Slaying Feminism: Ending the Impossible Quest for Sexual Interchangeability

If I had three wishes, I’d consider using the first to rid the world of feminism and the second to ensure that it never came back again. Perhaps that is a bit overstatement, but only by a little. For few movements have produced so pervasively devastating effects in society, in the home, and in the church as feminism has.[1] The pill and declining birth rates, abortion and the Orwellian language of “reproductive justice,” rampant cohabitation and single-parent households, untethered empathy and emasculated men, transgenderism and female priestesses in the church (which is ecclesial transgenderism)—all these rotten fruits stem from various facets of the feminist revolution.

1. I suppose some would say that, when it comes to destructive power, Marxism can give feminism a run for its money. Yet Marxism is really a species of feminism on the national stage. As Jean-Claude Michéa has shown, all totalitarian systems operate with a kind of matriarchal domination. Hence the nanny state; hence Mother (not Father) Russia. See Jean-Claude Michéa, the Realm of Lesser Evil (Polity, 2009), 119–135.

Unfortunately, feminism has become so interwoven with the fabric of the modern West that few now recognize it for what it is; fewer still perceive the ways in which it radically departs from a scriptural vision for the sexes. Even confessionally conservative Christians lend their qualified support for the earliest waves of feminism. What could be wrong with women’s suffrage, they reason. The impression left on the uninformed is something like, “Feminism was good at first, but it went off the rails somewhere in the last couple decades.” Yet a little leaven still leavens the whole lump, and many of our societal ills today are directly traceable to the moves feminism made at the start. The difficulty, Rebekah Curtis warns, is this: “As we grow accustomed to riding the waves of feminism, the crests in the historical distance look less treacherous.”[2]

2. Rebekah Curtis, “Emancipated Surf,” Touchstone, March/April 2016.

What is more, many Christians have failed to grasp the fundamental flaw of feminism and therefore have failed to perceive its inevitable end. In brief, feminism is built on a faulty notion of equality. As such, observable, natural differences between the sexes—gendered traits, tendencies, behavior, performance, responsibilities, privileges, etc.—are taken as indications of systemic sexual injustice, even when these differences are simply the asymmetrical (i.e., unequal or non-identical) design of our Creator. Thus each wave of feminism naturally led to the next. The sexes must become functionally interchangeable or else (on the feminist reckoning) they are not truly equal.[3] This is why Carrie Gress says, “Unlike any other ‘ism’ in the world today, feminism is one we aren’t supposed to question. We are meant to embrace it with our whole hearts.”[4] The choice before Christians therefore is one of whole-hearted allegiance to the feminist vision or whole-hearted allegiance to the God who made us male and female, who gave us different natures with corresponding callings, and who said his design is “very good” (Gen. 1:31).

3. See Colin Smothers, “The Fallacy of Interchangeability,” CBMW, June 5, 2019.

I suggest we choose the latter. Yet to make the right choice—and to help others to do the same—Christians must understand both the scriptural vision of the sexes and how feminism is a satanic departure from God’s good design. For, as Sun Tzu rightly observed, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”[5]

Feminism Defined: The Destructive Consequences of an Impossible Quest

Any critique of feminism must, of course, begin with a definition of the movement under scrutiny. But here’s the rub: there is no agreed-upon definition of feminism among feminists.[6] Similarly, feminists cannot agree on how many “waves” of feminism there have been—is it just three? or four? or even five? This confusion is not going away anytime soon. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult for feminists to explain what they mean by their self-chosen label when they can no longer agree on what a woman actually is.[7]

6. See Judith Lorber, “The Variety of Feminisms and Their Contributions to Gender Equality,” Oldenburger Universitätsreden, Issue 97,  accessed Oct. 21, 2024.

7. For intramural debates among feminists that illustrate this point, see Michelle Goldberg, “What Is a Woman?” The New Yorker, July 28, 2014, Elinor Burkett, “What Makes a Woman?” New York Times, June 6, 2015, and Chris Bodenner, “What Makes a Man or Woman?” The Atlantic, July 1, 2016.

Perhaps a basic definition, which most feminists would recognize and embrace, is that feminism is the fight for “gender equality.” This is not far off the mark from the one given by actress Emma Watson, who was appointed to serve as the UN Women Goodwill Ambassador shortly after she helped defeat Voldemort.[8] In her inaugural speech for the HeForShe campaign, Watson opined: “For the record, feminism by definition is: ‘The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.’”[9]

8. I was tempted to make a joke about the title “UN Women Goodwill Ambassador” being more awkward to pronounce than the riddikulus spell, but that would be too much even for me.

