Christian influencers are making a killing peddling submissive womanhood to audiences

Complexified host Amanda Henderson welcomed the co-hosts of the “Saved By The City” podcast, Katelyn Beaty and Roxanne Stone, to talk about how Christianity for women has evolved in just the past 30 years.

The conversation recalls the 1990s era of "purity rings," the jewelry young girls wore to promise they were married to God until they found a man. Henderson remembered that being a woman meant homeschooling your children and submissiveness. That has changed.

Henderson said that the old ways have given way to a world "where the most recognizable in conservative Christian culture are as likely to be shooting their dogs as baking their sourdough."

The conversation began as the women shared their experiences growing up in the church and trying to maintain it as part of their lives at a time when Christianity, particularly non-denominational and evangelical Christianity, began a shift to the right. The early 2000s brought abstinence-only programs and a movement against LGBTQ+ people.

They note that it all began happening when the media itself was shifting. The "women of faith" conferences began, and evangelical women began producing books and content; all-female music groups like Point of Grace broke into pop culture music.

The hosts of "Saved by the City" used their show to track the shift that happened around the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of it came from "burnout" and "exhaustion," they said. Other shifts came as a result of influencer culture, where attractive white women could pretend not to work outside of the home and produce content about cooking, families and children couched in the universe of living as a submissive, traditional wife.

In a recent special on Christian nationalism, CNN host Pamela Brown spoke with some who have left their church's world of submissive wives. They noted that content creators pretending to be "trad wives" have very clear jobs creating those videos and blog posts. Most are making a killing doing it.

The shift of female roles in the U.S. happened so quickly compared to other cultural shifts. Women went from being nothing more than wives and mothers to going to school, entering the workforce and flourishing. Being a wife and mother became recognized as a job in and of itself. As women worked harder and did more, they excelled over their male counterparts. Stone and Beaty said the result has been evident in the church, where women are leaving conservative Christianity while men are flocking to it.

The anti-empathy movement has grown more in the past year. The group agreed that a lot of that anti-compassion image is coming from people like Laura Loomer and Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem famously went viral after publishing a book in which she confessed to shooting a dog she could not train.

The podcasters explain there is also the movement of militant Christian moms. The difference, they said, comes from the audience. In some ways, the militant mom content is more for men, while the wispy curtains and natural makeup are aimed at female viewers, even if they're both saying the same things.

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