Book review: Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right

The women of MAGA have been a consistently misread constituency in contemporary American politics, alternately pathologised as passive dupes, seen simply as power hungry cynics, or dismissed as peripheral and ignored. Katie Gaddini’s Esther’s Army offers a sharp corrective. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, from joining subjects as they organised, rallied, and celebrated across the country, and supplemented by interviews, archival work, and social media analyses spanning both Trump terms, Gaddini persuasively argues that this group represents a profoundly influential force in the rise of the American right, and that our continued failure to adequately analyse them weakens our understanding of reactionary movements. The result is a book that combines a compelling narrative style with empirical richness and analytical sharpness.

The book’s methodological strength is inseparable from Gaddini’s positionality. Having been raised to share the beliefs of evangelical conservative women, she brings an ethnographic attunement to her subjects that more conventionally distanced scholarship lacks. This proximity, which undoubtedly facilitated the interview access that gives the book much of its empirical texture, enables a level of empathetic inquiry rarely extended to such subjects. Without suggesting that reactionary actors should be taken at their word or afforded uncritical platforms, Gaddini’s work makes the case that ethnographic investigation conducted with patience and empathy is essential in revealing the motivations and affective and communal dynamics behind the rise of the far right.

Extending empathetic curiosity to women whose worldview entails the active removal of rights from others, and who often ground this in an eschatological self-understanding as vessels of divine will (a great many interviewees describing direct communication with God) is no easy task. Yet Gaddini manages it expertly, revealing the belief systems of her subjects without flinching. Her interviewees emerge as clear-eyed, organised, and driven: not simply credulous victims of false consciousness nor cartoon villains of liberal caricature, but agents who pursue their politics, however repugnant, dangerous, and self-undermining, strategically and with conviction.

Each chapter develops a distinct archetype that illuminates the shared ideological and culture-war vernacular of MAGA womanhood, and the surprising diversity of backgrounds, grievances, and cultural milieus that constitute it, a diversity the movement consciously cultivates: “It’s multiple streams, multiple ages, it’s Gen Z all the way to the gray hairs. It’s all of us, every skin color” (p. 37). Influential members and ideological threads drawn from varied international contexts highlight meta-community dynamics, with disparate constituencies held together by a unifying cause despite diverging identity.

The archetypes profiled immediately call to mind images of familiar figures glimpsed on news footage or social media feeds, yet Gaddini restores to them the interiority and personality that make deeper analysis possible. Emergent across the archetypes is a consistent self-image of righteous rebels, defenders of children, the family, and civilisation, against a corrupt and predatory establishment. At times they explicitly liken their cause to the civil rights movements they would, in all likelihood, have opposed. They frame their project as an expression of love, a higher calling pursued without interest in personal glory. This self-presentation as apolitical mothers and wholesome young women lends the movement a semblance of moral authority that has proven so effective in promoting their ideological project.

The overtly political nature of this culture nonetheless is unveiled with striking clarity. These women are trained and highly organised participants in a deliberate ideological project. Gaddini’s subjects refer consistently to “training” rather than learning or education, a choice that reflects the movement’s aim of producing effective political agents and culture warriors. The world she documents is saturated with political purpose, from campus, to church, to social media, in a way that challenges assumptions of passivity without ignoring the reality of a highly effective propaganda and indoctrination apparatus. These women may be shaped by a cult-like ideological machine, but they move through it energetically, with conviction and agency.

Esther’s Army reveals how seamlessly the religious and political dimensions of the movement reinforce one another, with church community, political organising, and ideological formation constituting an integrated network. Religious doctrine and weaponised moral panic prove powerful enough to override even identity-based contradictions: among the book’s impactful threads is the account of Black conservative women whose alignment with a predominantly white Christian nationalist movement produces a specific loneliness. This reflects recurrent themes in the book, which can be read as a reflection on contradiction. Gaddini expertly reveals the complexity that MAGA women navigate, between indoctrination and agency, community and alienation, moral self-assuredness and paranoid fear.

