This chapter claims that in the new millennium, religious conservatives succeed in their struggles to control women’s bodies and to turn their private prejudices into public policy through the misappropriation of human rights and by gaining unwarranted religious exemptions. By allegedly demanding the protection of their own rights to religious liberty, conscientious objection, equality, and multicultural accommodations, religious conservatives are reversing the progress in women’s rights and using liberal rights and concepts as a weapon against women. The chapter argues that, contrary to popular belief, the separation between religion and the state cannot protect women’s rights against the religious conservative attack. It compares the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in the USA, where religion is separated from the state, to the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in Israel, where there is no separation between religion and the state, and shows that despite the very different religion–state relations, the religious conservative attack in the USA and Israel is similar in both method and success.

Utilizing the Foucauldian concept of power, this chapter shows how the power of religion and culture has created and perpetuated the hegemony of patriarchy throughout the centuries, including in liberal states. It claims that liberal theory lacks an adequate theory of power and neglects the dynamics of power and control in the private sphere. Liberalism disregards the institutions, practices, and norms of religion and culture, as a socially and politically significant site of power. This severely curtails the ability of liberal states to ensure that the exercise of power and authority over the individual is justified and that the rights of the individual are safeguarded. After a general theoretical and historical discussion, the chapter discusses the history of the relationship between religion and the state in the USA and the critique of early American feminists on the power of patriarchal religion, and claims that despite the constitutional separation between religion and state in the USA, patriarchal religion continues to influence the law directly and indirectly and constitutes a significant force preserving the hegemony of patriarchy, as the 2022 Dobbs decision demonstrates.