The SAVE Act is Christian Nationalism in Action

Gendered Burdens and the Right to Vote

The SAVE ACT, the latest Republican attempt to make it harder to vote, just passed the House on a party-line vote. The bill requires that Americans, for the first time, be required to prove their citizenship in order to vote.

It’s a classic use of administrative burdens—superficially reasonable, and popular (in the abstract) but which in practice will prevent millions of Americans from voting by placing a complicated set of procedural hurdles in the way of a fundamental democratic right.

Photo by Paul Weaver/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images

The SAVE Act is nominally aimed at preventing non-citizens from voting. But since this is vanishingly rare, the real effects will be felt elsewhere. One new twist, compared to prior restrictive voting measures, is that women, especially White Republican women, will be hard hit by these burdens. The SAVE Act employs “gendered burdens” – bureaucratic obstacles that purposefully and predictably hurt women.

Married women who took their partners’ names — around 69 million of them — will be especially impacted by a citizenship requirement. Their current names don’t match the names on their birth certificate–and only about half of women have a valid passport. In practice, it will be far more complicated for these women to ‘prove’ their citizenship. The surest option–a passport or a paper trail reconciling their married name with the name on their birth certificate–requires significant investments of time and money.

While groups that voter restrictions have historically burdened, older Black voters, low-income, and trans voters among them, will be disproportionately impacted, the SAVE Act will also hit conservative Republican White women — because they’re more likely to be married, and when they marry, they are more likely to take their husbands’ names. The women most likely to vote Democratic are young, single, and higher educated, or married and more likely to keep their own names.

So why the willingness to place these burdens on your own voters? In part, the explanation lies in a surge of extreme misogyny since Trump was elected, as well as the growing political power of the Christian Nationalism movement. Christian Nationalists have strongly advocated for a household vote–which could be the practical result of the SAVE Act for many married households. The larger project is not about Republican dominance. It’s about creating a government and society where men are dominant and women submit.

The Desire to Coerce and Control

The surge in misogyny and racism since the start of the Trump Administration–and the adjacent MAGA community–has been fast and furious. Nick Fuentes, who has described himself as ‘just like Hitler,’ is trending mainstream–with millions of followers on social media and the support of large fractions of young Republican staffers on the Hill, His views on women are, putting it mildly, extremist.

A woman is a mother, subservient to her husband, or a nun, secondary to a male priest, or a whore, excluded from society. While Christian Nationalists, who are well represented in both the White House and Congress, have meaningful differences from Fuentes, they do fundamentally share the view that women should be subservient to men.

Misogyny is central to the White Nationalist project — including embedding those beliefs into policy. As Pastor Doug Wilson noted, in a CNN interview, “Women are the kind of people that people come out of.” And it’s not women in general. As Eric Schmidt, Republican Senator from Missouri emphasized, White Christian Pilgrims owned America, and the nation belongs to their descendents.

The idea that married women shouldn’t vote is a common belief in these circles. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s Christian Denomination, Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), promotes the ‘household’ vote. Brooks Potteiger, the pastor of Hegseth’s CREC Church, described it this way:

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…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.

Proponents of the view that women shouldn’t vote have an increasingly receptive audience among powerful politicians. Pete Hegesth just invited Chrisitan Nationalist Doug Wilson to speak at the Pentagon. Hegseth made the invitation after getting roundly criticized for retweeting a clip of Wilson espousing the view that women shouldn’t vote. The video also featured Wilson saying that women should not hold positions of leadership or combat roles in the military — Hegseth has removed women from leadership positions and ordered a review of women in combat roles.

Other members of the Trump Administration, from Russ Vought (Director of the Office of Management and Budget) to Brooke Rollins (Secretary of Agriculture) are active proponents of Christian Nationalism.

Christian Nationalist views are also common in Congress. For example, Capital Ministries runs a regular bible study in Congress, which is sponsored by 15 Republican Senators and 36 Republican House members. One recent bible study emphasized the biblical obligation for women to be subservient to their husbands and to respect their husbands (albeit not the reverse). They focused on Ephesians 522-23:

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.

How the Save ACT Operationalizes Coercion and Control

But while Christian Nationalists are increasingly powerful, their views are generally not shared by the public at large. Indeed, Brooks Potteiger and Joshua Haymes, a popular CREC podcaster, emphasized that they weren’t looking to repeal the 19th amendment immediately, but they were looking to open the door.

Haymes argued in a 2024 podcast with Hegseth that his central goal is to “radicalize you, like I was radicalized.” He went on to say that he didn’t “think Christians should make [repealing the 19th Amendment] their main issue right now, because it’s not a winning issue yet…But I do think it’s the kind of thing that is worth bringing up from time to time to challenge (precedent).”

