Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 8.6% (116 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 4.2% (57 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 11.2% (151 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 10.8% (146 hits)
• Framing Effect - 2.7% (36 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 2.2% (30 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 2.7% (37 hits)
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 3% (41 hits)

Article text

Why Do Some Women Buy Into Right-Wing Ideology?

Sharon, one of the 85 women interviewed by academic Katie Gaddini for her insightful new book Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right, lives in Portland, Oregon, “a famously liberal administration in a notoriously blue state.”

Because Sharon is Black, everyone at the state government office where she works assumes that she’s a Democrat.

They’re wrong.

“Every Tuesday,” Gaddini writes, “Sharon drives straight to her evangelical church to teach a class on faith and politics, presenting the view that, according to the Bible, God created male and female, abortion is murder, and critical race theory conflicts with God’s design for human unity and harmony.

On Wednesdays and Sundays, she hands out leaflets to upcoming conservative events she’s organized, and on weekends she marches at the state capitol, to save children from what she considers the Democrats’ indoctrinating agenda.”

Gaddini herself—an associate professor of sociology at University College London—grew up in an evangelical household and once proudly voted for George W.

Bush.

Although her political views have changed (seemingly a lot, though she doesn’t get into details), she believes that most people to the left of her subjects think they understand these women, and don’t.

Sharon and her co-workers may be one of the more dramatic examples of this disconnect in Gaddini’s eye-opening study, the product of 10 years of intensive research, but they’re not the only one.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Esther’s Army is simply how much time Gaddini spent just listening to her subjects, time that clearly led to a sort of friendship with many of them, despite their differences.

In times like these, when people seem to pride themselves on making sweeping snap judgments about others based on relatively little information, this comes across as even a bit revolutionary.

Gaddini hopes that Esther’s Army—the title is a reference to an oft-cited biblical story about a woman who risks her own life to save the Jews of ancient Persia—will challenge “the simplistic, one-dimensional version offered by the Left.”

Most of the women Gaddini speaks to are politically active.

“They praise intensive, stay-at-home motherhood,” she writes, “yet frequently prioritize their political careers over their kids”—a contradiction often reflected by some of the most prominent women in MAGA circles, from Erika Kirk to Katie Miller.

These aren’t the only incongruities that puzzle Gaddini.

Such women often concentrate their activism on public education while enrolling their own kids in private Christian schools or homeschooling.

They disavow feminism while deploying “feminist rhetoric and strategy to make political claims.”

Gaddini is aware of theories that scholars and commentators like the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin have advanced for these conundrums, from the assertion that right-wing ideology “offers women a political schema for their unhappiness and rage” to viewing their activism as a bid for acceptance and protection in a male-dominated subculture.

Gaddini sees a bit of merit in those arguments but finds none of them satisfying.

“The women I’ve met are not irrational or easily controlled,” she writes, “nor are they unhappy.

They remain enigmatic, perplexing, and paradoxical, yes, but also clear-eyed and competent.”

It helps, perhaps to recognize that Christian conservative women aren’t all alike.

Gaddini finds six distinct categories: college activists, “mama bears” who use their motherhood as a political tool, Black evangelicals or “Blexiters,” powerhouse figures in conservative circles, influencers, and white suburbanites, the biggest group of all, and the decisive voters for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

It is a member of the final group who provides Gaddini with the only really convincing argument for why these champions of traditional virtues have supported a man who has routinely trampled on all of them.

The woman interrupts Gaddini’s questions to say, “We tried the nice Christian Republicans.

We had Mitt Romney.”

Those candidates, she argues, “don’t win.

And so, I think that Republicans realized that we need someone with sharper teeth.”

The white suburbanites Gaddini interviews perceive their existence—the predictable, well-ordered good life they feel they have earned—to be under attack by a changing cast of racialized outsiders, depending on whatever current event has mobilized their xenophobia.

“Muslims were the primary threat in 2016,” Gaddini writes, “Black Americans in 2020, and Latin American men in 2024.”

One of Gaddini’s sources in Seattle was trapped in her car with her kids on a freeway when Black Lives Matter protesters shut down traffic, and her neighbor was punched in the face by an activist.

Her block had to hire off-duty sheriffs to clear the streets of young people who blocked access, which incensed her, given Seattle’s high taxes.

Though these may sound like minor inconveniences to people caught up in what they felt to be an epochal call for racial justice, to Gaddini’s source, they amount to ominous signs of social decay and a direct attack on her own safety.

*Esther’s Army* further drives home the often-counterproductive results of actions by her subject’s critics.

In the chapter on young conservative women, a source Gaddini calls Alyssa (not her real name) maintains that her right-wing beliefs were cemented after she posted a photo to Instagram of herself and her sister standing next to a small Trump sign they had spotted in a rural area outside her largely liberal city.

She said her account was inundated with hostile messages, and when she returned to high school, she found she had become “a pariah” whose best friends no long spoke to her and whose classmates made TikToks mocking her and threatened to burn down her house.

No doubt those classmates (and many people reading this) believe that this purported treatment was merely what Alyssa deserved for endorsing a hateful candidate, but their shaming only strengthened her conservatism, leading her to enroll in Liberty University, a private evangelical college in Virginia that serves as a training ground for right-wing leaders.

There, she met other young women with similar experiences, women who might have opted for the traditional feminine roles they insist they subscribe to, but who are instead interning in Washington for conservative organizations like Concerned Women for America and planning to attend law school.

Liberty University, a nexus in Gaddini’s research, along with Turning Point USA, may serve as the nation’s “conservative youth pipeline,” but it is sometimes the very people who deplore those organizations who help feed youth into them.

Another fascinating tidbit Gaddini offers up is the fact that “in 10 years of research, only one right-wing Christian woman I interviewed said she followed a trad wife online,” undermining the common narrative that content creators who post idyllic-looking snippets of their stay-at-home, gender-role-adhering lives are speaking directly to conservative women.

Instead, the women Gaddini interviews follow influencers like Alex Clark and Allie Beth Stuckey, the latter a “down-to-earth millennial Texan mom you turn to for Christian lifestyle advice.”

Gaddini’s sources are drawn not to freakishly idealized performances of conventional femininity but to figures “who present outspoken personalities, common values, and relatable lives.”

On Stuckey’s Instagram feed, Gaddini spots a photo of “her son playing video games in a messy living room, which conveys just how imperfect, normal, and relatable Stuckey is.”

This turns out to be a recurring theme in Esther’s Army, an increasing attraction to public figures whose willingness to acknowledge their own flaws makes them come across as authentic.

In the end, though, Gaddini writes, “I have spent years studying right-wing Christian women and I still don’t fully understand them.”

Perhaps, really, her question is not how did they—raised in conservative evangelical households like the one in which she grew up—maintain their faith in those beliefs, but rather how she ended up abandoning them.

Yet Gaddini never offers an account of her own conversion, which leaves the reader, who likely shares her political beliefs, at a loss for a way out of our current divide.

It’s easy to speculate about how the people we disagree with became so delusional, but considering how they might be liberated from those delusions (rather than motivated to become even more effective crusaders for them) is a much more challenging exercise.