Because this is what the SAVE Act does with ruthless efficiency: It creates a backdoor to the disenfranchisement of millions of people—especially women, who have consistently been more likely than men to vote for Democrats than Republicans in presidential elections since 1980. This is happening just as carving away women’s voting rights has become a hot topic of conversation among some of our country’s proudest Christian nationalist influencers.

In this respect, the references to The Handmaid’s Tale actually fall short of illuminating the forces working to lock women from the voting booths. Rather than a harbinger of some fictional dystopia, the SAVE Act reflects an erosion of women’s rights that has already been normalized in practice in many conservative corners of this country. The Christian right has been playing a long, long game, and it intends to take full advantage of a moment where the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court are all aligned in their direction. We can see what the future could hold from simply observing how women inside these oppressive systems of control already live. Just as Christian nationalist ideals have seeped into our laws and discourse, ideals from its companion worldview, Christian patriarchy, have set the groundwork for women’s voter suppression through the church.

Concern over Christian nationalism has (rightly) become part of our political discourse in recent years, with voters and some of our national leaders operating with the assumption that the U.S. is a Christian nation and ought to be ruled under a conservative, xenophobic form of Christianity. At the same time, a companion philosophy of Christian patriarchy, which claims men are created by God to lead women in home and church, thrives among some of the same figures fighting for anti-democratic, conservative, Christian power in the civil sphere.