A cool evening air was descending on the 25-acre farmstead, blowing across the pond, around the barn, through the apple orchard and into the windows of Mike and Jenny Thomas’s two-century-old, red brick farmhouse.
The dinner hour had come. Edith, five, and George, three, enthusiastically rang a bell hanging near the kitchen door, sending metallic peals back into the early dusk.
Mike sat down at the head of a wooden table, his wife at the other end, their four children along the benches between. He recited a prayer in Latin, then led a short grace: “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive …” Everyone crossed themselves, and Jenny began serving homemade pizzas.
A decade earlier, Jenny and Mike had been urban Democrats of a progressive and granola bent: the sort of people who shop at farmers’ markets, read about psychoanalysis, volunteer at community gardens. But they felt some frustration – some lack. They fantasized about leaving the city behind for a simpler, purer life in the countryside, and 11 years ago they finally took the plunge.
Running a farmstead in the mountains of central New York state turned out to be hard work, but it suited them. As Mike worked on the farm, he began to feel an almost spiritual connection to the land and to nature itself. He immersed himself in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers.
One day, while staring at an oak tree, he felt a visceral awareness of the tree as a living thing – and of Jesus Christ, not just as a historical figure or Christian symbol, but as a presence emanating from everything around him. He emerged from the experience a believer in God’s existence.
Jenny pointed out that being Christian meant more than just a vague spiritual identification. Shouldn’t they start going regularly to mass? Shouldn’t they try to actually abide by the sacraments?
As they did, she and Mike began to wonder if many of the secular liberal assumptions they had long held were true. Did technological progress really make people happier? Had greater gender equality actually worked out for women and families? They discovered other people with the same doubts – and a similar yearning for an America that no longer exists, and perhaps in some regards never did.
A couple years ago, Jenny went through her books to remove some final remnants of her left-leaning 20s: the Frankfurt school, the situationists, Žižek.
She burned them.
Although Mike and Jenny are nothing but warm and welcoming in person, on social media they casually speak of revoking women’s suffrage and make insinuating references to throwing Marxists from helicopters. (During their rightwing dictatorships, the Argentine and Chilean militaries executed thousands of people – enemy guerrillas as well as leftwing trade unionists, students, and journalists – by drugging them and dropping them from aircraft into the sea.)
Today, Jenny and Mike still believe in respecting the environment and buying local. But they are ardently conservative by common definitions, devoutly Catholic and part of a counterculture where describing someone as “reactionary” is high praise.
They are part of a small movement of Americans who believe that the modern world is broken – and that the solution lies not in economic equality or social progressivism, but in an older, stricter family order. For families like these, a house is not just a home, but a castle against a decadent and dysfunctional world. They believe that they have figured out something about modern life that the rest of us have not, or are in denial about.
And they may find some sympathetic ears at high levels of the Trump administration: the “trad” (traditionalist) movement coincides with a time of extraordinary political assault on women’s rights in the US and a cultural backlash against decades of feminist consensus. At its most militant, it is intertwined with far-right political projects.
“A man should be able to earn a single wage,” Mike said, “that allows him to own property, be productive on that property, and pay for his family so his wife doesn’t have to work. This is the way that our society should be oriented. What I have here shouldn’t be so uncommon. This should be the common.”
My hours-long drive to the Thomases’ farmstead was almost cut short in the final stretch when I felt the sickening shudder of a flat tire. It was almost too on-the-nose: of course a New York City journalist would get a flat tire on the way to interview a man who chops his own wood for heat.
I called Mike and, with some embarrassment, asked for assistance. Minutes later, a friendly bearded man in a checkered shirt pulled up in a pickup truck and introduced himself. Soon, we were on our way.
I had become interested in the trad movement as a reporter who covers the culture of the right. Before my visit to the farm, I had spent weeks reading about families like theirs: men and women leaving cities behind to live as modern-day yeoman farmers. I had heard of social media tradwives, but less about trad husbands, and even less about the realities of embodying this life.
What I encountered intrigued me. In contrast to Christian fundamentalists, the Amish, or other conservative religious communities, many of the trads were converts who had chosen their lifestyles as adults, sometimes after years of spiritual seeking. Some seemed eminently reasonable and simply wished to be left alone to coexist with mainstream society, others to inhabit a different and unsettling planet.
