Mike and Jenny Thomas with their daughters, Edith, five, and Astrid, 13.<\/p>\n
A cool evening air was descending on the 25-acre farmstead, blowing across the pond, around the barn, through the apple orchard and into the windows of Mike and Jenny Thomas\u2019s two-century-old, red brick farmhouse.<\/p>\n
The dinner hour had come. Edith, five, and George, three, enthusiastically rang a bell hanging near the kitchen door, sending metallic peals back into the early dusk.<\/p>\n
Mike sat down at the head of a wooden table, his wife at the other end, their four children along the benches between. He recited a prayer in Latin, then led a short grace: \u201cBless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive \u2026\u201d Everyone crossed themselves, and Jenny began serving homemade pizzas.<\/p>\n
A decade earlier, Jenny and Mike had been urban Democrats of a progressive and granola bent: the sort of people who shop at farmers\u2019 markets, read about psychoanalysis, volunteer at community gardens. But they felt some frustration \u2013 some lack. They fantasized about leaving the city behind for a simpler, purer life in the countryside, and 11 years ago they finally took the plunge.<\/p>\n
Running a farmstead in the mountains of central New York state turned out to be hard work, but it suited them. As Mike worked on the farm, he began to feel an almost spiritual connection to the land and to nature itself. He immersed himself in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers.<\/p>\n
A man should be able to earn a single wage that allows him to own property … and pay for his family so his wife doesn\u2019t have to work<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Mike Thomas<\/p>\n
One day, while staring at an oak tree, he felt a visceral awareness of the tree as a living thing \u2013 and of Jesus Christ, not just as a historical figure or Christian symbol, but as a presence emanating from everything around him. He emerged from the experience <\/strong>a believer in God\u2019s existence.<\/p>\n
Jenny pointed out that being Christian meant more than just a vague spiritual identification. Shouldn\u2019t they start going regularly to mass? Shouldn\u2019t they try to actually abide by the sacraments?<\/p>\n
As they did, she and Mike began to wonder if many of the secular liberal assumptions they had long held were true. Did technological progress really make people happier? Had greater gender equality actually worked out for women and families? They discovered other people with the same doubts \u2013 and a similar yearning for an America that no longer exists, and perhaps in some regards never did.<\/p>\n
A couple years ago, Jenny went through her books to remove some final remnants of her left-leaning 20s: the Frankfurt school, the situationists, \u017di\u017eek.<\/p>\n
She burned them.<\/p>\n
Jenny Thomas is expecting her fifth child.<\/p>\n
Although Mike and Jenny are <\/strong>nothing but warm and welcoming in person, on social media they casually speak of revoking women\u2019s suffrage and make insinuating references to throwing Marxists from helicopters. (During their rightwing dictatorships, the Argentine and Chilean militaries executed thousands of people \u2013 <\/strong>enemy guerrillas as well as leftwing trade unionists, students, and journalists \u2013 <\/strong>by drugging them and dropping them from aircraft into the sea.)<\/p>\n
Today, Jenny and Mike still believe in respecting the environment and buying local. But they are ardently conservative by common definitions, devoutly Catholic and part of a counterculture where describing someone as \u201creactionary\u201d is high praise.<\/p>\n
They are are part of a small movement of Americans who believe that the modern world is broken \u2013 and that the solution lies not in economic equality or social progressivism, but in an older, stricter simpler family order. For families like these, a house is not just a home, but a castle against a decadent and dysfunctional world. They believe that they have figured out something about modern life that the rest of us have not, or are in denial about.<\/p>\n
And they may find some sympathetic ears at high levels of the Trump administration: the \u201ctrad\u201d (traditionalist) movement coincides with a time of extraordinary political assault on women\u2019s rights in the US and a cultural backlash against decades of feminist consensus. At its most militant, it is intertwined with far-right political projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cA man should be able to earn a single wage,\u201d Mike said, \u201cthat allows him to own property, be productive on that property, and pay for his family so his wife doesn\u2019t have to work. This is the way that our society should be oriented. What I have here shouldn\u2019t be so uncommon. This should be the common.\u201d<\/p>\n
My hours-long drive to the Thomases\u2019 farmstead was almost cut short in the final stretch when I felt the sickening shudder of a flat tire. It was almost too on-the-nose: of course a New York City journalist would get a flat tire on the way to interview a man who chops his own wood for heat.<\/p>\n
