100 Sermon Illustrations on Feminism

A former conservative president of the Southern Baptist Convention ridiculed the denomination's mandate that wives should submit to their husbands and doesn't support the denomination's ban on female pastors, according to a Texas newspaper.

Charles Stanley's comments were reported in an Oct. 18 Fort Worth Star-Telegram article. The story, written by veteran religion writer Jim Jones, was based on an interview given during Stanley's visit to Texas to promote his latest book, “Finding Peace: God's Promise of a Life Free from Regret, Anxiety and Fear.”

Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, was elected SBC president at the peak of the battle between moderates and conservatives. His re-election victory in Dallas in June 1985, when more than 45,000 messengers registered, is considered a pivotal moment in the denomination's so-called “conservative resurgence.”

Both edicts Stanley criticized were additions to the SBC's Baptist Faith and Message doctrinal statement -- the first approved by convention messengers in 1998, and the second in 2000. Those controversial additions were penned and promoted by some of Stanley's allies in the fight to change the direction of the SBC beginning in 1979.

The section on women being submissive to their husbands is based on a misreading of Scripture, and the topic should not have been dealt with in a general statement of doctrine, Stanley told the Star-Telegram.

“If a woman is going to be submissive, she's not going to be submissive because of the Southern Baptist Convention,” he told the paper. “It's just ridiculous.”

Even though SBC leaders have said the statement is not intended to make women “doormats,” that is the impression it gives, Stanley said. “They should never have discussed the issue.”

A proper reading of the New Testament book of Ephesians -- the main text SBC leaders used to justify their statement -- leans more toward mutual submission, said Stanley, who is divorced. “Jesus said we are to honor one another. Submission means you should submit yourself one to another.”

Stanley disputed the prohibition on women serving as pastors based on his own experience. He told the paper: “Let me put it this way: I was saved by a woman preaching. I was saved at 12 years of age, and I'm still saved.”

The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message ignores the fact that in some places around the world, men are not taking responsibility for leading churches while women are, Stanley said. “You can go to India, Japan and other countries and find women are preaching the gospel. People are being saved. Lives are being changed. Big churches are growing up. Are we going to tell these women, 'You can't do that'?”

The fact that Stanley was converted under the preaching of a female Pentecostal preacher in Danville, Virginia, has been previously reported.

This isn't the first time Stanley has made comments on the issue of women that were viewed as departing from the denomination's conservative party line. In the summer of 2000, soon after the revised Baptist Faith and Message was adopted, Stanley told a group of pastors in North Carolina: “There are some godly women out there. I would never say that a woman could not preach.... You just can't put God in a box.”

Stanley quickly backed away from that report, however, saying his words had been “twisted and distorted” by the Charlotte Observer. At the time, he drew a distinction between a woman being a preacher and being a pastor.

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Who says women are second-class Baptists? No one I know unless it might be someone who suggests that teaching the Bible to women and children is a waste of talent and training unless men are in the audience.

The discussion of a woman's role in the church has moved to the front among evangelicals, especially in the last two decades. The issue divides congregations and destroys the faith of individuals. The problems and confusion accompanying the rise of “biblical” feminism prompted Southern Baptists to address the matter head-on. What could be a better defense in a conflict of ideas than a clear and unambiguous statement based on the text of Scripture?

Producing a concise, clear statement of the generally held beliefs of Southern Baptists is challenging, especially when Scripture is contra-culture and against popularly held notions. I served on the Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee that drafted a statement on the family. The committee examined major passages of Scripture on the family and relationships therein. The article is positive in its tone and declares what Scripture affirms rather than what it forbids; its words and phrases were carefully fashioned in line with Scripture itself.

Anyone taking issue with the statement needs to address his concerns to the words found in the statement as well as to the Scriptures cited. Facts should overshadow feelings; Scripture should overrule experience.

