‘A husband expects a yes’: wife schools and the Christian nationalist movement

0:00Alaina Demopoulos:This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, the rise of Christian conservative influences teaching women to be submissive.

0:23Alaina Demopoulos:I'm just your average little small town pastor's wife. We're a Reformed Baptist, you know, Like we're not known for our... One morning, Guardian feature writer Elena Demopoulos was drinking her coffee and scrolling through TikTok when something caught her eye. Calling this proactive submission. This is where we're actually going to be pitching leadership opportunities to our husbands. and giving... And she is promising you that if you have lost your way in your marriage, if your husband isn't paying the attention that you want him to, she has the answer for you. And you will find it in the six-week class that she is selling you.

1:10It was an ad for an online school for wives. She was intrigued, so she paid the$17 and signed up. She's sitting on the ground. It's really informal, like you would maybe be talking with a friend. Oh, hi there.

1:25Alaina Demopoulos:Let's talk about the honor of attention. She speaks pretty softly. You get the sense that she has probably done this type of talk in a church somewhere with other wives in real life. And show them that you're listening, that you're glad to see them. This is the kind of thing you can do with your husband when he comes home or just when he walks into the room to tell you something. The woman was called Tilly Dillehay, one of a raft of Christian conservative women building online businesses by promising women that they can find happiness if they would only follow a few simple rules. She has amazing eye contact with the camera, which might sound silly, but it's really, really easy to feel like she's giving you this kind of womanly wisdom that you get from your girlfriends, right?

2:18And underneath the soft furnishings and the cozy girl talk, the rules are clear. Stay at home. Submit to your husband.

2:34I think the first thing that really got me, and she says this pretty early on, is if you're going to suffer, suffer as a righteous woman. And that, I think, was the first sign that something here was off, because she doesn't actually want to make women's lives better. She just wants to make women more palatable for their husbands and their church communities. What kind of a world are these influencers helping to build? And who will really benefit? From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, the rise of the Y School. And who is really behind them?

3:17alana demopolis you are a features writer for the guardian based in new york welcome to today in focus thank you so much annie so we are here today to talk about your recent foray into the world of wife schools so tell us why did you sign up i mean how can you not be just intrigued by by the idea of wife school. I'm a single woman. I don't have a husband and I'm not trying to be a good wife. But I think that there is a lot happening right now in the conservative Christian women-esphere and how these influencers are speaking to women and trying to mold women into these kind of ideal, picture-perfect, Stepford, fundamentalist Christian wives.

4:04That is really intriguing to me. Just the idea of just teaching submission in this obvious of a way was really shocking to me and obviously very terrifying. But it definitely made me want to learn a little bit more. So I signed up for this class with this woman, Tilly Dillahay. I wanted to know what they were teaching women because I didn't know if it would literally be, you know, this is how you fold your laundry or something or if it was more substantial than that. And who was the course marketed to? Was it single women? Was it women who were still married? It was marketed to wives. And it's not going to teach you how to find a husband.

4:43It's assuming you already have a husband. It's assuming you have a husband, probably some kids. And it's assuming that the spark has gone from your marriage. It's never explicitly said, but I kind of got the assumption sometimes that she might be speaking to women who are dealing with like a recent infidelity with their husband, because it's really kind of how to sort of, if your man has, you know, withdrawn, here's how to kind of grab him back.

5:10Alaina Demopoulos:And that is what being a woman married to a man is like. You have jumped on the back of a tandem bicycle, and he's on the front of that bicycle because God put him there. And your job is to pedal with all of your might and to learn how to lean with him. Do you have any idea of how popular these courses are or how many women have been attending them? So according to Tilly Dillahue, 700 women have signed up for this class. 700 women is not a ton, but it's also not nothing, especially considering Tilly Dillahue, her reach is still somewhat small. She has around 11 ,000 followers on Instagram. So it's not nothing.

5:50So tell us a bit about what you were taught at Tilly's wife's school. Can you take us through her curriculum? them. Basically, very early on in the course, she says something about mastering the art of zipping it, which just means shutting up. Wow. And that is kind of, if you don't take anything away from this class, that's the only thing, that's basically what this class is. It tells you how to shut up, basically.