All, however, seemed to share similar frustrations with the modern age.
I had contacted Mike because he is the director of the Catholic Land Movement, an organization that advocates for conservative Catholic families to form rural homesteads. (Thomas is not his actual surname, but the name by which people in the movement know him.)
Mike has a day job as a manager at a construction company. He was frank about the fact that his farm is more of a project than a primary source of food or income. The rambling compound was, nevertheless, teeming with animals: two dogs, four cats, a dozen chickens and 17 sheep. He said not to stand near the driveway gate because their sheepdog is known to nip bottleneckers.
Families like his see themselves as part of a growing subculture. In 2002, the conservative writer Rod Dreher published an article, Crunchy Cons, arguing that some rightwing Americans valued environmental conservation and skepticism of globalized capitalism: stances often dismissed as leftwing. In a subsequent book, Dreher urged conservatives to protect what is “small, local, old, and particular” rather than “big, global, new, and abstract”.
That idea spread online through outlets such as Front Porch Republic, which advocates for a localism that promotes family life deeply rooted in small communities. It stands in contrast to the free-market absolutism historically associated with the Republican party, and might be said to have predicted, in a small way, the tectonic rise of Donald Trump’s anti-free-trade populism, as well as Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” strain of anti-corporate, anti-vaccine politics.
Mike, who voted for Trump, supports his use of tariffs and other means to try to “reshore” American jobs and promote national economic self-sufficiency, although he hopes that Trump officials will do more to promote small businesses and local agriculture. He also supports paid parental leave for both parents.
The pandemic has also been “a departure point”, Mike said, which increased interest in the trad lifestyle. Covid-19, he said, exposed the fragility of economic supply chains, the public school system, and other institutions in a way that made families want to be more self-sufficient and rely on neighbors and churchmates rather than the government.
Since then, he and Jenny have to explain their odd lifestyle choices less.
Inside the house, Jenny, then five months pregnant, was working in the kitchen. She had just picked up their 13 year-old, Astrid, from an Irish dance class. The large, rustic room was adorned with Christian icons and crafts projects.
“This is Mr Conroy,” Mike told the children. To Jenny, he said: “How can I help, mom?”
“There’s not much,” she said. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
Over dinner – with occasional babbling interruptions from George, the toddler, who had recently learned the phrase “excuse me” – Jenny described her experience as a home school teacher.
Home schooling has sharply risen in the US in recent years, particularly during Covid school shutdowns, and many students may never return to the formal school system. Among religious conservatives, home schooling has long been popular; for trads, it can also be, like breastfeeding, home birthing, big families and cooking from scratch, somewhat of a status symbol.
Jenny said they began home schooling simply because good local schools were scarce. She had also wrestled with a sense that the strictures of formal schooling tended to “crush the spark of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, enthusiastic children”.
It is hard work. “I’m not the best home school teacher,” she laughed. “Some people love it, and are really good at it. I have friends that are like that and then, thankfully, I have friends who are kind of like, ‘Are you failing miserably at this too?’” Even so, she felt her children are doing at least as well, socially and academically, as their formally schooled peers.
“I would say,” Mike said, “that there’s something about the education system that is technocratic in its nature, and more about managerial philosophies than encountering a genuine and whole person and educating them. I think we wanted to create an environment where our kids were actually ‘encountered’, whether it was with literature, or history, or philosophy or …”
“EXCUSE ME,” George said.
We paused to let George speak. He had recently encountered a version of The Iliad for children, and it had made a deep impression. “I like it,” he explained. “I like it when people are blooded.” Everyone chuckled.
After dinner, Mike showed me around the farm. George was keen to join, but fell out of a tree, became blooded and was crying.
Mike paused at an apple tree infested by caterpillars, which he pulled off and dumped in the chickens’ yard. The farm draws on principles partly similar to those of permaculture, a holistic philosophy that has long been popular among hippyish leftwing agriculturalists. The animals and orchard form a closed loop: chickens eat insects and lay eggs, sheep graze and provide meat, and apples are pressed into cider that Mike trades with neighbors.
