The Political Power of Christian Right Women

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we'll talk to the author of a new book called Esther's Army, The Christian Women Who Power the American Right. The author, Katie Gaddini, is a former evangelical Christian who was once a registered Republican.
Now she's a sociologist who researches right-wing Christian women. She's a visiting scholar at Stanford, an associate professor of sociology at the Social Research Institute at University College in London, and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology. She spent 10 years speaking to right-wing Christian women in communities like the one she came from, trying to understand how they ended up becoming such Trump supporters for one thing, and other things about their lives and politics. Professor Gaddini, congratulations on the book. Welcome to WNYC.

**Katie Gaddini** (1:03)
Thanks for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:05)
And listeners, are you a conservative Christian woman? What might others be misunderstanding about you? Maybe you're one of those who wants to repeal the 19th Amendment, the one giving women the right to vote. That's a bit of a movement now. For anyone else, if you have questions for our guests, please call us at 1-877-312-433-WNYC-433-9692.
Will you talk about yourself a little first? Where and how did you grow up as it relates to what you researched for this book?

**Katie Gaddini** (1:34)
Sure. So I grew up in Northern California. My dad was a Baptist minister. There are four other evangelical pastors in my wider family.
And when it came time to register to vote, I naturally voted Republican. That's what my family and all my friends were Republicans. I went to a conservative evangelical college. And that was my whole community. And I didn't really question the fusion between evangelicalism and conservative politics until later in my 20s, when I left my community and I moved to Boston for grad school, and started to meet folks who were Democrats and who were not evangelical.
And it stopped making sense to me that it was naturally fused, that to be a white evangelical in this country is to be a Republican. And I started to untangle both of those different institutions, but also my affiliation with them and the way that they're so merged in this country.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:34)
So if people are wondering if this book is a kind of attack against a culture you rejected, I know you would say it's not, but how would you like the people you write about to think of it?

**Katie Gaddini** (2:45)
You know, my aim going into this book and the research that informs it was genuine curiosity. I had lived out of the states for 12 years at this point and really wanted to know why these women would support Trump. You know, he's a different candidate than when I was in the Republican Party. I also wanted to know how they were getting so involved in politics. So that curiosity drove the project.
And I also wanted to showcase women's voices. There have been so many books and articles written about the Christian right and the Christian right under Donald Trump. And women's voices are often missing from those accounts. We don't hear from women themselves. They're kind of seen as ancillary to the MAGA project. So I hope that the women that I feature in my book would feel that I represented their stories accurately and truthfully and that the connections that I formed with them, which were genuine, came through, even though I'm doing it from a perspective as a scholar and not as a MAGA supporter myself.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:49)
And the title of the book again is Esther's Army, The Christian Women Who Power the American Right. For less biblically inclined listeners, who is Esther?

**Katie Gaddini** (4:00)
Esther is a queen in the Old Testament, also in the Hebrew Bible. She was married to the King of Persia, and in the book of the Bible named after her, she was keeping the fact that she was Jewish, a secret from the king. And then when there was an order to kill all the Jews, she intervened and pled with the king to spare them. And interestingly in that book, she says, if I perish, I perish. She knew she was risking a lot by going to the king. And long story short, she ended up saving the Jews, and there is a Jewish holiday named after her, Purim, which happens every year. But what's interesting about the quote, if I perish, I perish, is that that is used a lot in right-wing Christian women's gatherings, activism, and rallies today.
And they transport the Old Testament story onto contemporary politics. They see themselves as the Esther figure who is tasked with saving the nation from destruction, or the nation's children from destruction.