Trad-Wives and Pagans and Pipelines, Oh My: A Look at the Feminine Alt-Right Pipeline

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You know I remember when the terms “crunchy” and “granola” had primarily liberal connotations. 

Marked by a concern for the environment, the quality of the food we were consuming, and the educational value of children’s books and free play outside, up until recently it was always something I associated with hippies and left leaning people. My own parents were basically crunchy adjacent when I was a kid in the early ‘aughts. They weren’t eschewing all preservatives or plastic toys or screen time (we certainly did not have the money nor access nor time for the hyper “clean,” no artificial sugar, organic only diets), but we did spend more time at the library and playing outside and watching PBS and listening to NPR than most kids I knew. Apparently around this same time “crunchy conservatism” was starting to take hold (see this 2006 piece from NPR on the topic), but in my own rural corner of Indiana, that certainly didn’t seem to be the case. Though I was 9 when that piece came out, and while I was a pretty politically aware 9 year old, I was still more concerned with spelling tests and figuring out how to hula-hoop (never did get that one) than the conservative opinion on organic tomatoes, so maybe I missed it.

But all of that seems to have taken a radical shift to the right in recent years. I’m sure it happened earlier than when I first noticed, I only really started picking up on it during the spring of 2020. I, like many people going stir-crazy at home trying to isolate from potential COVID exposure, got really into baking sourdough bread and other things from scratch, and I picked up plenty of tips from Tiktok. “Cottage-core” aesthetic was popping off as influencers made gorgeous videos set to calming music of them kneading dough, baking, and removing the lids from their dutch oven to reveal stunning loaves of bread. A lot of us found a ton of joy in a task that required us to use our hands and take a break from the doom scrolling. But I also remember seeing a huge rise in discussions about “gut health” (the fermentation process for sourdough can be good for digestion) and “chemicals” in our foods alongside the new interest in baking. Gardening saw a similar boost as people were looking to fill their time at home and mitigate rising grocery prices, but also came with a new level of fear mongering about pesticides and GMOs. Herb gardening in particular became popular amongst young people like myself who were living in apartments, and with it came an interest in herbal medicine, especially as we were all trying to find any possible cure for the pandemic and watching our mainstream public health systems fracture. People seemed to be increasingly distrustful of their food and medicine at a rate that I, at least, was previously unaware of. 

With this distrust came the rise of the “trad-wife” influencer. Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith, amongst others, with their gaggles of adorable children, impeccable prairie dresses, and home cooked meals presented themselves as aspirational. They presented a narrative that the world’s problems could be solved by returning to a simpler time, well before COVID was even a thought in anyone’s minds, where people ate food that they grew themselves, their children ran around barefoot, and of course, where traditional gender roles were honored and Christianity was at the center of everything. But it wasn’t only the conservative Christians tapping into these ideas.

Much of my for you page at the time, along with Animal Crossing and baking videos, was (and still is) filled with a revival in neo-paganism, Wicca, and other “alternative” spiritualities. Many people who leave Christianity still feel a sense of spirituality, and a not insignificant amount of those people are drawn to these more individualized forms of spirituality, where they are able to engage on their own terms. Some of it comes from an interest in unpacking culture from Christian colonialism as well, digging into what beliefs their ancestors held pre-Christianization, or in the case of Wicca, taking the founders’ false statements as historical fact, though usually well intentioned. The biggest, most well known faces in the space inhabited some of the same demographics as the trad-wife set, namely cisgender white women with flowing skirts and herb gardens and fresh baked bread, though typically fewer children in sight, and more gay/bi folks to be sure. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of BIPOC, trans, and to a lesser extent men creators within “witchtok” but there’s a stereotype about it for a reason. Amongst the cis women especially, you’ll start noticing an odd pattern. Despite many of them espousing ostensibly liberal politics, especially regarding religious liberty, they are deeply deeply invested in traditional cissexist gender roles.