A sublime sunset had begun to glow on the horizon. The farm would be photography catnip to a social media influencer. Yet the property, though attractive, was hardly curated. The house was cluttered with semi-contained chaos and half-completed projects. The mud in the fields was very real.
“This isn’t easy,” Mike said. Tradlife also means going against the grain of an economy oriented toward two-income households, he said. “A willful acceptance of poverty or hardship is not something that’s, like, baked into our cultural conditioning right now.” Butchering animals does not leave a lot of time to watch Netflix.
Secular liberals who experiment with agrarian life often wash out, he believes, because they do not have a religious or philosophical anchor. “I read these ridiculously hysterical things of like, ‘My six-month foray into homesteading.’ I’m like, six months? You barely parked the car.”
Each weekday, Edward Phillips wakes at 4am, works out, takes a cold shower and says his daily prayers. On his way to work, where he is a mechanic for trucks and heavy machinery, he also prays a rosary.
His wife, Emily, gets up around 6.30, sometimes earlier, to nurse their one-year-old. She exercises and prays, and spends the day home schooling, doing chores, paying bills, cooking and taking the children to appointments. By the time Edward gets home, she usually has a list of repairs for him to do while she preps school lessons for the next day.
Emily and Edward are 31 and 33. They are raising six children on a small hobby farm in rural Illinois. The couple’s days are so full, so disciplined, that when I first read Emily’s description of her life in an online essay, I found it a bit hard to believe.
Speaking by video call, she and Edward were friendly and unassuming. Describing one’s home life can feel like “you’re flashing people”, Emily said, laughing and miming the motion.
She said: “I often ask my husband, ‘Does anybody even want to read this?’ And he’s like, ‘Emily, not everybody lives this way; you’re forgetting that.’ Conversely, I do enjoy reading about women living in the city, what they’re doing, so I think it goes both ways.”
Emily and Edward met as adolescents, reconnected later and got married when Emily was 19 and Edward was 21. Both had been raised Catholic and drifted away – “I dabbled in, like, leftist, progressivist ideas and I was living very differently for a while,” Emily said – before deciding to give religion an earnest second try.
They started attending a church that offers the Latin mass; the old-fashioned liturgy has risen in popularity in recent years as an influx of conservative young adults have converted to Catholicism, or “reverted” after abandoning religion in high school or college. (Vice-President JD Vance converted in 2019. Five of the US supreme court’s six right-leaning justices are also Catholic.)
Edward does not feel that his politics map neatly onto either major political party, though “my religious beliefs put me on certain sides of issues, kind of as a non-negotiable,” he said, referring especially to abortion, “and, you know, that’s that.”
“I agree,” Emily said.
She and Edward knew they wanted children – “though we didn’t know we would have this many, this fast” – and liked the idea of raising kids on some land. Their lifestyle is not accessible to everyone, the couple acknowledge: they live in an inexpensive area, bought their house when interest rates were low, and have family nearby to help.
As for home schooling, “I don’t disrespect parents that send their kids to school,” Emily said. “But I really enjoy getting to choose what my children are learning, knowing their particular personalities [and] strengths, and getting to cater to the things that they enjoy.”
On Substack, Emily is part of a small community of women who blog about their lives as Christian mothers, though many of the writers view the famous tradwife influencers with about as much distance as the average secular urbanite does. Mentioning Ballerina Farm – the social media brand of the Neelemans, a wealthy Utah ranching family whose carefully curated life has drawn millions of Instagram followers – often prompts an eye roll.
Similarly, the community tends to view with bafflement the fantastical – and sometimes sexualized – perception that outsiders have of their life. When Evie Magazine, a publication launched in 2019 as a conservative alternative to Cosmopolitan, touted a low-cut “raw milkmaid dress”, real-life trads mocked it. “That, to us, is kind of a disgusting dress to wear in public,” a trad told me. “I would hate to see my wife wear it, and I don’t think she would, except maybe as a nightgown.”
Not all the writers are particularly political, but a common thread is pride in being different; in making choices that other Americans regard as weird. In their view, true counterculture is not Woodstock, but rejecting the permissive society that Woodstock ushered in. It means trading relaxed “boomer” Christianity for a stricter, more primeval faith, and embracing a household where women raise children and men earn.
The historical reality, though, is complicated. The single-breadwinner home that trad families idealize was never the rigid norm in American history. It was largely a mid-20th-century anomaly, made possible by an unprecedented postwar economic boom combined with generous government housing and education subsidies for veterans.
In her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, the historian Stephanie Coontz also notes that married women in earlier eras – when they did not have independent incomes, could not have their own bank accounts, and had difficulty obtaining divorces – were easily trapped in abusive marriages.
At its worst, according to former adherents, the current trad movement can replicate the ugliest tendencies of those earlier eras. In an interview last year with the journalist Anne Helen Petersen, Tia Levings, a self-described former Christian fundamentalist “tradwife”, said she felt an intense pressure to project picture-perfect domesticity to the outside world even as her husband was privately spanking her and subjecting her and their children to “high control and abuse”.
Some of the couples I interviewed acknowledged that the trad world, in its eagerness to set itself apart from secular liberal society, is not free of its own forms of conformity, one-upmanship, and virtue signaling. Young mothers in particular can feel pressure – often from other women – to model a certain kind of crunchy conservative purism.
There is also a fairly broad spectrum of tradness. I asked Emily where she fits.
“I mean, I’m wearing pants right now, if that answers your question.” She and Edward giggled. “In some circles,” she explained, “women don’t wear pants.”
Emily writes in snatches, at night or while nursing, and Edward said that it is important to him that he supports her ability to write. There is an obvious tension between trying to live at a remove from modernity and documenting one’s life online, as they and others acknowledge.
When it comes to the “return-to-the-land stuff”, Edward said, “we take what works, and we’re really practical about what doesn’t.” They limit their children’s screen time, and grow some of their own food, but otherwise have no aversion to technology.
“Would I like to go off [and] be Pa Ingalls or whatever?” he said. “Maybe. But that’s not available.”
“We’re not trying to get back to anything,” Emily said.
Joelle and Jim Kurczodyna are not necessarily trying to return to anything, either, though they know plenty of people who are. One of their friends, a trad farmer, is fond of saying that he is “going backwards as fast as I can”.
The Kurczodynas are in their late 30s and live on a farmstead in Illinois. The couple are observant nondenominational Protestants, and Joelle is currently expecting their fifth child.
Joelle and Jim both grew up in the suburbs. Jim’s family was conservative in a commonplace way; Joelle’s family less so. Her baby boomer mother was a career woman who had chosen, on feminist grounds, to work in a male-dominated field.
“I kind of went the opposite way,” Joelle said. “Where she chose to do computer science and engineering, I said: ‘Well, I’m going to stay home with my kids, because that feels like bucking the system a little bit to what I grew up with.’”
For the most part, however, Joelle and Jim began their marriage living a mundane suburban life not too different from their parents’. That changed when Joelle encountered fertility problems. Those sent her on a nutrition and alternative health “rabbit hole”, she said, that led her and Jim to become interested in growing their own organic food and renegotiating their relationship with the modern world. (The US health department, under RFK Jr, recently expressed interest in promoting “holistic” alternatives to IVF, though medical professionals have criticized these treatments as a misleading rebranding of common fertility practices.)
Jim and Joelle’s Christian faith had also become increasingly important to them, and they became uneasy with what progressive public schools might be teaching children.
When they decided, in 2019, that Jim would quit his stable job so they could move to a dilapidated country property, “It was scary, and it was a difficult thing to explain to a lot of people at the time,” Joelle said. Family and friends were shocked and, at the time, less than supportive.
Jim and Joelle turned their experimental lifestyle change into a popular blog and social media account that they eventually monetized. That business now provides a full-time income to supplement their farming, but they still live with extreme frugality. They also still find themselves feeling like they need to defend some of their decisions.
Joelle had always been excited about her pregnancies, but when she became pregnant with their fifth child she was suddenly self-conscious. “For whatever reason, it just felt like up to four children feels pretty ‘normal’, but when we had the fifth one, it felt like that’s pushing it.” She had heard people make remarks about “family size” that made her worry that her pregnancy might “not be seen as a positive”.
