Much ado has been made about Republican V.P. candidate JD Vance’s repeated comments about the problems of childless Americans, from fearmongering about “childless cat ladies” to warnings about the supposed crisis of “radical childless leaders in this country.” What we haven’t heard much this election season, by Vance or Trump, is what had been a standard for Christian Right politics since the early 1980s: fears about the “radical homosexual agenda” and opposition to sexual minorities’ rights. Why shift to childless Americans?

Far from a one-off comment, Vance’s repeated focus on the childless is a new expression of a much older mainstay of the Christian Right: a focus on the family—meaning only nuclear, patriarchal families are legitimate. Criticisms of the childless, and childless women in particular, along with a new focus on anti-trans rhetoric and policies, represent a new version of this much older focus on the patriarchal family. This new sexual politics is strategic. It recognizes, for now, that the Christian Right lost the cultural and legal war over same-sex marriage. This new family politics is meant to appeal to a larger audience, not just the white evangelical base of the Republican Party but also a broader patriarchal movement found in both conservative Catholicism and a new far-right tech culture. This broader coalition has the possibility to strengthen support for the conservative movement even as its evangelical base declines in numbers.

For decades, white evangelicals have represented the largest voting bloc in the United States, making up around a quarter of the electorate (despite actually decreasing in numbers, white evangelicals vote in such high numbers this percentage has remained largely the same). Typically, around 80% of white evangelicals support the same conservative candidates. In 2016, 81% of white born-again/evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump. Yet, each year they decline in numbers in relation to the electorate.

Through appealing to both white evangelical culture and this broader patriarchal coalition, Vance’s rhetoric is an experiment in building a new conservative movement, one that embraces Christian nationalism but also moves beyond it. While Vance was raised in an evangelical culture, he converted to Catholicism as an adult, and his newfound conservative Catholic faith resonates with much of the evangelical ethos that makes up the majority of today’s Christian nationalists. And this broader coalition of white evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and tech billionaires is an effort to continue to hold political power despite not reflecting the desires of most Americans.

Understanding Family Politics in White Evangelical Culture 

As the base of Christian nationalism, it is important to understand how a focus on the family has primed white evangelicals for Christian nationalism. In 2008 and then again in 2010, I moved to Colorado Springs, a center of white evangelical culture, to better understand how religious practice links seamlessly to political behavior for so many white evangelicals.

The first time I attended an evangelical service for my research I expected to hear a sermon with explicit political commentary. Instead, what I witnessed was an extended ecstatic worship session with a seven-member band, complete with stage lighting, that played for the majority of the service. The mood ranged from meditative to raucous and included in the set was a love ballad to Jesus with lyrics reminiscent of any secular love ballad: “Hold me in your arms,” “Never let me go,” and “your love is all I need.”

When the pastor finally entered the stage, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flop sandals, he boomed at the church, “Notice anything different this morning? What do you guys think about my bike?” Hanging above the center of the pulpit was his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The pastor went on to describe Jesus as a “man’s man” not “a sissy,” and preached that his goal was to make the church a welcoming place for men. He said the contemporary church could make men uncomfortable because they, “have to sing love songs to another man, even if it is to Jesus!” The congregation laughed loudly at his reference to homosexuality.

After completing sixteen months of research, over an eight-year period, on predominantly white evangelical spaces, including attendings dozens of sermons, listening to countless hours of Christian radio, and completing one hundred interviews with evangelical leaders, pastors, and congregants, I realized that this first introduction to white evangelicalism provided a key insight. While I heard frequent messages about opposing abortion, explicit political commentary was rare in nearly all of the churches I attended. What saturated evangelical spaces, however, were messages about gender, heterosexuality, and nuclear families. I came to see this focus on gender and the nuclear family in everyday life as connected to and a result of the Christian nationalist emphasis on defending the family.

One way evangelicals tie everyday family life to their theology is through directly linking fathers with the Heavenly Father, making patriarchy, and the patriarchal family, sacred. Pastor Alex, the pastor of a large church in Colorado, frequently preaches on this theme. In one sermon just before Christmas he made this case specifically. He preached that “what the Holy Spirit is inviting you into is a family! It’s about family and being together!” In another sermon, he preached on the importance of maintaining a child-like faith. He implored us to ask ourselves: “Do you see God as dad? Do you feel like you are in the palm of a good dad’s hand?”

The most important aspect of evangelical life is an intimate relationship with God. Male pastors sacralize the hetero-patriarchal family as a godly life through stories of their spouses and children, and with metaphors of marriage to understand one’s relationship with God. Such valorization of the patriarchal family as of primary importance incites emotional responses to defend it. And for evangelicals, emotional affiliations define their religious life. Proper action is important, but one must possess authentic feelings.

Linking proper Christian devotion with strong emotional ties to nuclear, heterosexual families means that defending the patriarchal family—particularly through opposition to LGBTQ rights and abortion access—became a way to defend one’s faith and one’s understanding of what God wants for everyone. Same-sex marriage challenges the inherent hierarchical order in patriarchal, heterosexual marriage. And elective abortion takes reproduction outside of male control. Both pose a problem to the millions of evangelicals who see the heterosexual nuclear family as not simply an ideal, but as central to God’s plan for humanity.

The Divine Institution and Its Politics

Evangelical leaders present heterosexual marriage as a divine institution, one with a set of hierarchies, what evangelicals call “relationships of accountability,” where wives are subservient to their husbands and children are subservient to their parents. Take James Dobson’s understanding of marriage. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and easily the most influential evangelical in the Christian Right, wrote in one of his many books, Marriage Under Fire:

“To put it simply, the institution of marriage represents the very foundation of human social order. Everything of value sits on that base…When it is weakened or undermined, the entire superstructure begins to wobble. That is exactly what has happened during the last thirty-five years, as radical feminists, liberal lawmakers, and profiteers in the entertainment industry have taken their toll on the stability of marriage. Many of our pressing social problems can be traced to this origin.”

Christian Right leaders have a long history of framing the institution of heterosexual marriage as the foundation for society. Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University and the Moral Majority, wrote in Listen America!: The conservative blueprint for America’s moral rebirth in 1981:

“There are only three institutions God ordained in the Bible: government, the church, and the family. The family is the God-ordained institution of the marriage of one man and one woman together for a lifetime with their biological or adopted children. The family is the fundamental building block and the basic unit of our society, and its continued health is a prerequisite for a healthy and prosperous nation. No nation has ever been stronger than the families within her. America’s families are her strength and they symbolize the miracle of America.”

For evangelicals, such messages turn their religious beliefs into political issues.

The Class Dynamics of this Focus on the Family 

While conducting research on American evangelicals, I attended a national Christian Right gathering in Washington, DC. At an awards banquet I sat next to a middle-aged white lawyer from Tennessee. He talked about his passion for conservative politics and the importance of family values. He shared a perspective I’d heard repeatedly from Christian Right leaders that positioned the nuclear family as the solution to virtually every social problem. He told me that while thirty percent of American families were living in poverty, poverty affected only five percent of two-parent families (his numbers). “Isn’t that amazing?” he said. “It just shows how important the family is, and how much we need to support it.” I heard similar appraisals from many others.

The poverty rate among single-mother households in the U.S. is indeed much higher than for married households, with around 31% of female-headed households with children living in poverty compared to 6% of married couples. However, implying that marriage is the solution ignores a complicated breadth of data, not the least of which is the fact that, as a 2013 Pew Center report made clear, “there is no longer one dominant family form in the U.S.” Only 46% of children are currently living with parents who are in their first marriage, with many children living in single-parent families (26%), with stepparents (15%), or with unmarried co-habiting parents (7%). There is also a large racial discrepancy in family formation, with 69% of white children and 81% of Asian-American children living with two biological parents, and only 30% of African American and 54% of Hispanic children living in such families.