Several analytical threads will particularly reward researchers, journalists, and anyone tracking contemporary reactionary politics. Gaddini’s treatment of femonationalism (the instrumentalisation of feminist ideas by nationalist and far-right actors to justify anti-immigrant and xenophobic positions), enacted here by women who simultaneously disavow feminism as an identity, or actively claim it to advance a reactionary agenda, is a particularly incisive contribution. The contradictions are striking and well-documented: women who preach traditional domesticity while occupying or pursuing senior political and corporate positions; who loudly assert their own political voice while belittling women’s enfranchisement; who mobilise to dismantle the decades of feminist progress they have benefited directly from. Some of Gaddini’s subjects appear to momentarily register these tensions, yet the contradictions never destabilise their political formation. They are negotiated and contained, her interviewees carving out just the degree of female agency their worldview can accommodate.

Gaddini also reveals the Christian right’s investment in parallel epistemic infrastructure. Liberty University and Regent University School of Law, revealed as sites of ideological and strategic formation, and international influence projection, are prominent examples (Liberty U. is described as an incubator for conservative leaders). One of several structural contradictions Gaddini allows to speak for themselves is the irony of a majority-female student cohort deploying the expanded opportunities feminism secured in order to be trained as its opponents. Researchers tracking the wellness-to-radicalisation pipeline will find the book’s treatment of the MAHA influencer archetype equally valuable, connecting it directly to live debates around health misinformation as a far-right recruitment vector.

The book also makes a vital contribution to analyses of the affective and community dimensions of far-right recruitment. A securitised mentality runs through the accounts of Gaddini’s subjects, fears about terror attacks on their institutions, aggression from pro-Palestine or left-wing students, the erosion of religious liberty, revealing how effectively securitisation discourse is weaponised to entrench people within the movement’s orbit. Yet this siege mentality is only part of the picture. Gaddini shows how MAGA spaces prove adept at offering validation and warmth: social events, shared rituals, pride, and the kind of affirmation and belonging that are hard to come by in contemporary society, particularly for those with the wrong politics. The movement, in this account, thrives not only on fear and anger but on fun and celebration, as those marginalised for their reactionary views find in these spaces a home. This dynamic has significant implications for how we think about radicalisation and prevention. Gaddini’s ethnography unfolds against a backdrop of acute social turbulence, the Black Lives Matter protests, the accelerating visibility of LGBTQ+ people in public life, the COVID-19 pandemic, with lockdown conditions accelerating the spread of conspiracy theories. Each perceived crisis functioned as fresh confirmation of the threats her subjects already believed themselves to face, and as a recruitment engine for a movement whose offer of community and righteous purpose gained urgency.

What the book ultimately demonstrates is the dynamic adaptability of the contemporary Christian right. A movement that espouses deeply entrenched regressive ideas remains tactically agile: refining its messaging, absorbing diverse constituencies, pursuing long-term metapolitical strategies, and expanding its international reach. The broader argument is one that researchers in this field will recognise, but that bears repeating: pathologising or ignoring constituent members of reactionary movements is analytically limiting. If the MAGA coalition has been built in no small part by women who are competent, motivated, and clearly effective, then understanding what drives them and how they see themselves is a precondition for anything more than circular denunciation. Esther’s Army is a serious and successful attempt to provide that understanding.

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Dr. Katie Gaddini is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Social Research Institute, University College London (UCL) and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, Department of Sociology. From 2022-2026 she is a United Kingdom Research & Innovation (UKRI) Research Fellow at Stanford University and UCL.

Benjamin Nangle is a PhD researcher at KU Leuven’s Media, Culture, and Policy lab, affiliated with the DEMINE project. His research focuses on far-right digital communication, gendered and affective propaganda, and migration-related discourse.

Both Katie and Benjamin are members of the RPRN.

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