Both are wary of pressing their views on others and keep their web presence mostly focused on the practical aspects of homesteading – which “isn’t for everyone”, either, Joelle emphasized. Yet they have found a large audience, including a lot of people “living in the city, living in the suburbs, whatever”, she said.
They get a steady stream of messages, Jim said, from “people that have kind of followed our story, and then followed a similar path. Which is really scary on our end, because they’re thanking us for our inspiration, and leaving their house and jobs and cutting out to the country and buying a milk cow or something.”
He chuckled nervously. “And we’re like, hope it works out for you.”
Keturah and Andy Hickman feel that cars and airplanes are unnatural and avoid them whenever possible. To get around their small village in upstate New York, the couple walk or bicycle; for longer distances, they take trains or buses.
“People sometimes wonder if [we’re] mentally ill,” Andy said.
Andy also objects to full-time employment, which he considers a recent civilizational development, and Keturah, who believes that men should be attracted to “women as God made them”, doesn’t shave her legs. Although she tries to avoid judging “individual women for how they dress”, she also finds the idea of women wearing trousers “to be very perverse”, she admitted when I spoke to her and Andy.
Keturah, 29, and Andy, 31, are about to welcome their first child. The couple are each prolific writers on Substack, where their arguments for intentional anachronism – for choosing to inhabit, as Keturah has put in, a “third-world bubble” inside the 21st-century US – are read by thousands.
Keturah grew up in Missouri in a family of Christians so fundamentalist that they considered most Protestant denominations suspiciously Romish. She is fourth-generation home schooled – her family started decades before it was legal – and has no social-security number, because her great-grandfather was opposed to registering with the state. To this day she is, she said, an “undocumented American citizen”.
Andy speaks in a slight drawl that sounds almost southern, though he grew up in upstate New York, in a “bucolic country town that is very depressed, is very irrelevant and obscure, but looks like a Norman Rockwell painting”. His family were cultural Catholics, not particularly devout. He was an only child, and his father was not present in his life; he spent long periods of time in nature.
As a young adult, he hitchhiked across the US and immersed himself in anarchist and environmentalist writing, even finding Ted Kaczynski’s (better known as the Unabomber) critique of industrial society formative. Over time, his search for the roots of modernity’s problems led him into conservative Christian critiques. He now describes himself as a graduate of the “anarcho-primitivist to traditionalist Catholic pipeline” and believes America should be a Catholic monarchy.
The couple met in 2023 through a mutual online friend who enjoyed playing matchmaker to young trads. “She had me fill out a questionnaire about things I wanted in a man,” Keturah said. “One of the things I said was: ‘I do not want to marry someone who has a nine-to-five job.’”
A recurring theme of their writing is that young Americans can still access an affordable and fulfilling life, if they are willing to make certain lifestyle sacrifices.
“The first job of anybody living like we’re living is to lower your expenses,” Andy said. “And that sounds like a cheeky thing to say, but it’s actually true. I’m not pulling your leg; we could thrive on $600 a month, maybe $700.”
In a recent essay, he argued that a young couple can live on $432 a month in some rural and downtrodden places; by buying from Amish farms, cooking from scratch, and supplementing their groceries with hunting, gardening and fishing, he claims that he and Keturah spend only $300 a month on food.
Keturah once ran a “Living Room Academy”, teaching sewing, canning, and scratch-cooking to visiting young women. Most enjoyed it – except one, who bristled at the emphasis on women’s self-sacrifice.
Keturah – who once wrote that she “loves burning books” but draws the line at the government doing it – holds two beliefs that outsiders might see as contradictory. Women, she insists, should be strong (she praised other trad women as anything but the “demure doormats” of stereotype), yet also voluntarily submit to their husband’s authority.
A phrase that often crops up among trads is “headship”. According to the theory, a husband may cede to his wife control over many day-to-day household decisions, but holds ultimate authority.
Keturah said: “I think of [Andy] as the head of the household, yes, but I think of the woman as the queen of the kitchen and the children. The man leads spiritually, he leads financially, and the woman follows that. And the man’s like, ‘OK, this is where the house is going to be,’ and the woman’s like, ‘OK, I’ll make this house into a home.’ And they both trust each other in that domain. Of course, there’s still this hierarchy where he’s the head of it all. But I also have my authority under that.”