For me, any creator that heavily focuses on the “divine feminine” and “embracing your feminine energy” immediately launches a red flag about a thousand feet into the air. That’s not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with a belief system that acknowledges and values femininity, but often in these online spaces it signals a whole hodgepodge of biological essentialist, TERF, anti-reproductive choice politics. Many of these alternative spirituality creators preach to their primarily woman audience that their problems can be solved if they just embrace their “natural feminine powers” which typically include “nurturing” and “caretaking” and “creating life.” Often you will see them suggesting that their female followers learn to take on more submissive roles, and avoiding “masculine” behaviors for the sake of their spiritual health. So prevalent is the biological essentialism and two-dimensional view on womanhood and femininity that if you removed the specific gods and religious texts from the equation, it would be nigh on impossible to tell the difference between many “divine feminine” witchtokers and the “trad-wife” influencers. They’re both deeply hostile to gender diversity, or even simply diverse expressions of womanhood amongst cis women, they eschew many aspects of modern life, including birth control, vaccines, and other medical revolutions, and stoke fear of progress in their followers.

Now let me be clear, as someone who has embraced folk Catholicism as a means of political resistance, loves a good herbal remedy for a mild cold, and bakes all of their own bread (store bought gluten free bread is so bad y’all), none of these practices automatically mean you are in some kind of alt-right fascist pipeline. I have many dear friends in these spaces from all sorts of backgrounds, who are frequently on the front lines for the fight to save American democracy. But that alt-right pipeline is there, and the only way to keep ourselves and our loved ones from accidentally being pulled into it is to be aware of it. Think pieces, essays, and books on the alt-right pipeline that young men have been finding themselves in are everywhere, and rightfully so, but less has been made of the equivalent pipeline that is drawing in young women of all stripes.

Let’s step back for a moment and discuss the alt-right pipeline more generally. As defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the alt-right “is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization.” You’ve almost certainly come across alt-right accounts on social media. They may take on the face of Radical Traditionalist Catholics (you can find my take on rad-trads here), conservative political commentators like Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones, pastors across a wide variety of denominations, and any number of conservative podcast bros, amongst others. They go beyond standard conservative’s belief in limited government and individual liberty, and almost exclusively follow the MAGA political framework. They firmly believe that the United States needs to be saved from “liberal identity/gender/racial politics” and that a return to “traditional” gender and racial hierarchies, along with a hypernatalist politick, is necessary for saving western civilization.

They also won’t always necessarily characterize themselves as “alt-right” and in particular, the individuals that want to present themselves as “rational intellectuals” rather than extremists will claim that they are simply “classical libertarians” and “philosophers.” Frequently you’ll find that they seem to believe that the peak of human knowledge was, at best, during the Enlightenment, and that any philosophical evolution past that moment is absurdist nonsense that should be disregarded. Their philosophical heroes are, unsurprisingly, white men, with a particular focus on the Classical Philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (you’ll almost never find, say, Diogenes in their repertoire). Women philosophers, with perhaps the exception of Ayn Rand, rarely make an appearance in their citations, unless to serve as objects of ridicule or symbols of the “decline” of intellectualism. The “intellectual” alt-right is often, in my experience, at least somewhat religiously diverse, at least in name if not in politick, encompassing not only Conservative Christian think tanks and seminaries, but large swaths of the New Atheist movement, which readers of this blog will be familiar with my ongoing conflict with. Concepts like classical masculine “virtue” and the rejection of postmodernism are found across the intellectual thought machine of the alt-right.

The alt-right pipeline, then, is the process through which individuals, who may have espoused more moderate, or even liberal views, are brought into the alt-right political fold. For the majority of Americans, especially younger Americans, this has been driven heavily by social media algorithms. A 2020 study featured by the MIT Technology Review found that the Youtube algorithm, for example, showed that the video platform’s algorithm was pushing people increasingly towards alt-right content creators, essentially creating an environment in which the viewer becomes a frog boiling in fascist rhetoric. As noted before, this has been traditionally considered an issue for young white men and boys, with algorithms often taking them from video game let’s play videos to videos of podcast bros telling them that their problems are the result of political correctness, feminism, and racial equality, giving them an enemy to rally against. This is deeply appealing to many people, especially Gen-Z, who have experienced massive political turmoil and are exhibiting increased feelings of disenfranchisement and disenchantment with the democratic process. This phenomenon has become so prevalent that parenting books on how to keep your son away from the pipeline, like this one, are beginning to pop up as parents and caregivers become more and more aware of the risks of unmitigated access to social media algorithms.

