The Christian Conservative Who’s Reinventing Womanhood
12 min read
Delivering hard truths is Allie Beth Stuckey’s job—a job she was called to do by God. And after a decade, she’s gotten pretty good at it. “Do I love when people think that I’m a hateful person?” Stuckey asked me in an interview in June. “Of course not.” We had been talking about her opposition to gay marriage, but Stuckey opposes many things that most younger Americans probably consider settled issues. “I’ve thought really hard about the things I believe in,” she said, “and I would go up against literally anyone.”
The 32-year-old Texan hosts Relatable With Allie Beth Stuckey, a podcast in which she discusses current events and political developments from her conservative-Christian perspective. Stuckey is neither a celebrity provocateur in the style of her fellow podcast host Candace Owens, nor the kind of soft-spoken trad homemaker who thrives in the Instagram ecosystem of cottagecore and sourdough bread. Stuckey is a different kind of leader in the new counterculture—one who criticizes the prevailing societal mores in a way that she hopes modern American women will find, well, relatable.
The vibe of her show is more Millennial mom than Christian soldier. Stuckey usually sits perched on a soft white couch while she talks, her blond hair in a low ponytail, wearing a pastel-colored sweatshirt and sipping from a pink Stanley cup. But from those plush surroundings issues a stream of stern dogma: In between monologues about the return of low-rise jeans, Stuckey will condemn hormonal birth control—even within marriage—and in vitro fertilization. She has helped push the idea of banning surrogate parenthood from the conservative movement’s fringes to the forefront of Republican politics. Her views align closely with those of Donald Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, and fit comfortably in the same ideological milieu as the Heritage Foundation’s presidential blueprint Project 2025, which recommends, among other things, tighter federal restrictions on abortion and the promotion of biblical marriage between a man and a woman.
I first became aware of Stuckey in 2018, when a low-production satirical video she made about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went semi-viral. It wasn’t particularly funny, but it made a lot of liberals mad, which was, of course, the point. Back then, Stuckey didn’t have a huge fan base. Now she has 1 million followers on her YouTube and Instagram accounts combined. She runs a small media operation of editors and producers—and recently recorded Relatable’s 1,000th episode.
Earlier this summer, I went to San Antonio to watch her address a conference of young conservative women alongside GOP heavyweights, including the Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump and former Fox host Megyn Kelly.WhenStuckey took the stage, she was the picture of delicate femininity, with her glossy hair and billowing floral dress. But her message was far from delicate. “There is no such thing as transgender,” she told the crowd of 2,500 young women. She went on to argue that feminism has hurt women because they are not built to work in the same way as men. Women are predisposed to nurturing, she said, which—by the way—is why two fathers could never replace a mother. She had a friendly audience. As she walked off, every woman in the room stood to applaud.
Stuckey’s is a movement that has felt ascendant in the past few years, especially since the fall of Roe v. Wade, which has emboldened social conservatives like her to seek new territory to conquer. Relatable is a glimpse into that crusade. Stuckey sees herself as a sisterly Sherpa helping Christian women navigate the rough terrain of America’s polarized society. “What she is doing is exactly what Phyllis Schlafly did,” Jonathan Merritt, a religion writer and the author of A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars,told me, referring to the activist who rallied conservative women against abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. “She’s just able to do it with the amplifiers of modern social media and the internet.”
Stuckey is resisting what she views as a strong leftward drift in American society. “It’s easy to be a progressive. Everyone’s gonna affirm you and validate you and applaud you,” she told me. “The last thing a woman wants is to be excluded.” Stuckey, however, is comfortable swimming upstream. She wants her followers to be, too.
Conservatives have prescribed many remedies for what ails American culture. Stuckey, for example, would like people to stop having premarital sex, and for drag queens to stop reading stories to children. And right now, what she would really like is an iced honey latte—but only 12 ounces, because it’s already late afternoon.
Stuckey had been reluctant to meet me, she said, because I was a journalist from outside the conservative-media universe. But she finally showed up—sans press handler—at a coffee shop in a North Dallas suburb. She wore another long floral dress, and her dark eyebrows were knit in a slightly suspicious frown.
“It’s Allie, right?” the cashier, a young man, asked when she ordered. “I follow her,” he explained to me.
Maybe it was this particular coffeehouse, with its white-clapboard, Christian-influencer aesthetic, or maybe Stuckey was even more of a celebrity than I’d realized, but during our two-hour conversation, three separate groups of young women approached Stuckey to tell her how much they loved her podcast. “Did you think you were going to be where you’re at when you were younger?” one of them asked her.
Stuckey smiled. “I always liked to talk,” she said. “But you just never know where God is going to take you.”
