When they prayed on the Sunday after Valentine’s Day, as on other Sundays, most of the women at King’s Way Reformed Church in the old mining town of Prescott, Ariz., wore dainty kerchiefs knotted over their hair to show devotion to God. Marybelle East, 36, wore hers all the time, she said — seven days a week — “for him to see that I submit to his authority.” Her husband’s authority, that is.
Her head scarf is a physical reminder of biblical patriarchy, the kind of marriage the church preaches. “It keeps me from running my mouth,” she said.
To her and the other women, patriarchy also means ceding their political voices to their husbands. They believe America would be better off if women could not vote.
The Easts and their children had driven two hours from the Phoenix area to hear Dale Partridge, the 40-year-old pastor based on the outskirts of Prescott, in a brick-and-glass events space set between a regional airport and a modest golf course.
On social media, the pastor has attracted a following by posting incendiary commentary: railing against feminists, Catholics and gay people, describing immigration as “national suicide,” and labeling Islam and Hinduism “demonic.” He also calls for erasing women’s suffrage, which he lists as one reason “the world is falling apart.”
The 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment, the landmark legislative achievement of the movement to make women equal citizens, made it possible for women across America to vote. But for Mr. Partridge and a growing number of like-minded Christians, it drove America into national decline. Instead, they support “household voting.” One household, one vote — the husband’s.
While many Americans would see this as an unthinkable regression to a time when women were treated as second-class Americans, proponents of the concept believe deeply that this arrangement is what God envisioned in a marriage.
If a decade ago the idea was just another extreme provocation, today it is gaining adherents beyond the fringe. Male influencers and podcasters in the ultraconservative corner of the internet known as the manosphere often push to “repeal the 19th,” and far-right young women have also backed the idea.
“I used to teach this as, ‘This is this fringe thing that’s out there.’ Now I teach it as, ‘This is no longer fringe,’” said Beth Allison Barr, a history professor at Baylor University, author of “The Making of Biblical Womanhood” and advocate for women’s equality in the church, who said she has heard household voting and biblical patriarchy being discussed increasingly in evangelical circles. “It’s being made to sound more palatable and reasonable.”
Even Mr. Partridge is surprised at how fast the conversation has shifted. Just a few years ago, “you’d be slaughtered talking about this,” he said.
And now?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a clip last summer of pastors in his ultraconservative denomination, which holds that America is a Christian nation whose laws should reflect Christian tenets, arguing that women should be barred from voting. In 2024, the popular conservative wellness podcaster Alex Clark said on her show that she “wouldn’t mind if it was just the male head of household that voted.” A prominent anti-abortion activist who spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Abby Johnson, has also endorsed household voting.
The church Mr. Partridge founded out of his house with a few people in 2021 now has more than 100 parishioners attending every Sunday, with five to 10 new families joining every year, he said. They’re coming from Phoenix and Minnesota and Las Vegas, from Canada and from as far away as Germany.
“Early adoption of any particular idea always seems strange to the mass,” the pastor said in a recent interview in Prescott, where he lives with his wife, Veronica Partridge, and four children. “But then a few years later, the mass is there, and you’re not as weird as everybody thought you were.”
To people at King’s Way, feminism is what’s weird, and women holding civil authority, or voting independently, is what’s unnatural.
“The results just speak for themselves,” Ms. Partridge, 36, said of female independence. “Everybody seems more stressed out, angry, frustrated with one another, depressed.”
Every democracy in the world has universal suffrage, and repealing the 19th Amendment would require approval by three-quarters of the states — an exceedingly unlikely prospect. But Mr. Partridge said that as more Americans embraced traditional gender roles, he foresaw red states throwing up barriers to women’s suffrage.
Some obstacles to women voting could come sooner. President Trump and Republican allies are pushing legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, a restriction that opponents say could disenfranchise the many women whose married names do not match those on their birth certificates or other documents.
As an untested model, household voting still has some basic problems, people at King’s Way acknowledged. Unmarried women, they suggested, could be represented by fathers, brothers or uncles. But in their ideal, women would be married, and only to men. (Gay couples have no place in this system.)
Supporters say women’s suffrage divided wives from husbands, rupturing the unity of what the Bible describes as “one flesh.” They argue that what they describe as women’s natural tenderness makes them dangerously susceptible to supporting immigration-friendly candidates and liberal policies.
Prominent conservatives including Allie Beth Stuckey, the Christian podcaster, and Ben Shapiro have also railed about what Ms. Stuckey calls women’s “toxic empathy,” though they stop short of advocating barring women from voting.
“Don’t allow that love and compassion to paralyze your brain from thinking, especially when we are making policy decisions,” Ms. Stuckey said in a January podcast episode about liberal women’s opposition to the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, adding: “All of these good things about us make us more susceptible to lies.”
Household-voting supporters take that thinking to an extreme.
“Politics is by nature warlike,” said Corbin Clarke, 29, a King’s Way assistant pastor and UPS driver who moved his family to Prescott from Indiana in 2023. “Women weren’t made for battle.”
He added: “They were made for love. They were made for beauty.”
His wife, Haley Clarke, 34, quickly agreed. “God designed it that way,” she said.
Her husband guides her through any hard-to-understand political issues, she said, but as Republicans, “we have the same view on everything.”
For supporters, household voting stems intuitively from what they call biblical patriarchy. In patriarchal marriages, husbands hold ultimate authority, with wives in “submission.”
“If you’re patriarch of your home and your voice is the voice of your home, then it should be that way in politics as well,” Mr. Clarke said.
Many mainstream evangelical Christians have long embraced a softer version, known as complementarianism, which holds that men and women have equally valuable, but different, roles.
