At the end of 2024, singer and anti-LGBTQ activist Anita Bryant died. Bryant was a standardbearer and leader of movements in the 1970s that sought to demonize LGBTQ+ people. She popularized bigoted tropes that are still heard today.
While policies and culture associated with the Christian Right often value men’s leadership and patriarchal structures, coverage of Bryant’s death was a stark reminder of the role that women have played in right-wing Christian politics. It’s a misconception that men entirely run the movement. From the beginning, women have been influential leaders in right-wing Christian movements.
Though the women of the Christian nationalist movement generally get less recognition, PRRI’s past three studies of American values found that men aren’t more supportive of the ideology than women. “Women are just as likely to support Christian nationalism,” according to PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman. The research organization’s most recent look at American values, like their studies in 2023 and 2024, found no gender divide in support for Christian nationalist views. The ideology is strongly linked to “conspiratorial and racist views,” regardless of the person’s gender.
Ranging from Sarah Palin to Phyllis Schlafly, the women of the Christian Right have historically served a key role: making extremism more accessible, Deckman said. In her book, Tea Party Women, Deckman details Christian conservative women’s historic role in shifting politics rightward.
When stumping for conservative candidates, Schlafly, a devout Catholic, argued that women were guardians of virtue in the home who could “restore morality to our federal government.” In 1964, several prominent conservative women became board members for Mothers for Moral America, a group created to soften Barry Goldwater’s 1964 “law and order” campaign by playing up the country’s moral decline. The group’s mix of spiritual and patriotic overtones laid the groundwork for the current conservative movement, writes historian Michelle Nickerson in Mothers of Conservatism.
“The justification for women’s political activism and those movements was rooted in biblical ideas that women were more holy, more virtuous. In that guise, it was acceptable for them to have a limited area that they could be politically active,” Deckman said. Today, women hold high influence among the Christian Right, including executives at legal organizations, elected officials, and internet personalities. Here are some of the women worth knowing about.
Kristen Waggoner
Waggoner is the president, CEO, and general counsel of the Alliance Defending Freedom. Under her leadership, the ADF has strategically used the courts to further reshape the country in their perceived image of “God’s design,” including by using manufactured incidents to prop up their lawsuits.
The ADF, which believes that hate speech laws “undermine free speech and should be opposed,” launched the Center for Free Speech to ensure “consequences for the government actors and their proxies who operate the Censorship Industrial Complex.” They specifically pursue cases that could dismantle reproductive rights, lead to discrimination against queer people, and erode the separation of church and state.
Waggoner has been an integral part of several high-profile legal cases that have dismantled the rights of marginalized Americans. She was on Mississippi’s legal team in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and led to disastrous health outcomes for pregnant people across the country. She has also been brazen in her opposition to the rights of queer people. After the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationally in 2015, Waggoner told USA Today that the decision “not only jeopardizes religious freedom, but it jeopardizes all of our religious liberties.” Through the ADF, she tried to overturn a Washington law that banned licensed therapists from practicing conversion therapy, insisting the legal protection violated free speech and religious freedom rights.
Susan Rinkunas, reporting for Slate, predicts Waggoner and the ADF will try to influence the Trump administration toward goals such as banning abortion federally, reclassifying some contraceptives as abortion-inducing medication, undoing discrimination protections for trans people, among other efforts to enshrine right-wing religious views.
Jacky Eubanks
In addition to being a former staffer for the Trump-aligned nonprofit Turning Point USA, Eubanks is a self-described “Phyllis Schlafly heir apparent.” In 2022, she unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the Michigan House of Representatives. While on the campaign trail, she made headlines for espousing several Christian nationalist ideas and earning a Trump endorsement. In a 2022 interview, Eubanks told Michael Voris on the now-defunct Church Militant, “You cannot have a successful society outside of the Christian moral order, and things like abortion and things like gay marriage are outside of the Christian moral order.”
