One hundred five years ago this month, Nashville was consumed by a debate over whether women should have the right to vote.
During the so-called War of the Roses, opponents of the 19th Amendment wore red roses, and those in favor wore the iconic yellow and white roses associated with the suffragist movement.
Activists from across the country, representing both sides, flooded Nashville during a heated special session of the Tennessee General Assembly to lobby around what had become a last hope for a years-long effort to ratify the amendment and give women nationwide the right to vote.
After it was approved by the State Senate but looked improbable in the House, Tennessee’s decision to become the 36th and final state needed to ratify came down to Rep. Harry Burn, a 24-year-old representing McMinn County.
While Burn wore a red rose-printed lapel and was a presumed “no vote,” he famously received a letter from his mother urging him to “be a good boy” and vote in favor of ratification, which he did, resulting in the largest expansion of voter rights in U.S. history.
“I changed my vote because I believe suffrage is right,” Burn said on the House floor the next day.
“And I think a boy should take the advice of his mother,” he added.
This August, women’s right to vote was unexpectedly thrust back into the national conversation after more than a century, when a politically connected Christian nationalist church leader said that he would support repealing the 19th Amendment in an interview with CNN.
Though still considered a fringe faction of Christianity, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), an Idaho-based patriarchal traditionalist Presbyterian denomination founded in the late 1990s, has expanded to around 150 individual churches, including three in and around Nashville, seven in Tennessee and a recently opened church in Washington, D.C., with the express purpose of influencing politicians.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a CREC church in Goodlettsville and is reportedly considering a bid to be Tennessee’s next governor. Hegseth lent credence to the comments about the 19th Amendment when he shared a clip of CREC leaders advocating for household voting on social media earlier this month, captioned “All of Christ for All of Life.”
While Hegseth later deleted the social media post, his position in the Trump Administration and engagement with the CREC have raised questions about the church’s influence in D.C. His local ties and the growing number of CREC churches in Tennessee again center Nashville in the debate.
This week, Hegseth’s pastor and other members of his home church, Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, endorsed the idea of household voting and a general return to patriarchy across society, including in the federal government, in interviews with the Banner.
‘Happy warriors’
In the wake of the CNN interview, a Signal group of CREC women was abuzz with commentary on the response from outsiders to church leaders’ comments. They shared photos of their domestic lives, like children playing and a husband doing carpentry, with facetious captions like “here’s what my oppression looks like today.”
“As a pastor, my heart just sang, because these are women that are so fruitful, so glad and so thankful for their husbands,” said Brooks Potteiger, the pastor and founder of Pilgrim Hill in an interview on Thursday.
Potteiger and his wife Laura both describe CREC as a return to tradition through a literal interpretation of the Bible. In that, Laura Pottegeir says she happily submits to her husband, an idea that she does not think is particularly unusual.
“I don’t see how what we’re doing is very different from any church I have been a part of or the home I was raised in,” Laura Potteiger said.
A former attorney who gave up her law practice to focus on raising her now seven children, she believes that women are meant to be domestically focused and nurturing, are meant to let men lead the household and are not meant to fill leadership positions in the church.
Part of leading that covenant household, Brooks Potteiger says, would ideally be casting the household’s sole vote.
“When the founders founded America, it was household voting. So this is how it was for a long time. This is not some radical idea,” Brooks Potteiger explained. “It’s not that the women don’t get a vote. It’s that households vote, and then the head of home, man or woman, on behalf of the household, cast the vote.”
While he says women can be heads of the household when they are single or widowed, in most cases, the head-of-household vote would be men.
Laura Potteiger says she votes “every time” and has “never” felt conflict between that and her faith. When asked about the idea of household voting, she offered that it was strange that, with individual voting rights, a husband and wife could “cancel each other out,” but said household voting was too distant an idea to think about.
“I don’t think that futuristically, and I’m not that much of a visionary,” she said.
Similarly, Brooks Potteiger says he does not prioritize the idea and doesn’t “really think about the 19th Amendment,” noting that he’s “totally fine with the thought of his five daughters voting because of how they’re being raised.”
But just a few years ago, CREC wasn’t on the Potteigers’ radar either. Now, they run the second Middle Tennessee church in the denomination, and a third is being planted in Columbia.
The primary difference between CREC and similar liturgical Christian denominations is the church’s unabashed desire to create a theocratic form of government at every level and impress their biblical interpretations — including around gender roles— on society as a whole.
Asked if his religious views should influence the legal rights of people outside of his faith, Brooks Potteiger said that’s the goal.
“Loving our neighbors means that the more we can conform society to biblical standards, because God is wise, the better our neighbors will be loved,” Brooks Potteiger explained. “And again, the entire founding of America was steeped in biblical thoughts.”
According to him, the idea that America was founded on religious freedom is misconstrued to mean absolute freedom, when, he believes, the intent was to form a better Christian nation.
“They weren’t saying it’s a religious free-for-all all, because that’s an unlivable situation, ultimately,” he explained, noting that he is now trying to return to that version of a theocracy.
