I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas.” Those twelve words convey why, in voting for president, evangelical women found Hillary Clinton's feminism more disruptive to their “family values” than Donald Trump's infamous boast of touching women's genitals without their consent. The sentence, uttered in 1992 when Clinton was queried by reporters on being the unconventional political wife of presidential candidate Bill Clinton, put her forever on the “wrong” side of the culture wars. More than two decades later, Christian author Rachel Held Evans reported, “I was at a Christian apologetics conference, and every time her name would come up, everyone would boo. A friend of mine said, ‘Christians aren't allowed to say “bitch,” but they make an exception for Hillary.’”

Many politicians and public figures champion causes from reproductive rights to marriage equality that the Christian Right opposes. Why does the evangelical movement, a community of faith with which one in four adults identifies, single out Clinton? Church historian Randall Balmer grew up in the evangelical subculture and affirms that the movement's politics of resentment start with “Clinton in particular, and [then] feminism in general.” Christian conservatives, he explains, see themselves as “a persecuted minority perpetually under siege at the hands of Communists, Hollywood, liberals, homosexuals, feminists, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.” As such, Clinton “has come to embody everything that politically conservative evangelicals fear: a woman who is intelligent, articulate, independent—in other words, out of control.”

But why do evangelicals value controlled gender relationships? The key is the Bible. When asked what source they trusted for spiritual guidance, whether the Bible or personal experience, 73 percent of evangelicals surveyed answered the Bible, versus 49 percent of mainline Protestants and 37 percent of Roman Catholics. Personal Bible reading is practiced at least weekly by 63 percent of evangelicals, compared to 30 percent of mainline Protestants and 25 percent of Catholics. Forty-four percent of evangelicals attend weekly Bible study or prayer groups, while only 19 percent of mainline Protestants and 17 percent of Catholics do so. Thus, evangelical gender ideology begins with the Scriptures.