At the San Antonio conference—the eighth annual Young Women’s Leadership Summit, held by the conservative group Turning Point Action—signs outside the bathrooms read GIRLS ONLY. The current iteration of the conservative-women’s movement is a hot-pink goulash of subcultures: evangelical traditionalism meets crunchy homesteader vibes—with a little MAGA rancor sprinkled in. At the conference, a clinical social worker addressed the crowd about the harms of day care for young children, and so did Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s lawyer, who talked about facing attacks from “fake news” outlets. Speaker after speaker vouched for the advantages of temperature-based ovulation tracking, holistic remedies for pain and depression, and all-natural fertility supplements. The most in-demand piece of merch at the event was a tote bag decorated with cutesy jam jars whose labels read Strawberry Jams But My Glock Don’t.
Attendees in their 20s and early 30s, predominantly wearing sundresses and shiny hair ribbons, told me that they felt judged by their peers for wanting to have babies and be homemakers. Some said they were relieved when Turning Point’s founder, Charlie Kirk, assured them in his welcome speech that college “is a waste of time.” Here is where people like Stuckey see an opportunity to promote an alternative—for women to embrace an older idea of womanhood with new verve.
This retro brand of womanhood is feminine, not feminist. Stuckey told me that of course she wants women to have equal rights and protection under the law, but the notion that women “need to be liberated” and “go into the workforce,” rather than stay at home and have kids, “has actually led to a lot more misery than freedom.” Her push toward traditional womanhood is an attempt “to reassess some of the girl-boss culture that has permeated even some conservative spaces.” Of course, as a female employer, she is the definition of a girl boss. But this doesn’t strike her as hypocritical. “When I think of a girl boss, I think of this kind of domineering woman who puts her career first, who is independent at all costs, who don’t need no man,” she said.
Women should put family first, as she does with her three young children, Stuckey told me. “Whether you have an Etsy shop, whether you have a crocheting business, whether you have a podcast, or you’re a writer, I don’t think those things are bad,” she said. “But especially in these little years, I just think that they need to come after raising your children.” (When I asked Stuckey who watches her children while she’s in the studio, she declined to offer details but added that her husband is not a stay-at-home dad.)
Women in Stuckey’s DMs are constantly asking her how to advocate for their own socially conservative views. “Everyone knows if you want to learn the best way to win an argument or a debate, it’s by listening to Allie,” Alex Clark, a Turning Point commentator and Stuckey’s friend, told me in an email. “I hear pretty regularly from Millennial women who consider themselves to be newly conservative that they credit Allie for their transformation.”
Some recent episodes of Relatable include “Can Christians Say No to Sex Within Marriage?” and “Feminism Is Gender Dysphoria.” Despite the abrasive titles, Stuckey says that she always aims to defend her positions first using a scientific argument, and then to “buttress that with what’s theologically true.” Her critique of gender theory, for example, starts with the fact that most humans possess either XX or XY chromosomes. Then she’ll explain that God makes people in his image—and that God doesn’t make mistakes.
Unlike the many commentators primarily focused on owning the libs, Stuckey has “an integrity, a sincerity,” Amy Binder, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me when I asked about Stuckey’s appeal. “There’s a sophistication with Allie, shot through with knowledge about the Bible, and linking it up to the choices women are making today.” Owens, who has had Stuckey on her own podcast, told me that Stuckey is the person “you hope your daughter will grow up to be” because of how well she “embodies the Christian values she espouses.”
American culture is saturated with themes that Stuckey finds morally repugnant. She gave up going to Target because of the store’s prominent Pride section, and she lost faith in the fashion brand Anthropologie when it shared a video of a man modeling a woman’s dress. Stuckey enjoys reading the latest in fiction, but Colleen Hoover’s novels are “basically porn,” she told me. And music? “I can’t sit there and listen to Billie Eilish without being like, I’m sad for Billie Eilish,” she said. (The singer recently came out as bisexual.) “The only topic Allie and I may disagree on is Taylor Swift,” Clark told me. “I am a diehard fan.” (One of Stuckey’s latest episodes, “Ex-Psychic Says Taylor Swift Promotes Witchcraft,” explores “occult glorification” in the music industry.)
Stuckey described her primary audience as women in the “mushy middle”—tuned-out Christians who see themselves as apolitical. She hopes to bring them into the fold and move them rightward. But she seems at least as devoted to stiffening the spines of women who already agree with her. During her monologues, her tone is blunt and mocking; she rarely laughs, and when she does, it’s usually at the expense of someone on the left.“Her following is looking for someone to help them articulate what they already believe in a concise and compelling way, and she does that,” Merritt said. And the already persuaded keep coming back partly for the scolding. “The meanness of a person like Allie Beth is attractive because it is a catharsis for conservatives.”