I called Mike and, with some embarrassment, asked for assistance. Minutes later, a friendly bearded man in a checkered shirt pulled up in a pickup truck and introduced himself. Soon, we were on our way.<\/p>\n
I had become interested in the trad movement as a reporter who covers the culture of the right. Before my visit to the farm, I had spent weeks reading about families like theirs: men and women leaving cities behind to live as modern-day yeoman farmers. I had heard of social media tradwives<\/a>, but less about trad husbands, and even less about the realities of embodying this life.<\/p>\n
What I encountered intrigued me. In contrast to Christian fundamentalists, the Amish, or other conservative religious communities, many of the trads were converts who had chosen their lifestyles as adults, sometimes after years of spiritual seeking. Some seemed eminently reasonable and simply wished to be left alone to coexist with mainstream society, others to inhabit a different and unsettling planet.<\/p>\n
All, however, seemed to share similar frustrations with the modern age.<\/p>\n
I had contacted Mike because he is the director of the Catholic Land Movement<\/a>, an organization that advocates for conservative Catholic families to form rural homesteads. (Thomas is not his actual surname, but the name by which people in the movement know him.)<\/p>\n
Mike has a day job as a manager at a construction company. He was frank about the fact that his farm is more of a project than a primary source of food or income. The rambling compound was, nevertheless, teeming with animals: two dogs, four cats, a dozen chickens and 17 sheep. He said not to stand near the driveway gate because their sheepdog is known to nip bottleneckers.<\/p>\n
Families like his see themselves as part of a growing subculture. In 2002, the conservative writer Rod Dreher published an article, Crunchy Cons<\/a>, arguing that some rightwing Americans valued environmental conservation and skepticism of globalized capitalism: stances often dismissed as leftwing. In a subsequent book, Dreher urged conservatives to protect what is \u201csmall, local, old, and particular\u201d rather than \u201cbig, global, new, and abstract\u201d.<\/p>\n
Left: a girl holds a baby chick in her hands outside; right: a colander of red berries nestled in the grass.<\/a>Left: Edith and Astrid play with chicks. Right: Astrid picks berries on the family property.<\/p>\n
That idea spread online through outlets such as Front Porch Republic<\/a>, which advocates for a localism that promotes family life deeply rooted in small communities. It stands in contrast to the free-market absolutism historically associated with the Republican party, and might be said to have predicted, in a small way, the tectonic rise of Donald Trump\u2019s anti-free-trade populism, as well as Robert F Kennedy Jr\u2019s \u201cMake America Healthy Again\u201d strain of anti-corporate, anti-vaccine politics.<\/p>\n
Mike, who voted for Trump, supports his use of tariffs and other means to try to \u201creshore\u201d American jobs and promote national economic self-sufficiency, although he hopes that Trump officials will do more to promote small businesses and local agriculture. He also supports paid parental leave for both parents.<\/p>\n
The pandemic has also been \u201ca departure point\u201d, Mike said, which increased interest in the trad lifestyle. Covid-19, he said, exposed the fragility of economic supply chains, the public school system, and other institutions in a way that made families want to be more self-sufficient and rely on neighbors and churchmates rather than the government.<\/p>\n
Since then, <\/strong>he and Jenny have to explain their odd lifestyle choices less.<\/p>\n
Inside the house, Jenny, then five months pregnant, was working in the kitchen. She had just picked up their 13 year-old, Astrid, from an Irish dance class. The large, rustic room was adorned with Christian icons and crafts projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is Mr Conroy,\u201d Mike told the children. To Jenny, he said: \u201cHow can I help, mom?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s not much,\u201d she said. \u201cDinner\u2019s almost ready.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over dinner \u2013 with occasional babbling interruptions from George, the toddler, who had recently learned the phrase \u201cexcuse me\u201d \u2013 Jenny described her experience as a home school teacher.<\/p>\n
Home schooling has sharply risen<\/a> in the US in recent years, particularly during Covid school shutdowns, and many students may never return<\/a> to the formal school system. Among religious conservatives, home schooling has long been popular; for trads, it can also be, like breastfeeding, home birthing, big families<\/a> and cooking from scratch, somewhat of a status symbol.<\/p>\n
