Religion has often been categorized as a source of oppression and constraint in public discourse. Take, for example, policy debates in the United States about curtailing women’s reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights; in these kinds of debates, particularly in progressive responses to these debates, religion is typically associated with justifying oppression. In reality, however, both religious and secular frameworks can and have been utilized with great success to advance all manners of subjugation and violence, whether through oppressive foreign and domestic policies, discriminatory laws, or military interventions. Yet certain religious communities—Muslims, Orthodox Jews, Mennonites, Amish, and other conservative Christians, for example—bear sociopolitical stigmas in the US context, not least because their female adherents may adopt styles of dress and demeanor that set them apart from the dominant white Protestant culture in the United States. These differences in clothing or customs can mark such communities as outsiders whose compatibility with western liberal values such as individualism, freedom, and capitalism is called into question. Similar attitudes permeate research on gender and sexuality as well as the policies that result from that research. Consequently, religion is either rendered suspect in the broader struggle for gender justice or otherwise overlooked as a productive category...