The Feeder Program: Woke Manipulative Church Women Versus Rightwing Jerkface Theobros

By Brian F. Marks and Kaeley Harms

“Don’t add fuel to a fire.” We’ve all heard that advice a million times. Those of us with more tempestuous personalities have heard it a million and one. It’s widely understood by even unscientific minds that if you want a fire to die, you have to stop feeding it. You can’t afford to keep supplying it with everything it needs to grow into a full-blown all-consuming fireball.

But in today’s church, it often seems like this very simple formula is very poorly understood with two specific groups of people who seem hellbent on perpetually pouring endless supplies of gasoline on the blazing infernos they ironically claim to be fighting. The battle is between woke, manipulative church women (many of whom have been deeply hurt by abusive men and covertly narcissistic conservative pastors) and the rightwing jerkface theobros, who are almost always ultra-Reformed in their theology and are bone-tired of the histrionics and flagrant evils that are often pushed by women.

While there are degrees of difference in both camps, there’s this ongoing war – and it is a BRUTAL war of words – that constitutes a feedback loop, a program of sorts that reinforces the worst aspects of the other. In our conversations with one another, we’ve come to casually call this dynamic “the feeder program,” and it is beyond maddening to watch. Being caught smack dab in the middle of the chaos gives us blistering theological and spiritual migraines. That’s not hyperbole.

Enmity between the sexes is nothing new. It’s as old as Eden with the blame shifting dating all the way back to original sin when Adam pointed the finger at Eve (and ultimately God) and Eve, in turn, blamed the serpent. It’s always a lot easier to solve problems that are someone else’s fault. This principle is not limited to the battle of the sexes, of course. Just look at today’s political climate with made up words like “Repugnican” and “Demoncrat” being bandied about by people who’ve sincerely deluded themselves into believing that all the world’s ills will magically disappear the minute one half of the population is steamrolled into compliance with the will of the other.

But when the battle is allowed to invade the church, when people who claim to be believers behave as though a literal curse that Jesus came to lift is, instead, created order to which everyone ought to align, then some really maladaptive behaviors start to emerge as the face of Christianity, and it’s a toxic distortion of the freedom in Christ we are supposed to be modeling.

It’s important to recognize that there has never been a time in history when human sin has not brought discord, disarray, and pain, yes, even on the resurrection side of the cross. Conflict of this sort isn’t exactly new but it’s important to articulate a few things as we see it in 2025 in the American church, given what we’ve seen in the bowels of evangelical Twitter and from personal experience in churches and ministries. Here’s how this feeder program has functioned and still motors on:

The rightwing theobros take a glance at the current state of the culture and are not merely frustrated, they are volcanically enraged. They see a church marked by passivity in the face of evil and are determined to gain power wherever they can to combat it. They are tired of being told to be “winsome” while the unborn are slaughtered by the millions. They are horrified to observe crosses being replaced by rainbow flags in the very institutions that are supposed to point people to surrender all parts of themselves (including their sexuality) to the lordship of Christ.

The theobros refuse to kowtow to the attitudes that evangelical elites have goaded churches into for years, always urging people to exude sympathy for all the wrong things including sins that are harming people. They notice how these elites always punch to the right and are quick to criticize conservative Christians (especially those with no formal education) while staying notoriously tight-lipped about evils the left perpetrates.

What’s important to understand is that the theobros categorize all this passivity and softness as “the feminization of the church.” This is women’s fault. This is what happens when they allow women to vote and hold church office. The sexism is so deeply baked into their theology that they don’t even recognize it for what it is. They genuinely believe that women, as a whole, are “more easily deceived” and that this widespread deception overtaking the church is because women’s unrestrained empathy has been weaponized against the truth that can save. And so they see it as their godly mission to push women back into the sidelines and reclaim their manly leadership roles by silencing and subjugating women. And they’re not subtle about it.

They popularize hashtags like #Repealthe19th. They write article upon article about the importance of keeping women out of the public sphere. They shame men whose wives work outside the home, and they demonize any woman who opposes them, calling her names like “Jezebel,” leveraging cherrypicked Bible verses against her, and telling her to go home and make her husband a sandwich.

On the other side of the equation, many godly women have experienced the awful behavior of these men and they are NOT having it. Many of them have an admirable heart for justice, concern for the vulnerable and marginalized, and have done much good helping those whom most have forgotten. They care about true social justice and serve the homeless, refugees, and other groups and causes that conservative-leaning Christians don’t make much noise about in the political sphere.

