Marble Falls Talking to Katie Gaddini about her “I spy” sociological study of how conservative, largely evangelical Christian women were increasingly become the backbone of MAGA support was an eye opener. Gaddini had spent almost a decade interviewing people who were both big and small in the movement in order to get a grip on what was happening. Her interest had been piqued, because she had been raised in the milieu that produced many of these women. Coming from a family of evangelicals, a church school, and religious college education, she had a later epiphany as she studied and lived in various cities around the world, but her earlier life gave her some legitimacy, a common language, and experience that allowed her entry and understanding of these women. The end result was a book called, Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right.
This was a subject outside of my wheelhouse, but a source of no small amount of head scratching over the years, especially because women seemed so critical to the MAGA base, but its misogyny in word and deed was often so horrific that almost any woman’s support seemed a contradiction, especially in Trump world. Gaddini helpfully broke the women into generations of leadership. In the earliest cohort, many of them had been inspired by Reagan, his charisma, and speeches in a somewhat more moderate conservativism. Subsequent generations saw themselves as bulwarks holding the fort against leftward drifts in the culture that they felt threatened the family, at least their more traditional view of the family. Some, as we have seen, with Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, were aggressive and take-no-prisoners.
Becoming Esther’s Army is part of their self-identification as “bold, brave fighters.” Esther in the Bible was a young Jewish woman living in the 5th century in Persia, now largely Iran, and won the affection of the King becoming his queen “while hiding her true identity.” A court official convinces the king of a program to kill all the Jews under his rule, but her cousin challenges her to use her position to intervene. At the risk of her life, she does so and the king spares the Jews and instead kills the advisor that had lobbied for extermination. In contemporary times, she has become the Joan of Arc for many conservative women as they have also adopted personifications as Mama Bears in some camps as well.
I was interested in Gaddini’s centering of so much of the emergence and sustenance of these women leaders at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Beginning as another Christian college and training ground for evangelicals, the school has become huge and a mecca for women wanting to put their religious convictions into political action. For a minute, I wondered if progressives had any institution that could serve as an alternative to Liberty, but then I realized that from a conservative perspective all liberal arts colleges and universities are the alternative opposition.
A group of women called the “Blondes” was dominant at one point in the late 20th century that included women like Laura Ingraham and Anne Colter. More recently a new generation of young women, who some call “cuteservatives”, have been cultivated deliberately by groups that have sprung up like Turning Point, led by the recently assassinated Charlie Kirk. These women are “influencers” and embed their conservativism in podcasts and videos that many younger women and mothers find helpful in their lives and careers, but carry the right message. The Turning Point message that “politics is downstream from the culture” is one that is worth all of us thinking hard about, because the evidence of its truth seems characteristic of the current polarity of our politics and social views as well.
It’s impossible to dive into this world with Gaddini and not agree that Trump and MAGA might come and go, but this vein of the American right that sees itself in the reflection of Esther is very deep and will be part of the political and religious landscape for a long, long time.