God introduced His purpose for marriage in creation (Genesis 2:24) and reaffirmed that purpose in the Gospels (Matthew 19:5) and the Pauline epistles (Ephesians 5:31). This covenant commitment for an exclusive, permanent, monogamous union of one man and one woman is pledged in the presence of God and transcends time and culture. Epidemic divorce -- even among church leaders -- and militant attacks on divinely fashioned sexuality complicate the matter even more as biblical standards are blurred by experience and convenience.

Scripture defines how a husband and wife are to relate to one another. As exercising dominion over the world and extending the generations (Genesis 1:28; 2:18). There is no hint of inferiority in the assignment. God is described as a Helper (Psalm 27:9). In this unique function a wife complements and augments her husband.

The husband's leadership was established and carefully defined at creation, i.e., before the Fall in the Garden of Eden and not as the result of human failure (Genesis 2:15-17), and then was modeled by Jesus, the perfect servant leader. The union of “servant leadership” with “gracious submission” is natural and edifying.

Both husband and wife mutually submit, as suggested by the participle translated “submitting” in Ephesians 5:21. This mutual submission does not negate the unique submission described in verse 22 and elsewhere (Colossians 3:18; Titus 2:3-5; 1 Peter 3:1-4). The understanding of mutual submission sets the stage for obedience of husband and wife to their respective assignments from God.

Submission to any command, by definition of the Greek word used in the earliest text of Scripture, reflects a choice in contradistinction to forced action. A husband “submits” to the command of Christ when he determines to “love” his wife as Christ loved the church, even to the point of being willing to lay down his life. A wife “submits” to her own husband (Ephesians 5:21-22; Colossians 3:18; Titus 2:3-5; 1 Peter 3:1-7). What may seem “ridiculous” in a modern cultural setting or inappropriate when juxtaposed to current ideology, if coming directly from Scripture, is elevated to divine mandate; and that position trumps all others. Even knowledge from firsthand experience should not mold and fashion your interpretation of Scripture; rather, Scripture should bring your thoughts and actions into focus, and subjection, to what is prescribed by God.

Success is not a criterion for sanctifying a task and making it right. I have three graduate degrees in theology, considerably more theological education than most pastors. I have experience on the public platform, and some even suggest that I have gifts for biblical exposition and teaching. Others have testified that I have met their needs through my messages. Some men have expressed appreciation for my ministry.

However, ministry success, public affirmation, spousal permission, pastoral blessing, widespread opportunity -- none is the biblical criterion for what I should or should not do in the Kingdom of Christ. In the Pastoral Epistles within the context of church order (1 Timothy 2:9-11) are found explicit boundaries that cannot be violated by what I perceive to be my calling.

Any calling I believe to be from God is filtered through my human frailties. What I feel may not be what God wills. That is why Scripture is ever the monitor and governor of all I desire to do for God. I do not have ultimate jurisdiction over my own actions, and I cannot dictate or control the actions of others. Yet, I have the responsibility not to put myself in a situation where I am regularly or willfully violating boundaries of Scripture.

Doctrine and practice, whether in the home or in the church, are not to be determined according to modern cultural, sociological and ecclesiastical trends. Nor are our choices to be according to emotional whims, obvious giftedness or even a calling that stands in contradiction to any clear mandate in Scripture.

Scripture alone must be the final authority in all matters of faith and conduct (2 Timothy 3:16-17; Hebrews 4:12; 2 Peter 1:20-21). Scripture makes frequent connections between the life of the family and the life of the church (1 Timothy 3:5, 5:1-2). Leadership patterns in the family are consistently reflected in the church as well (1 Timothy 2:9-14; 3:1-7; Titus 1:5-9). A Christ-centered marriage has the potential to give a “word about God” to a world indifferent to spiritual truths.Those within the family circle have a unique opportunity to study the Bible and to learn theology through object lessons built into the family's structure. By lifting up Scripture, we can point women and men to Jesus Christ, and discover God's unique purpose for each of us.