Jenny said they began home schooling simply because good local schools were scarce. She had also wrestled with a sense that the strictures of formal schooling tended to \u201ccrush the spark of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, enthusiastic children\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is hard work. \u201cI\u2019m not the best home school teacher,\u201d she laughed. \u201cSome people love it, and are really good at it. I have friends that are like that and then, thankfully, I have friends who are kind of like, \u2018Are you failing miserably at this too?\u2019\u201d Even so, she felt her children are doing at least as well, socially and academically, as their formally schooled peers.<\/p>\n
Children\u2019s books on the Thomas family windowsill.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would say,\u201d Mike said, \u201cthat there\u2019s something about the education system that is technocratic in its nature, and more about managerial philosophies than encountering a genuine and whole person and educating them. I think we wanted to create an environment where our kids were actually \u2018encountered\u2019, whether it was with literature, or history, or philosophy or \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEXCUSE ME,\u201d George said.<\/p>\n
We paused to let George speak. He had recently encountered a version of The Iliad for children, and it had made a deep impression. \u201cI like it,\u201d he explained. \u201cI like it when people are blooded.\u201d Everyone chuckled.<\/p>\n
After dinner, Mike showed me around the farm. George was keen to join, but fell out of a tree, became blooded and was crying.<\/p>\n
A willful acceptance of poverty or hardship is not something that\u2019s baked into our cultural conditioning right now<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Mike Thomas<\/p>\n
Mike paused at an apple tree infested by caterpillars, which he pulled off and dumped in the chickens\u2019 yard. The farm draws on principles partly similar to those of permaculture, a holistic philosophy that has long been popular among hippyish leftwing agriculturalists. <\/strong>The animals and orchard form a closed loop: chickens eat insects and lay eggs, sheep graze and provide meat, and apples are pressed into cider that Mike trades with neighbors.<\/p>\n
A sublime sunset had begun to glow on the horizon. The farm would be photography catnip to a social media influencer. Yet the property, though attractive, was hardly curated. The house was cluttered with semi-contained chaos and half-completed projects. The mud in the fields was very real.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis isn\u2019t easy,\u201d Mike said. Tradlife also means going against the grain of an economy oriented toward two-income households, he said. \u201cA willful acceptance of poverty or hardship is not something that\u2019s, like, baked into our cultural conditioning right now.\u201d Butchering animals does not leave a lot of time to watch Netflix.<\/p>\n
Secular liberals who experiment with agrarian life often wash out, he believes, because they do not have a religious or philosophical anchor. \u201cI read these ridiculously hysterical things of like, \u2018My six-month foray into homesteading.\u2019 I\u2019m like, six months? You barely parked the car.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike Thomas sweeps an outbuilding on his farm.<\/p>\n
Each weekday, Edward Phillips wakes at 4am, works out, takes a cold shower and says his daily prayers. On his way to work, where he is a mechanic for trucks and heavy machinery, he also prays a rosary.<\/p>\n
His wife, Emily, gets up around 6.30, sometimes earlier, to nurse their one-year-old. She exercises and prays, and spends the day home schooling, doing chores, paying bills, cooking and taking the children to appointments. By the time Edward gets home, she usually has a list of repairs for him to do while she preps school lessons for the next day.<\/p>\n
Emily and Edward are 31 and 33. They are raising six children on a small hobby farm in rural Illinois. The couple\u2019s days are so full, so disciplined, that when I first read Emily\u2019s description of her life in an online essay<\/a>, I found it a bit hard to believe.<\/p>\n
Speaking by video call, she and Edward were friendly and unassuming. Describing one\u2019s home life can feel like \u201cyou\u2019re flashing people\u201d, Emily said, laughing and miming the motion.<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cI often ask my husband, \u2018Does anybody even want to read this?\u2019 And he\u2019s like, \u2018Emily, not everybody lives this way; you\u2019re forgetting that.\u2019 Conversely, I do enjoy reading about women living in the city, what they\u2019re doing, so I think it goes both ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emily and Edward met as adolescents, reconnected later and got married when Emily was 19 and Edward was 21. Both had been raised Catholic and drifted away \u2013 \u201cI dabbled in, like, leftist, progressivist ideas and I was living very differently for a while,\u201d Emily said \u2013 before <\/strong>deciding to give religion an earnest second try.<\/p>\n
They started attending a church that offers the Latin mass; the old-fashioned liturgy has risen in popularity in recent years as an influx<\/a> of conservative young adults have converted to Catholicism, or \u201creverted\u201d after abandoning religion in high school or college. (Vice-President JD Vance converted in 2019. Five of the US supreme court\u2019s six right-leaning justices are also Catholic.)<\/p>\n
