One woman’s story about being denied prenatal care spotlights how religious freedom is weaponized against the vulnerable.
I believe that resistance against oppressive forces is energy in the universe that is never wasted. And I think that’s especially true when the oppressive force is the power of religion gone wrong.
—Christa Brown, author of the memoir Baptistland
I want the Christian women who may read this to know they are deeply loved and to listen to themselves. I know you’ve been taught that you’re fallible and filled with sin. But trust yourself, and ask, “Does this feel like love, or does this feel like fear?”
—Julianna Glasse, founder of This is What Happens When Women Read
Put yourself in her shoes for a moment: You grew up in a small Christian town in northeastern Tennessee. Community values—kindness, compassion, love—are deeply cherished. You’ve never moved; why would you? You enjoy the simple neighborliness of your little community.
But the tide turns with a growing political movement seemingly predicated on bigotry and punitive, hypocritical morality. The news cycle churns frenetically, each day bearing more distressing confusion.
Your state representatives are unresponsive to your concerns, and you have a serious one: You’re pregnant and unmarried in post-Roe America, and cannot get care in your state. Legally, a doctor can decline to provide care for you if you are unmarried.
You’re not trying to cause problems. But you’re terrified and you want answers. Above all, to the questions: How did we get here as a nation? And can we ever go back?
The Christian Doctor
Do not be like the hypocrites.
—Matthew 6:5, NIV
The doctor had reviewed her chart with raised eyebrows, then inquired about her marital status. She’d been with her partner for 15 years. They already had one child together. Did she plan to get married? No? Well then…
“That provider told me that thanks to [the 2025 Medical Ethics Defense Act], they were not comfortable treating me because I am an unwed mother and that goes against their Christian values.”
Shocked gasps and outraged cries rang through the room as she revealed she must now cross state lines for prenatal care.
“I call Marsha [Blackburn’s] [R-Tenn.] office twice a day. I’m either blocked or she has all calls going directly to voicemail. … When I contacted Bill Hagerty’s [R-Tenn.] office, I was told he’s not obligated to listen to his constituents.”
Her allegations appalled everyone present. The Woman was unprepared for and overwhelmed by the attention.
“She’s afraid for her job and her child,” said Rachel Wells, the journalist who first broke the story on her Substack, TN Repro News. She’d spoken to the Woman on the grounds that her anonymity would be guaranteed. I also promised to respect her wishes to protect her and her family’s safety. Thus, there are details we cannot verify. Some will inevitably speculate this is a hoax—which would be disappointing if true.
But the raw, breathless emotion in her voice, the pleading desperation as she speaks, is hard to dismiss. “If you were in that room, you believed her,” said Tennessee state Rep. Gloria Johnson (D), who had attended the meeting to answer questions about Medicaid cuts.
I’ve lived here my whole life, born and raised. … Growing up, there was always a sense of community: iI was very much to help your neighbor, regardless of who that neighbor is, and to support one another. There was a sense of community, and there just doesn’t seem to be now.
Anonymous Tennessee woman to journalist Rachel Wells
There is a grave truth transcending the specifics here: Christian fundamentalism has insidiously inserted itself into American policy, perverting its own values to legalize discrimination.
The Fundamentalist Gospel of Domination
Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.
—James 1:26, NIV
There is a stark difference between Christ and many (not all) Christians, and the divide grows each day. The church preaches compassion and acceptance, but its culture often disguises malice as love.
While the church represents authenticity and safety, the community’s saccharine veneer can feel performative. Spiteful gossip or prejudice thinly veiled as concern runs rampant, and vulnerabilities disclosed tearfully can easily be weaponized. A group of middle-aged women will soothe a distraught parent, praying over her in one breath, while clucking amongst each other about her failings as a mother in the next, speculating that this is divine punishment.
But this is the way it so often is in this community: superficial and mean-spirited, even hateful and discriminatory—so unlike the teachings of Christ. It breeds a profound moral distress for many Christian women.
