Evangelical women join political fray
Jill Boswell never used to be political. Like many other suburban moms in her small California town 40 minutes outside Sacramento, her family attended a nondenominational evangelical church, her husband worked a middleclass job and her three children attended the local public school. When it came to politics, Boswell’s engagement was limited to praying for candidates and voting in major elections.
But that changed for her last year and in recent years, for many other white, evangelical women across the country. These women have found their political voice and they are exercising it — including in this midterm election.
For Boswell, her activism started in November 2021 when her 8-year-old son woke up and declared that God didn’t want him to wear a mask to school anymore. Boswell and her husband supported their child’s decision, so he and his siblings went to school without masks — defying the state-mandated order at the time that school-aged children wear face masks in the classroom to slow the spread of COVID-19. By lunchtime, the school sent Boswell’s children home.
Since they weren’t permitted to enter a classroom without a mask, Boswell’s children stayed home and eventually were issued truancy notices, as required by state law when a child has three or more unexcused absences. In response, Boswell and her mom-friends began picketing outside the school every morning. They were supported by advocacy groups like Let Them Breathe, a nonprofit that advocates for children’s “freedom,” started by another Christian mom who is now running for school board.
Mask mandates and vaccinations may have turned Boswell into a conservative activist, but it certainly did not end there. Like many other white evangelical women, Boswell extended her crusading to other core conservative issues: ensuring the total eradication of abortion and promoting traditional gender identities in education.
Boswell’s story is not unique. Since I began researching white evangelicals and politics six years ago, I’ve observed a groundswell of evangelical women who are becoming politically active like never before. The combination of the 2020 presidential election and the pandemic has spurred women to form grassroots movements such as Moms on the Ground and to set up Go Fund Me accounts to finance moms on the front lines. They have joined school board races and run in other local elections, written books, pulled their kids from mainstream schools and started home school groups. One woman I interviewed left her job and ran for Congress in the past election, hoping to challenge sex education and — in her words — the “LGBT agenda” in public schools.
In many ways, evangelical women’s political engagement today mirrors that of evangelical women in the 1960s and 1970s: It is conservative, grassroots, gender-specific and undergirded by faith. Then as now, these women’s involvement in politics centers on and reaffirms their identity as traditional women, and specifically, moms. As Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin said last year in his acceptance speech, referring to the ultra-conservative women who helped elect him, “Way to go, mama bears! You guys were awesome.”
But the political activism of today’s evangelical women does differ from the women that came before them. Whereas key figures from the movement in the ’70s and ’80s, like Beverly LaHaye and Tammy Faye Baker, exerted their political influence alongside that of their husbands, today’s women mostly operate independently of their spouses and on their own terms. Many of the women I’ve met have husbands who are far less politically engaged — one woman said her husband doesn’t even vote, while she regularly marches against mandatory vaccinations at the state capitol.
And while abortion and advocating for children remain priorities for them, just as they were for their predecessors 40 years ago, new causes are galvanizing them as well: crushing the “trans movement” and challenging pro-Black initiatives, including critical race theory, Black Lives Matter and the 1619 Project.
The criticism from the left starting in 2016 that Trump was sexist and antiwoman fired up many conservative evangelical women. “Who are you to speak for me?” they asked liberals, in reaction to the narrative that their candidate was a chauvinist — with 73% of them voting for him that election year.
And even though Trump is no longer president, evangelical moms are still carrying his message, and method, forward. As these women come to the political forefront in their communities, political strategists in both parties will have to take gender into account in a way they never have when thinking about evangelicals.
Politics used to be the evangelical man’s domain. Not anymore.
Evangelical women have entered the arena, in elected and unelected positions, ready to lead. In the words of one mom I interviewed: “We tried being nice, and it didn’t work. The time has come to fight fire with fire.”
It will take some time before political analysts are able to determine just how big of an impact these women made in this year’s election. But that they are a politically active, networked and motivated force is undeniable.