Edward does not feel that his politics map neatly onto either major political party, though \u201cmy religious beliefs put me on certain sides of issues, kind of as a non-negotiable,\u201d he said, referring especially to abortion, \u201cand, you know, that\u2019s that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI agree,\u201d Emily said.<\/p>\n
She and Edward knew they wanted children \u2013 \u201cthough we didn\u2019t know we would have this many, this fast\u201d \u2013 and liked the idea of raising kids on some land. Their lifestyle is not accessible to <\/strong>everyone, the couple acknowledge: they live in an inexpensive area, bought their house when interest rates were low, and have family nearby to help.<\/p>\n
As for home schooling, \u201cI don\u2019t disrespect parents that send their kids to school,\u201d Emily said. \u201cBut I really enjoy getting to choose what my children are learning, knowing their particular personalities [and] strengths, and getting to cater to the things that they enjoy.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Substack, Emily is part of a small community of women who blog about their lives as Christian mothers, though many of the writers view the famous tradwife influencers with about as much distance as the average secular urbanite does. Mentioning Ballerina Farm<\/a> \u2013 the social media brand of the <\/strong>Neelemans, a wealthy Utah ranching family whose carefully curated life has drawn millions of Instagram followers \u2013 often prompts an eye roll.<\/p>\n
Similarly, the community tends to view with bafflement the fantastical \u2013 and sometimes<\/a> sexualized \u2013 perception that outsiders have of their life. When Evie Magazine, a publication<\/a> launched in 2019 as a conservative alternative<\/a> to Cosmopolitan, touted a low-cut \u201craw milkmaid dress\u201d, real-life trads mocked it. \u201cThat, to us, is kind of a disgusting dress to wear in public,\u201d a trad told me. \u201cI would hate to see my wife wear it, and I don\u2019t think she would, except maybe as a nightgown.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sheep on the Thomas family property.<\/p>\n
Not all the writers are particularly political, but a common thread is pride in being different; in making choices that other Americans regard as weird. In their view, true counterculture is not Woodstock, but rejecting the permissive society that Woodstock ushered in. It means trading relaxed \u201cboomer\u201d Christianity<\/a> for a stricter, more primeval faith, and embracing a household where women raise children and men earn.<\/p>\n
The historical reality, though, is complicated. The single-breadwinner home that trad families idealize was never the rigid <\/strong>norm in American history. It was largely a mid-20th-century anomaly, made possible by an unprecedented postwar economic boom combined with generous government housing and education subsidies for veterans.<\/p>\n
In her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap<\/a>, the historian Stephanie Coontz also notes that married women in earlier eras \u2013 when they did not have independent incomes, could not have their own bank accounts, and had difficulty obtaining divorces \u2013 were easily trapped in abusive marriages.<\/p>\n
Edith and Astrid caressing their mother\u2019s pregnant belly.<\/p>\n
At its worst, according to former adherents, the current trad movement can replicate the ugliest tendencies of those earlier eras. In an interview<\/a> last year with the journalist Anne Helen Petersen, Tia Levings, a self-described former Christian fundamentalist \u201ctradwife\u201d, said she felt an intense pressure to project picture-perfect domesticity to the outside world even as her husband was privately spanking her and subjecting her and their children to \u201chigh control and abuse\u201d.<\/p>\n
Some of the couples I interviewed acknowledged that the trad world, in its eagerness to set itself apart from secular liberal society, is not free of its own forms of conformity, one-upmanship, and virtue signaling. Young mothers in particular can feel pressure \u2013 often from other women \u2013 to model a certain kind of crunchy conservative purism.<\/p>\n
Would I like to go off [and] be Pa Ingalls or whatever? Maybe. But that\u2019s not available<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Edward Phillips<\/p>\n
There is also a fairly broad spectrum of tradness. I asked Emily where she fits.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, I\u2019m wearing pants right now, if that answers your question.\u201d She and Edward giggled. \u201cIn some circles,\u201d she explained, \u201cwomen don\u2019t wear pants.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emily writes in snatches, at night or while nursing, and Edward said that it is important to him that he supports her ability to write. There is <\/strong>an obvious tension between trying to live at a remove from modernity and documenting one\u2019s life online, as they and others acknowledge.<\/p>\n