Much of this work is led by CREC founder Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho, whose pro-patriarchy, anti-LGBTQ and slavery-apologist views have made him and his church polarizing political outliers for decades.
Because the ultimate goal of CREC is Christian nationalism, Brooks Potteiger says that members are unbothered by controversy, like what came with Wilson’s interview.
“We have kind of a ‘happy warrior’ ethos,” Brooks Potteiger said. “It’s kind of this idea that we’re joyful, but we are not going to just back down. We’re going to engage because we expect Christ’s kingdom to expand in this world.”
Other, more evangelical clergy largely denounce CREC.
Newly retired Lutheran Pastor Matt Steinhauer says the idea of a church advocating against equal rights “riles him up,” in part because of the influence his wife, mother, and female mentors in divinity school had on him.
More importantly, Steinhauer believes it is a misinterpretation of Christianity to see people as anything other than equals.
“They really are just terribly misinformed by society, by what they think they know about scripture, and somehow by the life they live, to not have seen how important women are in our faith and our very lives,” Steinhauer said, noting that he had been “stewing” since hearing that the CREC movement had grown and was now in Nashville.
Red pilled
Joshua Haymes, a CREC podcaster and member of Pilgrim Hill, has shared his views against women voting repeatedly on social media around elections and in the aftermath of the Wilson interview, including a post this month in which he said, “there is an incredibly strong biblical, historical, anthropological case for denying women the right to vote.”
“Voting has become a sacred right, almost sacramental,” Haymes said Friday, noting that the “liberalism” which he believes is pervasive in society has created an overemphasis on individual equality, as opposed to a theocratic world in which the focus is on making households and society as a whole flourish.
This “egalitarian” reality and “absolute individual freedom,” he says, “always results in anarchy, which is what we’ve been seeing lately.”
Just a few years ago, Haymes was in Los Angeles, trying to start a more mainstream church when COVID hit. The pressures of the pandemic mixed with watching other churches “capitulate” to the government and activists on mask mandates and Black Lives Matter protests, he says, drove him to CREC.
He followed a familiar pipeline of conservative Christians and left California for Nashville.
Now through a substantial social media following and his Reformation Red Pilled podcast, Haymes and CREC-friendly guests like Hegseth, Wilson and Potteiger share their viewpoints on cultural issues, with subjects like “The Case Against Women’s Ministry” and “Patriarchy: What Are The Limits of a Husband’s Authority?”
“What I’m trying to do is I’m trying to radicalize you, like I was radicalized,” Haymes said to the camera during a 2024 episode of the podcast featuring Hegseth.
While Haymes is ultimately sharing his viewpoint that women should not vote, he’s quick to admit that the intention behind this messaging is to make fringe ideas seem probable enough that less extreme shifts toward theocracy and patriarchy seem reasonable.
“I don’t think Christians should make [repealing the 19th Amendment] their main issue right now, because it’s not a winning issue yet,” Haymes said. “But I do think it’s the kind of thing that is worth bringing up from time to time to challenge (precedent).”
Wilson and both Potteigers are also quick to impress upon people that there is no imminent threat to women’s right to vote.
But Steinhauer believes that, given the opportunity, CREC leaders would absolutely move to repeal the amendment.
“Any time a door would open for that, they would move just as rapidly as they could,” Steinhauer said, noting that the pendulum has swung toward the CREC beliefs in recent years.
“Christian nationalism used to be kind of an understood heresy by most Orthodox Christians, and now they talk about it openly,” Steinhauer continued. “So Christians that are in the same vein that I’m in are very concerned about this movement.”
Of course, groups like the League of Women Voters, which got its start in Tennessee around the suffrage vote in 1920, are still quick to reject the idea of taking away anyone’s right to vote.
“We believe very strongly, as a voter-centric organization, that democracy functions best when all people have the opportunity to be a part of the process of electing our representatives,” LWV Tennessee President Debby Gould said Thursday. “And certainly, after 72 years of effort to make sure [ratification] happened for all women in the United States, we continue to champion that cause.”
And stories like Haymes’ show how quickly viewpoints can change when men become “red pilled.”
“I wouldn’t have said anything, I wouldn’t have supported this or anything like this just a few years ago,” Haymes said. “I would have thought, ‘No, that’s crazy.’”
But a national shift toward more conservative political views, a series of recent wins for the church’s beliefs — the biggest of which was the 2022 Supreme Court decision which overturned the decades-old right to abortion — and the increasing influence of people like Hegseth in politics, makes the once “crazy” idea seem closer to possible than it would have less than a decade ago.
A spokesperson for Hegseth declined to comment on the secretary’s potential bid for governor or his stance on the 19th Amendment.
In a press conference in D.C. last week, a representative of Hegseth’s office said that reporters asking if the secretary supported women’s right to vote in light of the video was “a stupid question.”
In the original interview, Wilson recognized those shifts.
“My views on a number of things have become steadily more mainstream, and they’ve done that without me moving at all,” Wilson said in the interview.
Haymes told the Banner that acceptance of once-radical views is exactly what their movement is banking on.
“Absolutely. The political winds are shifting,” Haymes said. “And it’s happening fast.”