Stuckey recalls that, as a child in the Dallas suburbs, she was always a talker. She was raised Southern Baptist, and attended private Christian schools that taught her how to write, debate, and recite Bible verses from memory. In high school, Stuckey left her parents’ church to be part of a more modern, nondenominational congregation. Later, after reading and following the work of several prominent Calvinist theologians and pastors, she began identifying as a Reformed Christian, a more doctrinally strict denomination.
Her father, Ron Simmons, was a Republican representative in the Texas state House, but Allie never dreamed of a political career and wasn’t much involved in politics during her time at Furman University, a small liberal-arts college in South Carolina where she graduated with a communications degree in 2014. For a while, she did social-media work for a company in Athens, Georgia, the city where she met and married her husband, Timothy Stuckey.
When the presidential-primary season began in 2015, Stuckey noticed something that surprised her:Many women her age didn’t seem to know—or care—about the race. Especially jarring was the revelation that one woman in her Bible-study group was backing Senator Bernie Sanders, who proudly described himself as a democratic socialist. “I was like, okay, I need to be talking to young women about these issues,” she told me. “They’re not thinking through it in the way that I think they should, as Christians.”
So Stuckey began visiting college sororities and speaking to young women about politics and theology. She launched a blog called the Conservative Millennial, and by 2017, she’d quit her publicity job and was recording political commentary for Glenn Beck’s network, the Blaze. Fox News would sometimes call her for comment on issues of the day. Later that year, Stuckey moved to the online network Conservative Review TVand started the first iteration of Relatable.
After the Blaze and CRTV merged, Stuckey’s podcast went on YouTube. She released one new episode of Relatable each week; now she releases four. Early preoccupations included marriage, socialism, and, of course, abortion. During the convergence in 2020 of the pandemic and the protests against police brutality, her podcast following surged, Stuckey said. “There just weren’t very many white evangelical women saying that, actually, loving your neighbor does not mean being pro-BLM—that, actually, loving your neighbor doesn’t mean wearing a mask and taking the vaccine,” she told me. And “there were a lot of Christian women who were looking for sanity.”
The number of Republicans and independents identifying as “socially conservative” rose during the pandemic years, according to a Gallup poll from 2023. “People can only tolerate so much cultural change in a limited period of time, and we are reaching the limits of our own tolerance for change,” Merritt said. “In times like that, conservatism can feel very comfortable and safe and familiar.”In one telling indication, Republican approval of gay rights has dropped since 2022 from 56 to 40 percent, and support for same-sex marriage is down from 55 to 46 percent. “Conservatives are becoming more fundamentalist,” David French, a columnist for The New York Times, told me.
Seeking the restoration of traditional gender roles is not new for the conservative movement. But these days, calls to take back womanhood from the feminist left are getting louder—arguably, louder than they’ve been since the late ’70s, when Schlafly helped kill the Equal Rights Amendment. This time around, the network of conservative commentators is sprawling and well financed, thanks to projects like Kirk’s Turning Point Action and Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute. Ahead of November’s election, conservatives hope to use gender and sexuality as a wedge—a way to peel off voters disillusioned with the Democrats. Although the Dobbs decision knocking down Roe two years ago was highly unpopular among American women, it seems to have emboldened social conservatives—forcing them to both reassess their goals and imagine new ones. “Even on gender and abortion,” Stuckey told me, “I think most conservatives are too liberal.”
One of those milquetoast conservatives is Donald Trump. Stuckey isn’t exactly a fan of the former president. Like many Christian conservatives, she didn’t appreciate Trump’s criticism of six-week abortion bans, and she thinks the Trump-led changes to the GOP platform on abortion and traditional marriage were “stupid.” Stuckey, who voted for Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2016 and 2024 primaries, gets that Trump turns off many women. Some of her listeners are his supporters, but generally, she said, “my audience is not MAGA.”
Still, like many of her fellow evangelicals, Stuckey is pragmatic. Even if Trump doesn’t represent all of her views on abortion and sexuality, he will surround himself with people who do—people like Vance, for example. The president’s running mate “is definitely more my ‘vibe,’” Stuckey told me in an email after Trump announced his pick. “I like how he talks, how he writes, how he carries himself.”
So far, though, the rollout of Vance’s candidacy has not gone smoothly. The senator from Ohio has been battered with criticism for his comments about “miserable, childless lefties,” and his association with Project 2025 is awkward now that Trump has distanced himself from the initiative. And Stuckey is well aware that her Christian-conservative vision for women still commands only minority loyalty in the liberal-leaning, secular mainstream of American society.
But if politics is downstream of culture, as the famous Breitbart News doctrine goes, then changing that culture must be the first priority. If Schlafly’s life’s work was to stand in the way of the feminist ERA, then Stuckey’s might be the modern equivalent: equipping Christian women to swim against the current.