Like the conservative Christian lawyer I met in DC, white evangelical leaders use this data to say the solution to poverty, as well as child neglect, crime, and a variety of other social ills, is to encourage heterosexual marriage. And yet, the social science literature actually tells us the opposite. Instead of a solution to poverty, the decrease in marriage is actually a result of increasing poverty and economic stratification. In other words, people are marrying less because of the very economic policies touted by Christian Right leaders since Reagan.

What we are seeing now in the United States and Western Europe is a new phenomenon where marriage is often a marker of class stratification, in that wealthier individuals are increasingly more likely to get and stay married. It isn’t then that marriage leads people out of poverty, but that financial wealth itself is a better predictor of which people are more likely to marry. The actual reasons why poverty rates are lower for married couples are thus complex, reflecting the broader realities of economic inequality. Whereas evangelicals see marriage as the solution to poverty, the data suggest the inverse. Alleviating poverty through government-sponsored social services would likely see the marriage rate increase, as many working-class individuals value marriage but prioritize economic stability in a partner. Countless choose not to marry if they cannot find a financially secure partner.

By emphasizing the importance of “family,” today’s Christian nationalists offer a false solution to the callousness of neoliberal capitalism. A religious left position, and policy leaders with no religious persuasion, point to the structural factors that have created increasing economic distress for the majority of Americans, whereas the Christian Right defends the family as the way to offer a privatized solution to capitalist inequality. Take, for example, when JD Vance was asked in a recent forum how to address the high cost of childcare, he responded: “maybe grandma and grandpa [want] to help out a little bit more, or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more. If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all the resources that we’re spending on day care.”

Arguing that marriage and the family curtail poverty also provides moral justification for opposing the welfare state. If the government provides services like childcare, according to this conservative Christian logic, people will be less likely to marry or stay in marriages. In turn, Christians with such views do not see themselves as coldhearted or unsympathetic for the poor, but as compassionate advocates for families.

Abortion: “The Department of Life”

As the family politics of Christian nationalism shifts away from same-sex marriage and towards denigrating childless women and families that don’t resemble the patriarchal norm, how does abortion politics fit into this? While the Trump campaign waffles now on its views on abortion, let us look at Project 2025’s abortion policy directives, which, shall we say, do not waffle. The nearly 900-page document calls for ending the “Healthcare Access Task Force” within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and installing “a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children. Additionally, HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

Although now disavowed by Trump’s campaign, Project 2025 is the product of a broad coalition of Christian nationalists who will surely work to implement these goals in the case of a second Trump presidency. In research I’ve completed in Tennessee after the implementation of the state’s total abortion ban, we found that reproductive healthcare providers are now practicing hesitant medicine, often compromising the safety of pregnant people, in order to try to comply with the state’s abortion ban. In a more extreme case, we can also see the possible effects of such a ban in the closure of Sandpoint, Idaho’s only labor and delivery ward—where I myself happen to have been born—due to complications after the implementation of Idaho’s abortion ban. This has forced local pregnant people to drive sometimes hours to the nearest hospital, causing stress and possible complications. In the first year after the closure of the ward, five babies were born in the hospital’s emergency room, including 32-week twins. Luckily all five babies were healthy, but the possible effects of a national ban are significant and treacherous.

Diversions from Class Warfare

The policies supported by Christian nationalism are harmful to actual families, but this focus on the family is strategic in that it also works to shift attention away from an increasingly staggering wealth gap in the United States. Over the past few decades, the reduction of government services and a changed tax structure to support corporations and the wealthy, policies prioritized by  Christian nationalists, have facilitated a staggering $50 trillion “transfer of wealth” from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Christian nationalism, and its ongoing culture wars against families, continued to support the very economic policies that have devasted this country’s people: married, single, parents, and otherwise. As long as this coalition wants to divert attention away from these class dynamics, we are likely to continue to hear about “childless cat ladies” and the imagined threats they pose.

 

Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the U.S. based Religious Right and white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers 2021, winner of the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). She has been interviewed on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the Guardian (UK).