9. Emma Watson, “Gender Equality Is Your Issue Too,” speech by UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson, United Nations Headquarters, New York, September 20, 2014.

When framed in that way, feminism sounds like an innocuous thing. Yet the devil, as they say, is in the details. Equal rights and opportunities may sound fine in the abstract, but once the particularities of God’s design are brought to bear upon the matter, the fundamental error of feminism becomes apparent. Men and women are not, and cannot ever be, equal in all respects. I hasten to add that this is not some he-man woman-haters’ statement about the world as some chauvinist wishes it would be; this is a statement about the way God’s world is—and has been from the very beginning.

Simply put, men and women are not the same. They have never been the same. They have particular strengths (1 Pet. 3:7) and peculiar glories (Prov. 20:29; Song 1:15), which the modern world blurs and diminishes to the detriment of both. To insist upon male and female equality in ways that ignore or obscure God’s diverse design is thus a non-starter from the outset. Men do not have the right or capacity to bear children, for example. Likewise, in Israel—and in all societies that understand God’s commands are “for our good always” (Deut. 6:26)—women did not have the right or opportunity to serve as priests[10] or as soldiers.[11] In view of such God-given limitations, to speak of “equal rights and opportunities” for men and women is rhetorically compelling but categorically misguided.

To be sure, the Scriptures do affirm the equality of man and woman as human beings, that is, as creatures who are equally loved by God and equally worthy of fundamental human rights (e.g., the right to life). But the scriptures seem to assume our equality rather than to assert it.[12] Indeed, a careful survey of the biblical account of the sexes reveals that the inspired authors take pains to highlight how and why God made male and female different from each other and different for each other (i.e., for each other’s good),[13] rather than constantly insisting upon our equality in certain respects. Unfortunately, feminists have taken up almost exactly the opposite emphasis throughout their successive waves.

12. Unfortunately, some evangelicals have recently made the opposite argument. In her argument for increasing the roles of women in ministry, Jen Wilkin stresses the sameness of men and women in the creation account. “Partners in Ministry: How Men and Women Must Labor Together for the Good of the Church,” The Gospel Coalition, October 4, 2024.

13. For more on this distinction, see my response to Gordon P. Hugenberger’s article, “Complementarian at Home, Egalitarian at Church? Paul Would Approve”: Doug Ponder, “Different From and Different For,” American Reformer, April 5, 2024.

The First Wave of Feminism

In Christian circles today it is common to hear praise offered for the first wave of feminism, a mixture of soft criticism and qualified praise for the second wave, and near total criticism for the additional waves that followed. Yet this is an erroneous oversimplification of feminism’s origins and emphases, not to mention the intrinsic connection that each wave has to those that came before it.[14]

14. For a brief overview of feminism’s origins and inroads in one conservative Protestant body of believers, see Doug Ponder, “Feminism in the SBC,” Center for Baptist Leadership, May 17, 2024.

Consider the first wave of feminism. Though its origins can be traced to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the movement began in earnest at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. This two-day event featured various leaders, including men, who met to “discuss the social, civic, and religious condition and rights of Woman.” The explicit goals concerned women’s suffrage (voting), married women’s property rights, and the abolition of alcohol via the temperance movement. The issue of suffrage would eventually become the chief concern (hence the nickname “suffragettes”), but all three factors were targeted because each was viewed as a contemporary hindrance to “the equality of the sexes.”

The problem, present from the start, is that the sexes are not equal in all respects. Men and women have differing traits and tendencies,[15] differing strengths and weaknesses, and differing spheres of primary responsibilities that correspond with how God made the sexes. Indeed, though it is not as widely known today as it ought to be, there were many women who opposed women’s suffrage.[16] Unless one is prepared to suggest that these women were either stupid or self-loathing, their arguments deserve careful consideration. They feared that the right to vote would disrupt the unity of the family, diminish women’s power of influence over their husbands and sons, and thrust women into spheres of public life that were harmful both to women and to society, exclaiming, “Politics are bad for women and women are bad for politics.”[17]

In other words, the reason women had hitherto been denied the “right”[18] to vote was not male chauvinism—despite progressive revisionist history—but considerations of how God designed men and women to work together as well as how God created the family, not the individual, to serve as the basis for human societies.[19] In God’s design, men are the heads of their families (1 Cor. 11:3; Eph. 5:23) and thus are the representatives of their households. The same principle can be found in the laws recorded in Numbers 30, where the Lord held fathers and husbands responsible for the actions of their family members. As such, it is not unreasonable for a society to consider the merit of applying scriptural principles to civil policies, including voting rights. Perhaps such a vision for society would have kept the family at the center while calling a man to vote in ways that would benefit his whole household as one who would have to give an account for how he led those the Lord entrusted to his care.

