(Image source: Lausanne)

This past June, I found myself standing in line in a progressive, independent bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan, thinking about irony: here I was, a once pro-life, deeply committed, conservative Christian, about to sign a reproductive-rights petition a few days after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion. I never would have believed that I would one day use my name, my voice, and my vote to advocate for reproductive freedom.

Until my mid-twenties, I lived in a family that followed the rules of Christian patriarchy, a fringe movement that promotes biblical literalism, discrete gender roles, purity culture, the unquestioned authority of fathers, and the submission of women. While patriarchal societies have existed since the beginning of civilization, this form of religious patriarchy has spread in the United States since the 1970s in reaction to second-wave feminism and the legalization of abortion.

Even though men benefit the most from patriarchal systems, white evangelical women were among the first to popularize the patriarchal lifestyle. In 1977, prominent evangelical Nancy Campbell started publishing a magazine called Above Rubies, which still runs today, that idealizes stay-at-home motherhood and discourages women from working outside the home. More than one hundred thousand people follow the Above Rubies Facebook page today, where posts encourage women to prioritize maternity above all else. One such post reads, “Motherhood is the only career that lasts for eternity. Don’t waste your life on things that you will leave behind.”

For the Christian patriarchy movement, feminism is a dangerous threat. In 1985, Mary Pride, an evangelical who was influential in the early homeschooling movement, wrote a book called The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality. Pride claimed she was a former feminist who found her way to Christianity. She was against all forms of birth control and believed women must let God decide how many children they should have.

The Christian patriarchy movement is not a centralized organization. Rather, it spans across various evangelical and Reformed Protestant churches, making it impossible to determine how many followers exist. And yet, the Christian patriarchy movement’s influence has become increasingly visible in national and local politics. Understanding the teachings and influence of Christian patriarchy is key to making sense of the rise of Christian nationalism within the Republican Party and the concurrent loss of civil liberties, such as reproductive rights, across the country.

Life under Christian Patriarchy

Growing up as a child in the Christian patriarchy movement, I was taught from an early age to believe that my calling in life was to get married, provide a sexual outlet for my husband, and have as many children as God would bless me with raising. I was not allowed to date, leave home after high school graduation, work for an employer who was not my father, or make life decisions independently. I was required to live with my parents until marriage, submitting to my father in all things.

I became what the Christian patriarchy movement calls a “stay-at-home daughter,” practicing my future of being a stay-at-home wife by being a daughter who served her father. My only way out was to marry a man who met with my father’s approval.

Because my parents homeschooled me, I received no sex education beyond the rule that I was not allowed to have sex until my wedding night. I do not remember ever being taught about the concept of consent. In fact, the patriarchal church we attended when I was a teenager considered my lack of autonomy and independence holy because it meant I had submitted to my father and to “God’s will.” If I were to exert any semblance of my own rights to my life and body, I would have been labeled sinful and possibly excommunicated. Fear of abandonment and exile kept me in check.

Church leaders in this movement condemned contraception as people’s “attempts to play God,” and many went as far as to say birth control was sinful. As an unmarried young woman, I was not allowed to receive the HPV vaccine and was discouraged from seeing an OB/GYN because it was presumed that I would be sexually inactive until marriage. Nothing was said about what would happen if I were raped, because according to the teachings of Christian patriarchy, girls who live under the protection of their fathers do not need to worry about that. If I were married in the movement, I would not have received any help for potential marital rape, as the concept was nonexistent in a world where women are to give all of themselves to their husbands in order to obey God.

(Image source: Rocco Fazzari)

I was taught that patriarchy would protect me, but I did not feel safe because I had no say in what that protection would look like. Instead of protecting me, my father controlled all aspects of my life and based his rules on the movement’s teachings. After I started to experience depression, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms, I began to understand that Christian patriarchy was a form of spiritual abuse.

I finally escaped at the age of twenty-five after finding the resources and supportive friends I needed to survive outside of the community. Even so, it took me years to process the trauma and powerlessness I had experienced in not having rights over my own body. In working through my time within Christian patriarchy, I came to see how the movement’s influence extends far beyond homes like my parents’ and into mainstream American politics.

Michigan’s Reproductive Freedom for All

Along with the more than 600 people who visited the bookstore that summer day, I signed the Reproductive Freedom for All petition to add a proposal for an amendment to the Michigan state constitution that would, in part, “establish new individual right to reproductive freedom, including right to make all decisions about pregnancy and abortion; allow state to regulate abortion in some cases; and forbid prosecution of individuals exercising established right.” Throughout the state, activists gathered 753,759 total signatures from voters in every county, 300,000 more than needed to ensure the proposal would be on the ballot in November.

After the overturning of Roe, Michigan was set to have a near-total abortion ban based on a 1931 law that predates oral contraceptive pills. Although a Michigan judge put a temporary hold on this ban, hundreds of thousands of Michiganders worried that reproductive rights were about to disappear.

When I first heard the Supreme Court’s decision, I was surprised by the bodily reaction I had. I could feel the ache of adrenaline in the back of my neck. My stomach rolled. My thoughts scattered, then focused on what this ruling would mean. My body knew what my mind had taken so long to understand: authoritarian control over our bodies is dehumanizing, disempowering, and dangerous.

With the overthrow of Roe, experts have warned that loss of bodily autonomy will cause more fatalities for pregnant people and more severe inequality throughout the country. This kind of inequality is nothing new, and many people already experience this in marginalized communities and high-control religious groups across the globe, including the United States. In fact, an estimated 45 percent of women worldwide, according to a 2021 report from the United Nations, lack bodily autonomy, which the report’s authors define as women’s “ability to make their own decisions on issues relating to health care, contraception and whether to have sex.”

(Rally in Michigan to support legal abortion. Image source: Emily Elconin for Getty Images)

I can attest to what it is like to be controlled in this way, to live without self-ownership. I now fear what our country will be like as Christian patriarchy principles are applied to laws that govern all of us.

Dominionism

To recognize how the ideas of Christian patriarchy are infiltrating American politics, we must understand the related ideology of dominionism, “the belief that Christians should take moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical control over society.” Christian patriarchy and dominionism both originate from the idea that the Bible is the inerrant, literal word of God and is meant to rule all aspects of society. In patriarchy, fathers rule the household; in dominionism, Christian men rule the church and government.

Children like me learned the principles of dominion theology through religion-based homeschooling curricula. One year, my history course consisted of listening to tapes from the Christian Reconstructionist R. J. Rushdoony, whose hefty Institutes of Biblical Law includes such ideas as this: “The social order which despises God’s law places itself on death row: it is marked for judgment.” Reconstructionism is a strict form of dominionism that promotes theonomy, a government that would be based on biblical law. In Rushdoony’s view, a government that does not obey biblical law would be subject to God’s judgment.

Rushdoony died in 2001, but his ideas and the teachings of other dominionists have been influential in the overlapping worlds of religious homeschooling and Christian patriarchy, and followers are working to impose their views on society.

Take for example the town of Moscow, Idaho, home of Doug Wilson’s Christ Church. Wilson is a highly recognized and admired pastor in the Christian patriarchy movement, and his empire-making machine of churches, a college, a publishing house, and a streaming service churn out content that gives his teachings of female subordination and male domination the facade of validity by showing the patriarchal lifestyle in an idealized, highly polished way.

Dominionism is a clear part of Wilson’s plan. According to an investigation conducted by The Guardian, “Christ Church has a stated goal to ‘make Moscow a Christian town’ and public records, interviews, and open source materials online show how its leadership has extended its power and activities in the town.” Ten percent of Moscow’s population are members of Christ Church and its affiliated churches, and the congregation has been known to gain influence by owning property and businesses and running for local political offices. While many of the other residents are resistant to Wilson’s ideology, his popularity continues to rise in conservative circles and has gained the attention of national media.

Another example is my own previous pastor, Kevin Swanson, who has long blurred the line between church and state. In 1994, he ran for governor of Colorado as part of the religious Constitution Party. Forty thousand residents voted for him, less than 4 percent of the total votes. But even though he failed in his political campaign, he worked to gain power in other ways, including becoming executive director of the statewide Christian homeschool organization, Christian Home Educators of Colorado. He later made national news when he spoke at a Republican political event in 2015 when he said that, according to the Bible, “homosexuals” should receive the death penalty.

