How the tradwife social media trend is anti-gospel

Have you heard of the term “tradwife”? It’s short term for the phrase “traditional wife”.

If you are a woman and active at all on social media you likely have come across it. Or others talking about it. It’s a social media trend that picked up in 2020 and has been gaining steam ever since, mostly on Instagram and TikTok. It’s becoming one of the most hot-button cultural conversations around the question, “What does it mean to be a woman?” As with most extremes, there’s now a movement developing of women who call themselves “ex-tradwives” sharing the dangers of this lifestyle marketed to young vulnerable women.

There’s a recent article on Christianity Today called, Tradwife Content Offers Fundamentalism Fit for Instagram which gives an excellent overview of the tradwife phenomenon.

Here’s a short quote that breaks down what it is for those who don’t know:

“Tradwife content is unabashedly ahistorical, drawing on ideas and imagery from across time periods. Some tradwives build their brand with a 1950s June Cleaver persona, wearing lipstick and an A-line dress to do housework. Others evoke imagined versions of Little House on the Prairie: long dresses, rustic homemade bread, and rural homesteads. Some posts borrow painted images of Victorian households or Regency-era social gatherings.

Unlike other influencers who create content about homeschooling or homesteading, a tradwife influencer makes faithfulness to some aspect of “traditional” womanhood a central tenet of their online brand and identity. It’s a subtle distinction, but not every influencer online who wears long dresses and bakes sourdough fits in the tradwife category.”

The tradwife messaging is extremely subtle, but highly influential and marketed by social media brands like Ballerina Farm (an online account with over 8.5 million followers, run by a Mormon couple).

Can you imagine reaching over 8.5 million people with one post? It’s not just Ballerina Farm, but dozens and dozens more accounts like it promoting this view of idealized and (often) racialized womanhood.

It’s also highly likely that the women in our communities are more influenced by these trends on social media than the preaching and discipleship found in our local church communities. It’s essential to be talking about this.

You may think: What’s the issue if women want to bake bread, wear long dresses, and post about it on social media?

The issue is the tradwife social media trend also enmeshes a hyper-conservative lifestyle with biblical truth in a dangerous and legalistic way. It’s messaging tips toward the prosperity gospel and sets up vulnerable women and families towards abusive tendencies.

Every “trend” or “lifestyle” that we see marketed to us on social media, or even talked about within our church circles, needs to assessed through the lens of scripture.

What does it look like for followers of Jesus to love their families and care for their homes?
How should we pursue healthy, biblical marriage and raise our children to love the Lord?

These are vital questions that both men and women in our local church communities need to wrestle with and be discipled in––but the tradwife social media trend does not offer the life-giving, biblically based answers those questions seek.

In fact the root of its messaging goes against the very gospel we are trying to preach and live out day by day.

Let’s dive in.

1. The tradwife trend is rooted in legalism and tips towards the prosperity gospel.

As always, the heart of the matter (what God cares about most), is a matter of the heart. The heart of the tradwife messaging is promoting a legalistic attitude there is only one “good” or “right” way to live. This subtle messaging is driven by the beautiful aesthetics of their social media posts, the clothes they wear (it is heavily fashion driven), and the life choices they platform. At its root, it believes only what they see as “traditional women” are “good women”.

The Bible does not align with this kind of messaging at all.

In fact, many who aspire to be tradwives, or even those who create brands that platform tradwife ideals, would not always call themselves biblical or Christian. And yet, so many seem to conflate the vision of the tradwife lifestyle with biblical womanhood, some using soundbites from the Bible––what is going on?

The Christianity Today article linked above gives some insight:

“Evangelicals and Mormons come together in the tradwife space, sharing a vision of family life, marriage, modesty, and religious liberty, despite stark theological differences.”

Being a tradwife supersedes doctrine and theology. It’s a commitment to a legalistic lifestyle that confines women to a specific role in the home and sets limitations on what a woman can and should be.

It also lends towards the prosperity gospel: “do xyz and your life will look just like mine (blessed by God, peaceful, and prosperous)”. Is this what God through his gospel invites us into? Not at all.

It’s completely normal for the human heart to long for peace, blessing, and God’s goodness but those things don’t come from what we do or set to achieve. They definitely don’t come through discontentment and fantasizing about the images and videos we binge watch to find emotional escape on social media. They come from God himself, through the blood of Christ shed on the cross for our sins, to offer healing and restoration.

Paul writes in Romans 5:1-5 about how we can experience the peace of God in the midst of our suffering and trials, through obtaining peace with God:

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Through faith in him, God invites us into experiencing his peace and presence no matter what circumstances we face. He works through our hardship to produce endurance, character, and hope through God’s love poured into us through the Holy Spirit.

God doesn’t offer us an immediate beautiful, aesthetic life like the fantasies the tradwife brands and people platform. He offers us something so much more beautiful: himself!

God also doesn’t define one “right” way to live outside of finding salvation through Christ alone and “seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33). In many things there is freedom to choose. One choice is not better or more righteous than the other.

You can bake sourdough bread, or buy Wonderbread.
You can homeschool or send your kids to the local public school.
You can be a vegan or eat meat daily.
You can live on a farm and have 10 kids.
You can live in the city and have no kids.
You can work primarily in the home.
You can work in the marketplace.
You can marry and honour God with your marriage.
You can remain single and honour God with your singleness.

Our “goodness” doesn’t come from the lifestyle choices we make but from being made holy through the shed blood of Christ. We are made good through God, not from pursuing a tradwife lifestyle.

I appreciate how Allie Beth Stuckey spoke out against the tradwife trend on X:

"Not all “trad wife” content is Biblical. Some of it is straight-up 1950s fetishized cosplay. Some of it is just capitalizing on the aesthetics of homesteading without any moral substance. Like all social media trends, it has vapid and, yes, harmful elements to it. And these secular subsets of “trad life” can needlessly tempt Christian women into discontentment. Maybe they live in the suburbs. Maybe their kids attend in-person school. Maybe they don’t raise chickens. Maybe they buy bread from the store.

So, in an effort to help Christian women who are tempted to conflate making sourdough and living on a farm with Biblical womanhood, I encourage women to remember that these things are not the same. They can be wonderful practices! But it is absolutely possible for you to be a Godly wife and mom without your life looking like a modernized version of a 19th century homestead and all that comes with it.”

This may seem obvious on paper, but the subtle undertones of legalism can easily grip any local church community. Without being careful those who don’t “fit the mould” of the tradwife lifestyle of home and hyper legalistic gender roles, either get pushed out, shamed, or shunned. It happens more than we may be aware of or want to think.

2. The tradwife trend platforms the image of 1950s white women as “ideal” and doesn’t affirm or give space for other racial groups to express their unique cultural identities.

What does it mean to be a woman?

I truly hope being a woman is more than the 1950s white woman who wore lipstick and high heeled shoes as she vacuumed her home and baked a meatloaf.

I tend to love meatloaf and vacuuming, and some white women in the 1950s lived godly lives and cared for their homes and families well. But God never designed for them to be placed on a platform whereby we should strive to be just like them.

When there’s a trend of idealized “womanhood” that only seems to appear with white skinned people and idolizes blonde haired children all lined up in a row, there is a serious problem here that get’s to the heart of God’s love and care for all nations and peoples.

The tradwife trend is an intense subculture. If you naturally fall outside of the mould of a white woman that dresses like she’s from the early 1900s (and that’s a main part of the imaging and videos you are consuming on social media), you may be tempted to feel as if you are not good enough. The issue isn’t what we look like, or how we dress, but what we are fixing our eyes on and consuming in mass amounts. In reality you are exactly the beautiful expression of God’s image that God in his goodness created you to be.

John writes in Revelation 7:9-10 about a vision he saw of a great multitude of people worshipping God and Jesus:

“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

People from all languages, tribes, and ethnic groups were created by God and will join together to worship him, praising Jesus for salvation when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead. What is God’s vision for people all over the world? It is to know and worship him together with all of their cultural differences and languages!

As many cultures and languages will worship God will equal as many expressions of home and living out the gospel principles of being free in Christ to love and serve others and steward the earth.

