Women’s Rights, the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism and the Misappropriation of Feminism
December 26, 2025
[Editor’s note: this is the second of six posts commenting on Gila Stopler’s new book, Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion, and the Chimera of Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2025)].
Gila Stopler wrote a thought-provoking book that exposes the deep embeddedness of patriarchy in liberalism, populism, and conservatism, as well as in religion and culture. The book aims to deepen our understanding of the weakness of women’s rights in Western liberal democracies and to uncover the underlying connections between this weakness and the success of religious nationalism and right-wing populism in these societies.
I agree with much of what Prof. Stopler argues. Indeed, to understand current regression in women’s rights in Western countries such as the United States or Israel, it is crucial to highlight the enduring power of patriarchy in liberal societies and how it is used by right-wing populists and religious conservatives to advance their own cause, to restrict the rights of women, and to endanger the future of liberal democracy itself. Hence, in this commentary I seek to supplement and strengthen Prof. Stolper’s central claims by adding three additional perspectives to the discussion on the relationship between religion, liberalism, and patriarchy.
My first comment is conceptual. Throughout the book, Prof. Stopler refers to the rise of religious conservatism, adopting a term widely used in current scholarship to describe the type of religious forces that have gained growing political influence in many liberal democracies and primarily the United States. I would suggest replacing the term religious conservatives with religious fundamentalists, as the latter better captures not only the nature of the forces that are currently driving democratic backsliding but also the unique threats they pose to liberal rights and gender equality.
Religious fundamentalism involves a strict, literal interpretation of sacred texts and a belief in their absolute, unalterable truth. It often leads to dogmatism and extreme intolerance toward opposing viewpoints, which are seen as threats to “the truth.” For fundamentalists, their religion is beyond any form of criticism and must therefore be imposed upon others. Conservatism, by contrast, while often socially traditional and cautious about rapid change, is a broader political and social philosophy. It values inherited traditions and institutions without necessarily requiring literal interpretations of religious doctrine or a total rejection of modernity. The key distinction is that fundamentalism represents a more extreme, dogmatic, and militant subset of religiosity – one that cannot be equated with conservatism as a whole.
Justice Alito and Justice Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, are not religious conservatives – they are religious fundamentalists. This more precise classification better illuminates their judicial reasoning and explains the often extreme and violent implications of their decisions. Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs[1] is not merely a rejection of precedent; it is also a text that disregards the devastating real-world consequences of abortion bans for women’s lives and denies that such consequences should matter to the courts, even when they cause immense suffering. Similarly, Justice Thomas’s opinion in Bruen[2] – the case striking down New York’s requirement that individuals show “proper cause” to carry a concealed handgun in public – reveals a similar indifference to the human cost, disregarding the decision’s consequences for escalating gun violence and mass shootings, as well as its impact on ordinary people’s fundamental right to life.
The proposed focus on ‘religious fundamentalism’ as a distinct form of ‘religious conservatism’ also illuminates the nature of the ultimate project that these religious forces seek to advance, bringing me to my second comment.
In her book, professor Stopler rightly emphasizes that at the heart of the struggle waged by religious forces in liberal democracies lies not only the preservation of patriarchal power in the private sphere but also the patriarchal restructuring of the public sphere and the creation of a patrimonial state. I wish to reinforce this insight by suggesting that the precise objective of religious fundamentalist forces is to elevate “religious liberty” to the status of a super-right – one whose protection is prioritized above and beyond other fundamental rights. Crucially, the goal is not to protect the religious liberty of all religious views, but rather to enable the establishment of a single, fundamentalist version of religion as the primary regulator of the public sphere. This underscores the true essence of the fundamentalist project, exemplified by U.S. Supreme Court Justices such as Thomas and Alito: it is a reactionary enterprise aimed at undermining the existing constitutional order and replacing it with a new one – an order in which the Anti-Establishment Clause becomes increasingly irrelevant, and fundamentalist interpretations of Christianity emerge as a dominant force in shaping public life.
A recent article by Adam Hamdan[3] illustrates how these trends manifest in the Court’s jurisprudence. The article offers a statistical analysis of the role of religion in Supreme Court decisions. Hamdan finds that under the Roberts Court, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of religious groups, especially Christian groups, more frequently than its predecessors. The Roberts Court has also taken up a greater number of Free Exercise Clause cases and issued consequential rulings on religious liberty at a significantly higher rate than earlier courts. Notably, Hamdan reports that in two-thirds of cases involving Christian groups, those groups prevailed, underscoring how the Court’s rulings actively assist in, and align with, efforts to impose a Christian nationalist worldview on the American public, practically erasing the Anti- Establishment clause.
Finally, we cannot discuss the current regression in gender equality without critically acknowledging the misuse of the term feminism and its strategic adoption by ultra-conservative and populist forces. These actors are actively undermining the feminist agenda and the struggle for gender equality by reframing feminism as a patriarchal concept. Their primary tool in this effort is the promotion of what they present as a new strain of feminism: “conservative feminism”, positioned as a declared corrective to the alleged failures of liberal feminism.
A revealing example comes from a recent episode of Ross Douthat’s podcast Interesting Times. Douthat is a conservative Catholic commentator whose new show, sponsored by The New York Times, aims to explore the New Right and other contemporary political realignments. In this recent episode he hosted two women described as ‘theorists’ to discuss the following question: “Did liberal feminism ruin the workplace, and is there a conservative feminism that can correct its mistakes?”[4] His first guest, Helen Andrews, recently published an essay titled “The Great Feminization,” in which she argues that women’s large-scale entry into the workforce has “feminized” numerous professions. According to Andrews, this shift endangers the labor market because women’s supposed prioritization of “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, and cohesion over competition” ultimately weakens institutions and professional standards. The second guest, Leah Libresco Sargeant, has recently published a book titled The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. Under the guise of a new strain of feminism and as part of the slogan “advocating for women as women”, she calls for celebrating women’s distinct care-related and compassionate qualities that she ties to their biology or more precisely to their ability to become pregnant. Although Libresco Sargeant rejects Andrews’s assertion that feminine traits are inherently inferior to masculine ones, she nonetheless advances a similarly essentialist rhetoric that reduces women’s nature to innate caregiving and reproductive capacities, thereby echoing patriarchal stereotypes of women.
Historically, patriarchal structures sought to undermine feminist ideas by associating feminism with negative stereotypes such as militancy, radicalism, misandry, and the rejection of femininity. What we are witnessing today is a far more sophisticated campaign: feminism has been seized by populist and religious fundamentalist actors who redefine it as a sexist ideology that affirms, rather than challenges, patriarchal norms. So, following Prof. Stolper’s important book and as we chart the various threats to gender equality in this era of democratic backsliding, rising populism, and religious fundamentalism, we must recognize that the hostile takeover of feminism itself is an additional aspect of the contemporary assault on gender equality.
[1] Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022).
[2] New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022).
[3] Adam Hamdan, Rule for Thee but not for Me: From Roberts to Vinson, a Statistical Analysis of the Role of Religion in the Supreme Court, Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs Vol. 6(1) 178-199 (2025)