US Pastor With Pentagon Ties Proposes Stripping Women of the Right to Vote

American preacher Doug Wilson is openly calling for a theocracy built on the principles of white Christian nationalism — and is even proposing the repeal of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which granted women the right to vote in 1920. The story was reported by the Spanish newspaper El País.

In place of universal suffrage, Wilson advocates a voting model already practiced within his own religious community — what he calls "household voting." He claims this would help cure the "cancer of individualism" supposedly unleashed by the 1920 amendment. The logic behind his "one family, one vote" principle is simple: the vote belongs to the husband, and if a woman is unmarried, it passes to her father, brother, or uncle.

Doug Wilson is a theologian and one of the founders of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), an umbrella organization of roughly 170 congregations across the United States. He also runs a sprawling ultraconservative media empire that includes a small college, a K–12 school, his own streaming platform, and a publishing house — all based in Moscow, Idaho, one of the most conservative corners of the country.

In America, where religion has long been a lucrative business, preachers like Wilson are not exactly rare. But few can claim a follower as prominent as US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who personally invited Wilson to deliver a sermon at the Pentagon.

The idea of stripping American women of their right to vote may sound far-fetched — it would require approval from two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. But few people expected the Supreme Court to overturn federal abortion protections back in 2022 either, and yet it happened.

"The success of once-marginal theories now at the center of political debate, amid a broader global backlash, is precisely because they've gained visibility and demand," writes political philosopher Wendy Brown, one of America's most influential contemporary thinkers. According to her, such views find support among both men and women — meaning the women who embrace them are knowingly willing to give up their own status as citizens.

"Wilson loves to provoke, loves the sound of his own voice, and goes viral through the most outrageous and hateful statements he can make," says Professor Matthew Avery Sutton, author of the recently published book Chosen Land, which aims to be a comprehensive history of Christianity in the United States. According to Sutton, almost no one in Moscow, Idaho sees anything Christ-like in Wilson — but white nationalist groups across northern Idaho adore exactly what he represents.

Wilson is the most famous proponent of these ideas, but he is far from the only one. His views form part of a broader movement, loosely dubbed "masculinism" for lack of a better term, that is gaining traction through social media and the online communities of the so-called "MAGA manosphere."

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz