Christian Conservative Women Aren't Who You Think They Are

You probably think you understand conservative Christian women. You’ve got them figured out—trapped in outdated gender roles, easily manipulated, voting against their own interests. Except you might be wrong. That’s the unsettling premise of Katie Gaddini’s new book, *Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right*, a decade-long research project built on something radical: actually listening to the women involved.

Gaddini, an associate professor of sociology at University College London who grew up evangelical herself, interviewed 85 women across the conservative movement and discovered something far more complicated than the caricatures the left trades in. Take Sharon, a Black woman working in Portland, Oregon’s liberal state government office—everyone assumes she’s a Democrat. Wrong. Every Tuesday she teaches faith and politics at her evangelical church. Wednesdays and Sundays she distributes leaflets for conservative events. Weekends, she’s at the state capitol fighting what she sees as the Democratic indoctrinating agenda. She’s not an outlier; she’s one of six distinct categories Gaddini identifies, from“mama bears”weaponizing motherhood for political gain to college activists to the white suburbanites who turned out to be Trump’s decisive margin in 2024.

What makes *Esther’s Army* genuinely revealing isn’t that Gaddini disagrees with her subjects—she clearly does. It’s that she resists easy explanations. Yes, there are contradictions everywhere: these women praise stay-at-home motherhood while prioritizing political careers; they attack public education while enrolling their own kids in private Christian schools. Previous scholars like Andrea Dworkin have argued that right-wing ideology offers women a political outlet for rage, or that activism itself is a bid for male-dominated subculture acceptance. Gaddini acknowledges the logic but ultimately rejects it.“The women I’ve met are not irrational or easily controlled,”she concludes,“nor are they unhappy. They remain enigmatic, perplexing, and paradoxical, yes, but also clear-eyed and competent.”

That competence matters. One source explains why she supports Trump bluntly:“We tried the nice Christian Republicans. We had Mitt Romney. Those candidates don’t win. And so, I think that Republicans realized that we need someone with sharper teeth.”For white suburbanites, the calculus hinges on perceived threats—Muslims in 2016, Black Americans in 2020, Latin American men in 2024. When a Seattle mother gets trapped on a freeway during Black Lives Matter protests, punches fly, and off-duty sheriffs get hired to clear her street, that’s not a minor inconvenience to her. It reads as social collapse, a direct assault on the life she’s earned.

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting: the women Gaddini studied overwhelmingly reject the“trad wife”influencer aesthetic. Only one of her 85 subjects followed a trad wife online. Instead, they gravitate toward figures like Allie Beth Stuckey, a relatable millennial Texan mom whose Instagram includes messy living rooms and imperfect real life—not airbrushed domesticity. They want authenticity, not performance. They want leaders who acknowledge flaws. This suggests the conservative female activism pipeline runs on something more sophisticated than nostalgia for traditional roles. These women are building actual power.

Yet Gaddini herself—having abandoned the evangelical worldview she once held—never explains her own conversion. That’s the book’s most glaring gap. It’s easy to theorize about why people we disagree with believe what they do. It’s infinitely harder to sketch a path out of that worldview, which means neither Gaddini nor her readers have much guidance on how to actually bridge the divide, rather than simply deepen it. The challenge isn’t understanding these women anymore. It’s figuring out what comes next.