When imagining ‘traditional’ wives, we picture 1950s women impeccably dressed in full skirts with cinched waists, cooking, cleaning and dutifully waiting for their husbands to return from work. This image reflects strict gender roles, household order, and not much more for women to do than keeping the home. Although this lifestyle has existed throughout modern history, it has now spread to the far-reaching digital world: ‘Tradwives’ have emerged as online communities of women who claim to promote a traditional, heteronormative model of femininity while commercialising it through twenty-first century influencer culture.
The emergence of the religious tradwife should be understood as a reaction to secular modernity and globalisation. Rather than representing a simple return to the past, the movement reflects the tensions and contradictions produced by contemporary life: the erosion of moral certainty, the pressures of individualism, and the disconnection associated with rapid social change. In this sense, the tradwife phenomenon is not a rejection of modernity as such, but a product of it. The movement is shaped, amplified, and transmitted by the very digital infrastructures of the modern world.
Research from Sophia Sykes and Veronica Hopner (2024) suggests that tradwife content spans the right-wing ideological spectrum, yet consistently leans on a core identity that can blend together religious, political, countercultural, or anti-government. Social media platforms have become key spaces for this synthesis, allowing traditionalist ideals to circulate through carefully curated aesthetics, affective storytelling, and monetised self-branding. The prominence of explicitly religious tradwives is particularly striking, given broader trends towards secularisation in Western societies.
Newton’s Third Law of Modernity
The tradwife movement is a reaction to the discontent produced by our hyperconnected modern world. It repackages Christian patriarchal values and sells them to women through social media. Political Scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2019) explain the rise of authoritarian populist support by quoting Newton’s third law, ‘for every action, there is an equal opposite reaction’. The same dynamic can explain why religious tradwives appear even in a world that is apparently secularising, according to 2022 research from Pew. Professor Bill Schneider wrote in 2022 in The Hill that while America is secularising overall, it is becoming exceedingly politically polarised along religious lines, a paradox that mirrors the rise of thetradwife movement. These trends are deeply related: the tradwife movement attempts to restore moral certainty in the face of globalisation.
While modernisation explains the broad decline of religion in the West, it also creates conditions under which religion can resurge. Jörg Stoltz and David Voas (2023) emphasise five mechanisms that help explain religion resurgence, namely: crisis, reaction, transition, state intervention, and composition. In this framing the tradwife movement falls primarily under the reaction mechanism. It describes how religious resurgence defends group identity against modern ‘threats’ that can be unpredictable and disruptive, namely feminism and secular individualism.
A perception of threat is evident in content from Solie, a Christian tradwife influencer who frequently presents modern institutions as hostile to the family. In one widely shared reel from March 2025 entitled ‘Do you want to know the saddest SCAM of our time?’, she warns her audience that public schooling ‘indoctrinates’ children and separates families. Homeschooling, she explains, is not merely a personal preference but a religious obligation that is part of God’s intended ‘family design.’
Resistance to globalisation can spark a kind of ‘counter-secularization’, with some religious groups reacting defensively and turning against other worldviews and ideologies. For instance, Banet-Weiser and Reinis wrote in 2025 that while tradwife content portrays happiness and serenity, it is infused with rage aimed at feminism. According to this analysis, tradwives and feminists seem to mirror each other in that they are born out of the same cultural disenchantment. They both respond to similar feelings borne of labour exhaustion, the degradation of reproductive labour, and a failure of the care system, but in opposing ways. While feminism channels anger into collective transformation, tradwives turn it inward, preaching a surrender to the patriarchy and the return of gender roles.
Christian influencer Jasmin Dinis encapsulates this concept well. In a 2023 YouTube video titled, ‘Raging Feminist to Traditional Christian Wife’, Dinis described how modern work left her feeling ‘angry and resentful’, leading to burnout and constant competition with men. According to her, feminism promised empowerment but instead produced exhaustion, and relief from modern frustration arrived only when she abandoned her business, embraced domesticity, and reoriented her marriage around biblical authority. Submission to her husband, once understood as oppressive, became a source of emotional peace, allowing her to recover time, femininity, and moral clarity. Her story, akin to those of many other tradwives, narrates the transformation of collective anxieties produced by modern social arrangements into personal moral failure, which could only be rectified by religious submission as a defense against an unpredictable and demanding world.
Feelings of uncertainty and fear among tradwives are met with a steady supply of legitimising, identity-based narratives from the political sphere. According to Tobias Cremer (2022), Western right-wing populists borrow Christian values and use them as a cultural boundary to define a ‘we’ versus ‘them’. Christianity becomes a cultural identity marker rather than a sacred faith, and is used to symbolise tradition, historical heritage, and opposition to Islam. Building on this, Joseph O. Baker and Andrew L. Whitehead (2024) show that Christian nationalism is associated with a fear of ‘outsiders’, globalism, and a presumed white demographic decline. The tradwife movement is in agreement with these theories, using Christian values not only to define an identity but to cluster cultural fears.
