You’ve probably seen the warning posts and memes: Women! The United States Congress is coming for your vote! This is Project 2025! Welcome to Gilead!
The rumors are true: The proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, now considered a priority for Republicans in the House, will make it harder, if not practically impossible, for millions of women to vote. The SAVE Act would require documentation, such as a passport or birth certificate matching your current legal name to allow a person to register to vote. These requirements would pose a challenge to broad swaths of the country, but would fall especially hard on women.
Eight in 10 married women in opposite-sex marriages took their spouse’s last name, and the bill could exclude over 69 million married American women whose names do not match their birth certificate. One Brennan Center for Justice study found that one third of American women do not have access to any documents with their current legal name. About half of Americans do not have a passport, a costly process that adds a financial burden for those who have had any name change throughout their lives.
The SAVE Act pretends to create guardrails against noncitizen voter fraud, a vanishingly small problem that the nonpartisan Brennan Center found in only 0.0001 percent of jurisdictions surveyed after the 2016 election. Even The Heritage Foundation, which promotes the phantom crisis of noncitizen voting and Donald Trump’s lie that Democrats were purposely letting migrants into the country so they could vote, can’t fudge the numbers to back up its claims. The Heritage Foundation has tracked election fraud cases for decades, finding only 85 cases of alleged noncitizen voting between 2002–2023.
The SAVE Act is also unnecessary as it is already quite illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. So the law, which won’t help solve an already nearly nonexistent problem, makes very little sense—unless, of course, disenfranchising millions of women is the point.
Because this is what the SAVE Act does with ruthless efficiency: It creates a backdoor to the disenfranchisement of millions of people—especially women, who have consistently been more likely than men to vote for Democrats than Republicans in presidential elections since 1980. This is happening just as carving away women’s voting rights has become a hot topic of conversation among some of our country’s proudest Christian nationalist influencers.
In this respect, the references to The Handmaid’s Tale actually fall short of illuminating the forces working to lock women from the voting booths. Rather than a harbinger of some fictional dystopia, the SAVE Act reflects an erosion of women’s rights that has already been normalized in practice in many conservative corners of this country. The Christian right has been playing a long, long game, and it intends to take full advantage of a moment where the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court are all aligned in their direction. We can see what the future could hold from simply observing how women inside these oppressive systems of control already live. Just as Christian nationalist ideals have seeped into our laws and discourse, ideals from its companion worldview, Christian patriarchy, have set the groundwork for women’s voter suppression through the church.
Concern over Christian nationalism has (rightly) become part of our political discourse in recent years, with voters and some of our national leaders operating with the assumption that the U.S. is a Christian nation and ought to be ruled under a conservative, xenophobic form of Christianity. At the same time, a companion philosophy of Christian patriarchy, which claims men are created by God to lead women in home and church, thrives among some of the same figures fighting for anti-democratic, conservative, Christian power in the civil sphere.
Christian nationalism is concerned with maintaining a hierarchical social order and excluding others from access to power, notes Samuel L. Perry, a sociologist of religion from the University of Oklahoma. He notes Christian nationalism uses the language of faith to defend a social arrangement that American conservatives readily stand behind: “Women under men, children under parents, workers under their bosses, laity under their pastors, citizens under the authority of a Christian magistrate.”
In such a worldview, any inversion of the hierarchy is a menace. This is one of the reasons transgender and nonbinary people pose such a threat to conservative Christians—their very existence defies the assumed gender binary of men holding power. (And these folks would likely be impacted by the SAVE Act too. An estimated 68 percent of transgender and nonbinary adults do not have government-issued I.D.s that match their name and gender identity—and even then, the bill’s language does not make it clear that a driver’s license, even a real I.D., would pass muster because birthplace is not listed on those documents.)
The threat to hierarchy is why women leaders are treated as a danger to family and nation. Women taking part in representative democracy as freethinking voters undermines the assertion that men were made by God to rule, and that in an ideal Christian nation, women to submit.
This isn’t new. This isn’t fiction. This is already the way many women live.
Christian patriarchy began to deepen its roots during the 1980s backlash against the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. As the influential Christian right organizations such as the Moral Majority grew, so too did the influence of evangelical leaders who taught women’s obedience to their husbands was mandated by God.