My point here is not about the nineteenth amendment, which gave women the right to vote, but about the ideas that led to its passage and the consequences of those ideas for men, women, and society as a whole. In other words, the pressing issue is not whether women should be able to vote; wise Christians have disagreed about this (e.g., Abraham Kuyper opposed women’s suffrage, while his friend and theological collaborator Herman Bavinck supported it). Rather, the issue is the contrast of visions between society as a collection of family units or society as an aggregate of individuals. The first wave feminists heavily preferred the latter view, but the scriptures repeatedly assume and explicitly endorse the former.

Admittedly, this way of seeing God’s world is so foreign to modern minds that most people, even many Christians, recoil in horror over discussions about the nineteenth amendment that do not heap praises upon it as an unalloyed boon. The world sees the issue as a matter of justice and equality, when the real debate is a question of what is fitting (in view of God’s design) and what is prudent (in view of a particular society’s embrace of God’s design).[20] In any case, by attaching the “right” to vote to the elusive goal of “gender equality,” first wave feminists—regardless of their intentions—advanced a view of humanity that undermined vital aspects of God’s design, not only obscuring beneficial differences between men and women, but also supplanting the family as the basic unit of society by placing the individual at the center. “The specific unintended consequences brought about by the causes of first wave feminism,” Rebekah Curtis explains,

were the loosening of nuclear family bonds and the transference of protection for weaker members of society from extended family to government. . . . Divorce, cohabitation, abortion, births out of wedlock, the habitual daily separation of young children from their parents, acceptance of homosexuality, and the denial of a person’s biological sex have all grown out of the societal prioritization of the individual, and the appointment of government as a protector of individuals in lieu of family.[21]

In other words, first wave feminism did not liberate women so much as it liberated men from the full weight of their God-given duties, empowering the government to perform functions that the Lord assigned to husbands and fathers. And all but the most blindly dogmatic can see how well the government has fared on this point.

There is more. As Carrie Gress has shown in her masterful work, The End of Woman, most of the first wave feminist leaders were an unsavory lot. They were theologically heterodox (mostly Quakers and Unitarians), they were sexually promiscuous and openly immoral, and they were disdainful of their husbands and of children. Many were also plagued over their lifetimes with psychotic tendencies now commonly called “mental illness.” These “Lost Girls,” as Gress calls them, channeled their deeply personal rage against Christian views of chastity and marriage, the family and children, and especially the scriptural teaching of male headship.

Here’s a sampling of their writings on these matters: “It is in vain to look for the elevation of woman so long as she is degraded in marriage,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in a letter to Susan B. Anthony.[22] Elsewhere Stanton wrote, “I frankly admit that to be a ‘mistress’ is less dishonorable than to be a ‘wife;’ for while the mistress may leave her degradation if she will, public sentiment and the law hold the ‘wife’ in hers. . . . The legal position [of a wife] is more dependent and more degrading than any other condition of womanhood can possibly be.”[23] Katherine Bushnell—a heroine of Kristin Kobes du Mez—argued that Genesis 3:16 was problematic, that God’s design for the sexes was actually “arbitrary fate,” and that marriage turned women into a “prostitute class.”[24] Similarly, many first wave feminists argued that pregnancy—even as a God-ordained consequence of sexual activity in marriage—was “forced maternity,”[25] the solution to which was the so-called right to “voluntary motherhood,” a concept that led Margaret Sanger to regard abortion as the key to women’s liberation.[26]

22. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Letter to Miss Susan B. Anthony,” Seneca Falls, March 1, 1852.

23. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Marriage and Mistresses” in Revolution, Oct. 15, 1868.