When it comes to the \u201creturn-to-the-land stuff\u201d, Edward said, \u201cwe take what works, and we\u2019re really practical about what doesn\u2019t.\u201d They limit their children\u2019s screen time, and grow some of their own food, but otherwise have no aversion to technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cWould I like to go off [and] be Pa Ingalls or whatever?\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe. But that\u2019s not available.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not trying to get back to anything,\u201d Emily said.<\/p>\n
Joelle and Jim Kurczodyna are not necessarily trying to return to anything, either, though they know plenty of people who are. One of their friends, a trad farmer, is fond of saying that he is \u201cgoing backwards as fast as I can\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Kurczodynas are in their late 30s and live on a farmstead in Illinois. The couple are observant nondenominational Protestants, and Joelle is currently expecting their fifth child.<\/p>\n
Joelle and Jim both <\/strong>grew up in the suburbs. Jim\u2019s family was conservative in a commonplace way; Joelle\u2019s family less so. Her baby boomer mother was a career woman who had chosen, on feminist grounds, to work in a male-dominated field.<\/p>\n
\u201cI kind of went the opposite way,\u201d Joelle said. \u201cWhere she chose to do computer science and engineering, I said: \u2018Well, I\u2019m going to stay home with my kids, because that feels like bucking the system a little bit to what I grew up with.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
For the most part, however, Joelle and Jim began their marriage living a mundane suburban life not too different from their parents\u2019. That changed when Joelle encountered fertility problems. Those sent her on a nutrition and alternative health \u201crabbit hole\u201d, she said, that led her and Jim to become interested in growing their own organic food and renegotiating their relationship with the modern world. (The US health department, under RFK Jr, recently expressed interest in promoting \u201cholistic\u201d alternatives to IVF, though medical professionals have criticized<\/a> these treatments as a misleading rebranding of common fertility practices.)<\/p>\n
Jim and Joelle\u2019s Christian faith had also become increasingly important to them, and they became uneasy with what progressive public schools might be teaching children.<\/p>\n
When they decided, in 2019, that Jim would quit his stable job so they could move to a dilapidated country property, \u201cIt was scary, and it was a difficult thing to explain to a lot of people at the time,\u201d Joelle said. Family<\/a> and friends were shocked and, at the time, less than supportive.<\/p>\n
Jim and Joelle turned their experimental lifestyle change into a popular blog<\/a> and social media account that they eventually monetized. That business now provides a full-time income to supplement their farming, but they still live with extreme frugality. They also still find themselves feeling like they need to defend some of their decisions.<\/p>\n
Joelle had always been excited about her pregnancies, but when she became pregnant with their fifth child she was suddenly self-conscious. \u201cFor whatever reason, it just felt like up to four children feels pretty \u2018normal\u2019, but when we had the fifth one, it felt like that\u2019s pushing it.\u201d She had heard people make remarks about \u201cfamily size\u201d that made her worry that her pregnancy might \u201cnot be seen as a positive\u201d.<\/p>\n
Both are wary of pressing their views on others and keep their web presence mostly focused on the practical aspects of homesteading \u2013 which \u201cisn\u2019t for everyone\u201d, either, Joelle emphasized. Yet they have found a large audience, including a lot of people \u201cliving in the city, living in the suburbs, whatever\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n
Left: religious iconography in the Thomas home: Right: Flowers on the family property<\/a><\/p>\n
They get a steady stream of messages, Jim said, from \u201cpeople that have kind of followed our story, and then followed a similar path. Which is really scary on our end, because they\u2019re thanking us for our inspiration, and leaving their house and jobs and cutting out to the country and buying a milk cow or something.\u201d<\/p>\n
He chuckled nervously. \u201cAnd we\u2019re like, hope it works out for you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keturah and Andy Hickman feel that cars and airplanes are unnatural and avoid them whenever possible. To get around their small village in upstate New York, the couple walk or bicycle; for longer distances, they take trains or buses.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople sometimes wonder if [we\u2019re] mentally ill,\u201d Andy said.<\/p>\n
Andy also objects to full-time employment, which he considers a recent civilizational development, and Keturah, who believes<\/a> that men should be attracted to \u201cwomen as God made them\u201d, doesn\u2019t shave her legs. Although she tries to avoid judging \u201cindividual women for how they dress\u201d, she also finds the idea of women wearing trousers \u201cto be very perverse\u201d, she admitted when I spoke to her and Andy.<\/p>\n