The feminine “crunchy” alt-right equivalent seems to be operating on a similar algorithmic framework. As I noted up top, my own brushes with the pipeline have been through Tiktok, and to a lesser extent Youtube, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. You look up a few recipes and before you know it, you’re inundated with content encouraging you to get married, have as many babies as possible, and become financially dependent on a man. Particularly amongst the Christian flavor of this content, though certainly not limited to it, there is a railing against feminism, and particularly the fight of our mothers and grandmothers for the right to equally participate in the workforce. In clear reaction to the “girl boss” feminism of recent decades, the predominant narrative in these spaces is that women would be far happier leaving the office and returning to the home. Utilizing the argument that modern society holds women to impossible standards of juggling career success, homemaking, child rearing, and relationship management, they note how much happier they are having “given up” a professional career in favor of traditional domesticity (never mind that amongst the most successful accounts their influencer careers make them the primary breadwinner of their families.)

This lifestyle is incredibly appealing to young women and girls, because its justification is based in social and economic realities not fully shared by the masculine alt-right equivalent that makes this pipeline even more dangerous.

Women are held to impossible standards when it comes to the balance of career and family life. Stay-at-home moms are ridiculed as unintelligent or inherently anti-feminist. Working mothers receive snide comments from others about how they “could never give up precious time with their children or let a daycare raise them,” and often are still faced with the same domestic workload of their stay-at-home counterparts when they return home. And the child-free set, whether by choice or otherwise, are constantly harraunged about when they are going to have children, and told that they are selfish and cannot possibly be fulfilled without becoming a mother. Many women are also realising that the promise of “girlbossing” their way to the top is unrealistic and exhausting, and typically requires working unreasonable hours for less pay, often making very little progress unless they already came from a place of social and financial privilege. This disenchantment with capitalist feminism causes many women to embrace the romanticized version of the housewife of by-gone eras, in which office politics and financial stressors are left to the husband. 

Now this image of women’s past lives has very little basis in historical reality – working and middle class women have always taken on paid labor “outside the home” – the “domestic angel” stereotype being almost completely the domain of the wealthy (note that the most successful trad-wife influencers have deep ties to generational wealth.) But rather than blame the capitalist structures that have long forced families to struggle to meet basic needs like food, housing, and healthcare, the feminine alt-right blames feminism and sexual liberation for their struggles.

The feminine alt-right movement also tends to have more compelling defenses against many of its detractors, and has been able to shrewdly weaponize both classic anti-feminist rhetoric and “choice feminist” rhetoric as the moment calls for. “Choice feminism” frames any choice a woman makes as inherently feminist because the woman is making the choice, with little regard for the systemic impacts that either cause or are proliferated by said choice. It’s a highly individualistic conceptualization of feminism that works to insulate its wielders from critique, because any criticism can be met with a simple rebuttal about respecting women’s choices.

The draw for conservative Christian women is easy to trace, and it’s easy to figure out how they made their way into the pipeline, because as will be clear in a moment, this particular brand of Christian thought is its origin. Gender theology in Imperial/Conservative Christian circles has historically been explicitly clear on sex and gender roles, with much of the framework for these roles traceable to the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. Adam, having been made first, and having been “tricked” into eating the fruit from “The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” in the Garden of Eden by Eve, is incontrovertible proof of God’s design that men should be in control of both society and their individual families. Eve, on the other hand, came from Adam’s rib, and was designed specifically to be a companion for him, not an equal, and that because she was so easily fooled by the serpent in the Garden, she is primarily responsible for the fall of man. Eve’s apparent weakness and primary role in the fall, according to this strain of gender theology, is proof that women need men to be the primary authority in their lives, in order to guide them away from the sin and temptation that Eve was so susceptible to. Particularly amongst Christians who take the Bible to be wholly literal, this story is weaponized against women in order to subjugate them over and over and over again throughout history. This theology disregards the many strong, independent women found throughout scripture, as well as the roles that women played in the early Church as deacons, priestesses, bishops, and patrons, because it is a theology of power, and specifically imperial power. Empire, which frequently goes hand in hand with fascism, relies on gendered and racial hierarchies to survive, which is why you will also almost always find white supremacist theology and Christian nationalism in the same churches that espouse traditional gender theology. The “crunchy” trad-wife movement is built by and for these structures.