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The Vatican has launched a major salvo in the culture war by releasing an important statement which opposes ideological feminism and affirms the integrity of marriage and the natural family. Hitting the scene just as the U.S. presidential campaign goes into high gear, the statement is certain to have an impact. Some feminists are already hitting the panic button.

The magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, its central governing authority, issued the document on July 31, 2004. The Vatican's statement is titled, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.” The document was approved by Pope John Paul II, officially released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and is intended to instruct the church's bishops on the issues of women, feminism and gender roles.

The document presents a devastating critique of ideological feminism, with particular attention to radical strains that have been highly influential in the United States and other Western nations.

Ideological feminism, the statement argues, “leads to opposition between men and women, in which the identity and role of one are emphasized to the disadvantage of the other, leading to harmful confusion regarding the human person, which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family.” Faced with mistreatment and subordination, women have improperly responded with an ideology that makes them “the adversaries of men,” the statement explains.

Addressing more contemporary forms of feminist ideology, the letter to the bishops also condemns postmodernist attempts to deconstruct gender. Differences between the sexes are not “mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning,” the church emphasizes. “The obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes has enormous consequences on a variety of levels,” the statement insists. These consequences include the weakening of the family, damage to marriage and confusion over the very nature of sexuality. As the statement instructs, these feminist ideologies have “in reality inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.”

This last concern suggests a possible rationale for the timing and structure of the Vatican's letter. With the homosexual movement pushing the agenda of same- sex “marriage,” and with Western courts and governmental structures moving toward its acceptance, the Catholic Church has responded with a clear statement of opposition to the “polymorphous sexuality” that is the inevitable result of feminist ideology and the denial of God-ordained differences between the sexes. This “polymorphous sexuality” now marks the public culture of the United States and many other nations, devastating families and undermining the moral integrity of civilization itself.

What gives birth to these feminist ideologies? The Vatican explains that, though political and sociological factors have some impact, the “deeper motivation” is found “in the human attempt to be freed from one's biological conditioning.” In other words, these postmodern ideologies promote the idea that human beings are not bound by any biological conditioning or physical structure. Accordingly, human beings have attempted to remake themselves in terms of whatever gender or sex roles they might choose.

Arguing from Scripture, the Vatican letter returns to the first two chapters of Genesis, affirming, “From the very beginning therefore, humanity is described as articulated in the male-female relationship. This is the humanity, sexually differentiated, which is explicitly declared 'the image of God.'“ According to Genesis 2:4-25, the woman is created as a helpmate and life partner for Adam. “The term here does not refer to an inferior, but to a vital helper. This is so that Adam's life does not sink into a sterile and, in the end, baneful encounter with himself. It is necessary that he enter into relationship with another being on his own level. Only the woman, created from the same 'flesh' and cloaked in the same mystery, can give a future to the life of man.”

Differences between the sexes reflect God's glory and also serve to instruct humanity concerning the essential goodness of marriage and the calling to procreation. The “one flesh” union of the man and the woman, within the covenant of marriage, fulfills the meaning of both man and woman, and in this covenant there is no shame.

Interestingly, the Vatican explicitly pushes its argument beyond the physical dimension to the psychological and spiritual constitution of both men and women. In particular, the document argues that “sexual difference” includes psychological distinctions between men and women, as well as physical differences. This means that women have a particular role, a unique psychological and spiritual giftedness, as well as a different physical constitution. “It is women, in the end, who even in very desperate situations, as attested by history past and present, possess a singular capacity to persevere in adversity, to keep life going even in extreme situations, to hold tenaciously to the future, and finally to remember with tears the value of every human life.”

In the face of political correctness and modern confusion, the Vatican argues that women are first and foremost “significantly and actively present in the family.” This unembarrassed emphasis of the woman's domestic role is balanced by the letter's affirmation of the important role of women in the community and the church. Nevertheless, the “genius of women” in the family is one of the central aspects of this Catholic statement.