Keturah, 29, and Andy, 31, are about to welcome their first child. The couple are each prolific<\/a> writers on Substack, where their arguments for intentional anachronism \u2013 for choosing to inhabit, as Keturah has put in, a \u201cthird-world bubble\u201d inside the 21st-century US \u2013 are read by thousands.<\/p>\n
Keturah grew up in Missouri in a family of Christians so fundamentalist that they considered most Protestant denominations suspiciously Romish. She is fourth-generation home schooled \u2013 her family started decades before it was legal \u2013 and has no social-security number, because her great-grandfather was opposed to registering with the state. To this day she is, she said, an \u201cundocumented American citizen\u201d.<\/p>\n
Andy speaks in a slight drawl that sounds almost southern, though he grew up in upstate New York, in a \u201cbucolic country town that is very depressed, is very irrelevant and obscure, but looks like a Norman Rockwell painting\u201d. His family were cultural Catholics, not particularly devout. He was an only child, and his father was not present in his life; he spent long periods of time in nature.<\/p>\n
The man leads spiritually, he leads financially, and the woman follows<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Keturah Hickman<\/p>\n
As a young adult, he hitchhiked across the US and immersed himself in anarchist and environmentalist writing, even finding Ted Kaczynski\u2019s (better known as the Unabomber) critique of industrial society formative. Over time, his search for the roots of modernity\u2019s problems led him into conservative Christian critiques. He now describes himself as a graduate of the \u201canarcho-primitivist to traditionalist Catholic pipeline\u201d and believes America should be a Catholic monarchy.<\/p>\n
The couple met in 2023 through a mutual online friend who enjoyed playing matchmaker to young trads. \u201cShe had me fill out a questionnaire about things I wanted in a man,\u201d Keturah said. \u201cOne of the things I said was: \u2018I do not want to marry someone who has a nine-to-five job.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
A recurring theme of their writing is that young Americans can still access an affordable and fulfilling life, if they are willing to make certain lifestyle sacrifices.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first job of anybody living like we\u2019re living is to lower your expenses,\u201d Andy said. \u201cAnd that sounds like a cheeky thing to say, but it\u2019s actually true. I\u2019m not pulling your leg; we could thrive on $600 a month, maybe $700.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a recent essay, he argued<\/a> that a young couple can live on $432 a month in some rural and downtrodden places; by buying from Amish farms, cooking from scratch, and supplementing their groceries with hunting, gardening and fishing, he claims that he and Keturah spend only $300 a month on food.<\/p>\n
Keturah once ran a \u201cLiving Room Academy\u201d, teaching sewing, canning, and scratch-cooking to visiting young women. Most enjoyed it \u2013 except one, who bristled at the emphasis on women\u2019s self-sacrifice.<\/p>\n
Keturah \u2013 <\/strong>who once wrote that she \u201cloves burning books\u201d but draws the line at the government doing it \u2013 holds two beliefs that outsiders might see as contradictory. Women, she insists, should be strong (she praised other trad women as anything but the \u201cdemure doormats\u201d of stereotype), yet also voluntarily submit to their husband\u2019s authority.<\/p>\n
A phrase that often crops up among trads is \u201cheadship\u201d. According to the theory, a husband may cede to his wife control over many day-to-day household decisions, but holds ultimate authority.<\/p>\n
Keturah said: \u201cI think of [Andy] as the head of the household, yes, but I think of the woman as the queen of the kitchen and the children. The man leads spiritually, he leads financially, and the woman follows that. And the man\u2019s like, \u2018OK, this is where the house is going to be,\u2019 and the woman\u2019s like, \u2018OK, I\u2019ll make this house into a home.\u2019 And they both trust each other in that domain. Of course, there\u2019s still this hierarchy where he\u2019s the head of it all. But I also have my authority under that.\u201d<\/p>\n
She and Andy also emphasized that they are opposed to a man exerting violence or coercion against a spouse.<\/p>\n
Yet headship can also lead to toxic dynamics. In 2019, a former Mormon mommy blogger, describing<\/a> the causes of her divorce, said that she suspected that traditionalist gender roles were one of the factors that strained her marriage to breaking point.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was treating me as an extension of himself,\u201d she said. \u201cSo it didn\u2019t seem inappropriate to be hard on me because I was a reflection of him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike Thomas holds two chicks.<\/p>\n