24. Katherine Bushnell, Dr. Katherine C. Bushnell: A Brief Sketch of Her Life Work (Rose and Sons, 1930), 14.

25. Treva B. Lindsey, “What Did the Suffragists Really Think about Abortion?” Smithsonian, May 26, 2022.

26. Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (Brentano’s, 1920). Sanger’s demonic dreams began to come true in 1961, when the birth control pill was approved for public use, and in 1973, when abortion was publicly enshrined as a “constitutional right.” Together these technologies provided women with the means for achieving “voluntary motherhood” and Sanger’s desire for  “the right to marriage without maternity.”

One does not have to squint to see how the trajectory established by these “Lost Girls” would be later realized in successive feminist waves, which have directly contributed to many of the most devastating social ills in the West today.

The Second Wave and Beyond

In 1948, Richard Weaver famously reminded the West that ideas have consequences.[27] Over a half-century later, David Wells reminded us that consequences also have ideas.[28] That is to say, many ideas do not occur to the human mind until certain social and technological conditions render them plausible. This is essentially the story of the birth control pill and second wave feminism. This technology, more than any other factor, pushed the fight for “gender equality” into new arenas hitherto impossible so long as the stubborn consequences of God’s design stood in the way.

27. Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (University of Chicago Press, 1948).

28. See David F. Wells, Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2003), especially chapter 1, “Miracles of Modern Splendor.”

With the advent of “the pill,” however, children came to viewed as either an avoidable burden or an on-demand commodity instead of a God-ordained outcome. This, in turn, further gave credibility to the notion that men and women were not all that different. Before the pill, sexual activity had predictable, observable, design-reinforcing effects: the man’s body does not change after conception; the woman’s body does. It was taken for granted that a married couple would have children (assuming the plumbing was all in order) and that the one whose body had been designed to conceive, bear, and feed the child would naturally do all that—not only that, but at least that.

The hopes attached to the pill also explain why feminists have been among the most ardent supporters of abortion. For if the pill could not guarantee a woman would never have to be a mother, except on her own terms, then (feminist logic insists) she must be able to kill any unwanted child. Otherwise, she is not as free—and thus, not as equal—as a man.[29] As Frederica Mathewes-Green puts it, “Feminists defend abortion with desperate passion because the whole shaky structure of their lives depends upon it.”[30]

29. It does not seem to occur to feminists that there is a real sense in which no man who begets a child is free from the responsibility to protect and provide for the child and its mother. The Lord will indeed hold every man accountable for the children they have produced. Woe to every man who has abandoned his progeny and the mother(s) of his children if he does not repent. “It would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea…” (Luke 17:2).

By making motherhood virtually optional, and therefore avoidable, the full picture of what it means to be a woman gradually came to be separated from the vocations of wifedom and motherhood. The latter stations were now entirely elective,[31] even for marriedwomen (and, mutatis mutandis, for married men). Gone was the God-given vision of every son and brother as a potential husband and father, every daughter and sister a potential wife and woman.[32] In its place was a brave new world forged by technologies that could achieve the feminist ideal that women should be able to live exactly as men do, with “equal rights and opportunities,” namely, the right not to bear children. For once children were removed from the picture—except at the behest of the woman’s newly-minted sovereign prerogative (“her body, her choice”)—women were free to do whatever men do.

32. Patrick Schreiner, “Man and Woman: Toward an Ontology,” Eikon 2, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 68–87.

In this way, the pill (and later, abortion) also enabled women to enter the public workforce in record numbers—an arrangement that burgeoning bureaucratic governments were all too pleased with. This move was championed by women like Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, became the touchstone of feminism’s second wave. Now that legal barriers had been removed, feminists turned their sights on social barriers, namely, traditional gender roles, in the name of ending “sexist discrimination.” But not all that goes by the name of “discrimination” is accurately so-called (cf. Isa. 8:12), and much of what feminists of both sexes in the 1960s and 70s sought to overthrow in the name of “gender equality” was little more than rebellion against the differences between men and women within the order of God’s creation.  

There is an ironic cruelty here, which the devil is all too happy to propagate. Encouraged to trade the home and hearth for full-time careers away from their families, women were told they could have what men had and thus find the fulfillment they always longed for. Apparently nobody told them that most men work jobs that do not make them happy—out of love for a family that does make them happy. Nobody told them that submitting to a husband who loves them (Eph. 5:22–25) is far easier and more enjoyable than submitting to a boss who uses them or tries to take advantage of them. And nobody saw the irony of that infamous Chestertonian quip: “Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.”[33]

33. As with so many of Chesterton’s quotes on the internet, this line is a paraphrase. He actually said, “They [women] fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm.” G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World? (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1910), Part Three (“Feminism, or the Mistake about Woman”), chapter III (“The Emancipation of Domesticity”).