6:19Alaina Demopoulos:Yeah, how to shut up. Yeah. How to shut up. Number two, speaking for him. This is interrupting the story about how you met because he's telling it wrong. Stereotype for a reason. Answering the waitress's question about his order. I don't know how many women actually do that, but if you're doing that, please stop. I mean, she goes through a lot of different resets. She tells you how to reset in the way that you talk to your husband. You're supposed to be building him up instead of nagging and complaining. Everything kind of kept coming back to if there is a problem in your marriage, it is because of you.

6:53And if you want to fix something in your marriage, you have to change something about yourself. There's absolutely no negotiation. There's no kind of like counseling, you know, couples counseling to be found here. It's really teaching women just how to make themselves smaller and smaller and smaller. You said that this was like a multi-part course. So women supposed to kind of go through this course and do one module and move on to the next. Is it a cold kind of experience of how of how to be a better wife and a better person. So she sketches it out, suggesting that you take, that there's six lessons and she's kind of says, do a lesson a week and she gives you homework.

7:31What was your homework? What my favorite, favorite in scare quotes, homework was if there's something that you don't like about your husband, instead of saying, I don't like it when you blank, rephrase it that says you do blank because you, and then make it a positive thing. So you can say, I don't like it when he tells me that I can't go out with my girlfriends, but you're supposed to reframe it to be like, he tells me not to go out with my girlfriends because he wants to spend time with me. She talks about resets in the bedroom, which is a really kind of awful part of the course where she is telling you that your husband expects sex and a yes for sex.

8:10And sometimes you just got to do it even if you don't want to. Can you talk us through that? Because that sounds pretty, pretty dark. Yeah, it was. She says that a husband expects a yes in the bedroom. If he asks you for sex, you kind of have to submit. She did tell me in an email. She did not want to speak to me over the phone, but she did email me and say, you know, obviously, if a man is raping his wife, that's not good. But she basically says, even if you're not feeling it, sometimes you just have to do it. She has this analogy that sex is like pizza. When it's good, it's really good. And even when it's bad, it's still pretty good, which is not a great thing to tell a wife.

8:56It kind of raises some troubling questions then, doesn't it, about how this message might translate to women in abusive relationships or this idea that if you give up your economic independence, you may not be able to leave a marriage. Has anyone been thinking about how that might affect the levels of abuse within these marriages? I spoke to one woman, Tia Levings, who is an ex-fundamentalist Christian, and now she's a writer and she also counsels women who are leaving that church. You just have these awful first-person stories about full-out spousal abuse, full-out marital rape that is happening.

9:34and it is justified because these women are taught, you know, you're there for your husband. You're there to please them. This is your like godly duty as a wife. It's bastardizing language of like the scripture to justify men being able to do whatever they want to women and sometimes in incredibly heinous ways. So let's talk about Tilly. Tilly Dillahay, what do we know about her? Who is she? Yeah, she's a millennial. She's in her mid-30s. She lives in Tennessee. She talks about, not necessarily in wife school, but on YouTube, she talks about growing up religious, but kind of falling out with the faith.

10:14And then her husband, who is a pastor, is the person who kind of brought her back into it. She's a full-time mom. She homeschools her kids. She used to be a journalist. She worked at a small-town newspaper before she was married. And she does reference that in wife school. She sort of says, you know, change the headlines of your life. Welcome to Home Fires. I'm Abigail Dodds, and I'm here with Tilly Dillahay, infamous Guardian article subject. Oh my goodness. Going right in there. Yeah, well. Interestingly, Tilly Dillahay did go on her podcast to talk a little bit about how she felt about our Wife School piece.

10:58Alaina Demopoulos:Just to have a clear moment where you're like, okay, the world really hates our life. Like your life, my life, like many of the people listening, the world hates what you do. But then she also said, I mean, again, another thing I maybe selfishly found sort of interesting was that she hoped that the pieces writer being me might kind of think, well, Tilly's very happy. Why is she happy? The writing is on the wall. Things aren't good. Like women are unhappy. if you achieve the feminist dream, you will be miserable. And I really just hope and pray that the woman who wrote it or even people who read it get curious.

