When the worship leader at one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest evangelical churches took the stage last Sunday in skin-tight jeans and a cropped sweater, few in the 4,000-seat auditorium blinked. The songs were the familiar seven-word loops made famous by Hillsong and Bethel.

Fog machines and purple lights. A worship leader in ripped jeans and a cropped sweater led the congregation in a 12-minute chorus of “You’re a good, good Father.” The crowd—mostly women—swayed, arms raised, phones recording.

The sermon, delivered by a female teaching pastor, was titled “Becoming the Woman God Created You to Be.” It never mentioned submission, divorce, or sexual sin. Across town, in a smaller Baptist congregation that still uses hymnals, the senior pastor spent twenty minutes rebuking men for “failing to lead their families spiritually” while the women’s ministry director (twice divorced, currently living with her boyfriend) organized the potluck.

Meanwhile, in another church, the senior pastor, a man in his early forties with a trimmed beard and a microphone headset, took the stage. For 38 minutes, he preached a sermon titled “Real Men Lead Like Jesus.” He spoke of “toxic passivity,” of husbands who fail to “step up,” of single men who “play video games while godly women wait.” The congregation nodded vigorously.

What he did not mention—what is almost never mentioned from pulpits like this—was the 28-year-old worship leader’s pending divorce (her second), filed six weeks earlier, citing “irreconcilable differences.” Nor did he address the fact that, according to church records obtained by this newspaper, women initiate roughly 78 percent of divorces among the congregation’s married couples, a figure that mirrors national evangelical trends and, strikingly, the secular world outside these doors.

These scenes are now commonplace in the modern American church.

What almost no one in either room will say aloud is that the spirit of Jezebel (the Phoenician princess who slaughtered prophets, emasculated her husband, and introduced Baal worship into Israel) has not merely infiltrated the American evangelical church. She has taken the throne.

The statistical evidence is undeniable. In 2024 the Institute for Family Studies reported that evangelical Protestants now have a divorce rate statistically indistinguishable from the general population: roughly 50 percent of first marriages end in civil dissolution, and in 74 percent of those cases the wife files first.

Barna’s most recent data show that 22 percent of practicing Christian marriages are entirely sexless and another 38 percent average intimacy less than once a week. Pastors privately admit they have stopped preaching on Ephesians 5:22-24 or Titus 2:3-5 because “the women will leave and take their giving with them.

”The asymmetry is staggering. Men are publicly shamed from pulpits for pornography use, emotional unavailability, or reluctance to marry (often while in their early twenties). Women, meanwhile, are rarely confronted for initiating no-fault divorces, withholding sex for years, refusing submission “in everything,” or leading gossip campaigns that force faithful pastors out of the ministry.

The result is a church that disciplines men with a rod of iron and women with a silk ribbon. This selective accountability has created a vacuum. Into that vacuum have stepped women (many of whom give no credible evidence of regeneration) who function as de facto pastors, elders, and doctrinal gatekeepers. They do not need official titles; they wield authority through women’s ministries, worship teams, counselors’ couches, and private Facebook groups with 40,000 members.

When a pastor finally dares to quote 1 Timothy 2:12, the backlash is swift: anonymous letters, whispered accusations of “abuse,” and ultimately a forced resignation. The pattern is so predictable that younger men now refer to it simply as “the Naboth treatment,” a reference to Jezebel’s murder of a righteous man who refused to surrender his inheritance.

Even the conservative wing of evangelicalism has not escaped. A new class of influential Christian women has arisen (polished, articulate, and politically right-wing) who operate with a level of public authority that would have shocked previous generations. Lila Rose, Allie Beth Stuckey, and Erika Kirk command audiences in the hundreds of thousands, write best-selling books, headline major conferences, and publicly correct male theologians, pastors, and politicians.

Their branding is pro-life, pro-family, anti-woke, yet their operational model is indistinguishable from secular girl-boss feminism: personal platform first, male headship optional. Rose, a Roman Catholic, is the founder of Live Action, has built a multimillion-dollar media empire built on fighting abortion but has recently cause a stir over calling out men for consuming porn while simulateously claiming that men don’t need sex and a lack of sex from a men is a sign of Catholic style “self control”.

Stuckey’s popular podcast Relatable routinely mocks “beta males” and “effeminate church leaders” while simultaneously rejecting the biblical category of wifely submission as “1950s legalism.” In a 2024 episode of her hugely popular “Relatable” podcast, Allie Beth Stuckey—widely regarded as a conservative Christian voice—devoted an entire segment to scolding single men for “refusing to commit” while never once asking whether the women in question had demonstrated the “chaste conversation” Peter requires of wives.

Kirk is now the head of Turning Point USA in the wake of her husband Charlie murder two months ago. Kirk blends trad-wife aesthetics with sharp political commentary, has built a following of hundreds of thousands by celebrating “feminine strength” while dismissing submission as “servitude.” Kirk boldly calls on men to be a man worth following as if biblical submission depends on whether a man is worthy of submission in the eyes of a woman.

All three women are celebrated at the largest conservative Christian events, while any male speaker who quoted the same verse against them would be canceled before the conference app refreshed. This is not complementarianism with sharper edges; it is right-wing Jezebelism (a spirit that hates abortion and critical race theory but still demands the microphone, the final word, and the right to define “godly womanhood” or “wifely submission” on her own terms).

The theological fallout is catastrophic. When women are not held to the plain New Testament standards of chastity, submission, and quietness in the churches, the vacuum is filled by the loudest, most charismatic, and most unrepentant. The result is a Laodicean church (rich, increased with goods, and in need of nothing) where Christ Himself stands outside knocking (Revelation 3:17-20). The same congregations that once thundered against Bill Clinton’s immorality now shrug at worship leaders living in open adultery and female influencers teaching doctrine to millions without male oversight.

Pastors who have tried to resist describe the same sequence:

1. A charismatic woman (often with a history of fornication or divorce) rises to influence.
2. She gathers a loyal following of younger women and soft men.
3. Any attempt at biblical correction is labeled “spiritual abuse.”
4. The pastor is removed; the woman is promoted as a victim-turned-heroine.

The tragedy is compounded by the young men who have simply walked away. Enrollment in conservative seminaries has plummeted 38 percent in the last decade, with many citing “the marriage trap”: pressure to wed high-body-count women who were never taught submission, followed by years of sexual deprivation and the near-certainty of a wife-initiated divorce.

The biblical diagnosis is brutal and unambiguous. The church that suffers a Jezebel to teach and to seduce God’s servants to commit fornication will itself be cast into great tribulation (Revelation 2:20-23). The church that becomes lukewarm by tolerating her doctrine will be spewed out of Christ’s mouth (Revelation 3:16). And the final vision of “Wickedness” in Scripture is a woman, sealed in a basket and carried by women to her permanent house in Babylon (Zechariah 5:5-11).

Until evangelicalism recovers the courage to hold women to the same biblical standard it demands of men (no more, no less), the statistics will not change. The divorce rate will mirror the world. The pulpits will grow quieter on sin. And the spirit that once painted her eyes and arranged the death of Naboth will continue to paint her face, post her podcasts, and arrange the quiet assassination of any man who dares to say, “Thus saith the Lord.”

The candlestick is flickering.

Don’t forget to Subscribe for Updates. Also, Follow Us at Society-Reviews, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Odysee, Rumble, and Twitch