Things did not improve for women when they became the ones doing the dictating, either. Several years ago an academic paper titled “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” published findings which showed that, despite having more freedoms and privileges than in any previous era, women today are less happy by many metrics than ever before.[34] More specifically, women’s self-reported happiness began its decline in the early 1970s, shortly after women had entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers. These trends have continued since the paper’s publication. According to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, nearly one third of American women take prescription drugs for depression and anxiety. As Zephram Foster has said, “When we insist that women can only be truly fulfilled in the workplace, in trying to imitate what men do, we are enslaving them to a function they weren’t created for, aiming them at goals they aren’t meant to find their purpose in. This is the prison that feminism creates, and it robs women of their glory.”[35]

34. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 14969, May, 2009.

35. Zephram Foster, “Lost of a Good Word (Again),” Touchstone, May/June 2024.

Clearly something is amiss. Equally clearly, feminists do not grasp how their project has contributed to the suffering women (and men[36]) now endure. For instead of asking hard questions about the consequences of their endeavors, feminists have continued to tear down every alleged barrier they believe to be keeping women from “equal rights and opportunities” with men—even when that barrier is reality itself. For in the wake of feminism’s third and fourth waves, which have chipped away at every definite feature of womanhood by defining gender as a social construct (in order to make men and women interchangeable), we now find feminists debating not what women should be able to do but simply, “What is a woman?” Having rejected the Scriptures, scorned the wisdom of the past, and ignored the ways in which gender stereotypes[37] often highlight indelible facets of created design, feminists have ushered in a world where even men can be “women,” yet nobody can say what a woman was made to be. Who can save us from this ideology of death?

36. Time would fail me to highlight all the ways that men have suffered from feminism, too. But in brief, the situation appears to be this: stripped of their duties to provide and protect, men have been set adrift in the world without any clear direction of why men matter. This has contributed to the meteoric rise in “deaths of despair” (e.g., suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdose), which disproportionately affect men at more than three times the rate they affect women. See Lisa O’Mary, “‘Deaths of Despair’ Among Men Fueling Life Expectancy Gap,” WebMD, November 14, 2023.

37. We tend to think of stereotypes as prejudicial judgments made of individuals based on overgeneralization, and there is a valid warning to heed here. But we tend to overlook that stereotypes do not appear out of thin air. They are, in fact, a perspective rooted in inductive observation. So, while not all men and women fit a “rigid pattern”—the etymological meaning of “stereotype”—a sufficient number of men and women exhibit certain tendencies to such a degree that specific stereotypes emerged in our collective consciousness. And while stereotypes would be a poor way to judge every particular man and woman, they remain a useful lens for contemplating the designs of God that lay behind men and women in general.

Feminism Defeated: The Glory of Male and Female

I began by noting that should a genie ever grant me three wishes, I’d use the first to rid the world of feminism and the second to ensure it never returned. My third wish would be this: I would that everyone could see the glory of God’s design of all things, especially with the men and women he made in his image. But that cannot happen apart from recovering a full-orbed recognition that men and women really are different, along with an unblushing affirmation that God’s design of the sexes really is good.

Back to Basics: Men and Women Really Are Different

In the hoary days of 1992, John Gray published Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and hardly anybody but feminists batted an eye.[38] In fact, the book sold over 15 million copies—five million more than Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life to date—becoming the best-selling non-fiction work of the 1990s. The basic premise was simple: men and women are so different that it can sometimes feel as though the sexes hail from distinct planets. Everybody knows that men and women are from earth, of course. But not everybody today seems to grasp that men and women are very different indeed.

38. To be sure, Gray’s book was not entirely consonant with the Scriptures. He overstates his case in places, and he relies more on psychology than the hard sciences. Even so, his basic assertion that men and women are different remains true.

