What Is ‘Fundie Baby Voice’?

When activist Jess Piper heard Alabama Republican senator Katie Britt deliver the GOP response to the State of the Union, she had a visceral reaction. The senator spoke in a breathy voice with a soft and sweet quality ― even as she described horrific acts of sexual violence and murder and painted a dystopian picture of the United States.

For Piper, there was no mistaking that sound, which permeated her childhood in the Bible Belt. Britt was using “fundie baby voice.”

“I think everyone who was born and raised in evangelical churches knows that fundamentalist ― ‘fundie’ ― woman sound,” Piper, who is the executive director of Blue Missouri, told HuffPost. “It’s that childlike, sweet, submissive, honey sound that just pours from the mouths of Sunday school teachers and pastors’ wives.”

The concept has cropped up in popular culture thanks to the 2023 documentary “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets,” which touches on matriarch Michelle Duggar’s high-pitched baby voice. After House Speaker Mike Johnson’s wife Kelly spoke in a similar manner during a Fox News interview, Piper created a video explaining the significance of “fundie baby voice.”

“I would describe ‘fundie baby voice’ as a woman’s voice that is higher than average in both pitch and breathiness,” said Kathryn Cunningham, a vocologist and assistant professor of theatre and head of acting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “While the average woman’s voice is higher-pitched than the average man’s due to a combination of anatomical and social factors, some women who speak this way seem to be intentionally placing their voices higher than their natural pitch range in order to convey submission to male authority and childlike innocence.”

Deliberate voice changes are very much a reality for women in fundamentalist Christian communities, noted Tia Levings, author of the upcoming memoir “A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy.”