Some couples I spoke with emphasized that gender roles in their homes were partly pragmatic, not rigid. Male headship, they also argued, is a double-edged sword.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen there are successes,\u201d Emily Phillips argued, \u201cit\u2019s clear who is to own for those, and when there are failures, it\u2019s clear who is to own for those. That\u2019s the hardship of being the leader.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cparadox of choice\u201d is the theory that humans, when offered too many options, become overwhelmed and unhappy. If liberal consumer capitalism is underpinned by the belief that individual autonomy and choice should be society\u2019s highest values, then perhaps the trad movement is one response to the decision paralysis of modern liberal life.<\/p>\n
Faced with a dizzying barrage of technological, social and consumer choices, some people prefer fewer options: duties rather than rights, constraints rather than freedoms, defined roles rather than elastic identities.<\/p>\n
That narrowing is part of a larger reaction<\/a> against modernity, a frustrated feeling that our secular technological age promised progress and instead brought loneliness, worsening material prospects, and a numbing onslaught of social media, spam, porn, gambling, gaming and AI slop, with the cold hand of capitalism \u2013 or Satan, or both \u2013 extending further into our lives with every chime, buzz and click.<\/p>\n
Mike argued that families like his have retreated to timeless values and institutions that can withstand the buffeting cultural winds. \u201cIt\u2019s like, OK, we\u2019ve seen these storms before. Family\u2019s important. Land is important. God is important. And those are the cores, and with them we can weather whatever is going on out there.\u201d The pronouncement carried a gentle hint of challenge. Everyone feels this too, he seemed to be saying, even if they are scared to admit it.<\/p>\n
For some, this rebellion is very much a political project \u2013 one that is at times theocratic, even fascistic.<\/p>\n
As a community, trads are overwhelmingly white, probably in part because non-white families find it harder to feel enthusiastic about reconstructing the past. In her book Momfluenced<\/a>, the writer Sara Petersen suggests that \u201cnostalgia for the good old days and the romanticization of traditional values [are] inherently tied to whiteness\u201d. She speaks to Koritha Mitchell, a literary historian who argues that trad life tends to \u201creflect the pleasure to be found in a particular kind of escape: insularity\u201d.<\/p>\n
Trad women sometimes seem more radical, more <\/strong>militant<\/a>, than the men. A frequent theme in some <\/strong>trad circles is that motherhood is a political act \u2013 and that conservative Christians are going to win the long game against liberals by the simple fact of having more children.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Emily Phillips, the writer and mother of six, published a thoughtful essay entitled Crunchy Lies<\/a>. When she had her first child, she writes, she was subjected to a barrage of intense \u201ccrunchy\u201d and trad messaging about parenting, often involving questionable holistic health claims.<\/p>\n
As an earnest young parent and a type A sort of person, she tried to follow all of it. She worked to keep her home pure of mold, plastics, polyester and chemicals. She breastfed her first child until he was two and a half.<\/p>\n
Edith and George play on their family\u2019s property.<\/p>\n
None of it prevented her son from developing a chronic health condition. \u201cOne of the universal principles of parenting I\u2019ve learned,\u201d she writes, \u201cis that there is no choice you can make as a parent which guarantees a specific outcome in your child.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet the urge to try to control those outcomes is all too human and relatable; so is the appeal of turning your back on much of the current world. Technology has made our lives easier, but at real costs. The anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee has argued<\/a> that some American conservatives have embraced<\/a> trad messaging because they are trying to get women out of the workforce in order to preempt looming job losses caused by AI.<\/p>\n
When I visited him, Mike Thomas expressed a larger revulsion at the capitalist techno-futurism of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and a particular anxiety about the world that Silicon Valley is bringing into being.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is a reduction of humanity, of our idea of intelligence and existence and consciousness, into a technical system,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the full human cannot be reduced to a sum of parts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jenny had taken the children to bed. Darkness had fallen; crickets were chirping. \u201cWe bleed into the mysterious, into eternity,\u201d he said. \u201cI want my kids to know that they have a soul.\u201d<\/p>\n