What The Hell America!

The Handmaid’s Tale and The Righteous Gemstones reveal how women’s strategic submission within patriarchal Christianity—from tradwives to televangelists—can reinforce systems that ultimately strip them of power and autonomy.

Prestige television’s focus on U.S. Christianity is relevant, often provocative and perhaps both worryingly prescient and instructive. 

The popular and critically acclaimed series The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017–2025) and The Righteous Gemstones (HBO, 2019–2025) each recently wrapped a successful series run. Aside from a focus on U.S. Christianity, the two series have little overlap at first glance.  

Adapted from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, Handmaid’s centers a dystopian theocracy in which women have no rights or bodily autonomy. This includes Serena Joy Waterford, an architect of the society that now silences her.  

Meanwhile, Gemstones focuses on a wealthy and dysfunctional televangelist family and megachurch culture—showing how sisters-in-law Judy Gemstone and Amber Gemstone each wield power within a system that seeks to exclude women. 

While some critics have described Handmaid’s‘ story of the rise of a totalitarian theocracy in the U.S. as hysterical and implausible, Gemstones has been praised as an accurate albeit over-the top depiction of wealth, power and Evangelicalism.  

Despite these differences, both series critically explore the consequences of women’s complicity in patriarchal, religious regimes.  

Judy and Amber Gemstone represent two versions of U.S. Christian women who embrace restrictive institutions. Judy craves power and recognition as a church leader alongside her brothers; however, enmeshed in traditional familial and religious structures, she demands personal power while leaving intact systems that marginalize women. 

On the other hand, Amber’s identity and place within the family and church resembles real world tradwives. Amber embraces her role as a Christian wife, helpmate and mother. She positions herself as the family’s moral compass while deferring to her husband (the church’s associate pastor and Judy’s older brother) on all public matters.  

The Gemstone women accept and even normalize patriarchal constraints. They submit to men strategically, all the while working within and around patriarchal systems to carve out their own authority based upon ambition and desire for accolades. For example, in private, Amber guides her husband and helps position him as heir to the family’s religious empire.  

While Judy and Amber adeptly manage restrictive religious and social systems to their benefit, The Handmaid’s Tale considers long-term consequences of women’s deference (even if performative) and willingness to prop up systems rooted in misogyny.

Judy Gemstone and Amber Gemstone—along with real-world tradwives—should be read as the precursor to the anti-feminist villain Serena Joy Waterford. 

The former conservative activist and Gilead architect also worked to normalize and advance a deeply misogynist religious and political system. Yet, unlike the Gemstone women, Serena Joy loses her ability to wield power behind the scenes. Strategic submission leads to a loss of autonomy and expected subservience. 

Like the Gemstone women, Serena Joy attempts to work within conservative cultural boundaries to claim status and power. Demonstrating her piousness while appealing for women’s rights, Serena reads aloud from the Bible in public. Her finger is cut off as punishment for resistance because Gilead forbids women from reading and writing. 

As the series progresses, Serena’s status as a high-ranking Commander’s wife, her ambitions and her ability to manipulate public perception lead her to believe in the possibility of a better life for herself on the periphery of Gilead.

While Serena sees opportunity for herself within an oppressive system, Gilead’s male leaders see her as a rogue woman who needs to be put in her place. In Gilead, Commander’s wives embody the tradwife identity. They have been conditioned—some more willingly than others—to accept that women submit to men.

Serena only realizes she cannot escape the painful realities of subjugation in the regime she built when her second husband brings a handmaid into their home against her wishes. 

Serena, Amber and Judy each work to uphold systems that degrade women. While Gilead is far more brutal and deadly than the Gemstone megachurch, the two systems parallel one another and the contemporary tradwife movement.  

The tradwife movement and many characters in these series similarly treat submissive femininity as reflective of God’s will. Men are protectors and providers and can only fulfill their sacred duty if women devote themselves to homemaking and childcare. Ultimately, the success and growth of the tradwife movement relies upon women’s participation and enforcement of patriarchal norms.  

Judy and Amber Gemstone submit to men strategically, maintaining some individual choice and control. In turn, the women of Gilead live with the abusive and dehumanizing consequences of women forsaking bodily autonomy, economic independence and personal choice. 

When placed in conversation, The Righteous Gemstones and The Handmaid’s Tale expose the dangerous consequences of women participating in anti-feminist cultural backlash. The tradwife ideologies that Amber and Judy negotiate, and that Serena Joy once embraced in theory, become a totalitarian nightmare for all women in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Yet women surrendering choice—not only for themselves but for others—is not a hyperbolic fictional threat. As the tradwife movement gains influence, more women are experiencing the consequences of romanticizing traditional gender roles—often without questioning how submission can masquerade as choice within coercive systems.