What is less immediately clear is what the draw for women in alternative spiritual spaces is. After all, folk traditions are often a means of resistance against imperialist cultural hegemony. A large number of neo-pagans, Wiccans, and other practitioners of new age spirituality come out of the “exvangelical” and ex-Mormon camps, as well as ex-Catholics who left Christianity, not because a lack of belief in the spiritual or supernatural, but because of disagreement with the politics of the modern conservative Church. Seeking spiritual fulfillment, many have turned to their love of the natural world and desire to connect with their family history and found the growing movement to revive traditional, pre-Christian religion. This in itself is not a bad thing, in particular reconnecting with one’s family heritage prior to coming to the United States can be a key tool in combating white supremacy. And these movements can lead people down a variety of political paths. But there is a strong conservative streak – Norse paganism in particular is rife with white supremacy, with many of its symbols having been co opted by far right groups, including the Nazis.

There is a broader secular reason for this to mention before tracing things back to Christianity. Much of the neo-pagan movement in particular harkens back to the past, and in particular a romanticized version of the pre-Christian world. While it is certainly important to understand the past and honor tradition as long as it still serves us, this mindset is critical to sliding into conservative politics. Political conservatism, by its very nature, seeks to either maintain the status quo, or, as is becoming increasingly common, return to a mythical past when things were “better.” Any philosophy, whether religious or secular, that puts greater weight on tradition and the past than on progress will almost always lead people down a conservative pathway, as they try to resurrect a past that never truly existed.

But I don’t think we can fully divorce this phenomenon from Christianity, especially considering the sheer cultural impact that Imperial Christianity continues to have on every aspect of American life. I am far from the first person to point out that many people who leave Christianity never truly leave the dogma and theology behind. We all know atheists that have copy and pasted the need to “save” people from certain beliefs that is so typical of Christianity onto their atheism. But this definitely occurs in alternative spirituality spaces as well. Gender issues seem to be the biggest area for this to be a occur, likely because so much of our sense of a gender binary in the United States is deeply, deeply tied into the Christian Imperialist project. While pre-Christian society was far from a gender utopia, there were different understandings of both gender and sexuality at the time, and much of the biological essentialism of the neo-pagan movement seems to map much better onto the modern Christian understanding. Beliefs that women draw power from their ability to nurture life and take care of others while men are inherently aggressive and dominant are at best light reframings of Christian gender essentialism that view men as the superior head of the household and limit women to the domestic sphere. In both frameworks, women are only able to become spiritually fulfilled through a domestic life path.

Both of these movements also lean heavily into transphobia. I won’t spend time on Christian transphobia for the moment, as most are aware of their basic argument that trans identity “defies God’s design for men and women.” But the gender essentialism in alternative spirituality also relies on the idea that our abilities, gifts, and strengths are inherently tied to our biological makeup. Many “women’s” groups in alternative spiritual spaces actively exclude trans women, focusing on the power they believe inherently flows from biologically female processes like menstruation and childbearing. In these spaces your gender is determined solely by your biological makeup, and any deviation from that predetermined role will leave one spiritually unfulfilled, (even though historically many pre-Christian religions recognized and even honored gender diversity,) ringing incredibly similar tones to their Christian counterparts.

As we continue the fight for democracy, gender liberation, queer rights, religious freedom, and beyond, we need to continue to be aware of all forms of alt-right and imperialist pipelines. Men are not the sole power brokers of fascism, and while Imperial Christianity has the greatest level of influence, self-identified Christians are also not the sole proliferators of biological essentialist conservatism. Our well justified dissatisfaction with both the economy and increasing distrust of our public health institutions can and will leave us vulnerable to these pipelines, especially as our social media algorithms direct us towards people who profit from making these lifestyles so appealing. No one is immune to these politics, and we need to continue to push back against gender essentialism in all forms, lest we set social progress back not just decades or centuries, but millennia. 

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Kat (they/them) is a queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.