In a novel approach, the letter calls for the work of women within the family to be valued, even as work outside the home is valued by the society. “In this way, women who freely desire will be able to devote the totality of their time to the work of the household without being stigmatized by society or penalized financially, while those who wish also to engage in other work may be able to do so with an appropriate work-schedule, and not have to choose between relinquishing their family life or enduring continual stress, with negative consequences for one's own equilibrium and the harmony of the family.”

The Vatican offered no suggestions as to how its proposal could be transformed into workable policy, but the letter should be respected for its clear affirmation of the invaluable role of women as wives and mothers.

Liberal Catholics were quick to respond with criticism and outrage. “The demonization of feminism is most disturbing,” declared Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, an abortion-rights advocacy group. She told The Washington Post that her blood pressure “shot up 20 points” when she read the statement. Kissling told Reuters that the document represents something of “a time warp.” As she explained, “I thought for sure I was in the 1960s and Archie Bunker had been appointed theologian to the Pope.”

The letter's rejection of women as priests outraged Regina Schulte, a feminist theologian who told the National Catholic Reporter that the statement's argument that the relationship between Christ and the church should be seen in terms of bride and bridegroom “places women in a headlock as far as church leadership and ultimately ordination go.” Of course, the Bride and Bridegroom image is drawn directly from Scripture.

In one of the most important, though brief, sections of the letter, the Vatican condemns liberal methods of biblical interpretation that deconstruct the Scriptural text by arguing that the Bible presents a “patriarchal conception of God nourished by an essentially male-dominated culture.” This critique has become the norm in liberal seminaries and divinity schools, where feminists have largely won the debate, condemning the Bible as a warped and corrupted text that must be corrected by modern feminist sensitivities.

Evangelicals should welcome this statement and the debate that is certain to ensue. While evangelicals will differ with some aspects of the Catholic argument -- especially a concluding section dealing with Mary -- the letter itself should be welcomed as a serious and responsible argument against ideological feminism. With confusion over gender and sexuality threatening the very foundations of civilization itself, the Vatican's statement is well-timed and courageous. In the midst of our present conflict, evangelicals must respond to the challenge of ideological feminism with equal clarity and equal courage.

As Americans have learned more about the devastating impact of abortion, we've seen our country become more pro-life. But we're still a long way from building a culture of life that welcomes every child. To do that, we need to demolish the most pervasive myths about abortion. A new book titled The Cost of 'Choice': Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion is a valuable tool in that effort. In a series of thought-provoking essays, women from all walks of life tackle those myths head-on.

Myth number one: Abortion is first and foremost a woman's issue. Again and again, the writers in this book make the case that abortion is an issue that hurts all of us, not least by pitting men, women, and children against each other. We've reached a point, the writers explain, where instead of providing support and solutions to women in crisis pregnancies, society often turns against them. The book is full of quotes and stories from women who aborted against their will because other people expected them to do so.

Also noteworthy here is an essay titled “The Feminist Case against Abortion,” in which Serrin M. Foster points out, “It is a man — abortion rights activist Larry Lader ... who credits himself with guiding a reluctant [Betty] Friedan, the first president of NOW to make abortion a serious issue for the organization.” Foster explains how Lader and Dr. Bernard Nathanson worked together to promote the abortion agenda to the feminist movement.

That leads to myth number two. Foster adds, “Dr. Nathanson, who later became a pro-life activist, said that he and Lader were able to persuade Friedan that abortion was a civil rights issue, basing much of their argument on the claim that tens of thousands of women died from illegal abortions each year. Nathanson later admitted that they had simply made up the numbers.” In other words, those who claim that repealing Roe would take us back to a Dark Age of women dying in back alleys are basing their argument on a lie.

