If I Perish, I Perish: Katie Gaddini on the Army of Esthers Powering the American Right

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello everybody, it's Tuesday, June the 30th, 2026 More than five years ago, Margaret Atwood came on the show to talk about her great novel, The Handmaid's Tale, which of course, at least in her words when we spoke was about how tradwives, shall we say, to use a contemporary phrase, could theoretically at least be exploited in a futuristic patriarchy. Some people think that Handmaid's Tale is very prescient, but others, I think, are a little more ambivalent about all that. There's a new book out today. It's by my guest, Katie Gaddini. It's called Esther's Army, The Christian Women Who Power the American Right. And I think it has slightly different take on what we might think of as traditional Christian women. Katie is joining us from Northern California, just down the bay from me, where she's currently a research fellow at Stanford University. Katie, is that a fair way to describe Esther's Army? I'm curious to what you think of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

**Katie Gaddini** (1:45)
I certainly would not characterize the women in my book as being Handmaid's Tale figures. They are very much in charge. They are politically engaged. They, in many cases, hold political positions of power.

**Andrew Keen** (2:02)
Wow. So is the argument essentially in your new book, which as I said is out today, Esther's Army, that liberals have got tradwives all wrong or that the Christian women who are increasingly central to the American right are misunderstood by the liberal establishment in the United States?

**Katie Gaddini** (2:30)
Yeah, somewhat. So tradwives are a really fringe element of the women that I study. And in fact, after doing nine years of research and speaking to over 100 women, only one woman told me that she actually follows a tradwife on social media. So I think that they're overpopulated in the media and attention wise, but they actually represent a much smaller political impact in the country. The women I talk to are sort of die-hard MAGA supporters, Trump supporters. They're very politically engaged, as I mentioned, but they also cover a broad range of women. So there was everything from home school moms who are involved in voting and local politics, to women who are lawyers for the Heritage Foundation.
I interviewed some women who work in DC and represent some of the top echelons of power. So really I tried to cover the range to show how women have been consequential, not only in our current moment, but also over the past 55 years.

**Andrew Keen** (3:40)
Tell me a little bit about your background, Katie. I know your narrative and maybe your own biography are in some ways connected.

**Katie Gaddini** (3:48)
Yeah. So I grew up evangelical in the US. My dad was a pastor. There are four other pastors in my extended family, all evangelical. And when it came time to register to vote, I naturally registered as a Republican and voted for George Bush.
I say naturally because this is what everybody in my community and milieu was doing. And it wasn't until I left my sort of very insular evangelical community that I realized that you could be a Christian and not be a Republican. So I have very deep ties to the community that I researched. I have a lot of friends and family who are still Republicans, conservative and Christian, even though I'm no longer.

**Andrew Keen** (4:39)
We've done a number of shows actually with people who have written books like yourself, who grew up in an environmental, not environmental, evangelical family and rebelled against it. But it sounds to me as if you're not a rebel against your background. Maybe you're a bit more ambivalent. Maybe you think of yourself more in academic objective terms. But would that be fair to say that you don't think of yourself as someone who rebelled against your upbringing?

**Katie Gaddini** (5:11)
Yeah, I definitely had a rebellion period. But that came earlier. By the time I started this project, I came at it from a place of genuine curiosity. I was living overseas. I was in the UK for almost a decade. I also had that detachment when Trump was the Republican nominee. In 2016, I was living in London. And for me, it was a sociologist curiosity of how is it that this candidate is the one that Christians are planning to vote for, and even more so that Christian women are planning to vote for.
And that's when I started the project. So I have definitely an investment still in Christianity and politics that it partners with, but I also have the distance of time in having lived abroad.