She and Andy also emphasized that they are opposed to a man exerting violence or coercion against a spouse.
Yet headship can also lead to toxic dynamics. In 2019, a former Mormon mommy blogger, describing the causes of her divorce, said that she suspected that traditionalist gender roles were one of the factors that strained her marriage to breaking point.
“He was treating me as an extension of himself,” she said. “So it didn’t seem inappropriate to be hard on me because I was a reflection of him.”
Some couples I spoke with emphasized that gender roles in their homes were partly pragmatic, not rigid. Male headship, they also argued, is a double-edged sword.
“When there are successes,” Emily Phillips argued, “it’s clear who is to own for those, and when there are failures, it’s clear who is to own for those. That’s the hardship of being the leader.”
The “paradox of choice” is the theory that humans, when offered too many options, become overwhelmed and unhappy. If liberal consumer capitalism is underpinned by the belief that individual autonomy and choice should be society’s highest values, then perhaps the trad movement is one response to the decision paralysis of modern liberal life.
Faced with a dizzying barrage of technological, social and consumer choices, some people prefer fewer options: duties rather than rights, constraints rather than freedoms, defined roles rather than elastic identities.
That narrowing is part of a larger reaction against modernity, a frustrated feeling that our secular technological age promised progress and instead brought loneliness, worsening material prospects, and a numbing onslaught of social media, spam, porn, gambling, gaming and AI slop, with the cold hand of capitalism – or Satan, or both – extending further into our lives with every chime, buzz and click.
Mike argued that families like his have retreated to timeless values and institutions that can withstand the buffeting cultural winds. “It’s like, OK, we’ve seen these storms before. Family’s important. Land is important. God is important. And those are the cores, and with them we can weather whatever is going on out there.” The pronouncement carried a gentle hint of challenge. Everyone feels this too, he seemed to be saying, even if they are scared to admit it.
For some, this rebellion is very much a political project – one that is at times theocratic, even fascistic.
As a community, trads are overwhelmingly white, probably in part because non-white families find it harder to feel enthusiastic about reconstructing the past. In her book Momfluenced, the writer Sara Petersen suggests that “nostalgia for the good old days and the romanticization of traditional values [are] inherently tied to whiteness”. She speaks to Koritha Mitchell, a literary historian who argues that trad life tends to “reflect the pleasure to be found in a particular kind of escape: insularity”.
Trad women sometimes seem more radical, more militant, than the men. A frequent theme in some trad circles is that motherhood is a political act – and that conservative Christians are going to win the long game against liberals by the simple fact of having more children.
Earlier this year, Emily Phillips, the writer and mother of six, published a thoughtful essay entitled Crunchy Lies. When she had her first child, she writes, she was subjected to a barrage of intense “crunchy” and trad messaging about parenting, often involving questionable holistic health claims.
As an earnest young parent and a type A sort of person, she tried to follow all of it. She worked to keep her home pure of mold, plastics, polyester and chemicals. She breastfed her first child until he was two and a half.
None of it prevented her son from developing a chronic health condition. “One of the universal principles of parenting I’ve learned,” she writes, “is that there is no choice you can make as a parent which guarantees a specific outcome in your child.”
Yet the urge to try to control those outcomes is all too human and relatable; so is the appeal of turning your back on much of the current world. Technology has made our lives easier, but at real costs. The anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee has argued that some American conservatives have embraced trad messaging because they are trying to get women out of the workforce in order to preempt looming job losses caused by AI.
When I visited him, Mike Thomas expressed a larger revulsion at the capitalist techno-futurism of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and a particular anxiety about the world that Silicon Valley is bringing into being.
“AI is a reduction of humanity, of our idea of intelligence and existence and consciousness, into a technical system,” he said. “But the full human cannot be reduced to a sum of parts.”
Jenny had taken the children to bed. Darkness had fallen; crickets were chirping. “We bleed into the mysterious, into eternity,” he said. “I want my kids to know that they have a soul.”