After a while, especially if they have the misfortune of being married to one of these theobro spiritual abusers, it becomes too much. Bitterness sets in, and it’s understandable. These men did NOT treat their wives as Christ loves the church, but because they are so convinced of the rightness of their theology that they think their terrible attitude and conduct is justified. One Christian abuse survivor advocate we know from Canada was married to her ex-husband for 29 years. But because she didn’t 100% subscribe to a hyper-Reformed theology, he spread rumors among the church that he was married to a non-Christian. She, thankfully, was able to divorce him.

But an unfortunate thing happens to a lot of these women escaping the oppression of theobro systems: They run full speed ahead into the open arms of equally oppressive ideologies that at least pretend to give a damn about their suffering. They come to embrace ideas that are actually evil, which the theobros are right to rail against. As if to confirm their central thesis, it seems to be, as has been documented on Honest to Goodness, these women are at the front of pushing all kinds of sexual immorality, often insidiously and covertly, but then sometimes overtly and blasphemously, in God’s name. That distortion has to be resisted as fervently as the appalling behavior of the theobros.

This wounded female pushing sexual immorality causes the theobros to only dig their heels in harder and claim that women must be subject to rigid, legalistic roles in the church. No skirts in the pulpit, they have to stay home and raise the kids, revert back to 50s-era attitudes and then we’ll have peace and harmony and godly order in the golden age that we’ve always wanted. It’s kind of eerie how Trump has tapped into this with all the “golden age” messaging. And we’re yet hopeful that it means better economic times, fairer international trade policy, a long overdue confrontation with the menacing Chinese Communist Party, and a return to some norms that actually weren’t so bad about the 1950s. Compared to the 2010s and early 2020s, with massive family breakdown and 75 nonsensical gender options, we more than understand the desire to return to a more morally sane time, which the 50s, at some level, absolutely were.

But today’s women, rightly, reject that delusional nonsense. While certainly some things were better then (that was before Roe v. Wade sanctioned the slaughter of over 60 million babies via legal abortion), it was not a golden age by any stretch of the imagination, especially for minorities and women. Women have made tremendous gains, including in churches where their voices – even theologically orthodox ones! – have been devalued.

And yet with the advent of wokeness in the past decade, some of them have indeed gone on to embrace Jezebelic manipulations tactics and it drives the theobros nuts. As Kaeley mentioned in her viral essay about Bishop Budde, the theobros are laughing like hyenas because she handed them a gift wrapped in 1000 bows as it confirmed all their priors. There she was preaching in full religious garb, furthering the myth of the trans child, while making an emotionally manipulative plea for a convoluted notion of “mercy.” It was awful.

But the theobros actually DO need to show mercy. The love of Christ is not in many of their hearts. They are out for power and they are worshiping the idol of perfect theology – which they think is watertight Reformed doctrine. They think they’ve got the special sauce, with all of its socially prescriptive fixes and rigid gender norms to boot. But it’s rooted in anger and resentment. It, too, is awful.

Enmity between the sexes is not created order. It is a curse, one we as Christians, should be working overtime to overcome as we work toward a new creation.

One of the very first things the Creator said about man upon creating Him is that “It is not good for man to be alone.” Women are necessary in all areas of life, including leadership. Women bring necessary balance to men. Neither brute, soulless strength nor runaway emotionalism untethered from truth will lead us anywhere good. We won’t restore civilization by sidelining half of its members or running roughshod over them. We must learn to work together in tandem and to value and amplify the strengths both sexes bring to the table in all sectors of society.

In this cultural moment, we desperately need godly men and women whose passion for Jesus compels them to stand boldly for both truth AND justice, neither at the expense of the other. We need Christians who value women and oppose their mistreatment. We need Christians who don’t compromise morality or God’s standards in the name of mercy. We need Christians who don’t panic and try to hoard power to solve the world’s problems. We need Christians with enough self-awareness to recognize that destructive fires need living water, not the fuel of rage and ego.

All this to say, if you’re a theologically orthodox Christian reading this, please pray that God, in this hour, destroys this awful feeder program. There is ungodliness on both sides that grieves the heart of Jesus, and it’s not his heart for his sons and daughters.

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