Which takes us to myth number three: the myth that legalized abortion automatically means safe abortion. Again, the writers in The Cost of 'Choice' beg to differ. Attorney Denise Burke writes, “With the abortion industry's own statistics as a basis, it is clear that thousands of women are being injured by abortion each year and that some of them die.” And then there's the physical aftermath of abortion, examined most thoroughly here by Dr. Angela Lanfranchi in an essay on the much-maligned link between abortion and breast cancer.

To enumerate all the abortion-related myths dealt with here could take all day. But really, they're all part of one greater myth: the myth that abortion is good for women. As this book demonstrates, nothing could be further from the truth. Wilberforce Forum Fellow Paige Comstock Cunningham of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity sums it up well: “Women are simply offered abortion, the quick fix, while genuinely meaningful solutions to their social or personal problems are left unexplored. ... As long as abortion on demand remains legal and a constitutional right, women will continue to be isolated and exploited.” Please, don't tell us abortion is good for women.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Erika Bachiochi, “The abortion debate,” Washington Times, 29 October 2004.

• Jan Wolfe, “Feminist argues cost of abortion,” The Heights (Boston College), 9 December 2004.

• Steven Ertelt, “Women Who Regret Their Abortions to Speak at Supreme Court,” Lifenews.com,11 January 2005.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 041026, “Human Life: It's What Matters Most.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 041015, “Politics First, Women Second: The Illness They Won't Talk About.”

• Brian McGuire, “Abortion: A Tool of Male Oppression?“ interview with Serrin Foster, National Catholic Register, 16-22 April 2000.

• Jill Stanek, “How does 'moderating pro-choice position' translate?“ Worldnetdaily.com, 5 January 2005.

• Debra Rosenburg, “Anxiety Over Abortion,” Newsweek, 20 December 2005.

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Copyright © 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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I understand why Harvard president Lawrence Summers might be confused. Speaking at a conference about “diversifying the science and engineering workforce,” he thought that science might have something to do with the subject. He was wrong.

The subject was why “relatively few women become scientists or engineers.” Besides the obligatory nod to discrimination on the part of universities, Summers noted the differences in math test scores. While, on average, boys and girls score approximately the same, more boys than girls score in both the highest and lowest percentiles.

Summers reportedly mentioned “innate” and/or “natural” differences between the sexes: the differences reflected in the test scores. That's when the fur flew. MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins told the BOSTON GLOBE that she thought that she was going to be sick. “This kind of bias” left her with no choice but to flee the room. If she had stayed, she risked “blacking out.”

Hopkins's hysteria is hilarious. As George Will put it, here we have someone “at the peak of the academic pyramid” overcome by the “vapors” upon hearing an “unwelcome idea.” Like a “Victorian maiden,” she collapsed waiting to be “revived ... by the offending brute's contrition.”

What's not funny is that Hopkins and others succeeded in getting Summers to apologize for “sending an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women.” What nonsense! The only “signal of discouragement” being sent in this affair was by Hopkins and the others directed at anyone who takes the pursuit of truth and free inquiry seriously.

That signal was intended to enforce the idea that differences between men and women are “socially constructed.” Aside from the inconvenient fact that only women can get pregnant and bear children, there's no reason that women and men shouldn't be interchangeable, whether at home or at work.

Unfortunately for Hopkins and company, as John Adams once said, “facts are stubborn things ... our wishes [and] the dictates of our passion ... cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” As Hopkins's MIT colleague David Page told the NEW YORK TIMES, “the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome.” By some estimates, the genetic difference due to sex is 100 TO 200 TIMES GREATER than the difference due to race or ethnicity.

One of the places these biological differences manifest themselves is the way in which our brains work. According to the LOS ANGELES TIMES, “men and women, on average ... possess documented differences in certain thinking tasks ...“ Those of us who are married know this — and are glad of it. It helps me that Patty's often more sensitive than I am. None of this means, however, that a given girl might not be a brilliant mathematician — only that, all things being equal, mathematicians are more LIKELY to be male than female.