In this context, using an administrative burden, like putting procedural hurdles in the way of allowing married women to vote, is an effective political tool. It performs the role that administrative burdens often do: providing a plausible administrative rationale for the more profound and unpopular end goal, which is weakening women’s political influence.

So How Does it Work?

The SAVE Act requires that people document their citizenship, primarily either through a birth certificate or a valid (unexpired) passport. The initial version of the bill only included these options.

The legislation that passed did respond to criticism about the implications for married women. SAVE now provides states with more flexibility as to how women could ‘prove’ they’re citizens. But it remains complicated, and also subject to the discretion of both state election commissions, as well as individual bureaucrats actually processing registration, who can be liable for these decisions.

A passport or a birth certificate remains the most straightforward way to validate citizenship. A drivers license is not sufficient. This hurdle is not insignificant. Just under half of Americans have a passport, and many Americans don’t have their birth certificates on hand–and it costs money, in addition to effort and time, to get one. Surveys suggest that young men, in particular, lack easy access to documentation.

The more insurmountable hurdle, however, is that 69 million American women and 4 million men (many of whom changed their names due to marriage, such as hyphenation) do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name. Half of women aged 18 and older are married, and over 85 percent take their husband’s last name. Less than half of Americans have a passport, and surveys report that women are somewhat less likely than men to have one.

In short then, gendered patterns of name changes and identity requirements make it much harder for women to demonstrate citizenship for the SAVE Act.

The processes to get a passport are onerous. Obtaining a new passport, if your name is changed, requires an in-person interview, which in many cities can take weeks to schedule. Notably, the State Department just significantly limited the range of places people could do this by no longer allowing public libraries to provide this service. In addition to filling the form, providing documentation of your name change (such as a marriage certificate), fees can range from $30 to over $200. Average processing time after completing the paperwork and interview is 6 to 8 weeks, including mail delivery time.

Of course, if about 70 million Americans apply to get a passport so that they vote in the next election, the system would be completely overwhelmed. The agency, annually issued about 27 million passports last year. For comparison, an additional 2 million unexpected passport applications in 2023, almost doubled average processing times. New passport applications are more administratively burdensome than renewal of status.

The path that doesn’t involve a passport is unclear. The legislation doesn’t outline specific options to remedy why the person’s name on a birth certificate is different than their current name, leaving it to the discretion of state election commissions. But it does hold election officials liable for ensuring proper documentation, creating uncertainty and likely more burdens.

Do Republicans care that this will hurt Republican married women? Married women most likely to keep their own last names — and therefore not face the burdens created by the SAVE Act — are younger, higher educated, and registered Democrats. For example, while 90 percent of conservative Republican women took their husbands’ last name, the comparable rate was 64 percent for liberal Democratic women.

Moreover, passport holders are more represented in Democratic and purple states, and less in key GOP voting blocs, like evangelicals and rural communities. As a result, liberals are more likely to have a passport. Passport holders are also more likely to be higher educated. For example, only 25 percent of those with a high school diploma or less report having a valid passport, compared to well over 60 percent of those with college and post graduate degrees.

Source: Center for American Progress

Put another way, Trump’s vote share actually mirrors the absence of passports in a state:

Source: Secure Democracy

What’s Next?

The Bill is currently in the Senate, where Republicans support its passage. But Democrats, who have made their opposition clear, will use the filibuster to block it. Republican leadership appears opposed to undermining the filibuster to pass legislation like this, but President Trump is continuing to press Republicans to pass the bill, calling for a talking filibuster.

Ruling out the possibility of its passage would be naive given Congressional subservience to Trump over the last year, and Trump has even hinted he would try to enforce the provisions of the SAVE Act “whether approved by Congress or not!”

If implemented, the burdens would fall not just on those directly affected, but also on election officials, and by extension, anyone seeking to vote. Election officials would face extraordinary new burdens in implementing the new law, slowing down processes at the polls, and predictably disenfranchising voters. The National Conference of State Legislatures, a non-partisan group representing state legislators, laid out the significant implementation challenges.

Ultimately, the SAVE Act will likely lead to a fundamental retrenchment in the most democratic right; the ability to determine our elected leaders.

While we can try to predict exactly how this would play out in practice, the enormity of the change makes those predictions subject to error. What is clear, however, is that the larger project is not simply about Republican dominance. The goal is to implement the vision of White Christian Nationalists — including a government and society where men are dominant and women submit.

Pam Herd is the Carol Kakalec Kohn Professor of Social Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan.