Sadie Robertson Huff Preaches Submissive Womanhood. Her Message Is Uncomfortably Compelling.

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When the BeReal notification pops up just after 9 p.m., thousands of young women are belting out a new worship song called “Open.” The track dropped only a week ago, but everyone here in Louisiana’s Monroe Convention Center already knows the words.

“This is the death of my ambitions....” The crowd is swaying in a giant sing-along. “I know Your ways are always best....”

This BeReal is going to be epic. Worshippers in the seats around me swipe open the app, hold their phones high, and angle for the perfect two-way shot that will frame their selfies with the famous figure who brought them here tonight: Sadie Robertson Huff—reality star, mega-influencer, and America’s foremost spiritual ambassador for feminine submission.

In person, Huff looks exactly as she does on her massively popular Instagram account, her sheer foundation and subtle bronze eyeshadow catching the spotlight just like they do the ring light. She has the cross-platform ease of someone who’s been famous forever because she basically has been. Huff was a teen when she first won hearts as a sassy side character on her family’s reality series Duck Dynasty. Now 25, and eight years after a strong second-place showing on Dancing With the Stars, she’s a celeb unto herself, even as she reminds everyone from the stage—surrounded by a Gen Z/millennial flock dressed just like her in oversize button-ups, delicate gold jewelry, no-makeup makeup, coordinated sweats, and utility jumpsuits—that we’re here as human offerings to Him.

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This assembly of young women, the LO Sister Conference, is the second annual summit for Live Original, the Christian lifestyle brand Huff has been building since 2016. She bills it as a haven for self-described Sisters to escape the darkness of a troubled society and connect with one another in their “original” form, which is to say as vessels for God’s light. Although technically nondenominational, Live Original has strong evangelical overtones, with a focus on calling the faithful ever closer to Jesus. The overarching sell: Your life and the world will be better if you accept that personal empowerment is illusory and submit to His unknowable plan. But I’m a reporter, here in the spirit of skeptical inquiry, and I do need to know: How is it possible that an all-female network of surrender not only exists but is growing in 2022?

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It’s not just this annual conference, with its $99 and up ticket prices. Huff’s vast faithscape includes a best-selling series of lifestyle books—the latest, Who Are You Following? Pursuing Jesus in a Social Media Obsessed World, came out in February—plus a merch line, a music label, and speaking tours. Huff’s podcast, Whoa That’s Good, has attracted major sponsors like Apple Card and Prudential. And at the heart of the community is the LO Sister app, a social networking and content platform Huff launched in 2019. There are Bible study groups and a Prayer Wall where members seek spiritual support. Self-care content offerings include fitness and mental health tips. With God as her co-salesman, Huff more than tripled the app’s user base this past year, to 15,000-plus, with more than 2,000 members paying an $80 annual subscription fee for premium content.

Evangelical culture has long held that secular society is largely “against God.” Huff’s success stems from spinning this message for women’s anxieties in a world that currently feels very much against us—although for the Christians she markets to, sexism and gender inequity don’t actually seem to be on the radar. “When the doctor’s diagnosis is not what you thought or your job is eliminated or natural disaster strikes or how about a global pandemic—how do we react to that?” she asks rhetorically in a sizzle reel for her app’s course on “living boldly” through hardship. “Despite quiet, faithful obedience not being flashy or popular, I want you to know that it is the best way to make a huge difference in this world.”

For people outside of hard-line Christian circles, including those like me who were raised in the faith and have since become agnostic, it’s easy to side-eye Huff’s messages as oppressively anti-feminist, strange, even dangerous...which one could argue is accurate. But being here has, I have to admit, nudged me toward a deeper, less smug realization: Once you peel back the Jesus jargon, Huff’s regressive pitch can feel uncomfortably comfortable—because in certain ways, millions of us seem to be opting in on passive self-preservation. I gaze around at the 3,500 Sisters in this huge hall and wonder how many women in the U.S. would secretly relate: huddled in existential surrender, doing our best to just get through it all, hoping someone in charge swoops in and saves the world. Maybe LO Sister isn’t a fringe movement. Maybe it’s a mirror.

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Held in Huff’s hometown, the conference itself feels like an exercise in submission. On each of the two days, attendees wait in the sweltering August heat until they’re whisked inside the center, where the A/C and worship music blast nonstop. The turnaround from day one to day two—after hours of praying and singing, waiting for food, for the bathroom, for everything else—offers barely a moment to decompress. On the second morning, I attend a long breakout session that starts with intense testimony from a member of the LO team (describing God’s intervention in her college suicide attempts) and ends with a workout that leaves my inner thighs sore for three days.

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Huff’s stage presence is a potent comfort in all this. She’s chill and fun, famous for peppering her discourse with seemingly off-the-cuff asides that begin, “Y’all, the other day...” and anecdotes like using frozen grapes to ice a hemorrhoid. She doesn’t position herself as a biblical scholar or a prophet. She’s a humble “wifey & mommy,” according to her Instagram bio—even if her 2019 wedding did garner almost 2.5 million views on YouTube.

The Sisters I spoke to enthused about Huff’s picture-perfect life and all the goodness that surrounds her—the result of supplanting her truth with His truth. Huff broke it down in a sermon earlier this year: “When I pray, I am not praying for my own empowerment,” she explained, pacing a stage in zebra-print Western boots. “That will not stop the war going on. That will not heal the sick. I am praying for the power of God. You have to look at this and say, ‘Is my truth really that powerful?’ It’s not.”

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I’m honestly not sure how powerful my truth is. My truth is tired though, I’ll tell you that. The notion of outsourcing the work of wisdom and receiving so much in return—world peace and an adoring husband; an end to the pandemic and my PMS breakouts (the latter thanks to the skin supplements Huff sometimes plugs)—holds a bracing sort of appeal.

Sure, the playing field is uneven. “Huff as an individual probably has a significant amount of privilege,” says Sara Moslener, PhD, a professor of philosophy and religion at Central Michigan University who studies evangelical culture. “So to have these kinds of promises—like, These are the things that I have done and God has fulfilled me—it’s like, well, is that God fulfilling His promises or is it just you being rich?”

Allie Dodson, 21, a Sister who grew up not far from Huff, feels that both things can be true at once. “I’m sure Sadie has a lot of money, and she’s famous,” Dodson says. “But she’s not letting it consume her. She lets God consume her.” For many Sisters, the twin protections of material comfort and moral virtue are the dream. Why not? Sounds like the ultimate win-win.

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“I think men should be more in charge,” says Terra Culbreath, 26. She’s a Sister who believes, for better or worse, that obedience should extend to interpersonal dynamics. She’s choosing her words with apparent care in laying out her case for me: “I feel like a lot of the time, most women base their thoughts, their words, their opinions on their emotions,” she says. “And men are just, like, straight up.” Huff makes sense as the leader of LO Sister Conference only because it’s a gathering specifically for women, Culbreath explains.

That’s not to say Culbreath isn’t a huge fan. At home in Sherman, Texas, she devoured Huff’s books during the pandemic’s lockdown days. Then health hardships plunged her into a deep depression. Huff’s writing on surrender helped Culbreath get through brain surgery last December—Culbreath imagined her survival story as a parable that might encourage someone else toward developing total trust in God. Culbreath splurged on a VIP pass for the conference. During the main worship events, she perched front row center. At one point, Huff singled her out for a moment of stage banter; they bonded over a shared appreciation of Don Chuy Mexican Grill. “I felt like I was the only one in the room,” Culbreath tells me at a Waffle House the next morning.

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She’s dressed in the same outfit Huff wore during their brief interaction: a pale-pink jumpsuit lettered with the repeating phrase “Child of Light,” available for $100 in the Live Original merch booth. Like Huff, who steered clear of revealing costumes on Dancing With the Stars, Culbreath prefers this modest style of dress (“It’s God’s body,” she says). Although Culbreath is “in her single season”—LO-speak for unmarried—she believes wives should obey their husbands and that to some extent, female workers should defer to their male bosses. Culbreath works in sales and catering.

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I refrain from challenging these points, in part because I’m here to understand Culbreath’s perspective, not talk her out of it. But also because on a certain level, I sense the hypocrisy in the impulse. My mind flashes to my own professional life, about the working women I know. How many of us are out here politely upholding sexist norms about not discussing salary, for instance, an ancient taboo invented by male bosses that’s still causing pervasive undervaluation of women’s labor? Am I—are most of us—railing as hard as we can against the structural problems that harm us? I don’t share Culbreath’s views, but in some troubling ways, I realize I do share her sense of compliance. I sip my coffee and hold my tongue.

All weekend, as I wander around the conference venue, I feel like I’m lost in a three-dimensional Instagram grid circa 2015. There’s a white plywood photo backdrop fixed with a giant cluster of beach balls, an Astroturf lounging area with Adirondack chairs, fiddle-leaf fig trees, and tasseled pink umbrellas. I sneak a selfie. Checking the event hashtags, I see the backdrops replicated across hundreds of posts.

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The hardest-hitting message of the weekend comes not from Huff but from guest speaker Charlotte Gambill, a UK-based traveling preacher who frequently speaks at women’s gatherings. Gambill starts by acknowledging that the world is rife with problems that seem to persist no matter how much of His light we absorb. But make no mistake, she says: “It’s not the word that’s faulty—it’s our soil.” In a tone of tough love, Gambill tells the crowd to prepare for “God’s scalpel.” It’s time to excise ourselves from harmful villages—groups of friends, online communities—that are not rooted in His glory. Into the echo chamber we must go.

And it’s here that I have to admit that I exist in an echo chamber of my own, one that may be, at times, overly affirming. In the name of intersectional feminism, I have marched for abortion rights and supported initiatives to defund the police. I slammed white supremacy at the height of the Black Lives Matter resurgence and worked to address my own white privilege in private. And all along, my social circle—my soil, if you will—helped me believe I was a good person for doing my part. Now I’m not so sure I did.

Despite my own stabs at activism, the truth is that I’ve settled back into a largely individualistic mindset. I remain enraged at the world’s injustices, but I’m not exactly taking to the streets every day or engaging much with the social justice accounts I followed on Instagram. Instead, I go numb.

Gambill’s message hits in a different way with 21-year-old musician Bella Windell. Windell traveled to the LO conference from Conroe, Texas, seeking a clear answer on what to do about a boyfriend situation that wasn’t feeling right. Tonight, as Gambill guides her away from the voice in her head, Windell receives direction from God. “It was clear: ‘Get rid of him; leave him. There are better things for you,’” she says.

God apparently presents Himself in a variety of ways. Several Sisters I interviewed described receiving His wisdom in the form of a shooting star or through a series of butterfly sightings. The woo-woo vibes feel generationally on-brand in a way that Huff seems to be leveraging even as she subverts them. A recent episode of her podcast, brought to you in part by the wellness supplement Athletic Greens, explores “why worrying is never the answer and why you need to stop ‘manifesting.’”

Bella texts her boyfriend and tells him it’s over. She feels a profound sense of peace, confirmation that she has chosen correctly. “This was God’s timing,” she says. TBH, I admire her (His?) certainty.

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Huff joins our audio Zoom 10 minutes late, her charming drawl echoey but unmistakable. She sounds ready for the questions I was asked to send over in advance. Near the top of my list is an inquiry on how young women today should actually navigate the many challenges that are external to the Sisterhood. Huff is emphatic that surrendering to God doesn’t mean women should just lie back and accept whatever happens to them. “If you lose your job, obviously, get up the next day and put yourself out there for another job,” she says. In a semi-circuitous bit of reasoning, she seems to suggest that women will simply struggle a whole lot less if they just give in.

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“When I surrender to God and I’m on my knees, that’s the strongest place that I can be,” Huff says. “So for women who feel the need to fight, who feel the need to stand up—which I think is great and I think is amazing—I think the beauty of surrendering to God is not in saying, ‘I don’t have a voice’; it’s actually allowing God to be your mouthpiece. Allowing God to work through you is only going to make you a stronger woman.”

My earlier conversation with Moslener primed me for this take. “Something I’ve seen in purity culture and white evangelicalism in general is that submission can be branded as empowerment,” Moslener told me. “You can use this feminist-sounding rhetoric to convince, to affirm women who make these choices and make it seem like, ‘Oh, well, it really is empowering.’”

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Moslener admits it’s tricky to unpack. “As a researcher, how do I think about agency? If women choose submission, is that agency?” she says. “I’ve started checking myself. Because feminism is not just one thing.”

In answering my question, Huff cites a Bible verse, Psalm 46, as her personal field guide for hard times. “It basically talks about what do you do when everything goes wrong: What happens when the mountain crumbles into the heart of the sea and the oceans roar and the kingdoms crumble and fall?” she explains. “And it says to be still and know that He is God. God is your refuge and your strength.”

On the surface, this seems illogical—humans can’t address the problems that...humans create? But up close and on this call, Huff’s sermonic cadence rings a bell of defeat I feel in my core. I want to keep fighting the good fight, but systemic ills like sexism and racism feel too big to take on. And so they remain problems for someone else to solve—maybe not God, but not exactly me either. I can’t stomach calling that submission, but maybe that’s what it is.

“I think it’s just a heart posture of: I can be still and not have to fix everything,” Huff continues. “I can’t fix the fact that the mountains are crumbling into the heart of the sea. I can’t fix the fact that the kingdoms are in an uproar and the nations are falling. That’s a God thing. I have to be still in my heart.”

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I consider the secular analogs big and small, political and personal—like the fact that half of young voters in the U.S. didn’t even bother to cast a ballot in the last presidential election. Or how many of us come home after our long days, distract ourselves from whatever nightmare is unfolding for women’s autonomy that week, and endlessly scroll through TikTok for stuff we don’t need. We aren’t still in our hearts, but we are still on our couches, in our bubbles, and in our collective exhaustion. Listening to Huff riff, I decide the fringiest feature of the Sister- hood might just be its honesty.

Huff has finally moved me. Just not in the direction she intended.

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Video loop credit: Sadie Robertson Youtube

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