Allie Beth Stuckey Is Here For Such A Time As This

ALLEN, TEXAS — In a sea of soft curls and claw clips, maxi skirts and cowboy boots, Allie Beth Stuckey is sitting on a spindly chair atop a white circular stage. Normally, Stuckey would be standing, but she’s 37 weeks pregnant with her fourth child, so a little support can’t hurt.

It’s a warm October day here in metropolitan Dallas, but inside the convention center, the air is cool and tinged with pink and purple lights that illuminate the nearly 6,000 women who have traveled across the country to hear Stuckey speak.

“What I do, and what I believe in this realm God has called me to do, is to the best of my imperfect ability to try to navigate the chaos of the culture with as much clarity and courage as possible and take many Christian women along with me,” Stuckey tells her audience. “That’s what Share The Arrows is about.”

This is the third annual Share The Arrows conference, a gathering for conservative Christian women to hear from Stuckey, worship with a praise band, and hear faith leaders share how to navigate a secular culture as a Bible-believing Christian. The name of the event is one of solidarity: if conservative Christians stand up for one another, they can “share the arrows” of the broader culture’s attacks. These women aren’t here to be coddled with feel-good women’s empowerment slogans. They’re here to be challenged.

The conference’s core audience is women in their 30s and 40s, but attendees are all ages. I speak with one 85-year-old who joined her friends for the day. “I’m so happy to be here with this many young women,” she tells me. The youngest attendees cannot speak with me — because they’re babies. Dozens and dozens of babies pepper the auditorium, the halls, and the designated nursing room. This conference could be sponsored by Mabe baby carriers.

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Thirty-eight-year-old Tracey flew all the way from Southern California with her two-month-old to attend the event. Stirring her coffee, the homeschool mom of three tells me she came specifically to hear Stuckey speak, and that she trusts her enough to expect the other speakers to be “really solid.” Perusing the booths and getting a “little bean” onesie from pro-life Seven Weeks Coffee was a bonus.

A fan of Stuckey’s YouTube content, Tracey praises her boldness and debate skills, saying Stuckey has helped her feel that it’s okay to speak out about your beliefs.

“My husband and I own a local business, and we tend to have quite a few LGBT customers,” she says. “We have a transgender person on our staff and several in the gay community, and we hire them because we want to encourage them and they’re really good at the work. But also — they’re lost.”

“You can’t just preach in your workplace; you can get in a lot of trouble for that. So it’s like, learning how to be bold in my faith in work. We homeschool, and there’s a big secular community of homeschoolers. And they think we’re crazy believing in ‘sky daddy’ or whatever they say,” she laughs. “So I think it’s just been more encouraging to me to stand up for what I believe.”

This year’s speakers include author and former lesbian Rosaria Butterfield, Reformed pastor Costi Hinn, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Alisa Childers, a podcaster and former member of the Christian band ZOEgirl. I hear attendees buzzing about the guest speakers, particularly Butterfield, but it’s Stuckey they’re most excited to see.

A Voice In The Wilderness

Since launching the “Relatable” podcast in 2018, Allie Beth Stuckey has become something of the patron saint of conservative Christian millennials. Well, maybe not the patron saint — she is Protestant, after all — but a standard-bearer, something more akin to the Old Testament prophetess Deborah.

She’s not afraid of telling hard truths; in fact, that’s her whole brand. Attendees repeatedly gush over her boldness and moral clarity. “She’s very confident and clear on what she believes,” Tracey, the homeschool mom, tells me.

Stuckey has 938,000 followers on Instagram, and “Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey” is one of the top 20 Christian podcasts. She’s known for her uncompromising positions on abortion, transgenderism, feminism, and pretty much every hot-button culture war issue you can name. She’s not just a Republican, though. Everything she talks about she sees through the lens of faith.

“I really admire the fact that she is such a straight shooter,” says Abbie Halberstadt, an author and homeschooling mother of 10 (with another on the way). Halberstadt, known on her Instagram as “M is for Mama,” was a speaker at last year’s conference.

“The Word of God is living and active; it’s everything we need for life and godliness, and that’s what Allie’s hammering over and over again,” she says. “This is such a unique opportunity to, as she says, get a no-fluff encouragement session, just a shot in the arm of ‘I’m not the only one out here doing this crazy thing of living according to the Word.’”

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In 2020, Stuckey published “You’re Not Enough (And That’s Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love.” Four years later, she followed it up with “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” a book whose title made critics lose their minds.

But her thesis isn’t that empathy itself is bad. It’s just that it can be easily weaponized — and often is.

Rachelle and Jennifer are in their 40s, and they traveled with 12 other women from Kentucky in a four-car caravan to attend the conference. Rachelle says Stuckey has made her think more deeply about political issues. She hadn’t considered the ethics of surrogacy, for example, until Stuckey addressed it in “Toxic Empathy.”

