ASSEMBLING GOD’S “LAST BEST HOPE”: THE EXPANDING REACH OF THE WORLD CONGRESS OF FAMILIES^*

Anti-gender activism is at the heart of contemporary geopolitics, and leading advocates are increasingly leveraging transnational connections. Since 1997, the World Congress of Families has become a premier venue for anti-gender advocates of the “natural family” to interact through its robust conference system. We introduce the World Congress of Families Dataset containing the speakers, organizations, and locations from all global and most regional conferences from 1997 through 2022, which we gathered across a series of archival sources. Across descriptive and network analyses, we document the key organizations and individual leaders involved in the World Congress of Families, and we show that the network has grown substantially. Although actors from the United States are overrepresented, regional leadership is becoming more common as the network spreads, especially across post-Soviet and African countries. Our investigation provides a new resource for understanding how anti-gender advocates coordinate, disseminate, and institutionalize anti-gender scripts on a global scale.