This month in Orlando, the Southern Baptist Convention — the largest Protestant denomination in America — took its first formal step toward barring women from preaching. Almost three-quarters of the voting delegates backed it. The millions of women who fill the pews every Sunday watched their own denomination move, by supermajority, to silence them.

This is hypocrisy striking the heart of American public life.

The U.S. built a foreign policy doctrine in part to stand against the silencing of women. It spent 20 years and more than $2.3 trillion in Afghanistan, with women’s freedom as a stated moral justification. It used the Iranian regime’s treatment of women as a cornerstone of its case for sanctions and diplomatic isolation. USAID poured hundreds of millions into education programs across the Muslim world — with girls’ access as an explicit priority — framed directly in U.S. counterterrorism reports as a tool to counter dangerous extremist ideology.

That doctrine had a vast budget and bipartisan support across four administrations. When thousands of Baptist delegates vote to enact a Taliban mullah policy on American soil, the political class is silent or reaches for the language of “theological disagreement” as an excuse to not speak up. This is a religious cover for a much broader political project: the systematic narrowing of every space where women are permitted to hold authority.

In February, President Donald Trump placed Paula White — a woman pastor — at the head of his newly created White House Faith Office. But the men who hold real power in this administration preach that women should not even have the right to vote.

Keep in mind that this is the administration operating in the shadow of Jeffrey Epstein. America knows what it looks like when powerful men are protected, when girls are failed, when institutions delay and escape accountability. A politics that preaches female submission has very little to say about male impunity.

This is already happening in practice. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends a church whose pastors believe women should not hold leadership positions and that wives must submit to their husbands — views he amplified on social media and appeared to act upon by canceling programs designed to increase women’s roles in national security.

The National Women’s Law Center concluded last year that Trump has not merely rolled back workplace protections, dismantled DEI or stripped reproductive rights— he has attacked the idea that gender equality is a shared national value.

Author and Bible teacher Beth Moore, who served Southern Baptist women for 40 years before the denomination drove her out, has already asked the right question: Which has been the greater problem — women trying to preach, or male pastors who spent decades abusing their congregations while leadership kept a secret list of 700 accused abusers and did nothing? The convention’s response to predatory men was years of silence. Its response to women preaching was a 75% supermajority voting for a ban. The institution has no shortage of decisive action. It is directed against women.

This is not a conflict between church and state. It is a convergence. Religious institutions are the primary pipelines for community leadership in America — civic engagement, local politics, nonprofit work. When women are barred from the pulpit, that shapes who is seen as fit to lead outside the church as well — in communities that are disproportionately Southern, rural and already underserved in many ways.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is moving in the opposite direction.

This March, Sarah Mullally was enthroned as the 106th archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to lead the Church of England in its 1,400-year history. Across a different tradition, Mohammed Al-Issa, secretary-general of the Muslim World League, convened representatives of 47 countries in Islamabad alongside Nobel laureates, senior muftis and government ministers and produced the Islamabad Declaration: a formal, unified statement that any use of scripture to restrict women’s rights deviates from the faith itself. Al-Issa was explicit: “No one can claim to speak on behalf of Islam regarding this issue anymore.” That 2025 declaration landed with force. The Taliban’s own leadership has since fractured over women’s rights — senior Cabinet ministers including the interior and defense ministers pushing back openly against their supreme leader’s ban on girls’ education. International religious pressure is doing what$2 trillion of American spending could not.

I have attended diplomatic forums at which women’s rights was America’s signature issue — evidence of its values, its seriousness, its distance from the regimes it opposed. Yet the administration’s new 2026 budget eliminates all funding for women’s reproductive health globally. Its new foreign policy strategy contains no reference to women at all. The U.S. is sacrificing its standing. This credibility is the difference between a country that can demand accountability from others and one that cannot.

The Southern Baptist Convention has made its choice. Now the rest of America’s faith community must make theirs. What is considered “extremism” in America? Right now, the answer depends entirely on who is preaching.

____

Nathalie Beasnael is a faith elder at Christ Citadel International Church in Los Angeles and founder of Health4Peace. She serves as diplomatic envoy to the U.S. for the Republic of Chad.

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.