“I used to have to do intellectual gymnastics to make sense of it. In one phrase, I was saying, I love you, but to love you was to tell you you’re living in sin because you’re gay, or you got pregnant out of wedlock,” says Julianna Glasse, the former Christian pop singer whom Donald Trump invited to perform at the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast.
Does this feel like love, or does it feel like fear?
Julianna Glasse
She’s wholly unsurprised about the Christian physician denying care to an unwed mother. Such punitive discrimination happened in the evangelical community before being codified in the Medical Ethics Defense Act.
She remembers a teenager from her former church who became pregnant. The baby had spina bifida. “The pastor of the church told the congregation that this was God’s punishment for getting pregnant out of wedlock. He told them to throw her no baby shower, to not support her in the hospital.”
Yet if you’d asked them, the church would have identified itself as pro-life.
“This is what a lot of Christians—and politicians—do: They’ll hide their homophobia or sexism behind universally held ideologies, such as love, justice, or family values. They use these vague terms, like ‘medical ethics,’ or the idea of conscience, or convictions. They hide their true agenda behind these words,” says Glasse.
Bigotry doesn’t always present as a Unite the Right rally or violence in our nation’s capital. Sometimes, it comes with a demure smile and a sweet, “It’s just my personal belief.” It’s still bigotry.
What Glasse describes sounds like a gospel not of love, but of domination. You’re taught that God is love and forgiveness. But question the church—accept other philosophies, even within Christianity, that don’t align with a rigid, narrow interpretation of righteousness—and feel the wrath of your community, who will insist that you risk not only losing God’s love, but also eternal damnation.
Many evangelical Christian communities actively discourage women from questioning authority, or outright punish them for any sign of independence. “God’s ways are not our own,” or “Your heart is deceitful,” the women are told as their autonomy is stripped away.
Glasse calls it “the doctrine of depravity”—where women are taught that they are born in sin, require male guidance, and cannot trust their own misgivings. Psychological warfare—on top of financial, emotional and physical abuse in many cases—keeps women trapped.
The grooming is intentional, beginning from a young age and molding women into submissive targets.
“Guys, I’m just telling you right now, that’s how you do it. You go so young they don’t know any better than to go with you,” said Texan pastor Mark Hartman in 2024 to his 7,000-member Southern Baptist congregation.
Predatory, misogynistic messaging is common in many fundamentalist churches, despite the virtue, wisdom and maturity that Scripture endorses. If church leadership promotes these “values” openly from the pulpit, what might the men be doing behind closed doors?
The patriarchal gospel of domination consciously renders women inferior. It welcomes misogyny with select Scripture verses instructing women to submit to men quietly, and conveniently forgets the complementary verses that call on men to protect and love women self-sacrificially, suggesting reciprocity in relationships.
To assert male power, the gospel of dominance deliberately neglects mutuality between the sexes in the Bible:
“Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor man of woman.”
—1 Corinthians 11:11, ESV
It would destabilize religious patriarchy—and undermine its control over women—if these men followed their own stated values. But it is impossible for a misogynist who considers women inferior and expendable, a slave to his needs, to exalt women. And so he perverts Scripture to justify the lust and contempt for women that turbulently coexist within him.
“Now I always ask, does this feel like love, or does it feel like fear?” says Glasse, who knows too well how a religious community can shame and abandon women who defy the will of men in the church.
Conflicted about the love the church preached and the contempt they showed for women and the LGBTQ+ community, Glasse embarked on a quest of self-discovery and education, starting with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Upending her world and losing a tour and a book deal in the process, Glasse left the church in 2019.
Many women like Glasse leave the church, not their faith. It’s a hard but sometimes necessary choice for self-protection. “They tell us about the dangers of the secular world, but no wars have ever been fought over Shakespearean literature! So, I became very … spiritually promiscuous,” Glasse laughs, “I explored many different beliefs, rejected what didn’t serve me, and accepted everything that felt like love.”
Religious Hypocrisy In Government
Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing.
—Matthew 7:15, ESV
There is no shortage of self-proclaimed Christians who moralize about family values, yet are less than pure themselves. Glasse recalls a telephone call she received from famed Christian minister, Ravi Zacharias, beloved by Mike Pence and Kayleigh McEnany. He tried to persuade her to stay: “He said God came to him in a vision, and was calling me to submission.” Meanwhile, Zacharias was engaged in sexual misconduct and abuse throughout his years of ministering, a postmortem investigation revealed.
The litany of “family values” politicians is no different from Zacharias, forcing fundamentalism that disguises discrimination as “religious freedom” into our laws, and now into medicine.
It began with a political leader who seemingly worships the church of himself, inflames the country with polarizing rhetoric, and has protected violent actors who brazenly flout Christ’s principles—emboldening covert misogynists, homophobes and racists to reveal themselves proudly. Like the fundamentalist communities that sinisterly perpetuate hatred, abuse and control with perverted Scripture, the Trump administration continuously finds itself mired in scandal, but obstinately justifies its regime with paternalistic rhetoric of protection.
It’s obvious to us all; the gospel of domination is now mainstream. The Woman despaired over the palpable shift in her community’s values under today’s political climate.
To Wells, she lamented, “[Jesus] is the embodiment of everything that they now publicly admit that they hate and that’s heartbreaking. I’ve lived here my whole life, born and raised. I don’t remember growing up that way. Growing up, there was always a sense of community: It was very much to help your neighbor, regardless of who that neighbor is, and to support one another. There was a sense of community, and there just doesn’t seem to be now.”
To me as a Christian physician, the perfect portrayal of religious hypocrisy is Donald Trump’s photo op in front of St. John’s Church during the George Floyd riots in 2020. It signals religion as a political prop used to consolidate power, not a lifestyle of genuine morality—a narcissistic politician with a history of adultery and other misconduct clutching a sacred text for the camera.
At this point, the degree of misconduct that the President has shown is almost boring; lately, it seems that each day brings a new revelation about his ties with Jeffrey Epstein, leaving many of us asking rhetorically, “What else is new?” The media is littered with data indicating that Trump does not live a Christian lifestyle, which the evangelical community quietly acknowledges, according to Glasse. Yet, sexual misconduct is not enough to lose him evangelical support. “They’ll say, ‘I wouldn’t want him watching my kids, but at least he’s anti-abortion and pro-family values.’” Julianna clarifies that “pro-family values” is coded homophobia in the community.
It’s the epitome of Christian hypocrisy. Homophobia and stripping women of bodily autonomy appear dearer to many evangelicals than protecting women and children from sexual abuse.
Some Christian politicians also appear to forget their principles when Trump or his associates brazenly fall short of Christ’s teachings.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson recently evaded a vote on the release of the Epstein files. Notably, he previously opposed the release of the House Ethics Committee’s file on Matthew Gaetz’s alleged history of sexual misconduct and drug use while in office.
Vice President JD Vance even lobbied for Senate support for Gaetz as attorney general. Let that sink in: The Christian “law and order” politician actively pushed to place a man who allegedly had a sexual relationship with a minor and paid women for sex in a position of high authority.
They seem more like the false prophets of the Bible than the God-fearing men they claim to be—for all their moral posturing, their “principles” in the face of substantively true reports of sexual misconduct by one of their own fell flat.
Johnson has proudly proclaimed that the Bible constitutes his worldview. If that were true, he wouldn’t have missed this verse from Ephesians while concealing alleged misconduct:
Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.
—Ephesians 5:11, ESV
Furthermore, Trump has questioned the historical separation between church and state, and the administration has politically positioned itself behind legislation that protects abusers in the Christian community, recently backing three Catholic bishops in Washington state who sued the state over a new law that would extend mandated reporting to confession. A federal judge subsequently ruled that priests cannot be forced to report child abuse or neglect learned from the confessional.
Interesting priorities for the church.
Together, these moves signal the administration’s willingness to blur the boundaries between religion and governance and to aid and abet misconduct within religious communities.
So, are you remotely shocked that Christian fundamentalism has successfully Trojan-horsed discrimination into our laws? The community was already well-practiced in using Scripture for subjugation.
Emboldened by this administration, Christian fundamentalism found an avenue by which to ensnare American laws in its senselessly punitive doctrine. The country has created the perfect climate for abuse, inequality and discrimination to become acceptable.
