A Survey of the Evangelical Battle Field: Feminism
Feminism’s target is the very person responsible to protect the family and the church from Satanic attack: the man. This is not a coincidence.
In a 2016 article found in Relevant Magazine, Jory Micah (a self-proclaimed “Christian Feminist”) touts the ascendance of “Evangelical Feminism:”
Evangelical feminism is on the rise, and the conversation is getting loud enough for the most traditional churches to hear.
She’s right. Some loud voices are fighting this crusade against the “Patriarchy.” Women like Jory Micah, Beth Moore, and Aimee Byrd — along with the secular #MeToo movement — have given “Christian Feminism” the legitimacy it has desperately sought after. The Center for Biblical Equality International is a growing organization dedicated to deconstructing God-given gender roles within the family and the church. CBE’s stated mission is to “promote the biblical message that God calls women and men of all cultures, races, and classes to share authority equally in service and leadership in the home, church, and the world. CBE’s mission is to eliminate the power imbalance between men and women resulting from theological patriarchy.” Famous scholars that we all know and read, men like Michael Bird, Gordan Fee, and Ben Witherington, sit on the board.
In response to Beth Moore leaving the SBC, Baptist News Global asks the question, “Is the Beth Moore Effect a feminist awakening?” Aimee Byrd, a popular figure within Reformed groups due to her partnership with Carl Trueman on the popular podcast “Mortification of Spin,” released a book called “Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.” In this book, she highlights what she terms “gynocentric interruptions” found all over the Bible. She does this, of course, to unravel the patriarchal structure of historical Biblical interpretation.
Ever the opportunists, supposed Christian men like David French, Russell Moore, and Phil Vischer rail against toughness and toxic masculinity. Their favorite, recycled tactic is using Trump as a political hammer against White Evangelical men who dare to promote truth and the purity of the Gospel rather than the Intersectional flavor of the day. While chiding Christians for allowing their politics to color their faith (worthy of criticism, to be sure), they, ironically, attempt to color our faith with their own Never-Trumpism.
The goal in all of this is to feminize men, the very ones, as we’ll see, who are responsible to guard sound doctrine and “contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3).” Feminism is a Satanic attempt to humiliate, disarm, and remove the watchmen of the castle. We cannot treat it with kid gloves. John MacArthur notes, “Unthinking believers, untaught Christians, have become prey to the ideology of the feminists.” Feminism is one of the primary battlefronts true believers must heroically engage for the sake of our children and grandchildren — along with the other battlefronts I’ve identified: Biblical Illiteracy, Safeism, Wokeism, Elitism, and Deconstructionism.
Boundaries
In Revelation 20:7-10, Satan will make one last attempt to overthrow the Kingdom of God. Like in Genesis 3, he will advance upon the Kingdom, full of rage, seeking to destroy everything that brings God glory. He will attempt remake man in his own image once again.
His Kingdom surrounded, Jesus, the Last Adam, takes the lead. He’s nothing like the First Adam, who stood idly by while Satan invaded his kingdom and took his wife captive by deceit. He is a Jehovah-Sabaoth, the God of Armies, in the flesh. He doesn’t wait around for a Joan of Arc to take over for equality’s sake. Unlike Adam, he’s the protector and provider of his garden. Jesus is the ultimate model for true manhood. With a word, Jesus calls fire from the heavens to destroy the opposition. What the first man should’ve done, the True Man will surely do.
The man-woman relationship is the first and primary human relationship created by God and introduced to us in the Bible. It is of enormous consequence: a distortion of this relationship guarantees the distortion of every other human relationship. Conversely, joyful submission to God’s boundaries within the husband-wife relationship naturally leads to beauty, order, and blessing. Rather than blurring distinctions between the two, God’s Word extols the differences. In unity of purpose and diversity in function, men and women were to fit and complement one another.
As the Danvers Statement affirms:
Both Adam and Eve were created in God’s image, equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood (Gen 1:26-27, 2:18).
Distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order, and should find an echo in every human heart (Gen 2:18, 21-24; 1 Cor 11:7-9; 1 Tim 2:12-14).
We are convinced that a denial or neglect of these principles will lead to increasingly destructive consequences in our families, our churches, and the culture at large.
Men have the God-given responsibility to cultivate and lead the church, marriage, and family. As Christ submitted to the authority of His Father, men are to submit to the authority of Christ. As men submit to the authority of Christ, women are to submit to the authority of men.
1 Corinthians 11:3 — But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.
“Submission” is an ugly word to Feminists, but it shouldn’t be. If a woman has been submitting to God’s Word and Christ’s gentle leadership, she will have no problem trusting Him to submit to her husband’s imperfect leadership. Christ’s leadership has led her there, in fact. Women who recoil at “submission” likely haven’t submitted to the Lord Jesus Christ in the first place.
Feminism
After the Fall of Genesis 3, God pronounced a curse that found its way into the man-woman relationship. Because of the curse, women have a natural desire to burst the bonds of her God-given function as “helper” and rule over man. Snubbing God’s sovereignty, she seeks to dominate him.
In a chapter titled “To Hell with Sexism: Women in Religion” in Megatrends for Women, authors Patricia Aburdene and John Naisbitt illustrate how modern culture celebrates feminism:
Women of the late twentieth century are revolutionizing the most sexist institution in history—organized religion. Overturning millennia of tradition, they are challenging authorities, reinterpreting the Bible, creating their own services, crowding into seminaries, winning the right to ordination, purging sexist language in liturgy, reintegrating female values and assuming positions of leadership.