In June 2025, the right-wing activist group Turning Point USA held a Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Texas to promote conservative, antifeminist and Christian values to thousands of young girls. The late Charlie Kirk, founder of TPUSA, described the event as a refuge for women where they could embrace faith, family, and freedom. Anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigration sentiments were interwoven with Christian values, as Kirk framed immigration as a direct threat to women’s safety. He even stated that ‘the whole idea of borders is a Christian and biblical idea.’ The summit had a hyper feminine decoration, with a pastel and tradwife-like ‘aesthetic’, reinforcing the nostalgic and biblical feminine ideal. Christian nationalism, through organisations like TPUSA, targets women’s grievances and modern discomfort, and portrays the tradwife lifestyle as a source of protection against these forces.
Religious Revival or Byproduct of the Modern World?
Some might question whether the tradwife revival of orthodox Christian values, submission, and domesticity could be seen as new ‘versions’ of modernity, as opposed to a byproduct. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s (2017) volume on ‘multiple modernities’ argues that modernity is not inherently secularising but is adaptable to social change or underlying societal traditions. Viewed from this perspective, tradwife content could simply be the consequence of a deregulated, digital religious economy seeking to meet new spiritual demands.
But this perspective underestimates the extent to which tradwife religiosity is reactive rather than adaptive. The movement is defined less by theological innovation or spiritual renewal than by opposition to feminism, secular individualism, and a perceived moral decline or threat. Religion functions primarily as a cultural and emotional resource, mobilised to provide moral certainty and identity protection in the face of modern insecurities, rather than an end in itself.
Moreover a ‘religious revival’ or ‘multiple modernities’ perspective struggles to account for the movement’s deep entanglement with the technological and economic infrastructures of contemporary life. Far from constituting an alternative to modernity, the tradwife phenomenon is sustained by social media platforms, influencer economies, and algorithmic amplification. Its reliance on monetisation, aesthetic branding, and digital visibility suggests not a revival outside modernity, but a reaction produced from within it.
Thus the tradwife movement is a plausible side-effect of modernity and globalisation, as opposed to a reversal of secularism as such. Demand-side explanations look to social and emotional grievances that create a market for religious revival as a form of coping with a secularised, globalised world. Meanwhile, on the supply-side political organisations offer shelter from the noise of modernity by ‘selling’ religiosity as an identity in need of protection.
Is the Tradwife Movement Problematic?
At first glance, the rise of the tradwife movement may not appear inherently problematic. Living in the countryside, baking food from scratch, practising religion, and choosing marriage and motherhood are not, in themselves, political problems. The issue lies not in what tradwives do, but in what the movement represents. Beneath its rose-coloured aesthetics and nostalgic imagery, the tradwife ideal hides a much darker vision of womanhood rooted in submission, dependency, and a retreat from hard-won forms of autonomy.
Historically, women did not ‘choose’ domesticity in the way tradwives content implies. Many lacked access to paid work, financial independence, and even the legal ability to exit marriage. Today, by contrast, many women formally possess choice. Yet the celebration of submission to a husband as a moral or spiritual ideal risks hollowing out that very freedom. Encouraging women to relinquish autonomy, in nearly all aspects of life, normalises dependence as virtue.
This danger is compounded by the economic illusion at the heart of tradwife influencer culture. A small number of highly visible content creators are able to monetise domesticity through sponsorships and online visibility, while for the vast majority of women adopting this lifestyle offers no such financial safety net. Maintaining an aesthetically pleasing and organised domestic life requires time, space, and resources that most people simply do not possess. Stripped of income, professional experience, or economic independence, many women are left vulnerable to precisely the forms of precarity that feminism sought to address. What is marketed as empowerment through tradition often conceals a profound asymmetry between those who profit from the lifestyle and those who consume it. In this sense, the tradwife movement does not offer an escape from modern pressures. It repackages them, transforming structural inequality into a personal failing and selling an illusion of serenity that few can realistically achieve.
In all, the tradwife movement reveals a deep paradox of contemporary politics. The anxieties it channels, as well as the embedded resentment and disillusionment with modern feminism, is the ghost of a world that promised liberation but delivered exhaustion. The digital-capitalist world provides the infrastructure through which conservative religious retreat is aestheticised, sold, and consumed by mass audiences desperate to put an end to uncertainty and disenchantment. In this light, the tradwife movement does not reject the machine but embodies it, and in a way needs it to survive. Whether the movement will continue to grow or fade remains an open question, but its emergence already reveals much about the unresolved tensions of contemporary modernity.
María Victoria Galfetti is a fourth-year undergraduate majoring in Economics and minoring in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin.