talk about Trump's reelection.

Instead, she spent her 30-minute lecture talking about a somewhat obscure character from the Old Testament. Even with my own knowledge of the Bible, I was struggling to track the resonance in the present day. It wasn't till the end, till she started making clear, "This was an unsavory character from the Bible. This was a very flawed character. Look at all these amazing things God did through him," and then she pivoted.

She started calling out students by name who were in the audience and saying, for example, "Justine, you could be the next governor. Bobby, you could be the next senator," and appointing them to these political roles, having given this allegorical story of an Old Testament, who was clearly supposed to be related to Trump. What I took away from that experience was that rather than explicit instruction to students, "You should vote for Trump, and here's all the reasons," there's a savvier and a more strategic way of integrating conservative politics and inspiring young students to be political leaders, rather than this overt method that perhaps I expected to find.

Brian Lehrer: Fascinating. You seem, in the book, to have the Christian right women perception of Trump as manly in a way that they like, even sexualized as a figure in his 2016 campaign, but more of a fatherly protector to this group in the 2024 race and today. Can you describe a little of the appeal of each period?

Katie Gaddini: Yes, that's right. What I noticed in 2016 is there was a real energy around Trump. At that point, I was interviewing men and women, actually, Christian men and women. There was a sense that he's this outside candidate, he's rogue, he is going to shake things up. When women would talk about him, it was almost, yes, there was a level of sexual appeal or titillation around him.

By the time 2024 came along, obviously, Trump had aged in that period. There had been a host of accusations against him, but also convictions, and it was almost a weariness. He was portrayed more as a grandfatherly figure who is still really strong, still able to get the job done, but the relationship to him was different. I characterize it along those terms to describe the way that I noticed women were talking about him.

Brian Lehrer: The Bible is full of figures who are highly imperfect but necessary, right? It's something like that?

Katie Gaddini: Yes, exactly. There's been a lot, especially in Trump's first turn, made of the comparisons of him with King David. As I mentioned from my experience at Liberty, there are other Old Testament figures that he was compared to. This is something that struck me, though. Again, as someone who has grown up in this community, and I know my Bible really well, is so much of the political conversation, the rallies, the events, the classes at Liberty related to the contemporary political moment in Old Testament language instead of New Testament language. This is significant when you consider that the evangelical faith is built around the character of Jesus. Jesus was conspicuously missing from a lot of these stories, a lot of these passages that were read at rallies. It was really related more to the Old Testament, especially when it came to the character of Trump.

Brian Lehrer: The Access Hollywood tape in 2016 in which he boasted, maybe jokingly, maybe not, about grabbing women by the genitals and saying, "When you're famous, they let you do it." So many Americans saw that as disgusting, obviously, even in admission of sexual assault. Melania dismissed it as boy talk. You seem to have found some of this population found it to be a positive, or am I overstating that?

Katie Gaddini: I wouldn't say a positive. I would say, at best, it didn't bother them. They didn't think anything of it. They completely rid it off. Some women were bothered by it, but not enough to weaken their allegiance to Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Last group, and then we're out of time. From your list of six, a group you called "Blexiters," Black conservative women, Blexiters. What does that word mean, and how do you describe them? After all, 90%, I think that's an accurate stat, 90% of Black women voted against Trump each of the three times he ran for president.

Katie Gaddini: Yes, so this was a chapter I wasn't sure about including because, on the one hand, in the course of my research, I came across several Black Christian women who were Trump supporters. On the other hand, it's a small part of the population. However, when we look at 2024, 10% of Black women voted for Trump. That's a small number. When we put that in historical comparison, that's the largest vote share a Republican presidential candidate has received in over 30 years.

This is when he was running against a mixed-race woman. There is something curious going on there, and that ultimately why I decided to keep it in, in addition to the fact that I think Black conservative women have a really unique relationship with the MAGA movement. On the one hand, several of them are part of this Blexit movement, which was co-led and started by Candace Owens and was a push to get Black Americans to leave the Democratic Party and come to the Republican side.

It was folded into Turning Point. Now, it's part of their larger project on TPUSA RISE, which is a minority grassroots organization. On the one hand, they want their political affiliation and their activism to be taken seriously, even though they are such a small population within the GOP. On the other hand, they do experience marginalization and isolation because there are not many other people like them in the Republican Party.

There's also not a lot of MAGA supporters in Black communities. I found their experience of isolation and marginalization, but not having the language to describe that because doing so would be to adopt the language of the left, language of marginalization, even that word. I found that position so interesting, so difficult, so hard to put into words, and a singular experience that really needed to be included along the wider groups that we're more familiar with.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give me one thought that I'm sure is outside the book on the current moment and these women? Trump's popularity is in decline among many groups. I'm not sure if among this group, and as it pertains to the war and the effects of the war on gasoline prices and the "no more forever wars" MAGA ethic, but maybe these women who are Christian conservatives are also Christian Zionists, and they're more for it even now. Can you give me anything on that?

Katie Gaddini: I've noticed a real shift over the last year when it comes to support for Israel. I've noticed a few things. One, I've noticed the Christian conservative women's support for the war is very, very low. They also are tying it to support for Israel, which I think has run the space of acceptability for them. At the same time, the Epstein files was another red line that a lot of conservative Christian women can't get past because it pertain to children.

I do think that the relationship with Trump is fracturing. I don't know the extent to how that fracture will play out, but I also think it's not even so much about Trump anymore. The MAGA movement is its own movement. It's got its own energy behind it that will go on beyond Trump, and that, for women, they are carrying on with these issues, the style of politics, the focus that he had, the language that was created during that period, and Trump is not as key to it anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, fascinating. We're actually about to do our next segment as a very early call-in for Democrats on who they're interested in for president in 2028, because there's a lot of news about that being made already. What about this group, if you can say? Are they seeing JD Vance as the default because he comes out of Christian conservatism, or anything to say to that in 10 seconds?

Katie Gaddini: Oh, God, that's hard. I would say in 10 seconds, I'm not sure that he's the heir apparent. I would look to candidates like Ted Cruz and candidates that ran alongside Trump in previous elections rather than JD Vance.

Brian Lehrer: Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right is the book. Katie Gaddini is the author. Thank you so much for sharing your research with us.

Katie Gaddini: Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Copyright © 2026 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.