On the campaign trail, Donald Trump has been using one word in an effort to convince women to vote for him, and it’s one that sets off alarm bells for me as an exvangelical, or former member of the evangelical church.
“You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector,” he said at a rally in Pennsylvania, a battleground state, last month.
This echoed a claim he made in an all-caps screed on Truth Social days earlier: “I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE.”
I heard the word “protector” often growing up in the Texas Bible Belt, a place where churches outnumbered retail stores and people introduced themselves by their Christian denomination. Some were Baptist. Others were Methodist. We were the Church of Christ.
While some white evangelicals believe in equality among sexes, most, including my church, pushed a concept known as complementarianism. It means men and women have different but complementary roles. Men are supposed to be the providers and protectors, while women are the nurturers and supporters. Complementarians believe the Bible backs these differences.
Ironically, growing up, I rarely felt protected by the men in our church. From a young age, my female peers and I were told we had the power to cause men to “stumble into sin,” which is a nicer way of saying that our young bodies would cause them to lust. The accusation was confusing because it simultaneously infantilized us and accelerated us into adulthood. Though many of us weren’t even old enough to think about sex, we were now told we had to be responsible for it.
An elder at my childhood church once warned my friend’s mother that her daughter’s “provocative” clothes weren’t suited for her “changing body.” She was 11. She and her mother were filled with shame, stuffing her daughter’s closet with long and baggy denim clothes as if it were a fabric barrier between the elder’s sin and her prepubescent body. Men who leer at children are the dangerous ones, not the children themselves. Yet, the elder’s words belie an underlying mindset common to evangelicals: men have the power to control everything but themselves.
That is certainly true of Trump. The man who is vying to be the most powerful in the country has a long history with uncontrolled sexual behavior. He infamously boasted to Billy Bush on “Access Hollywood” about forcefully groping and kissing unwilling women. He bragged about strolling into Miss Teen USA dressing rooms to get a glimpse of the half-naked underage contestants. A jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, and another jury heard the testimony of Stormy Daniels, who said Trump cheated on his wife, Melania Trump, with her before covering up their affair with a $130,000 hush money payment.
The word that springs to mind is not protector — it’s predator.
Trump isn’t drawing his inspiration from the Bible — the man once referred to “Second Corinthians” as “Two Corinthians” — but white evangelicals have embraced Trump as a leader because he shares their vision that women are subservient.
Evangelicals are taught that God cursed Eve for tempting Adam to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, making all women subordinate to men forever. Women’s main purpose became to “be fruitful and multiply,” filling the earth with children, while men’s role was to rule over women. In the highlight reels of social media, tradwives make the outdated concept appear trendy and idyllic. Christian influencers tell women there is strength in submission. I was fed a steady diet of these messages until I had my own daughter — and realized I wanted better for her.
My daughter was 2 when Trump was elected. She’s 10 now and hasn’t known a world where he’s not poisoning the airwaves in some way. By the time white evangelicals went all in for Trump, calling him “honest” and “morally upstanding” in polls, we’d been questioning other elements of white evangelical culture for years. We affirmed LGBTQ+ rights and dignity, while many of our Christian peers did not. We also fellowshipped with people who called climate change a hoax instead of seeing it as an opportunity to defend nature, which we believed was God’s creation. Those were disagreements we could parse. Trump was not.
In the world, Trump’s own descriptions of his predatory behavior could be considered criminal. Among our evangelical friends and family, they were written off as “locker room talk.” In the world, Trump’s flagrant, unscrupulous infidelity was criticized. In our church, he was compared to the Bible’s flawed hero, King David, who sent a woman’s husband to his death so he could claim her as his own. Every excuse our fellow church members made for Trump told the same story — protection exists for men, not the women they violate.
My husband and I began to distance ourselves from the church we loved, where we had spent hundreds of hours serving. We were simply no longer willing to raise our daughter (or our son) in a place that used the idea of protection as a veil to dominate and harm women.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest and most influential evangelical organization, has vast political influence because it is the home of numerous Republican leaders, including Louisiana House Speaker Mike Johnson. In the SBC’s doctrinal statement, the Baptist Faith and Message, the organization writes, “[A husband] has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family.”
The SBC was rocked by a widespread scandal in 2022 when a report revealed the organization had covered up more than 700 instances of sexual abuse instead of reporting the crimes. It seems the only people the SBC protected were the men in power.
In a way, I’m grateful to Trump for revealing something I couldn’t have seen when I was so deeply entrenched in my church community. Like a termite, he exposed the rot in evangelicalism that has been there all along. Now, it’s up to them to fumigate.
As for me and my house, I now believe that the best way to safeguard women is to ensure we have agency over our bodies and the power to make our own decisions. I neither need nor want Trump’s brand of “protection.” I’m protecting myself at the ballot box.
Tiffany Torres Williams writes about the dangerous intersection of Christian nationalism and politics in her newsletter, Project 2025 Takedown. She lives in western Montana with her husband, son and daughter.
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