11:39Why did she seem happy? Like, what is that? Right. But I did find it kind of amusing that she hoped that was sort of her silver lining of what would happen.

11:56So after your experience at Tilly Dillahay's Wife School, you started looking into her background. And can you tell me where that led you? So Tilly Dillahay, she again sort of presents herself as this independent creator, This stay-at-home mom, and this is sort of the side business for her. But she is actually signed to a publisher, Canon Press, which is owned by Doug Wilson, who is quite a major figure in conservative Christian circles in the U.S. So I'm willing to be a Christian nationalist because I prefer that phrase to the phrase I usually get called. What do you usually get called? White supremacist.

12:39White supremacist. Slave advocate, racist. He has spent the past 50 years in a small town in Idaho trying to build this theocracy that is incredibly backwards. He has expressed pro-Confederacy views. He does not believe that women should vote. When women were granted the right to vote, the nation had already accepted the lie that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individuals. We were so muddled, we thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were, in fact, taking it away from families. And just how politically influential is he? So Doug Wilson is the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth's pastor.

13:22Alaina Demopoulos:To include this service here in this place where many different things were worshipped for a very long time. So I just want to, I just, pastor, I want to thank you for everything you've contributed. And in recent months, Hegseth has invited Doug to pray at the Pentagon. Let's pray together again. Our Father and God, Lord of heaven and earth, we pray to you. And that's drawn a lot of headlines because it is sort of a rather unorthodox move for a pastor of a secretary of defense to go speak at the Pentagon. There's been a lot of rhetoric from Hegseth sort of justifying its current conflicts in Iran and the Middle East sort of as like a holy war.

14:06And a lot of that rhetoric, it seems like, comes from Doug Wilson, who is a very Christian nationalist figure, sort of believes that the U.S. should, quote unquote, return to its roots as a Christian nation. I'd like to see the town be a Christian town. I'd like to see the state be a Christian state. I'd like to see the nation be a Christian nation. I'd like to see the world be a Christian world. And how connected is he to Tilly Dillahir? Well, it's good to have Tilly Dillahir here with us. Welcome to Moscow. Welcome to this little video clip, whatever it is. Tilly is the author of Going On Three Books.

14:49So he's sort of in the background. Tilly's done a few appearances on his podcast. And this upcoming book that Cannon is going to be releasing, the working title is The Hemlock Letters. But her connection to him isn't really broadcast out there. You kind of have to dig a little bit or be a little curious about who she is to find this out. So while she presents herself as this independent figure, he is promoting her through his publishing arm. I don't think he's throwing buckets of money at her, but her message and her books and her podcasts and Wife School gain a larger audience because it is part of this platform that he owns and that has such a big audience through him.

15:36And why would Doug Wilson want to be helping Tilly Dillahue with her Wife School? What's in it for him? She is someone who, in her very friendly, subtle way, is preaching that women should be submissive to their husband and that they should go along with the family unit and what their husbands want. And I think that's incredibly in line with the worldview that Doug Wilson has. Again, we said he doesn't believe women should vote. He believes that all of the decisions should be made by the head of the household, which means the man. so you know she is a more palatable person to present all of this information because she's this um well-spoken very friendly affable woman and i think that also gives credence and legitimizes some of the misogyny because when you hear it coming from a woman it can't be misogynistic because a woman is saying it as opposed to someone like doug wilson

16:38mariah wellman you are an assistant professor at michigan state university and also an expert in social media influences i just wondered how much you have been charting the rise of these female conservative influences in all of their many different forms thank you annie it's a pleasure to be here it's nice to meet you um i have been studying social media influencers for a decade now, but specifically the sort of Christian white woman influencer has really been something that I've been interested in the last five to six years. So, you know, following COVID, we saw this large rise in the number of Christian women specifically related to Make America Great Again and Donald Trump's push for his second term, utilizing the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to sort of increase their visibility, their popularity.