The intentional blurring, dismissing, and outright denial of male and female differences is a direct result of the feminist revolution. It is plain why this is the case. For the feminist project to succeed, men and women must be so similar that they are interchangeable. Any notion of differences is thus a threat to their entire project. For if men and women are not the same, then men really are better at some things while women are better at others. Yet to speak of either sex as being “better” than the other in any arena suggests that the sexes are suited for particular tasks and outfitted with particular tendencies to serve those tasks. And to speak of the sexes as being suited for particular roles in this way suggests not only a preexisting (and thus unchosen) design, but also an eternally existent Designer—a God who has plans for the people he made.

Despite feminist protestations, however, the differences between men and women cannot be erased. Men have a centrifugal, outward-moving nature, women a centripetal, inward-drawing one. The Lord alerts us to this fact in the beginning: “Therefore a manshall leave his father and mother, and hold fast to wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24, emphasis added). It would have been easy enough to say the man and woman leave and cleave in equal measure, but Moses insists—and Jesus affirms (Matt. 19:4–5)—that the man moves out into the world (centrifugally), while the woman draws the man to herself (centripetally). It was the face of Helen, not of Hector, that launched a thousand ships to Troy. 

Throughout the Scriptures we see these differences play out on a larger stage: Taken from the soil and instructed to work and keep it (Gen. 2:15),[39] the man finds that his share in the curse concerns the thorns and thistles of the ground he was made to work (Gen. 3:17–19). And since no one has a field inside his house, the man must leave the walls of his home in order to provide for those he also protects.[40] Thus the man’s God-given strength (Prov. 20:29) has a God-given end. This can, of course, be corrupted by the powers of hell, as has happened many times, but abusus non tollit usum.[41]  This is why the Scriptures exhort men—but not women—to “lift holy hands without wrath or quarreling” (1 Tim. 2:8; cf. 1 Pet. 3:7). The point is not that women can’t be wrathful or quarrelsome, but that men have a greater tendency to be so, because the devil aims to corrupt what God has made.

39. Some may object that women can work the ground as well as men. That depends on what they mean by this. I readily concede that my wife is a better gardener than me, but she still asks me to carry the mulch bags.

40. This should not be taken as a holistic endorsement of the nine-to-five work schedule of men in offices entirely away from their families. But that is another article for another time.

41. That is, “abuse does not cancel use.”

The woman, meanwhile, is introduced as the man’s “helper” (Gen. 2:18). Taken from the man and given back to him (Gen. 2:22–23), she has a different orientation. This also explains why the woman’s share in the curse concerns her ability to conceive children and her relationship to her husband (Gen. 3:16). Of all things the Lord could have mentioned, he highlights domestic relationships forged by the centripetal nature of women. Once again, we see the woman’s God-given power has a God-given end. This can be corrupted too, which is why the Scriptures exhort women—but not men—to “adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control… with what is proper for women who profess godliness” (1 Tim. 2:9–10; cf. 1 Pet. 3:3–4). Again, the point is not that men can’t dress immodestly, but that women have a greater tendency to do so precisely because of the centripetal nature God has given them.[42]

42. Some will object that Paul is speaking not of sexual modesty but material modesty, hence the mention of “gold and pearls and costly attire” (1 Tim. 2:9b). This objection is too clever by half. For in the first century even prostitutes dressed with greater sexual modesty than many Western women today. In other words, Paul need not mention sexual modesty in this context because it was assumed. In any case, the dynamics are the same: the power of women to attract attention (which is good and right in the proper setting) be corrupted for selfish ends, and this holds true whether the sartorial accidents are flashy outfits or barely-there clothing.

None of these details are accidental. From the beginning, the Lord has taught us how to understand what male and female mean. And the more scientists have studied the sexes, with the kind of humility and wonder that is appropriate for creatures peering into the mysteries of God’s design, the more they discover just how many differences God built into the fabric of our being.[43] When God makes a man or a woman, he makes them male and female all the way down.

43. These differences are not only physical. Male and female brains differ in the thickness of the cortex to ratios of gray and white matter, the interconnectedness of the brain’s hemispheres, and the size of cerebral parts that mediate emotions, cognition, aggression, and nurturing behavior (J. Budziszewski, On the Meaning of Sex [ISI Books, 2012], 38–39). Women tend to be more generous and altruistic than men, exhibiting greater prosocial behavior (Alexander Soutchek et al. “The Dopaminergic Reward System Underpins Gender Differences in Social Preferences,” Nature Human Behaviour 1 [October 2017]: 819–27). Similarly, research shows that mothers tend to emphasize a child’s safety, while fathers tend to encourage beneficial risks (Brad Wilcox, “The Distinct, Positive Impact of a Good Dad: How Fathers Contribute to Their Kids’ Lives,” The Atlantic, June 14, 2013. See also Anthony Esolen, “The Boy Genius: Finding Him Again Through the Patriarchal Group,” Touchstone Magazine, March/April 2019.