There is a racialized element of the tradwife visual aesthetic that is concerning and doesn’t affirm God’s heart for all people, nor uplifts and celebrate diverse cultural expressions of following Christ.

3. The tradwife trend can easily take advantage of vulnerable young women and children.

Some tradwives will post beautiful videos and content telling their followers that their lives will be so much better and lovely if they just stay at home and submit to their husbands. The danger here is that the images we see on social media aren’t fully realistic to what happens in the home behind closed doors. The tradwife trend, though coined “wife” very much involves men too. The men are extremely active (behind the scenes) propping up these ideas and even insisting on them.

As many women in the “ex-tradwife” camp will attest, many women end up in poverty, trapped with domineering, controlling, husbands that they are forced to “serve” and care for. Along with multiple children to raise mostly on their own. One risk appears to be a pattern is young women encouraged to pursue this tradwife lifetstyle from a young age and discouraged from be equipped to work in any marketplace jobs. Or even if they do attend school they receive no practical job experiance outside the home. Then if something either happens to their husband tragically, or if the marriage dissolves due to abuse and neglect, they are left to care and provide for multiple children without workplace skills or the ability to easily work to provide for her family in a tangible way. These financial barriers may even prevent many women from leaving abusive homes and marriages to begin with.

But what does true Biblical submission look like and mean? And is the tradwife social media trend offering a realistic and helpful example?

True biblical submission is not subservience or enslavement to another’s whims, emotions, or demands. That is abuse. True biblical submission doesn’t leave a person feeling powerless, helpless, trapped, or experiencing a lack of financial freedom or choice. It also has nothing to do with baking bread, whether or not you work in or out of the home, or even how final decisions are made and how marital conflict is resolved.

Some tradwives claim that men are the “king” and the home is his “castle”. And the wife is to “show him how much you truly appreciate him” since all he does is work hard to provide the money to support their lifestyle. It really sounds like these men just want to be the gods of their own little kingdoms, being served by everyone around them.

God designed marriage to be a partnership, not the wife performing as a house slave.

If you think this sounds extreme and ridiculous, it’s not. I’ve seen it and some of my friends have lived it.

Thankfully this is not the type of man or leader that Jesus Christ emulated. Jesus claimed that he “came to not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). He modelled service to his disciples, instructing them to serve one another in the same way (John 13:12-17). Jesus’ example of humility moved Paul to write in Philippians 2:4-8,

“Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

This modelling of Jesus “taking the form of a servant” in humbling himself in obedience to the Father was a joyful and voluntary submission. Not coerced or forced by a domineering Father.

I’m not claiming that every family or marriage that espouses “tradwife” ideals is abusive. But there’s a risk for it to take place.

Does the Bible talk about wives submitting to their husbands, husbands serving their wives, sumbission to one another within marriage and more? It absolutely does.

There is so much that can be said about submission, but I will start by saying this: Submission doesn’t mean the husband needs to make all or most decisions. Submission is a free choice of love to place the preferences of the other above yourself. Both husbands and wives are to submit to each other out of reverence to Christ (Ephesians 5:21). Submission is not forced or demanded from the other partner.

If you have questions, concerns, or wrestling with any of those ideas, the best place to take them is in the context of a local church with real men and women whom you can read scripture with, ask questions, and live life together in community. Don’t take your wrestlings and be discipled by what you see others posting about on a screen.

What then shall we be?

What does it mean to be a woman? A wife? A mother?

I’m wrestling through these questions with the real women in my life whom I see each week and stay connected with via phone calls and texting regularly. I’m taking these questions to God as I read the Bible. I’m talking about them with my husband.

My prayer is that we would be women who live in freedom by the grace of the gospel. That we would embrace our own unique cultural and ethnic identities and seeking to love others well. May we not strive to imitate others we see on a screen, but instead be content and thankful for the unique expression of who God in his goodness has created us to be. Also as women let us strive towards competency both in the home and outside it, always trusting God to provide for our needs even if we find ourselves in a season of needing to be the sole provider for those entrusted to our care.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with having children, staying home to raise them, baking bread, or wanting to love your husband and family well. But your choices and way you do those things are not better or more holy than another woman who chooses to pursue another path as they also seek to follow Jesus and love their family.