(RNS) — “If I perish, I perish.”
That’s the chant sociologist Katie Gaddini heard echoing from the National Mall in October 2024, weeks before President Donald Trump was elected a second time.
Raised an evangelical, Gaddini knew the reference — Esther 4:16, a Bible passage in which the Jewish Queen Esther prepares to risk her life to save her people. But to the thousands of conservative Christian women gathered for a prayer rally that fall day, the declaration had taken on a different meaning.
“In the retelling, they were Esther, they were the warrior queens,” Gaddini explained to RNS. “God had called them to save the nation from destruction — that being the left, or what they call woke indoctrination.”
Gaddini said the chant was indicative of how conservative women viewed the stakes of the 2024 election. To them, the nation’s morality was on the line.
In her latest book, “Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right,” Gaddini distills 10 years of ethnographic research on conservative Christian women into six chapters, each exploring an archetype: college students, “Mama Bears,” political powerhouses, social media influencers, Black conservatives and white suburbanites. She spoke to RNS about how these women are re-defining feminism and reshaping America’s political and religious landscape. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did 2020 fuel a political awakening among conservative Christian women?
At the time, I thought it was a temporary awakening. Women were telling me that they previously hadn’t cared about politics. During the pandemic, they felt they lost trust in institutions, including the mai …