“I had never really thought a lot about surrogacy,” she says. “That kind of surprised me. But when she broke it down, it was like, ‘Okay, I guess I didn’t know as much, or I didn’t pay as much attention.’”

Jennifer chimes in, “I’ve never thought about finding what the truth is about that.”

My Sister’s Keeper

When I meet Stuckey, she’s wearing a walnut-colored maxi dress and half-reclining on a blue sofa, poised as if, despite being 37 weeks pregnant, she’s not quite ready to rest. She’s about to go on stage with Governor Sanders, but has a few minutes to spare.

It’s a bit of an understatement to say women have been in the news these past few weeks, between the Lindsay Clancy trial and the “Cornell 7” case. Of course, I’ve got to ask about toxic empathy.

Stuckey published her book in 2024 in response to what some call “Woke 1” — the cultural psychosis that was the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It ended up being prescient because it’s just gotten worse,” she says. “It’s gotten to the point to where we’re not just saying like, ‘Oh, riots are fine,’ or ‘These violent protests are fine,’ but actually, ‘We’re going to find a way to feel sorrier for a woman who murdered her children than the children themselves.’”

There’s not a lot of social cache to be found in being correct, she adds. “Actually, the story Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told about Jane Doe isn’t accurate” isn’t going to win over online mob. “There’s way more social capital to be gained by going along with what the mainstream says and seeming the most empathetic,” she says. There’s something particularly female about the urge to be perceived as taking the side of the oppressed, but the narrative doesn’t always fit reality.

“We as women are so relational, and it’s a good thing, and we’re social, and there’s part of us that wants to be accepted, and it’s not necessarily bad,” Stuckey says. “But when push comes to shove, I do believe that the truth has to win.”

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Stuckey is traditional, but not “trad” — “trad is not the same thing as biblical,” she says — and she has focused much of her attention over the years on the ethics of reproductive technologies: surrogacy, IVF, and birth control. These things are now staples of rightwing discourse, but just a few years ago, that wasn’t the case.

“In 2020 … most conservative commentators were not talking about surrogacy and IVF and hormonal birth control because it was just seen as like, ‘Oh gosh, they’re going to think we’re real extremists if we start talking about this stuff,’” Stuckey says.

“I just had a woman come up to me here who was like, ‘Last year, because of this conference, I got my IUD out, and here’s my baby!’” she adds.

Stuckey argues that hormonal birth control “doesn’t stop ovulation; it stops implantation,” making it impossible to support as someone who is pro-life. If her opinions have changed over the years, Stuckey says, they’ve only strengthened — particularly on the issue of abortion.

Even women who don’t use hormonal birth control are often using apps to track their cycles, and these apps use gender-neutral language or partner with organizations such as Planned Parenthood. Stuckey has just made a big announcement to her followers: She’s launching her own fertility app, Ana Kate.

“A baby is viewed as a burden to avoid, or a right any adult is entitled to,” says the ad for the app that plays in the auditorium. “Even science has become politicized, with many experts refusing to acknowledge the uniqueness of the female body.”

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Ana Kate, not yet released, is “a cycle and pregnancy tracking app to track what’s true,” with a prayer board and Bible verses and language about the sanctity of life.

To her followers, Stuckey says she hopes to make something big. “I want to create something that’s so good that even the progressives have to use our app and say, ‘Ugh, I’ll just get past the Bible verses!’”

Let There Be Light

This is 35-year-old Rachel’s second time at Share The Arrows.

“Some women’s conferences, they fluff stuff up a little bit too much, and they waver, and they tiptoe around things. And we knew that this conference would be steady. We’d be shooting some arrows, girl!” she laughs. She and four friends from church flew from Knoxville, Tennessee, to be here.

Stuckey “came out of the gate just like with abortion and LGBTQ. It was like, yes!” Rachel continues. “A lot of times, even in the Christian community, [those] are subjects that are danced around or can be controversial, and they shouldn’t be. And straight out of the gate … it was like, this is what you should stand on, this is what God’s word says, and here’s God’s word that backs this up. … It’s like, yes, queen!”

Sisters Kaitlyn and Kennedy, also making their second trip to Share The Arrows, are waiting in the merch line. Kaitlyn is wearing a blue and white toile prairie dress and soft baby wrap. A work-from-home mother of two, she says she left last year with a feeling of optimism.

“We know what the end goal is,” she says. “We know how this ends, so it made me feel better that we’re leading our lives the right way.”

Kennedy, a junior in high school, says last year her mother dragged her last minute to the conference, which took a precious Saturday away from her. This year, she feels differently.

She says she goes to a private Christian school in the Dallas area where many students aren’t living out their faith. Seeing the other attendees last year, she says, “I felt very behind.” But now, “I feel like I’m on the right track.”

“Like how she has hope in general,” Kennedy says, looking at her sister, “I just have hope for myself.”

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