Concerning that digital 'trad wives' tsunami

What's the key element of these debates? The Bible, digital editing skills or harsh economic realities?

I really thought that the online urban dictionary would have, by now, added a definition of “trad wife.”

This is, after all, one of hottest of hot-potato terms being tossed around by chattering-class warriors vlogging in blue and red zip codes everywhere. Writers even get to decide if it’s “trad wife” or “tradwife.” There will be a “TradWife” brand eventually.

But what is a “trad wife” and does this term have anything to do (#triggerwarning) with centuries of Christian tradition and doctrine? If you do a basic Google search for a definition, you will end up with options claiming that this term means:

* A “recent phenomenon in western culture in which women use social media to romanticize traditional gender roles and encourage the patriarchal structure.”

* A “married woman who embraces traditional gender roles, particularly focusing on homemaking and supporting her husband as the primary breadwinner.”

* A “married woman who chooses to be a homemaker as a primary occupation and adheres to or embodies traditional femininity and female gender roles, often associated with conservative or alt-right political values.”

Alt-right politics? Here’s one more option (out of many): This longer and rather hostile take at Bravely Go argues that the term “refers to a subsection of wives and husbands who live their lives according to a very specific set of rules.” Keep reading:

Each couple seems to amend the rules for themselves according to what they specifically want from their partnership. But the general rules of a tradwife seem to be:

* Married in a straight relationship.
* The man works, the wife does not.
* The man is the head of the household and the final word on all things financial, lifestyle, and professional for the family.
* Kids are a part of the plan if not already in the family.

Why bring this up at Rational Sheep? My goal — trust me on this — is not to start another war about whether “trad wives” are a requirement of “orthodox” faith — with or without a large “O.”

What interests me is that this is yet another hot-button cultural issue in American life in which it is impossible for parents, pastors, teachers and counselors to wrestle with these debates without colliding with the digital world of “influencers.”

What kind of “influencers”? In biblical terms, they are legion.

OK, that was rather snarky.

This brings me to an essay that I learned about via Anne Kennedy at her Demotivations With Anne Substack. It pointed (this is how online life works) to her own “theological trends” essay at the Christian Research Institute website, under the headline, “How Traditional Are Tradwives: Evaluating the Social Media Movement.”

The overture, as it should, leaps straight into smartphone culture:

One evening I casually posed this question to my six children and got six different answers: What is a tradwife? One named a sweet, soft-spoken mother in our church. Another spoke volubly about Shaye Elliott merch.¹ A third began searching through her phone for an account, the name of which she could not remember. A fourth — the most sarcastic of the bunch — shrugged and said, “Is that like a mommy blogger? Weren’t you the original tradwife?” The two boys made a lot of jokes at my expense, and the conversation devolved as everyone pulled out their devices and started scrolling. In the end, we were all stooped over my phone watching professional model Nara Smith, in full makeup and runway fashion, making marshmallows from scratch.²

Like so many social media phenomena, the tradwife trend flows like a swift current carving out a new riverbed. A torrent of clicks will transform the hashtag of last week into an entirely new genre by the end of summer. A “generation” online lasts the blink of an eye.

Once again, there is no way around the fact that “aesthetic preferences” — sights, sounds, implied scents — play a big role in all of this. Apparently, trad wives have lots of time to master the fine details of video-editing software.

In my old Mass Comm 101 classes, I used to emphasize that most of America — in terms of hard statistics — was a rural culture until World War I or, more likely, World War II. The isolated suburban home? Did that exist in many imaginations before television sitcoms?

Kennedy discusses her own agrarian, extended-family background, which was quite “trad” but not very TikTok:

Far away from electricity, running water, or any modern technology, traditional gender roles, what Ivan Illich calls “vernacular gender,” governed social norms. Women cooked and did some work in the fields — older girls and grandmothers minded babies. Men plowed, planted, mended equipment, and traveled into town sometimes. Nobody woke up in the morning and wondered what they would do that day, making a cup of espresso in a sleek device and staring into the middle distance.

As you would imagine, the economic realities of the wife of Kansas City Chief kicker and Catholic speaker Harrison Butker surface in this essay. Also, there is an interesting discussion of biblical images of the lives of wives and mothers (long before the arrival of the iPhone).

But I will end with this smart Kennedy nod to, well, the truth that “technology shapes content” (one of the mantras of Rational Sheep).

If there is any “we,” any corporate shared culture in these latter days, it must include a virtual component. It is not polite for me to pop next door and try to chat with my neighbors. It would be intrusive for me to try to be friends with people on my street. Yet strangely, it is perfectly acceptable for me to comment on the thread of a stranger’s Instagram post to attach myself to a person whom the market has vetted for me through clicks and shares. The hive of the internet makes each of us feel safe in our individual spaces.

It may be time for me to put away my Gen X lamentations over the loss of the sort of embodied community I feel comfortable with and that shaped my expectations. The fact is that communities around shared assumptions and knowledge are being recreated. The aggressive tide of fourth-wave feminism is showing signs of receding, as women give up on birth control, as they make bread from scratch while simultaneously clicking through an Amazon order. If you’re going to be a tradwife, the first thing you need is a way to take payment online — and to make it.

Yes, by all means, read it all.

If some of these digital-home topics are not showing up in sermons near you, it’s time to send your pastor a few URLs.