Keen On

“If I perish, I perish.” — the chant Katie Gaddini heard from Esther’s Army at the National Mall, weeks before the 2024 election Back in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Margaret Atwood came on the show to talk about The Handmaid’s Tale — her warning of how trad wives, to borrow a contemporary phrase, could be exploited by an evangelical patriarchy. Five years later, the Stanford fellow Katie Gaddini offers a strikingly different vision. Her new book, Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right (out today), is the product of nine years of research and over 100 interviews with conservative Christian women across 28 states. These women, this army of Esthers, are not handmaidens, Gaddini concludes. “They are very much in charge. They are politically engaged. They, in many cases, hold political positions of power.” Gaddini grew up as an evangelical — her father a pastor, with four more pastors in her extended family. She voted for George Bush “naturally,” before discovering she could be a