Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson posted a video last week explaining that his talk about repealing the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, is meant to push the Overton window—in other words, staking out an extreme position consistently enough that it moves what is considered acceptable discourse closer to that extreme position.
White nationalists like Nick Fuentes see their rhetoric as moving the Overton window to the right on issues like race and immigration. Wilson wants to push the Overton window away from the egalitarian ideals of first-wave feminism. Not that long ago, calling for an end to women’s right to vote would have gotten someone “exiled from public life,” Wilson acknowledged, but in the Trump era, it doesn’t even prevent him from being invited by a Cabinet member to lead worship services at the Pentagon.
First-wave feminism refers to activism in U.S. and other countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on winning legal equality in arenas like voting, education, and property rights. According to Wilson, the conservative Christian church has been infected with the egalitarian ideals promoted by first-wave feminism, and many conservative need to be “freed of their inner feminism.”
I am convinced that feminism light is pervasive in the conservative evangelical reform world. Any discussion of the 19th Amendment makes folks in this category wince, not because they don’t want half the conservatives to stay home in the next election, but rather because the idol of feminist individualism has been insulted. They want to be red-state first-wave feminists. But a true conservative reformation is not really possible when a large number of conservative leaders have unknowingly adopted radical premises. Premises will always drive the conclusions, and universal suffrage is not a conservative premise.
In other words, Wilson sees the legal equality of women as a “radical premise.”
Wilson said that it could take centuries of preaching and propagandizing to turn the U.S. into the “confessional Protestant state” of his dreams—what he calls “a constitutional theocracy.” But for now, he wants conservative Christian women to register and vote: “For liberty-loving Americans to cut their voting power in half during this attempted Commie takeover by the theater-kid Marxists would be strategically suicidal.”
In the short term, he said, his political priorities are to outlaw all abortion, repeal the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, eliminating no-fault divorce, and dismantling the administrative state.
“Now, if the women were not voting, achieving all four would be significantly easier, but the women are voting,” he said. “It is not at all practical to think that removing the franchise from them is even a remote possibility. At the same time, all four are a real possibility even under the current conditions, and that is where our energy should therefore be directed.” And that means, he added, encouraging conservative women to vote.
In the process of explaining his position, Wilson promoted multiple Trumpian conspiracies about election fraud: dead people voting; voters “who materialize from nothing at 2:00 am in order to buttress the campaign of a Democratic candidate who was losing at bedtime”; and “a truckload of ballots” being driven to a landfill.
Wilson argued that, like the 19th Amendment, the 17th Amendment—which made U.S. Senators elected by popular vote rather than chosen by state legislatures—a constitutional “downgrade.” He’s also not a fan of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18.