Instead of building community, we are fracturing it, weaponizing willfully misinterpreted Scripture against the vulnerable.
One Solution: Our Voices
Seek justice, correct oppression.
—Isaiah 1:17, ESV
Though she requests anonymity, the Woman wants her story to have wide reach. She wants people to understand how the Medical Ethics Defense Act and any others like it will harm marginalized communities who may not have the ability to travel for prenatal care, as she does.
Tennessee already has one of the worst maternal mortality rates and is a reproductive healthcare desert, Rep. Johnson tells me; this law is positioned to exacerbate that by opening up an avenue for physicians to discriminate against patients who need them. The Woman hopes that national attention to this story will generate enough public pressure to get the law repealed. Journalists like Wells are hard at work publicizing the reported injustice.
Glasse is doing her own organizing, highly aware that—while men dominate church leadership—women are the lifeblood of the church community. She’s capitalizing on women’s drive to build social networks and their hunger for knowledge, self-fulfilment, respect and dignity in a world that often denies them these.
“I’m so bored with those men,” she opines, her lip curling with contempt as we discuss “childless cat ladies,” conservative podcasters, and politicians who equate women’s reproductive capacity with their value. “I’m so fucking bored with them, and grateful not to be married to one. And you know what? They’re doing life wrong.” Glasse chooses instead to focus her efforts on building a better future for the next generation of women.
Knowing education is power and financial abuse keeps many women powerless—and we’re living in a climate where women are subtly discouraged from higher education to funnel them into domesticity—her new initiative, This is What Happens When Women Read, just partnered with Oxford University to send one woman each year to the Saïd School of Business for their MBA. She hopes to send more as her work gains traction. Glasse’s second project through TIWHWWR involves helping women trapped in cults escape safely. It’s still a work in progress, but she has high hopes for it.
Glasse is clearly passionate about her work and wants to share that fire with the world. She wants women—especially those dismissed as “hysterical,” “selfish” or “ungodly”—to trust their instincts when they question men in power. Like the woman in Tennessee who fears being identified, but who wants her story to ignite a movement, she wants women to know they aren’t alone.
The Woman’s story has already had a significant impact, Wells says. Readers in red states, even those identifying as conservative Republicans, are appalled. “I appreciate you shedding light on this horrendous act,” someone wrote to her. “I was unaware of the law that was in place that could allow this to happen, and you helped make me aware.”
Glasse wants to make the same impact: giving more women the freedom she found upon leaving the church. She despises the twisted grasp of Christian fundamentalism on our nation, but fervently believes that change is possible, one infuriated lady at a time.
“We intend to support [the scholars] as they go back to their home nations and fight for feminism in their own way. We exist as a cohort to help them share their stories of liberation—it’s how we’ll cultivate community, sharing stories like mine. Stories are powerful. Women being brave enough to share them are powerful. When you recognize the impact that it can have on politics, you realize, the time is now. There are millions of evangelical women like me. That is a sleeping giant—if we awaken it, we would change so much.”
Our voices are powerful. If they didn’t fear our voices, they wouldn’t label us “gossips,” “borderline” or “vindictive.” They wouldn’t hit us with defamation suits. They wouldn’t threaten reporters Jessica Valenti and Kylie Cheung with jail time, use non-disclosure agreements, or hire crisis PR teams to rehabilitate their images. They wouldn’t expend so much energy trying to convince independent women that we’re insufficiently feminine, undesirable, or living an unnatural lifestyle. They’re afraid of us, so they belittle and try to silence us.
Let’s keep the momentum going. Clearly, women cannot look either to the church or to our political leaders for accountability or real solutions. So, we must look to ourselves—the ordinary people, the independent creators, the wishful readers and community organizers—for solutions.
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The views expressed in the article above belong to the author alone, and not to any institution with which she is affiliated.
If you or anyone you know is experiencing intimate partner violence, help is available. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788.
If you or anyone you know has been sexually assaulted, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline 1-800-656-4673 or text HOPE to 64673.
Great Job Chloe Nazra Lee & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.