Christian fundamentalism, like all fundamentalisms, is a high-control belief system. It smothers believers – especially women – with an oppressive web of rules that dictate every aspect of their lives. It tells them how to dress, how to act in public and private, what they’re allowed to read, who they’re allowed to interact with, what ideas they’re allowed to express – and even how to speak, when they’re permitted to.

Those of us who watched Katie Britt’s response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union heard a demonstration of that. It’s called “fundie baby voice”.

Fundie baby voice (a term coined by ex-evangelical Jess Piper) is the art of speaking in a breathy, high-pitched, intentionally childlike tone. It’s a performance that’s expected of women in fundamentalist sects, as a display of subservience and inferior status.

And it is a performance. The voice that Britt used for her SOTU response isn’t what she really sounds like. To hear the difference between fundie baby voice and Britt’s normal voice, watch this TikTok video from AL.com comparing the two. The difference is jarring, and once you know it for what it is, the fundie baby voice is inescapably creepy. It sounds like something out of a horror movie: the whispering of a ghost from beyond the veil.

As patriarchy escapee Tia Levings says:

It’s the denial of our voices, the suppression of our natural sound and range of emotion, and the terms used to train us are reflective of the agenda and abusive system we were in. They want us to sound like sexualized children.

This is a widespread phenomenon in Christian fundamentalism. Michelle Duggar is another high-profile example, as was shown in Amazon’s Shiny Happy People documentary series. Kelly Johnson, wife of Christian nationalist and House Speaker Mike Johnson, does it too.

Women in these cultish patriarchies are expected to be perpetually docile, accommodating and obedient to the men around them. They’re never permitted to be loud, assertive or overly emotional. Speaking in a register that’s typical of children reinforces that mindset.

When they go high, we go low

Fundie baby voice is a dramatic example of how women are expected to contort themselves to fit the demands of a sexist society. It works the other way, too.

You may remember Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted fraudster behind Theranos. Among her other affectations, she spoke in a deep baritone voice in public interviews. That’s not her normal voice, as she finally admitted once the jig was up:

That register is no more — and is now somewhat of a joke for Holmes, who seems to have embraced her natural pitch. She speaks in a “soft, slightly low, but totally unremarkable voice,” according to a recent New York Times profile of the founder, for which writer Amy Chozick spent time observing Holmes and her partner Billy Evans at home.

You can imagine why she did this. Politics, science and other prestigious and powerful fields are still male-dominated, and this creates a feedback loop of unconscious bias.

To people steeped in this legacy of sexism, a deeper – that is, more masculine – voice is unconsciously perceived as a sign of competence and intelligence. Feminine traits, on the other hand, are looked down upon and treated as evidence of ditziness and frivolity.

In an experiment demonstrating this, spoken recordings were shifted to be either higher or lower in pitch, and participants were asked to “vote” for one. People, both male and female, consistently chose the lower voice. Apparently, we have an unconscious bias that people with deeper voices make better leaders.

It’s a widespread assumption – so widespread that most people don’t realize they hold it, much less think to question it – that the more competent a woman is, the more she resembles a man. A con artist like Holmes, skilled at altering her self to match people’s expectations, cynically played along with this belief. She’s not the only one. Margaret Thatcher adopted a deeper voice as she rose in the ranks of British politics.

The fact that women feel pressure to shift their voices, whether higher or lower, to appeal to an audience is clear evidence that sexism isn’t a thing of the past. Some traditionalists, too steeped in their own assumptions to look past them, believe that women (but not men) wearing dresses or using makeup is somehow “natural”.

But there can’t be anything “natural” about women disguising their normal voices to fit what others expect. That’s literally unnatural, in the strictest sense of the word. Whether they’re exaggerating their voices to be higher or lower, either way it highlights the double standard that still reigns: femininity is associated with submission and inferiority, and masculinity with intelligence and dominance.

In an enlightened world, there’d be no reason for anyone to suppose that the pitch of a person’s voice had any correlation with the contents of their brain. Nor would we judge people’s ability by the attractiveness of their face, the shape of their body, the clothes they wear, or their makeup or jewelry or lack thereof. We’d look past all these things as the irrelevancies they are.

We’ve taken some small steps toward this ideal, but not nearly enough or fast enough. Religion, especially fundamentalist religion is one of the biggest forces fighting progress toward equality, spreading toxic stereotypes about gender and trying to keep women subservient. It has to go if the world is ever going to become a better place.