Donald Trump Uses 1 Word To Appeal To Female Voters. Here's Why It Should Scare You.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump has been using one word in an effort to convince women to vote for him, and it’s one that sets off alarm bells for me as an exvangelical , or former member of the evangelical church.

“You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector,” he said at a rally in Pennsylvania, a battleground state, last month.

This echoed a claim he made in an all-caps screed on Truth Social days earlier: “I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE.”

I heard the word “protector” often growing up in the Texas Bible Belt, a place where churches outnumbered retail stores and people introduced themselves by their Christian denomination. Some were Baptist. Others were Methodist. We were the Church of Christ.

While some white evangelicals believe in equality among sexes, most, including my church, pushed a concept known as complementarianism . It means men and women have different but complementary roles. Men are supposed to be the providers and protectors, while women are the nurturers and supporters. Complementarians believe the Bible backs these differences.

Ironically, growing up, I rarely felt protected by the men in our church. From a young age, my female peers and I were told we had the power to cause men to “stumble into sin,” which is a nicer way of saying that our young bodies would cause them to lust. The accusation was confusing because it simultaneously infantilized us and accelerated us into adulthood. Though many of us weren’t even old enough to think about sex, we were now told we had to be responsible for it.

An elder at my