Both frameworks draw from the New Testament book of Ephesians, which instructs wives to “submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord” and husbands to “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
In practice, many complementarian marriages can resemble secular, egalitarian ones. Couples come to a consensus on most decisions. (Perhaps one meaningful difference is that, in theory, husbands cast the tiebreaker if needed.)
Though it has roots in older thinking, biblical patriarchy was popularized in the 1990s and early 2000s by Doug Phillips, the influential founder of Vision Forum Ministries, who also championed household voting. He later resigned over an infidelity scandal.
These days, its best-known spokesman is Doug Wilson, the pastor who built Mr. Hegseth’s denomination and believes America should be a theocracy. Mr. Wilson’s books on marriage form a spiritual road map for King’s Way and kindred churches.
“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” Mr. Wilson has written. “A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
Adherents to biblical patriarchy scorn complementarianism as a sop to feminism. The result — weak, watered-down patriarchy — leads to marital chaos, they say.
The Clarkes’ first year of marriage, before adopting patriarchy, was “the most tumultuous year of our life together,” Mr. Clarke said, describing fights over budgeting, job changes, when to start having children and whether to baptize them. “It was, ‘Who’s in charge?’” he added. “‘Where does the buck stop?’”
Embracing wifely submission, he said, established harmony.
Ms. Clarke’s role as homemaker, mother and “good helpmate” to her husband, she said, makes for “a very simple, beautiful life.”
King’s Way couples portray their way of life as a return to a better time of white picket fences and whole families. They cite the 1950s as inspiration, or the 1880s, or even Puritan America — before the upheavals of feminism, birth control, no-fault divorce, legalized abortion and other policies that granted women rights and independence. Patriarchy supporters would like to see them rolled back.
Critics say this view of the past ignores its harsh reality for many people, including nonwhites and anyone who could not survive on a male breadwinner’s income alone.
“It sells, because it’s attractive and soothing and speaks to our longing for order in the midst of chaos,” said Tia Levings, the author of “A Well-Trained Wife,” a memoir about leaving her patriarchal marriage, who counsels other women who have been abused in such marriages and writes a newsletter about Christian fundamentalism.
Her book describes how her husband changed after reading Mr. Wilson’s books about marriage, the same ones that influenced Mr. Partridge. Demanding she call him “my lord,” he began spanking her with a belt for disobeying him. (Mr. Wilson has warned against spanking wives, but has written that wives should be “led with a firm hand,” phrasing that critics say encourages harsh discipline.)
“The ultimate goal is to have women at home, out of the arena, out of public society, silent and procreating,” Ms. Levings said.
In early America, the common-law concept of coverture gave wives no separate legal existence from their husbands in the name of marital unity. Wives had no control over property or legal right to their children; husbands were legally responsible even for their wives’ crimes. In most places, only white, property-owning men could vote. In some, voting was limited to Christian men — a restriction some people at King’s Way said they hoped to restore.
States began relaxing the property requirement in the early 1800s. Mississippi became the first to begin dismantling coverture, in 1839.
To hear the couples at King’s Way that February Sunday tell it, patriarchal wives are freer than others, sheltered from the burdens of decision-making and political participation.
“I trust my husband. I know that he’s a good man, I know he’s a godly man,” said Tara Caldwell, 42. She, her husband and five sons were visiting from Las Vegas. They plan to move later this year to join King’s Way.
Submitting took practice for Ms. Caldwell, a former dietitian. “There have been times where I’ve had to swallow my pride and be like, ‘OK, this is not what I want, but I know God wants me to submit to my husband,’” she said. “God’s going to reward me when I get to heaven for my obedience.”
Her husband, Jesse Caldwell, 40, an Air Force pilot, said that biblical patriarchy might evoke “some cowering woman in the corner” and “some ridiculously machismo jerk of a husband just lording it over her.”
In reality, they said, he routinely consults her on decisions, often changing his mind after she “appeals.”
The husbands interviewed emphasized that they were required to lead according to biblical principles, not as tyrants, and to take responsibility for their family’s sins.
It is a vision of masculinity, disciplined and resolute, that the husbands said held clear appeal for men. In his sermon on marriage that Sunday, Mr. Partridge called on men to step up and provide so that their wives would be “free to be feminine.”
“You need to take responsibility, to offer the vision, the mission, the focus, the direction for your own family,” he said. “You’re not a guy who is playing video games all day.”
Ms. Levings, the writer, said she had seen patriarchal expectations pile unrealistic pressure on men, including many not up to the task.
“If he’s depressed, you still have to submit,” she said. “If he’s an alcoholic, you still have to submit.”
Bailee Jones, who moved to Prescott and joined King’s Way with her husband in 2023, said she grew up seeing “the opposite” model, with her mother, a full-time nurse, dominating her father.
Ms. Jones, 31, who worked at the Forest Service and in retail before giving birth last year, chose a marriage more like the ones at King’s Way.
Aghast, her mother walked out of their son’s baptism. “She thinks I’m under a dictatorship and all this stuff,” Ms. Jones said at the church’s after-service potluck.
“The only dictator in our household is this guy,” said her husband, Zachary Jones, 32, smiling at the baby, who sat in a carrier in front of them.
Yet Ms. Jones said she was inclined to forgive her mother. She was still family, after all.
But Mr. Jones, a county prosecutor, saw things differently. Though there had been a “thaw” in the relationship, he said, he had to be firm about what was good for the family — which might not include seeing her mother too often.
He added that he still discussed decisions with his wife. Sometimes he admitted he was wrong.
“Who would want to live in a marriage or a household where your wife hates you?” he said. Still, “giving someone that you care about everything they want, if what they want isn’t ordered according to some higher purpose, that’s not good either.”
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Vivian Yee is a Times reporter covering North Africa and the broader Middle East. She is based in Cairo.
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