The Men Working to Transform the United States into Gilead

A retweet endorsed by Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s idea of an ideal Secretary of Defense, made of a CNN report, “Inside one pastor’s crusade for Christian domination in the age of Trump,” is receiving quite a bit of attention, as well it should.

Declarations from right-wing “Christian” Idaho pastor Doug Wilson and his followers made in the piece by investigative journalist Pamela Brown include that “women should not be allowed to vote “as individuals.” Rather, households would cast a vote and, since the man is the head of the household and his wife should willingly submit to him, the vote is his. So too, of course, is she. The 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands.

Hegseth shared the post and added, “All of Christ for All of Life.” So far as we know, he was not drunk, but in fact everything that Doug Wilson stands for would be more accurately described as “Nothing of Christ for Any of Life.”

In a way, Hegseth performed a public service by bringing to wider attention the “Christian nationalist” movement that is gaining strength and has much support in the Trump Cult. As the title of the CNN report indicates, it seeks “Christian” domination of America. All of us need to know what they mean by that. Pastor Wilson is a flat-out nutter who envisions an America that is a “Christian nation” the way Saudi Arabia is an “Islamic nation.” The ultimate goal is replacing secular democracy with a government ruled by “Christ the King.” Jesus presumably being unavailable for such a role that rejects his most important teachings, it would mean “Donald the King” or perhaps “Doug the King.”

Male Monocreationism

This movement is all about reverting women to what was for thousands of years considered to be their proper place of inferiority and submission. Indeed, as I explain in the book manuscript on which I am currently working, An Agreed-Upon Fiction: The Creation of the ‘Inferior’ Sex — How It Misshaped History and the Present, the whole authoritarian enterprise is based on a Foundational Lie that arose more than five thousand years ago. I call it Male Monocreationism: the assertion that men have all reproductive power and women merely provide a place in which men’s creations grow. “Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” Wilson said in the CNN interview.

As the presumed creators, men were the authors of new life and so those with all authority. If males are the authors of new life, it follows that the “Author of the Universe” must also be male. Male Monocreationism inevitably led to male monotheism, which reinforced the fiction that women are inferior and that their purpose is to have babies and be submissive.

Reactionary strains of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam still take the Agreed-Upon Fiction as central to their theology. A couple of examples from a nearly limitless supply: Paul’s First Letter to Timothy instructs that women should be in “full submission” and never permitted “to usurp authority over the man … but women will be saved through childbearing.” The second surah of the Qur’an instructs “Your wives are a place of sowing seeds for you, so come to your place of cultivation however you wish.”

Wilson continues this line of belief. In his 1999 book, Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man, he wrote:

“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission.”

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Male Monocreationism established an imagined order based on the fiction ♂ > ♀. That vertical binary became the model into which all other supposed inequalities between categories of humans — race, class, nationality, and so on — were plugged.

The Enlightenment and the American Revolution put forth a radically different understanding of humans as inherently equal. Over the past six decades, we have been moving closer to the fulfillment of that ideal. The authoritarian movements we confront today are entirely based on the fiction that women are innately inferior and restoring the imagined order that prevailed through most of recorded history.

“We understand that worship is warfare,” Jared Longshore, pastor of the new Washington, D.C. branch of Wilson’s Christ Church, says. “We mean that.”

Margaret Atwood predicted in 1985 in The Handmaid’s Tale what an America taken over by such crazed, insecure men might look like.

We must stop them. Recognizing that sex/gender is a horizontal spectrum of equality, not a vertical binary of dominance and submission is the way to do that.

Robert S. McElvaine is Emeritus Professor of History at Millsaps College and the author of eleven books, including Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History. He is currently at work on a new book, An Agreed-Upon Fiction – The Creation of the ‘Inferior’ Sex — How It Has (Mis)shaped History & the Present, from which some of the arguments in this essay are drawn. He writes a column on Substack, Musings & Amusings.

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