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. 

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.

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]

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).

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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