17:33And I myself went and did my own wife course here in the UK. We seem to have a kind of growing surge of these online courses that are also popping up over here. And I just wonder if you've seen the popularity of those kind of courses and that kind of message, like spread out from the MAGA movement, spread even outside the US into other countries and other kind of spheres as well. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, one of the primary messages of Christian nationalists today is that they are the ones who are persecuted and oppressed across the globe, right? These white Christian women and men are ultimately the ones who are the victims of our contemporary society, and they are somehow losing as all of these other marginalized folks begin to win, right?

18:18And so what ends up happening is these messages spread globally because this sort of idea goes well beyond the United States. And you can find these women within seconds. And a lot of these women don't appear to be political at all. They don't have overtly political messages. But how is this movement playing into power and politics in the U.S. at this particular moment in time? One of the most recent real-life examples here in the United States is we're seeing this conversation again around household voting as a potential move forward, right? So most of those folks who are in the sort of Christian nationalist community, they are all pro-life, anti-abortion, etc.

19:03They are also huge proponents of household voting, where every household gets one vote. And if you are already in agreement that your husband's opinion is what matters most at the end of the day, that means it's your husband's vote. And if you are not married, that means it's your father's vote. And so the primary man in the household will be the one voting in the United States, that will end up being majority white men having, you know, the say in every political election at the end of the day. And that is a real concern here in the United States. It's kind of wild, isn't it, from the outside to see these incredibly regressive messages.

19:43And it's not just about household voting. You've now got people coming out, men and women, on mainstream TV channels calling for women's right to vote to be rescinded completely.

19:54Alaina Demopoulos:There are some who have gone so far as to say that they want the 19th Amendment repealed. I would support that. And I'd support it on the basis that the atomization that comes with our current system is not good for humans. And how much do you think this new wave are very high-profile conservative women, which I think have been called cute-servatives, I think, in some circles in the States, are spreading these really regressive views about women's rights and their own rights by default. Could you tell us who they are and who are the kind of main players in this movement? Cute-servatives, to my knowledge, was a term coined by one of the most popular women in this movement.

20:34Her name's Alex Clark. She's a member of Turning Point USA, which was founded by Charlie Kirk. She's a fantastic example when we're talking about how they spread these sort of regressive views in a way that is almost not too harsh and not at risk of alienating certain women who aren't sure what they believe.

20:51Alaina Demopoulos:Growing up, all I heard as a girl was how much harder women have it in America. It's funny. I'm hearing one thing, but I'm seeing another. It's completely... So Alex Clark runs a podcast called Culture Apothecary. In fact, they don't want you to know this, but Christianity has the power to overcome toxic behavior in men and reconcile the sexes. an unexpected finding that has stood up to rigorous empirical testing. This week's guest has a lot of opinion. And what she does is she talks a lot about wellness and well-being, which is very much in alignment with Make America Great Again, Make America Healthy Again, and Trump's sort of connection to our Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F.

21:28Kennedy Jr. And so she is non-threatening. She talks about topics in a really particular, interesting way that, again, cues people into particular political values, right? She is anti-abortion, pro-life, but she hardly ever talks about it outright. And also these cute servatives, especially influencers like Alex Clark, are very smart and they understand who their audience is on every single platform. So she understands who listens to her podcast. She understands who's following her on Instagram.

21:59Alaina Demopoulos:Our right to do what we want to our own body doesn't supersede another human being's rights. The argument of it's my body, my choice ends when you harm someone else's life.

22:14Coming up, just how much power do these cute servitives have?

22:35You've got Alex Clark, but you've also got Erica Kirk, Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife. But how powerful are these women politically in the States at the moment? Yeah, they're incredibly powerful. I always like to tell people that if influencers had no power, they wouldn't exist. Right. And every vote matters from a political perspective.

22:56Alaina Demopoulos:Never let yourself be in a position where you can't support yourself and don't rely on a man. That was ingrained in me. But this is how amazing God is. When you meet the right man, everything shifts. Everything changes. When I met Charlie, that was it. I could care less about the career. Sure. And therefore, if 100 ,000 people are following somebody like Erica Kirk and they decide to vote in alignment with her, that can make an impact on our society, on our leadership, on the direction of our country. And so they are incredibly prolific. And it's not just a numbers game here. I think a lot of people like to play that game where they say, you know, they only have X amount of followers, so therefore they are not, you know, as valuable.