This means men and women are not so similar that they can perform the same tasks and fulfill the same vocations as well as the other. For when God calls a man or woman to particular tasks, he equips each sex for the vocations he has given. Men are the heads of their households because God so constituted maleness and masculinity that it is “fitting” for men to be the heads. Any failure of men to carry out this task is not a failure of design, therefore, but a failure of sinners to “live up” to God’s design in some fashion. Similarly, women were not arbitrarily outfitted with bodies designed to conceive, bear, and sustain children. With apologies to Robert Frost, something there is that doesn’t excel at strengthening social bonds and nurturing life within the family, but that thing is not a woman. That is to say, women are well suited for these very things. The world will never promote the wellbeing of men and women so long as it denies these facts.

Gendered and Unashamed: An Unblushing Affirmation of God’s Good Design

It is not enough to assert the fact of sexual difference; the church needs to recover the glory of it, too. Far too many Christians give a subtle head nod to male and female, like a little votive candle left at God’s altar, only to carry on with their lives in much the same manner as the world around them. In some small effort to mount a defense against the society-destroying chaos that is transgenderism, Christians seem content to reduce all discussion about the sexes to X and Y chromosomes. Such a course of action keeps us from seeing the glory of God’s design. For when the Lord gave men and women differing constitutions and callings, he did not do so willy-nilly. Rather, God made man and woman with blessing in mind.

There are many ways to illustrate this point, but simply consider what we have lost. The differences between the sexes used to be a matter of dignity. Men stood when women entered the room, gave up their places on lifeboats to women (and children), raised their caps in honor, and laid down their lives, when duty called, out of a sense of deferential love. Women likewise poured themselves out like drink offerings, not behind desks (or pulpits), nor on the battlefield, but by giving the first portion of their time and energy to the home, blessing children with feminine gifts that a man cannot bestow, doing the lioness’s share of forming the next generation of men and women to take up their place in God’s world.

The differences between the sexes were also a matter of playful teasing. Men took a ribbing for tendencies like their refusal to ask for directions. (“I’ve got a map in my head,” dad insisted, on his way to getting his family good and lost.) Women likewise were teased for their tendency to give directions by landmarks instead of street names and addresses. (“Turn right when you see the weird-looking statue. Not the semi-weird one, but the really weird one. You’ll know when you see it. Then turn left onto the street with the wedding dress shop, and keep going until you see the yellow house with a nice garden.”) One country singer crooned that he would love his spouse for “as long as old men sit and talk about the weather, as long as old women sit and talk about old men.”[44]

44. Randy Travis, “Forever and Ever, Amen” on the Always & Forever album (1987). (I’m generally not a fan of country music, but look at us. Who wouldn’t thought? Not me!)

This is what feminism took from us. There was no “battle of the sexes” in the modern sense of the term. Men and women were not competing in the same arenas for the same things. Everyone understood that men did not carry heavy things because God “just so happened” to make them stronger, but rather that God made men stronger so that they might carry heavy things. Everyone also understood that a womb was not a curse but a gift, an organ whose sole function is for giving life to others—a literal feature with deeply symbolic meaning.[45]

45. Consider how Eve, the only person ever created within the paradise of Eden (cf. Gen. 2:7, 15, 22–23) carried within her body a bit of Eden inside her: a paradisal womb, where planted seed is fruitful and multiplies in an environment of protection and safety and warmth. In this way, every person begins his or her life this world in a type of garden paradise, both naked and unashamed, protected in a place perfectly suited to his or her growth and development—just as our primordial parents were of old.

None of this reduces the value of men to physical strength or the value of women to baby-making. On the contrary, it is the feminists who do this. For when feminists diminish or deny all the differences between male and female, the only remaining distinction between the sexes is the capacity of women to give birth. In other words, the Christian vision of the sexes celebrates feminine gifts beyond the birthing room, but the feminist vision of interchangeable cogs can give no reason for why women exist except their capacity to make babies.