Feminism has evolved over the years, as movements built on criticism and deconstruction of institutions typically do. “First wave” feminism sought voter rights, legal rights, and bank accounts. “Second wave” feminism took a dark turn, however. Biblical gender roles and modesty were problemetized. This gave birth to the sexual revolution and “safe abortion.” Boundaries created by a Sovereign God equaled slavery, and tearing down these boundaries meant “liberation.”
Clair Smith writes about the next iteration of feminism: “It’s hard to sum up third wave feminism: there’s the ‘raunch culture’ and sexual empowerment à la Miley Cyrus’ ‘wrecking ball’ music video—but there’s also a focus on women of colour, lesbians, bi’s, trans women, and other minorities, increasingly, seen through the compounding effect of belonging to several minority groups at once, in what’s called intersectionality (like being female and black and immigrant and gay), and where the interpretative grid is about privilege and power.
The common threads in third wave, it seems to me, are a focus on each woman’s individual choice and subjective experience, and (at the same time) a collective view of women as an oppressed disempowered underclass, with men as their privileged oppressors, in particular, white, western, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual, ‘cisgendered’ men.”
Swept up in the culture, Feminist Ideology enticed professing Christians to feminize their approach to Scripture and theology. According to another essay by Claire Smith,
Feminist theologians believe these systems of male power and privilege have shaped the history of the church, the history of traditional biblical interpretation—and sometimes even the content of the Bible (written by men for men)—and have justified and resulted in the oppression, silencing, and exclusion of women in all areas of life, including the church. In its search for liberation of women from these structures, feminist theology is informed by and usually considered a form of Liberation Theology.
Claire Smith continues, “Now, growing out of that essentially Marxist paradigm, there’s fourth wave feminism—seen in the #MeToo and Time’sUp movements—which uses the internet to campaign for safety for women from sexual harassment and violence (especially on uni campuses and social media), and other emblematic issues such as domestic violence, and female genital mutilation.
As with third wave, fourth wave feminism is not just about women, sexism and misogyny, but about minorities, racism, homophobia and transphobia—and that has sparked something of a turf war amongst feminists since many of the old guard don’t think trans women (who are biologically male) are women at all, and so on it goes.”
Intersectionality
The radical feminist movement of that third wave gave birth to what we know as Intersectionality today. Black, lesbian women within the movement drew attention to white, straight women’s privileged status, and sought equal voice within the movement. As the movement splintered more and more as it added aggrieved groups, feminism seemed to be on the verge of total collapse. How did feminists prevent their movement from falling apart?
Marxist-Feminist Julie Matthaei writes,
Feminists have found that we cannot bring women together to fight for our liberation if we do not also recognize and seek to eradicate the other forms of oppression that women face, both within our movement and in society. We need to reach beyond a politics that views feminism as a struggle of women against oppression by men for a solidarity politics that seeks to end all forms of oppression—patriarchy, racism, classism, homophobia, able-ism, neocolonialism, species-ism, etc.—from our movements, and from our economy and society. This emerging solidarity politics has the potential to bring people together across all inequalities with the shared purpose of deconstructing all forms of inequality. Solidarity politics has been developing in other social movements as well, as they confront the inadequacies of a unidimensional view and grapple with intersectionality.
Suspicion of one God-given boundary naturally leads to suspicion of all His boundaries. Solidarity politics explains Black Lives Matter’s close ties with the feminist movement. It explains the odd partnership between Racial Trauma Specialist Kyle James Howard and Beth Moore. They are working together to revolutionize Christianity. They each take turns deconstructing Christian institutions when opportunity affords itself. They have an “oppressed,” symbiotic relationship.
The End Goal
God created boundaries and distinctions. These distinctions, found in His Word, are testimonies of His sovereign rule over the universe. They glorify the Holy Trinity, who is both unity and diversity. To be truly human is to surrender to whatever God has made us to be.
The end goal of every Satanic ideology is to diminish the glory of God. As Owen Strachan writes, “Embracing feminism, transgenderism, and homosexuality as a ‘Christian’ is so perverse, so anti-reality, it necessitates redefining the character and identity of the biblical God to fit a cultural agenda.
George Gilder recognizes the end goal,
“The revolutionary members of the women’s movement say that our sexual relationships are fundamental to all our other institutions and activities. If one could profoundly change the relations between the sexes, they contend, one could radically and unrecognizably transform the society. And some unwitting person might think, ‘Well, maybe we do need to change some relationships.’ They’re not talking about getting along better. They’re talking about completely undermining God’s design for how we relate as men and women. It’s a life and death issue to them. The feminist agenda even in its most moderate version, is leading our society to doom, to years of demoralization and anarchy, possibly ending in a police state.”
Feminism turns watchmen into weakmen. It transforms protectors into pansies. It changes truth-tellers into self-lovers.
Feminism’s target is the very person responsible to protect the family and the church from Satanic attack: the man. That isn’t a coincidence.
The Solution
When we order our lives, families, and churches according to God’s Word, the beauty of God’s perfect design shines. There is something truly earth-shattering about men and women fulfilling their God-given roles in the world. Feminism leads to disorder and chaos. A home or church led by God will be full of joy and godly contentment.
Men, obey the Scriptures. Provide, protect, and lead. Act like men.
Women, obey the Scriptures. Help your husband, teach other women, nurture your children. Act like women.
But we also must communicate the Gospel with those who ascribe to Feminist ideology. There is no utopia on this side of eternity. Perfect equality and justice cannot be achieved without Christ. Fulfillment will not be found in embracing a victimhood identity and overthrowing the patriarchy. Those who seek to disrupt the God’s will for the family are actively opposing their Creator.
So, preach the Gospel.