The theologian and pastor Doug Wilson has been preaching from his corner, both literal and figurative, of the United States since the 1970s. He is co-founder of his own Christian denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which includes around 170 congregations across the country. He also leads an empire of ultraconservative ideas that encompasses a small university, a K-12 school, a streaming service, and a publishing house. He runs it all from the town of Moscow, Idaho, in one of the most conservative states in the Union.
There are many preachers like him in a country where religion is also a lucrative business. Few, however, can count among their followers the U.S. secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who has even invited Wilson to the Pentagon to deliver a sermon.
That closeness to Washington’s new center of power has recently drawn attention to the views of a religious leader who openly advocates a theocracy based on the principles of white Christian nationalism. In particular, scrutiny has focused on his proposal to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in 1920. Wilson would replace it with the system used in his own congregation, where voting is conducted “by household.” The goal, he argues, is to combat the “cancer of individualism” that, in his view, was introduced by the amendment.
It may sound outlandish and unrealistic to imagine the United States stripping women of their right to participate in the democratic process. Such a move would require the support of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. Then again, with the United States, one can never be entirely certain. Few expected the Supreme Court to overturn federal protections for abortion rights, yet that happened in 2022.
“The success of these formerly marginal theories in moving toward the center of political discourse, amid a broader global backlash, lies in the very fact that they have gained a degree of visibility and relevance,” political philosopher Wendy Brown, one of the most influential contemporary thinkers in the United States, writes in an email. “They are supported by both men and women, which means the women who endorse them are consciously willing to renounce their own status as citizens.”
Brown nevertheless considers more alarming, because they are far more “realistic,” the strategies with which Donald Trump is threatening to influence next November’s elections: “Gerrymandering, voter-identification laws, and intimidation tactics that suppress Black political participation and reduce Black electoral influence.”
“Wilson loves to provoke, hear himself speak and go viral with the most outrageous, hate-filled remarks,” says professor Matthew Avery Sutton, author of Chosen Land, a recent book that aims to serve as the definitive history of Christianity in the United States. “Almost no one in Moscow sees anything in him that resembles Jesus Christ, but the white nationalist militias of northern Idaho love what he represents.”
Wilson may be the best-known example, but he is far from the only figure using a megaphone to advocate stripping women of a right they have enjoyed for more than a century. His views are part of a broader movement that might best be described as “masculinism” for lack of a better label. As so often happens, it has gained traction through social media and within the online circles of the MAGA manosphere.
The rise of ‘masculinism’
Helen Lewis defined it in the June cover story of The Atlantic as “a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men.” It is a body of ideas rooted in religious traditions, built around the “notion of male headship and St. Paul’s belief that godly women should ‘be quiet,’” Lewis writes.
She notes, however, that secular masculinists are also increasingly prominent, including “nominally Muslim ones, such as the streamer Sneako, the self-proclaimed pimp Andrew Tate” and Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic and misogynistic leader of a segment of disaffected Generation Z men.
“Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements. You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex,” Lewis writes in her article.
Traces of masculinism can also be found in Washington — perhaps nowhere more so than at the top of the Pentagon, where Hegseth has systematically blocked the promotion of women and minorities within the military and recently sparked a political uproar by announcing mandatory testosterone testing for U.S. service members over the age of 30, whom he calls “warriors.”
The idea of “one family, one vote” — provided the vote belongs to the husband or, in the case of unmarried women, to a father, brother or uncle — has also found support among some women in Trump’s America and amid the online rise of the retrograde tradwife (traditional wife) lifestyle movement.
Perhaps the most prominent advocate of these views is influencer Savanna Stone, who took part in the Women’s Leadership Summit organized in June in San Antonio, Texas, by the MAGA youth advocacy group Turning Point. Founded by Charlie Kirk, who was killed in September 2025, the organization is now led by his widow, Erika Kirk.
Stone described feminism from the stage as “the spirit of Jezebel reborn,” a reference to the biblical queen who has come to symbolize manipulation. “Feminism is the biggest lie we have ever been sold as women,” Stone said. “[It] is a movement funded by the wealthiest evil people with the goal to destroy marriage and the family.”
During the 2024 election, a version of the “one family, one vote” idea gained traction in some Republican circles, including among Hispanic voters, where men were encouraged to oversee how their wives and daughters voted. The aim was to prevent them from casting ballots for Kamala Harris rather than for Trump. Fifty-four percent of women voted for Harris, compared with 44% who backed Trump.
Those elections produced a government with a conservative agenda that is reshaping the United States to such an extent that ideas once considered outlandish, such as barring women from voting, no longer seem entirely unimaginable. Political scientists refer to this as the Overton window, a concept describing how activists can make proposals that initially appear radical or unthinkable seem increasingly acceptable by shifting public debate with even more extreme ideas.
Trump has shown himself to be a firm believer in the effectiveness of that strategy, and in the notion that almost any idea can begin to sound reasonable if it is repeated often enough.
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