Therefore, instead of pushing for a “gender equality” which reduces the diversity of God’s design to an undifferentiated sameness, Christians need to recapture the biblical vision of harmonious sexual asymmetry.[46] That is to say, we need to grasp that God really did make men and women different from each other for the mutual benefit of both. And we should not be ashamed of these differences.

46. For an extended treatment of this subject, see Doug Ponder, “A Biblical Vision of the Sexes: Harmonious Asymmetry,” Eikon 6, no. 1 (Spring 2024): 28–40.

Yet that is precisely what many Christians are guilty of today. I am not here speaking of egalitarians, who have constructed a feminist syncretism of the Christian faith.[47] Rather, I am speaking of Christians who affirm the complementary (i.e., non-interchangeability) nature of the sexes but who, for various reasons, feel ashamed of what God says. This is why confessionally conservative (but culturally liberal) churches are flirting with appointing women to “non-elder pastors,” despite the New Testament’s consistent use of these terms to refer to the same office.[48] Some have invented new offices altogether, like “mothers” in the church, who act as some kind of supervisory board to guide the elders in their work to shepherd God’s people.[49] Others, embarrassed by male headship in the church, find innovative ways to “center female voices,” or host “women-led Sundays” and a host of other ill-conceived practices.

47. It is worth remembering the original name for egalitarianism was “Evangelical Feminism.” See Nancy Hardesty and Letha Scanzoni, All We’re Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today (Eerdmans, 1992) and Pamela Cochran, Evangelical Feminism: A History (NYU, 2005), 11–31.

48. For a defense of the New Testament’s consistent use of these terms, see Doug Ponder, “Pastors Are Elders Are Overseers,” Center for Baptist Leadership, May 29, 2024, and Doug Ponder, “Who Shepherds the Flock? (A Response to Russ Barksdale),” The Baptist Review, May 30, 2024.

All these initiatives are little more than a pressure-release valve for folks who are caught between a culture that wants to “smash the patriarchy” and a God who taught us to call him Father (Matt. 6:9) but never mother.[50] This is the same Deity who revealed himself as “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Exod. 3:6; Matt. 22:32) but not “of Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel,” who sent his Son, not his daughter, to save the world (Mark 1:1; Heb. 1:1–4), who restricted the priesthood to men (Exod. 28:1; Num. 3:10; cf. Lev. 21:1ff) and appointed men as the “heads” of their wives (Eph. 5:22–32; Col. 3:18–19; cf. 1 Cor. 11:3, 8–9), the God who chose twelve men to serve as his authoritative apostles (Mark 3:13–19), who “do[es] not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man” (1 Tim. 2:12), who prohibited women from judging prophecies in the assembly (1 Cor. 14:34–35), and who inspired only men to be authors of Scripture (2 Pet. 1:21).[51]

51. This paragraph is adapted from an essay that shows how many complementarians softening scriptural teaching on the sexes. See Bryan Laughlin and Doug Ponder, “Complementarians and the Rise of Second-Wave Evangelical Feminism,” Sola Ecclesia, February 26, 2024.

Thus the church has a decision to make: either the Lord is a misogynistic god who created women to be second-class citizens, or else he is good and his designs are good for men and women both. Christians need not wonder about this. For if God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all (Rom. 8:32), we can be sure that he is not withholding any good thing from those he died to save—even when he delivers different “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots” to the men and women that he created differently.

So, then, the church must learn to read (and practice) all of God’s Word without wincing.[52] But to do that, we’ll need confidence that God is good and a sober expectation that the world will think we’re nuts. Jesus has already told us how to respond to them: “You are blessed when they insult you and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me. Be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven. For that is how they persecuted the prophets before you” (Matt. 5:11–12).

52. Here’s a litmus test: Go read 1 Corinthians 11:7–9 with your spouse and see how it goes. Take note of any internal urges to qualify or explain away what God says until it means something other than what his Word clearly states. To be sure, there is a place for explanation, but our explanations of God’s Word must never be an extended exercise in twisting the Scriptures and making excuses on God’s behalf.

That means the world will say the church is full of misogynists, but our job is to smile knowingly, shrug our shoulders with a chuckle thrown in for good measure, and sing Psalm 128 a little louder next Sunday morning. We should fully expect a backwards world to think the church is regressive, but that does not mean they’re right. After all, feminists are the ones who cannot even tell us what a man or woman is, much less what men and women are for. It is very dark in the world today, but there is light in Goshen for the sons and daughters of God.