As far back as 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention, or SBC—the nation’s largest and arguably most influential evangelical body—adopted rules that declared that a woman should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership and that a man should “provide for, protect and lead his family.” In 2000, the Baptist Faith & Message (the group’s governing articles) also clarified that “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” The issue fueled SBC’s conservative resurgence, a fundamentalist takeover that swung the denomination—and its political influence—right.
This all created fertile ground for the latest permutation of anti-woman rhetoric currently informing Christian nationalists at the far-right. Joel Webbon, a pastor whose ministry has 120,000 YouTube subscribers, has argued for the removal of women from positions of civil leadership. He once bragged in a sermon about forbidding his wife from reading a book because he hadn’t gotten a chance to review it first. “You’re not going to outpace me,” he said.
Webbon is probably best known for arguing that in a Christian nation, women would not have the right to vote, because in fifty years, those voting women would undo the country’s Christian foundations.
Webbon, along with Stephen Wolfe (author of The Case for Christian Nationalism) argue for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and support a “household vote” system in which men vote on behalf of their families.
Wolfe, for his part, has argued that the basic unit of society is not the individual, but the household—and the head of household (a man) is the family’s public representative. In Wolfe and Webbon’s vision of a Christian nation, that male head of household would vote, representing the family’s interests, just as our national representatives represent us in Congress.
This model, of course, ignores failures in our current representative system, for instance, how many of us are not actually represented fairly due to gerrymandering and existing voter suppression methods. Instead, it concocts a patriarch’s fantasy: loving husbands who vote for their wives’ and children’s interests—and who understand those interests far better than they do.
Tia Levings knows too well how such a system fails women. She voted in her first election according to how her church said to vote; George H.W. Bush was the only “moral choice.” She got married two years later and didn’t vote again until she escaped what she calls “church-sanctioned domestic abuse,” a harrowing experience, which she details in her book, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy.
“During my marriage, I wasn’t allowed to vote differently than my husband,” Levings told me. “Evangelical fundamentalists teach head of household voting,” she notes, but her church also understood women’s votes counted in civil elections. So, they were allowed to vote only if they voted the same as their husbands.
Levings calls herself a bad liar and knew she couldn’t fake it if she did feel compelled to vote differently from her husband, so she opted not to vote at all. Otherwise, she would have had to face her husband’s “firm hand” if she was caught having voted contrary to his wishes. This was a form of discipline her church leadership supported.
In her experience—and that of many other conservative Christian women—marital voter suppression has long been a family practice.
Levings observes that how men run their homes within Christian patriarchy “is how they want to run the country.” A bill that would disenfranchise millions of women would hold appeal for Christian patriarchs and not be seen as a threat by women who already accept this form of family headship and household voting. They have, after all, already lost their vote.
Levings says the question her readers ask the most is how will patriarchal government change the laws?
“The SAVE Act shows how: one restriction and disenfranchisement at a time,” says Levings. The SAVE Act would hit “a very significant portion of voters: suburban married housewives” who would no longer be desirable swing voters. Levings adds, “They’ll be irrelevant.”
For his part, Perry has noticed Christian nationalism’s most vocal proponents tend to increase their comments about limiting women’s right to vote after statistics are released concerning young, single women, who are the only major demographic of white women who overwhelmingly vote Democrat. They may be responding due to traditionalist views and using patriarchy as a justification for abolishing women’s right to vote. But to Perry’s mind, such us vs. them, in-group tribalism is “perhaps the most characteristically Christian nationalist thing about the whole conversation” because “Christian nationalism is about who has the right to power.”
Those who align politically are worthy Americans. Those who don’t, in the Christian nationalist view, notes Perry, are “the enemy and we should be able to subvert their voice, because they’re destroying what’s ours.”
Threats of overturning the 19th Amendment may feed YouTube traffic and hate-bait, but actually doing so would be a losing battle unless our political and legal structures change greatly (which is becoming more conceivable by the day). But the SAVE Act could accomplish this in part, by inserting daunting hurdles in the voter registration process that women will face disproportionate difficulty in surmounting.
