The rise of the manosphere, with its call for a return to traditional gender roles, reflects a backlash to power-shifting cultural changes.
In Moscow, Idaho, conservative evangelical pastor Doug Wilson last year praised the nomination of now-U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for his opposition to women in combat.
Then, in an interview broadcast last month, Wilson told CNN that in his vision of a Christian America, women would hold few leadership positions beyond being “chief executive” of the home and raising children.
“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” he said. “It doesn’t take any talent to simply reproduce biologically.”
Meanwhile, at Covenant Bible Church, an evangelical church in suburban Austin, Texas, pastor Joel Webbon has echoed Wilson’s view that in a Christian nation, women shouldn’t be able to vote.
The manosphere — a movement encompassing hypermasculinity, male supremacy, misogyny and traditional gender roles and driven by podcasters, bloggers and social media warriors — has become increasingly mainstream. And now, it is converging with a segment of conservative Christianity.
Aspects of the manosphere weave through American culture, from Silicon Valley “TechBros” to the largely evangelical “TheoBros” typified by a number of high-profile Christian pastors and podcasters.
“There’s a version of ‘men in charge, women in submission’ that goes back as far as I can think of” in conservative Christian circles, said Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida. In other words, she said, most Sunday congregations would agree that while married couples more or less decide things together, the man has the ultimate say.
But over the last decade, Ingersoll said, this soft patriarchalism — sometimes called “complementarianism,” the idea that men and women have distinct but complementary roles — has yielded to more transgressive hierarchical versions. The shift, she and others say, is part of a backlash against power-shifting cultural developments and a reflection of how the emergence of the so-called manosphere overlaps with certain segments of Christianity.
“Complementarianism now is not like it was in the 1980s,” Ingersoll said. “It’s harsh.”
“They all believe society has a natural order, that some people should be in charge and others are meant to be followers,” Ingersoll said. “That weaves in misogyny, because the people perceived to be appropriately at top are always men, so by definition women have a secondary position.”
Both Wilson and Webbon rely on strict interpretations of the Bible to back up their views that husbands rule over their wives and thus their households. Both pastors said the Bible and their churches provide safeguards to curb the toxicity found in some parts of the manosphere.
“The woman’s role is a feminine and domestic role,” Webbon told USA TODAY. “Her voice matters, but it is subject to her husband’s authority. Women should hold no positions of authority over men in the church, neither should they hold positions of authority over men in politics.”
Wilson told USA TODAY that such views “are grounded in scripture, which we believe to be the word of God, and are important for that reason.”
Cultural changes in recent decades have seen advancements for women and the LGBTQ+ community, eroding conservative Christian views of U.S. identity, said Matthew Taylor, an expert on religious extremism at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. The backlash has prompted calls for a return to traditional gender roles.
“If you think about what American culture was until the 1950s, it was overwhelmingly dominated by White Christian males,” Taylor said. “In the 1960s and 1970s, you had the Civil Rights Movement, women’s liberation, heightened immigration and Supreme Court jurisprudence that changed the balance of church and state. … What we’re experiencing now is the backlash to that very rapid cultural change we’ve undergone.
“It’s also religious and often racial, and it’s often White men making this articulation,” Taylor said. “The trend lines are toward a cultural retrenchment of forces in American society that feel like they’re losing power.”
Where Christianity and the manosphere find commonality is in male entitlement, especially where Christian nationalism — the idea that Christian people and biblical law should govern American life — overlaps with evangelicalism, said Sheila Wray Gregoire, a former evangelical whose “Bare Marriage” podcast explores the marital and sexual satisfaction of evangelical women in the U.S. and Canada.
“It’s the idea that men are meant to have authority over women and women are supposed to serve, especially sexually,” she said. “There’s very little light between the two.”
Taylor said two major ascendant far right Christian movements in the U.S. heavily overlap with the manosphere, both of them highly patriarchal.
First, he said, are traditionalist Catholics. Second are reformed reconstructionist Christians, which he describes as a basically Calvinist, largely evangelical world of pastors and preachers, many of them young with well-groomed beards — the so-called TheoBros.
One preacher’s rise illustrates the phenomenon
While the Christian manosphere is largely an evangelical phenomenon, it’s also taken root in conservative Catholic and Presbyterian circles, smaller denominations and independent churches, said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University, a private Christian university in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The rise of Idaho pastor Wilson, now in his early 70s, illustrates how fringe evangelicalism has seeped into the mainstream over time, she said. By 1998, when Wilson co-founded the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, he was still an outlier who held benign views of American slavery and mocked evangelical megachurch leaders he would ultimately parody as spineless “Evangellyfish” in a novel of the same name.
“On the surface, he was not well connected,” said Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Christian Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” “He had set up his own outpost in Moscow (Idaho) and started a church, school and publishing house.”
Wilson’s rising profile, Du Mez said, was boosted by a podcast following of homeschooling families and impressionable young men, endorsements from old-school patriarchs like Protestant preacher John Piper and attention from commentator Tucker Carlson and the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Meanwhile, Canon Press, the publishing house he founded, published “The Case for Christian Nationalism” while Wilson himself has criticized women’s voting rights as harmful to male-headed families.
“He has emerged as one of the primary spokespeople for a rightwing, highly patriarchal, politically incorrect Christianity that aligns quite closely with the MAGA agenda,” Du Mez said.
Wilson’s bombastic and irreverent approach are also characteristic of the manosphere, she said.
“He gives his listeners permission to set aside proprieties and civility, to say it like it is,” Du Mez said. “He’s famously curmudgeon-ly and combative, and that tone and mood are having a moment. He’s kind of the grandfather of this in Christian spaces.”
Wilson and his Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches — a network which Hegseth’s Nashville-area church has since joined — have since launched a church and school in Washington, D.C.
“They want a position from which to shape the Trump administration and exert their influence,” Du Mez said.
Are TheoBros really separate from the manosphere?
As notions of Christianity-supported gender equality gained acceptance in the 1970s and 1980s, Ingersoll said, Piper and other conservative evangelicals formed the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood in response. That led to the 1991 publication of “Reclaiming Biblical Manhood and Womanhood,” an influential book of essays co-edited by Piper that advocated complementarianism.
The principle is popular among conservative denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention, which in recent years has disfellowshipped prominent churches that have installed women pastors.
“Men who want to feel important are gravitating toward evangelical churches because they’re being told, this is what God wants for you and you don’t have to do anything except be a man,” said Gregoire, the podcaster and former evangelical. “…. This is the only place in society where they can find that.”
Ingersoll said that while selective Bible verses are often used to justify patriarchy, “I don’t think people read the Bible and then conclude how they should be. I think people are a certain way and then read the Bible in a way that fits with how they are…. Their perspective on how the world should be comes first.”
That’s why, she said, the TechBros and TheoBros have much in common — because they start from the same hierarchical worldview.
Ingersoll points to Vice President JD Vance as an illustration of the overlap. Vance’s political rise was funded in part by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal whose views on women have come under scrutiny. But the vice president’s religious views, she said, align with Catholic Integralism, a political ideology that blurs the lines between church and state and frowns on religious pluralism.
“You can see all those things coming together in him in an amalgam,” she said. “I don’t see the Christian patriarchal TheoBro world as something separate from the manosphere; I see it as part of it. They really are the same group of people.”
Du Mez also cited Jordan Peterson, a secular figure with a YouTube following of more than 8 million, as someone instrumental in the rise of the Christian manosphere. Peterson’s messages about masculinity have found an audience among young men seeking direction and prompted soul-searching among Christian podcasting pastors.
“He was held up as an example to say, we should be in those spaces,” Du Mez said. “Like, ‘he’s not one of us, but he’s saying real truths.’ So the overlap has been around a while.”
Many of these podcasting pastors draw the line at radically misogynist figures like Andrew Tate, the former social media influencer now under investigation in Romania on accusations including of human trafficking and organized crime. Tate has denied the claims. But while they see Tate as overtly abusive, crass and profane, Du Mez said, “it doesn’t mean their listeners are drawing the same line.”
Wilson and Webbon told USA TODAY that scripture provides safeguards against toxic behavior. The Bible, Wilson said, “requires husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, and this is a standard that we hold the men to. If a husband veered into the kind of toxicity that is on display in some of those quarters, he would be disciplined by our church.”
Webbon agreed, saying “abuses must be prevented by using scripture as our guide.”
“The manosphrere is correct in much of their diagnoses of feminism, but they offer no biblical solutions,” he said.
Reversal of Roe v. Wade ‘just the start’
Gregoire said her research has found higher divorce rates and lower marital satisfaction among married couples with ideals of male hierarchy. Meanwhile, Sons of Patriarchy is a podcast focused entirely on stories of intimate partner abuse in Doug Wilson-influenced churches nationally and globally.
“What happens when biblical patriarchy, Christian nationalism, and a theology of authority and submission become the pillars of a movement?” the podcast’s tagline asks.
But some see broader social dangers at work as such ideology creeps into national politics.
Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an Albuquerque-based group that supports religious freedom for U.S. military members, said the misogyny of Christian nationalism “wants to replace our democracy with this barbaric version of Christianity, and an essential part of that is male dominance… It’s right out of Handmaid’s Tale.”
Consigning women to the home has socioeconomic effects, Ingersoll added, limiting their ability to act should a marriage turn sour or harmful and cutting them off from retirement benefits that reward a paid career.
“It’s talked about as a complementary, equal contribution to the life of the family, but in monetary terms it’s not recognized as that,” she said. “So women are at a real disadvantage when they’re older and have less Social Security because they didn’t work outside the home.”
Ingersoll cited Hegseth’s testimony when he was grilled as a nominee about his views about women in the military.
“Did he say women shouldn’t be in the military?” she said. “Technically not; he said women shouldn’t be in combat. But if you think about it, the way you get promoted to the highest ranks, the way you get the training to go on to other jobs like being a pilot — if women can’t be in combat they won’t be able to get to those positions because that’s the mechanism by which they get there.”
The America envisioned by the Christian manosphere, Ingersoll said, is “incredibly dangerous to the gains that women have made in terms of equality over the last half-century. Roe v. Wade overturning was just the start. These people want women having as many children as possible. They want to ban birth control…. It’s putting a certain segment of society back in charge of everything and sidelining everyone else.”