Both Wilson and Swanson unsurprisingly hold anti-abortion views, but their perspectives extend beyond abortion to broader issues of bodily autonomy.

Wilson’s book Fidelity, for instance, presents a distorted view of sex. He writes that “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage.” Such a teaching about sex leaves no room for consent and could serve as justification for marital rape. As a woman who was taught this, I believed I would need to have sex with my husband whenever he wanted it.

Swanson similarly promotes patriarchy and the subordination of women. He once spread misinformation about contraceptives on his radio show Generations: “…these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.” This is a blatantly false claim, causing only more shame for women who seek to have some control over their reproductive health.

Post Roe

Understanding the ideology of dominionists like Wilson and Swanson is important if we are to recognize the antidemocracy tactics of politicians influenced by dominionism. We are already seeing a push to bring “biblical law” to bear on state and federal legislation. Ohio, Georgia, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and South Carolina have all introduced bills that give personhood to fetuses from the moment of conception, and Georgia’s has passed. In September 2022, Senator Lindsey Graham introduced a bill that would institute a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks. Other legislation on contraception access has been introduced as well.

While most politicians pushing this agenda are unlikely to use the term dominionism, some fall into the related category of Christian nationalism, which is the belief that “America is Christian, that the government should keep it that way.” The difference between dominionism and Christian nationalism is subtle. Religion scholar Dr. Clint Heacock argues that Christian nationalism is a form of dominionism in which “the theology of conversionism and world missions has slowly been replaced over the decades with a view that holds that political means are the way to establish dominion.” In place of sending missionaries around the globe to convert “heathens,” countless churches are turning their attention to spreading Christian authority by influencing American politics. Dominionism and Christian nationalism are part of the same spectrum of religious authoritarianism—both strive for control; both hold Christianity as the superior religion fit to govern all.

Historian Dr. Kristin Kobes DuMez spoke to PBS recently about how this ideology is gaining power in the United States and threatening the democratic process. She said, “for many Christian nationalists, democratic means won’t necessarily achieve their ends. And so we’re seeing voter suppression, denial of voter suppression—that that’s even happening, and, again, this erosion to the commitment of democracy, and it’s really quite alarming.”

For dominionists and people in the Christian patriarchy movement, the dismantling of democracy makes perfect sense. God, not the will of the people, should have dominion over every part of society. From this perspective, theocratic control is much more important than protecting people’s rights.

To understand how destructive Christian nationalism is to a democratic society, we must also recognize how it is entangled with a belief in white supremacy. Dr. Jemar Tisby, a historian of race and religion, wrote in a report released by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, “Unfortunately, the white Christian nationalist version of patriotism is racist, xenophobic, patriarchal, and exclusionary. Their vision of the nation conveniently puts white people­—especially men—who are politically conservative and who make some claim of Christian adherence at the top of the social hierarchy.” Christian nationalism upholds a belief in the supremacy of white masculinity and conservative white evangelicalism.

If leaders influenced by dominionism and Christian nationalism get their way in criminalizing abortion across the country, Roe is just the beginning of more legislation that will restrict civil liberties for all of us. Those on the margins of society will suffer the most, including people in abusive relationships, the LGBTQ community, and people of color. These politicians do not take issue with the government controlling contraceptives, ending marriage equality, or restricting LGBTQ rights. They will not stop at Roe.

With the uncertainty of reproductive rights burdening all of us, I know this to be true: a future without bodily autonomy is too much like the past to which I never want to return.

But just as I was able to fight for my personal freedom to escape a restrictive religious movement, Americans are fighting to protect their rights for the future. In the midterm election, nearly 2.5 million Michigan residents voted in favor of the Reproductive Freedom for All proposal, ensuring that reproductive freedom will now be protected in the state constitution. As much as I know that religious extremism in government and rising Christian nationalism are dangerous, more than ever I believe that our voices and our votes do matter.

Cait West is a writer and editor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with publications in Religion Dispatches, Fourth Genre, and Hawai`i Pacific Review, among others. She serves on the editorial board for Tears of Eden, a nonprofit providing resources for survivors of spiritual abuse, and her forthcoming memoir on escaping the Christian patriarchy movement will be published in 2024.