Abuser Politics: Christian Male Supremacists Want Women to Shut Up

This week, extremist Christian pastor Joel Webbon had fellow Christian nationalist Wesley Todd on his New Christian Right YouTube show. As with nearly every episode of Webbon’s show that was a significant amount invective directed at immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and other nefarious culture war enemies. But who is to blame for the advances of these armies of evil? Who is to blame for the rise of sexual immorality and the increase of non-white and non-Christian populations in the West? Well, in large part, they blame women. 

I have written before how the far-right has begun calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, predicated on the idea that feminine empathy and gentleness have led to the kind of sexually free, multi-ethnic, multicultural societies these men detest. But the call to strip women of the franchise is only the beginning. Male supremacists on the right want to pull women back from public life entirely, ensconcing them in a fantasy version of the past that is somehow even more ruthless and misogynistic than ever before. It’s a politics of abuse, sickly legitimized by a gospel that is supposed to be about mercy. 

Just take this exchange from the show. At one point, Todd exclaimed

God in his word, God in nature that he made, said ‘women need to shut up. They need to be quiet. They don’t get to call shots. They don’t get to rule.’

Webbon responded

So true, king, women need to shut up…We’re saying in the public square, in ruling civil positions of government, in the church, in ecclesiastical positions of authority, and when it comes to making decisions in the household as the federal head for the family, in that arena, absolutely Wes is right. Women, shut up! Of course! It is literally an offense to God!

Todd and Webbon also connected the supposedly deleterious effects of women’s leadership to the rise of Catholicism in the United Kingdom. Todd laid this directly at the feet of the Church of England’s ordination of women. In particular, he aimed his ire at Archbishop of Canterbury Dame Sarah Mulally, who was ordained this January and is the first woman to hold the position. As Todd put it, it is unsurprising that young men are turning away from Anglicanism and toward Catholicism when a woman is leading the Church of England because women are inherently too compassionate and permissive to lead the church. Todd insisted that women are simply not “built” for leadership by nature, a truth that he argued any young man can easily see:

So when you have young men that they look around and it’s by nature—it’s not even that they’re reading their Bible—they say “homosexuality is gross. Mass immigration is destroying the fabric of our society.” Just by the light of reason and nature alone, they’re surmising these things. They look at the Church of England and they say, “I feel like we need God in society. Again, by nature alone I know that there is a god. But I look at this, I look at an old, haggard, ugly woman that’s supposed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ruling over the visible church? Ugh.”…Say what you will about Catholicism, you won’t find a woman priest.

It’s a virulently misogynistic, male supremacist tirade. And it also draws on a logic of natural order. As Webbon’s words make clear, the argument is not only about clerical matters but about the way all life operates. That is to say, both Webbon and Todd are asserting that female leadership in any place and at any time defies natural law. 

I think this is a crucial aspect of Christian male supremacism that must be understood. They view the feminine as an affront, a weaker strain of the human condition to be reviled and conquered. 

Joshua Haymes, a former pastor at Doug Wilson-affiliated Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship that Pete Hegseth attended in Tennessee, called the ordination of Mulally “spiritual transgenderism.” What he means is that female leadership is intrinsically a perversion. There is also a sense in which I think we can say Haymes's misogyny reveals a central hatred at the heart of transphobia. It's a view in which it is impossible for women to ever obtain the privilege and authority of men, and it is pathetic for men to seek to obtain the subjugated status of women. Here’s more of Haymes:

Let’s see what God thinks about this archbishop. [Beginning with] 1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” The word of the Lord. You know where all this transblender [sic] madness came from? I would say it came from the church. You see, the church became spiritually transgender years before all of this crazy gender-bending madness actually became mainstream in our culture. For decades, we have been pretending that women can be pastors. They can’t. They can’t by nature of the office itself. God is the one who designed the office of the pastorate, and women quite literally just don’t have the equipment. 

Haymes’s invocation of 1 Timothy here aligns with a fairly common approach to gender roles in many corners Christianity—particularly conservative evangelical Protestantism. I grew up in a church environment where women were never permitted to lead men in any form of prayer, worship, or spiritual study. Most congregations in my denomination would have twelve year-old boys lead communion services and congregational prayer, but never a woman. This would also be true inside home Bible studies and over family meals. 

I don’t want to disparage the people I grew up going to church with, and I don’t want to sound as if I’m suggesting any and all conservative Christians are hateful sexists.  Personally, I would like to see the world’s great faith traditions move toward genuine sexual equality—and an embrace of trans and queer identities, at that. But it is important to acknowledge the unbearable normality of patriarchy in many American homes and houses of worship. I strongly disagree with these views, but I nevertheless think it would be deeply unfair to compare everyday believers to Webbon and his ilk. 

As is clear, the way Webbon, Todd, and Haymes express their extreme beliefs is shockingly vile. What is even more disturbing is the totalizing approach these men take, extending their male supremacist logic into almost every aspect of public life. 

Of course, in many ways, it’s already there. The refrain of “shut up, bitch,” echoed from Andrew Tate videos to the halls of junior high schools to daily spats on social media carries a simple message: the feminine is to be reviled and stamped out in its entirety. The atmospheric, inescapable assumptions of male supremacy can’t be cordoned off in the manosphere. In their mundane expressions, they drive so much of daily life. And they are an animating feature of the far-right politics dismantling American democracy today. 

The desire for quiet women—really for silent women—in every public forum is neither about adherence to Biblical truth nor the revelation of natural law. It is, as with white supremacy, a logic of domination, of rape. Telling women to shut up, attempting to banish them from civic life, and insisting on the right of men, by virtue of their “equipment,” to rule as they please is a politics of rape. When these men talk about what they’ll permit women to do, it’s always essentially a threat. But their inability to hear any dissent puts the lie to their claims. There is no strength here, no virtue or authority. There is only the fragile, preening ego of the abuser. 

Featured image is Shopkeeper sews up his wife's mouth, by Thomas Lord. Busby