A decade into the Trump era, gender has become one of the most prominent and confounding stories in American politics. The conventional wisdom hasn’t changed much over time. In article after article, book after book, Trump is a strongman, beloved of voters who long for a patriarch; the villains are Evangelicals and angry Gen-Z men and women who must hate themselves. There is an element of truth to that story. Trump does owe much of his power to conservative, white Christians, and in 2024, the campaign made a point of courting the manosphere. By contrast, women seem more out of place on the New Right. If they have a clear role, it’s as mothers and guardians of national morality, but their authority has always been fragile, and it erodes more every day. Conservatives are questioning IVF and women’s suffrage and child-care funds for working parents, while their critics pose the same question, again and again: Why would any woman put up with all that?

The question persists because the answers are usually facile. Self-loathing explains little or nothing about women on the right. Katie Miller seems to like herself — and her ideology, and her ghoulish husband — very much. Nor does she appear delusional. Like her sisters in arms, she has chosen her life of her own volition, and if she has any regrets, she’s certainly not telling us. Indeed, the conservative “women I’ve met are not irrational or easily controlled; nor are they unhappy,” writes sociologist Katie Gaddini in her recent book, Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right. Instead, she says, they “remain enigmatic, perplexing, and paradoxical, yes, but also clear-eyed and competent.”

In Esther’s Army, Gaddini visits the young women of Liberty University, Black conservatives in the Deep South, and “mama bears” at an emotional rally on the National Mall. She discovers a multicultural coalition that defies easy narratives about right-wing women and what they believe and why. Although her subjects cite different catalysts for the ideological journeys they take, she says they’ve become activists “within a larger realignment of U.S. conservatism,” and their convictions mirror “a more nationalistic, aggressive, and conspiratorial branch of the Republican Party,” which now dominates American politics. Women receive signs and prophecies. Sometimes they believe things about vaccinations and masking that are false. Or they imagine liberal plots against free speech and Christianity that do not exist. They are mostly nativists and tend to share an attachment to a gender hierarchy with fathers at the top, although Gaddini is careful not to generalize. “Women in my study often described themselves in ways that didn’t match how I, as a political sociologist, would identify them,” she observes, recalling a subject who wants to ban abortion “under all circumstances” but calls herself “center-right,” even though she is on the fringes of public opinion.

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Gaddini is keen to understand her subjects’ “self-perception,” and so she takes them seriously, as a scholar and a former insider. Like me, Gaddini grew up Evangelical and attended a Christian college; she knows intimately the “contradictions” and “ideological knots” that........

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