The bill’s sponsor in the House, Representative Chip Roy, and Senator Mike Lee, the sponsor of the companion bill in the Senate, both oppose the Equal Rights Amendment and voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. The SAVE Act passed the House last year but was blocked by the then Democratic-led Senate.
Roy defended the SAVE Act, saying the bill includes language that directs states to create processes for voter applicants to provide other documentation to establish citizenship. However, this mandate would likely be undone by its vagueness. Worse, the SAVE Act also makes it a crime for any election official to register anyone who does not “present documentary proof of United States citizenship,” making it pretty unlikely that an election worker would be flexible about accepting other documents.
Cleta Mitchell, founder of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition asserted in a statement that married women who change their names already have to present documents to do so. “It is a pain but millions of women do it every day,” she stated.
The intersections between Christian nationalism and a bill that would disenfranchise millions of women are as close as the organizations that represent their shared political interests.
Only Citizens Vote Coalition, for example, is a hodgepodge of right-wing organizations, a quarter of which were involved in Project 2025. Mitchell was also president of a group called the Election Integrity Network in 2022, a group primarily funded that year by the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Center for Renewing America. CPI was founded in 2017 by senior staff from The Heritage Foundation. The Center for Renewing America states its mission is “to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”
The goal of the SAVE Act’s most devoted promoters is not simply to increase the amount of annoying paperwork voters have to push around.
Voter suppression is rarely sold by politicians as such. Instead it comes by way of logistical challenges such as reducing the number of ballot boxes in communities of color in Georgia, intimidation by “poll watchers” in Texas, or restrictive voter I.D. laws. It rolls in quietly, on the pages of bills claiming to fight nonexistent “voter fraud.”
A soft and effective way to suppress women’s votes has thrived in ultraconservative churches for years. Now, it has Christian nationalism as a vehicle and well-funded partners nudging another form of suppression through Congress.
Cait West, who was raised in Christian patriarchy, described to me how she’d been taught God is masculine and created men first; women are a secondary creation, fit to be helpers to men. It would have been better if women had never been given the right to vote, she was taught, because they weren’t meant to be leaders.
For church votes, her father would take all the slips of paper allotted for their family and vote his selections for them. Her mother was supposed to vote as her father did in civil elections. In her family’s circles, if her mother had “canceled” her father’s vote by voting differently, that would have been seen as sinful, a sign of rebellion “which could have escalated to excommunication.”
West, whose memoir Rift, details her escape from that system in adulthood, knows well that Christian patriarchy and Christian nationalism’s ideologies carry influence, sometimes together, sometimes separately.
But “what’s bridging them both is a movement for religious authoritarianism.” Those who uphold that authority are rewarded, to a point.
But propping up power is no guarantee your rights will be protected. Even white women who voted for Trump could be collateral damage to the SAVE Act—maybe more so than liberal women who are more likely to keep their name.
If the SAVE Act were a strategy to carve out Democratic women voters, its aim is off. While Democratic and moderate women will certainly be affected, Republicans and people living in the South and Midwest are less likely to have a passport. Republican and conservative-leaning women are the most likely to have changed their name upon marriage.
I asked West about this dynamic, which would make the SAVE Act appear to hurt conservative women more, and she said it reminded her of her father, someone with narcissistic tendencies, personality traits common across high-control religion. Not every decision was logical. Some might be contradictory. “But the general effect was that it made you scared, made you be on the edge,” she said.
“That’s what this whole administration feels like, the chaos of narcissistic abuse,” West continued. Every move may not make sense, but destabilization is the point. Maintaining power is the point.
For her part, West sees the SAVE Act as mainly “following the more racist ideology of being afraid of immigrants.” But, she points out, its “secondary impact is on women.”
Ultimately, denying women the right to vote or even voice a differing opinion is nothing new among Christian patriarchs. Their churches treat disempowering women as foundational theology. Women are useful when they submit, crushed as an enemy if they will not. It is possible the SAVE Act’s sponsors never intended this bill to disenfranchise women. But it’s difficult to see what they’d do differently if that was their intention. And either way, they just don’t seem to care if it does.
