For Our Daughters: The Christian Nationalist Threat, a Glimpse from the Inside

Learn about the new documentary short from Meidas Studios

Written for MeidasTouch by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

I didn’t set out to make a film about sex abuse in evangelical churches. I didn’t even mean to write a chapter on the topic.

But nearly two decades ago, as a historian of religion and gender, I started researching evangelical masculinity. What I saw was a militant conception of “Christian manhood”: God is a warrior God, and men are made in his image. Every man has a battle to fight.

At the time, I connected this conception of Christiam masculinity to a militant foreign policy: evangelicals were far more likely than other Americans to support the Iraq War, condone the use of torture, and promote preemptive war. I also came to see how this concept of Christian masculinity fueled a militant culture-wars politics domestically, one that divided Americans between friend and foe, one where the ends always justified the means.

In time, I began to notice something else. Many of the men preaching this militant ideal of Christian manhood became embroiled in scandal—in abuse of power or in sexual abuse—some as perpetrators, others defending friends who were perpetrators. Over and over again, I watched as sexual abuse was covered up in Christian spaces. I watched perpetrators defended and effortlessly “restored” to their pulpits and their power. I watched survivors blamed, maligned, and pushed out of their own churches and communities.

Fast forward to October 2016. With the release of the Access Hollywood tapes, everyone’s attention turned to Trump’s most stalwart supporters, white evangelicals. Surely this was a bridge too far for family-values evangelicals? Surely the moral majority could not support a man who bragged on camera about assaulting women?

We all know how that went.

A few Christian leaders wavered ever-so-briefly. One prominent theologian withdrew his support, but then he prayed about it and within the week was back supporting the morally compromised candidate.

Pundits asked: How could family-values evangelicals betray their values to support a man like Donald Trump? And then they asked again with respect to Roy Moore. And Brett Kavanaugh. And the list goes on.

But I knew then that this was the wrong question to ask, because this was not the first time we’d seen this behavior. We simply didn’t understand what those values actually were.

Time and again, powerful evangelical men had abused women in their own churches. Time and again, “good Christian people” sided with the abuser. Far too often, they blamed the victim instead. In an effort “protect the man’s ministry” and “protect the witness of the church,” the ends always justified the means.

Through my research, I also came to see how militant conceptions of Christian manhood had become intertwined with Christian nationalism. Christian men needed to be strong, even ruthless, in their defense of faith, family, and nation.

When I wrote my book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, I devoted the last chapter to a litany of well-documented cases of abuse and cover-up in evangelical churches. With respect to gender, sexuality, and politics, I showed how little separated the extremist fringe from mainstream evangelicals: “In the end, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Doug Phillips, and John Eldredge all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making.”

Now, in October 2024, some of these very men are poised to be handed unprecedented power. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump promised his evangelical supporters. They would have power not only over their own churches and families, but over the nation.

Indeed, many of the men profiled in Jesus and John Wayne are part of the Christian nationalist network linked to Project 2025, to the former Trump administration, and to the current Republican ticket. Doug Wilson, Mark Driscoll, Joel Webbon, William Wolfe, Stephen Wolfe, and other “TheoBros” no longer need to settle for ruling over small fiefdoms. With the election less than a month away, they have within their sights the nation itself.

What will this mean for American women?

Inspired by the last chapter of Jesus and John Wayne, the film For Our Daughters turns to Christian women themselves—to the women who have seen the darkest side of this patriarchal, ends-justifies-the-means ideology. In gripping first-hand accounts, survivors of sex abuse in evangelical churches describe in painful detail what this has meant for them, and they sound the alarm for all Americans.

In the words of prominent survivor and activist Christa Brown: “When people talk about turning the US into a Christian nation. It makes me quake. To ponder what that would mean for women in this country. Because I have seen what it means. For the largest evangelical Protestant faith group in the country. And it is bloody awful. But that is not the country I want.”

The film is already sparking much-needed conversation within evangelical communities, and the timing could not be more urgent. As the authors of Project 2025 make clear, they believe the Constitution guarantees Americans “liberty to do not what we want but what we ought.” And who determines what Americans ought to do? They do, of course. Looking inside their own communities, we can see what that means for women.

MeidasTouch will stream For Our Daughters live this Monday, October 21, at 9:15p ET/6:15p PT. You can find the link below. When you click on the YouTube video, the trailer will play. This will be the same place where you can watch the film on Monday. Click the the ‘NOTIFY ME’ button that appears over the video in order to be reminded when the film goes live.