Eubanks lost the 2022 primary for the Michigan House seat. She now maintains a Substack where she promotes far-right Christian ideas, for example, that the female brain is wired to develop a “personality type that prefers homemaking and childcare.” In 2024, she joined a roundtable hosted by conservative outlet The Free Press. She argued that despite being the head of a nonprofit and previously running for office, she doesn’t consider herself ambitious. Instead, she painted an image of herself as a victim of circumstance who was forced to go to college and work.
“I would much rather be with my own children and my own husband and do all of my work for them,” Eubanks said. Later in the roundtable, she expressed interest in getting a doctorate in political philosophy.
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Allie Beth Stuckey
Stuckey hosts Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey, a podcast on Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media where she “analyzes culture, news, theology and politics from a Christian, conservative perspective” for “the woman who is not quite awake yet.” She discusses Taylor Swift and fashion as much as she fearmongers about transgender people. Stuckey frequently attacks queer people, rejects education that doesn’t teach a “classical Christian curriculum,” and promotes restrictions on reproductive health care.
She is also an open supporter of Christian nationalism. A few days before the 2024 election, she hosted conservative pastor Josh Howerton to discuss Christians’ role in government, including voting. The pair also made the case for Christian nationalism, saying it’s not as bad as “the Left” leads people to believe.
“Nationalism was God’s idea. That’s how God ordered the world,” Howerton said during the interview. He then asked, “If you’re a Christian, Do you believe that society would be better if, in general, our society followed Christian principles and ethics?” Stuckey agreed and responded with a question for Christians who don’t support Christian nationalism: “Do you not believe God’s ways are better?”
Sen. Katie Britt
Sen. Katie Britt, a Republican, is the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate and Alabama’s first female senator. She gave the Republican rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union in March 2024. Like many of her colleagues, Britt pushes for a reshaping of America’s public schools toward her conservative Christian ideology. On the campaign trail, she advocated for getting liberals and “indoctrination” out of schools, saying, “I believe this nation was founded on Christian conservative principles … that is worth fighting for and so we have got to have parents — we’ve got to have people that step up and say enough is enough.”
Britt has had a hand in several attempts to bolster religious schools and erode Americans’ reproductive care rights. In early 2023, she cosponsored a bill that resembled model policy from the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization founded by Religious Right figure Paul Weyrich. The bill would give a tax credit to any person or organization who donates to scholarship-granting organizations for private and charter schools, diverting money away from the government and public schools to religious schools.
Last May, Britt sponsored the More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act, a bill that would create a government-run, online crisis pregnancy center to direct pregnant people to “alternatives to abortion” and “links to information on child development from moment of conception.” The bill plans to include resources for private adoption and fostering agencies but exclude any resources offered by entities associated with abortion. The bill also aims to establish a Positive Alternatives for Women program that would financially support crisis pregnancy centers. Crisis pregnancy centers already receive a substantial amount of government funding, despite several documented instances of the centers using unethical tactics to prevent pregnant people from accessing certain types of reproductive care, including abortions and contraception.
Penny Nance and Concerned Women for America
Founded in 1979 to combat ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, Concerned Women for America “combines faith in Christ with impacting the culture.” The group was part of the coalition that successfully defeated the amendment, which wouldn’t get the necessary ratification from a 38th state until 2020 — four decades after the deadline for approval. Paul Weyrich once called the group underestimated yet the “most effective group that we have today on the Religious Right.”
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, CWA went on a “She Prays She Votes” battleground bus tour. On the importance of the tour, CWA CEO and president Penny Nance said, “We recognize the impact of a woman who prays for her country, her community, and her family. When you combine that with political activism, it is a powerful force.”
Last year, Beverly LaHaye, the group’s founder, died. CWA has remained committed to her efforts opposing LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights. Following a successful presidential election effort, the organization is trying to repeal the FACE Act, which stops people from intimidating anyone seeking or providing reproductive health services at a health site.
Young Women for America, CWA’s youth initiative, aims to mobilize a new “generation of Christian, conservative women to protect and promote Biblical values and conservative principles.” It promotes patriarchal ideas of biblical femininity and opposes LGBTQ+ equality.
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