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Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance possesses a unique expertise—evoking dismay and disgust over his views concerning family and women's place in them. He's helped pinpoint the purpose of post-menopausal women and identified the threat of "childless cat ladies." Vance also previously suggested children be given votes—and that their parents control those votes (putting the childless at an obvious disadvantage).
But it's not just Vance. The candidate's anxiety concerning the American nuclear family resonates deeply with Republicans' evangelical Christian base, and it's important to understand how rigid definitions of "family" sound to that base.
In a time of "found families," blended families, and marriage equality, the old nuclear family structure is one among many. Not everyone sees this as good.
Vance is enough of a cultural shapeshifter to understand, or at least mimic, rhetoric concerning family that runs rampant among believers on the right—and lambaste those who don't fit the supposedly "traditional" model.
Christians dominating by birthrate is an old aspiration and is paired with decades' old fear—American Christians having fewer children and being outpopulated by people of other faiths or none at all. Vance has previously suggested that because the right lost control of the nation's cultural institutions, American families should be encouraged to have more children in order to avoid a "civilizational crisis."
For decades Bill Gothard (of Duggar family and Shiny Happy People infamy) and other pastors have encouraged women to submit to their husbands' headship and produce as many children as their bodies and God will grant. The practice, sometimes called "quiverfull," treats each child like an arrow in the quiver of God's army.
In a subculture that coalesced around opposing abortion, commitment to reproduction on God's calendar—whatever the health effects on the mother—is a powerful contrast.
I'm not suggesting that Vance is quiverfull or that all evangelicals are, but rather that his words hum along with a refrain familiar to many evangelical voters and that he believes doing so is politically advantageous. When Vance shames childfree Americans, he's whistling along with an evangelical movement that claims a desire to "return" to a traditional family structure.
Vice President Kamala Harris is in fact, a mother. She is step-mother to two children, Cole and Ella Emhoff. There are likely two reasons to pretend non-biological parents are not, in fact, parents.
In an era of marriage equality, those who oppose LGBTQ rights have added incentive to define family as resulting from a single marriage between one man and one woman.
But evangelicalism is also responding to an older cultural shift. No-fault divorce was first made legal in California in 1969, and spread across the U.S. By the '70s, the divorce rate nearly doubled. Many churches previously opposed to divorce and remarriage softened their stance as far too many church members were divorcing to exclude them all.
In recent years, some on the right, including Vance, have begun voicing opposition to no-fault divorce. House Speaker Mike Johnson preached on the subject. Republican legislators have begun adding no-fault divorce into state platforms, alongside efforts to block reproductive rights.
Importantly, no-fault divorce coincided with an 8 to 16 percent decrease in female suicides, a 30 percent drop in intimate partner violence, and a 10 percent decrease in women murdered by their partners.
As a reporter, I have talked to a tragic number of evangelical women who believed they had no option but to submit to husbands who used their "authority" to justify abuse. When these women turned to their pastors or even popular evangelical books for help, they learned that it was their job to keep their husband happy. If there was abuse, they must submit more. If their husband was angry or had a wandering eye, they must submit sexually to soothe and keep his interest.
There's no room for marriages that include happily blended families in such a worldview, because women are easier to control when they have no alternatives to leave their first, unhappy union.
There's also a growing argument for so-called householder voting, a supposedly family-based form of representative democracy in which women discuss their political wishes with their husbands, but only her husband votes. As the family's head, he engages with the state. Christian nationalists, whose goals include religious dominion over our shared civic spaces, include Pastor Joel Webbon, who argued that in a true Christian nation, women would not have the right to vote. Women's suffrage and no-fault divorce "more than anything else, ultimately split the household," Webbon said.
Theirs is an effort to redefine the American family, not by its growing diversity or ability to hold a variety of relationships or provide escape hatches when needed. Instead, Vance's most eager audience wants women in a place of submission—as if that is the measure of a man's strength rather than of his own insecurities.
Sarah Stankorb is the author of the national best-seller Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, The Atlantic, Marie Claire, and many other publications.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