Ideologues like Hopkins don't care about the facts. Like the villains in C. S. Lewis's THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, their goal is to re-make humanity in a more amenable image. That begins with denying the obvious and punishing those who dare to point it out — even if his title is the “president of Harvard.”

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• “Harvard president criticized for comments on women in science,” Boston Globe, 17 January 2005.

• Marcella Bombardieri, “Summers' remarks on women draw fire,” Boston Globe, 16 January 2005.

• George F. Will, “Harvard president pays high price for his hypothesis,” Sacramento Bee, 27 January 2005.

• William Saletan, “Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head: The pseudo-feminist show trial of Larry Summers,” Slate, 21 January 2005.

• Nicholas Wade, “Y Chromosome Depends on Itself to Survive,” New York Times, 19 June 2003. (Archived article; costs $2.95 to retrieve.)

• Rosie Mestel, “Brain Study Focuses on Gender Identity,” Los Angeles Times, 20 October 2003, A14. (Adobe Acrobat Reader required.)

• Walter E. Williams, “Campus exercise in anti-intellectualism,” Washington Times, 2 February 2005.

• Daniel J. Hemel, “Summers' Comments on Women and Science Draw Ire,” Harvard Crimson, 17 January 2005.

• Steven Pinker, “Sex Ed: The Science of Difference,” New Republic, 7 February 2005.

• Martin Peretz, “Body of Evidence,” New Republic, 4 February 2005.

• Andrew Sullivan, “Provocations,” New Republic, 19 January 2005. (Available to subscribers only.)

• C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Scribner, 2003 edition).

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Copyright © 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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On the seventeenth of December in the year 1840, Charlotte Diggs Moon, later to be known as Lottie Moon, was born in the small Virginia town of Viewmont. The third of seven children and the second of four daughters, Lottie was born into a family of considerable wealth and power. Her ancestry included “English royal favorites, Quaker scholars, colonial governors, heroes of duels and of the American Revolution, and a Lady Gordon known as 'The White Rose of Scotland'“ (Hyatt p.94). She grew up on a Virginia tobacco plantation surrounded by her family, servants, and several thousand acres of land.

Unlike most women during her time, Charlotte had many opportunities to succeed due to her high education and extensive knowledge. She was educated at the Albemarle Female Institute where, at her 1861 graduation where she received a master's degree in classics, she earned the reputation of being one of “the first southern women [along with her four classmates] ever to earn the A.M.” (Hyatt p.95). Another important occurrence in college took place when Lottie reluctantly attended a campus revival only to discover that it would forever change her life. She has said, about the revival, “I went to the service to scoff, and returned to my room praying all night” (Jeffreys p.1). While this was Lottie's first true connection with God and His word, her second connection, a sermon by Reverend Headden would be by far more powerful than the first.

In addition to her education, Lottie's strength and determination as a woman, and more importantly as a woman of faith, was due in large part to the influence of her mother and her sisters. In 1852, Edward Moon, Lottie's father, died in a riverboat accident. From then on, her house was a complete matriarch with her mother in charge of everything that went on in regards to the house life as well as the plantation. Under the influence of her mother, Lottie and her siblings all grew into very individualistic and strong-minded adults. Her older sister, Orianna, refused to go to finishing schools, became the first woman to earn a medical degree south of the Mason-Dixon line, and was a Lucy Stone feminist (Hyatt p.94). Even though Lottie was not known as a true feminist, she absorbed much of her mother's and sister's spirit and independence. This independence would later help her as she would spend forty years of her life as a missionary in the North Chinese cities of Tengchow and P'ingtu.

In the 1860s, Lottie taught in the states of Alabama and Kentucky, where she met a woman by the name of Anna Cunningham Safford, and together they started a female high school in Cartersville, GA in 1871. Lottie was soon dissatisfied with teaching and sought something else, but did not know exactly what her destiny was until she went to church one day. That particular day, the Reverend Headden was giving his sermon on the topic, “Lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.” That sermon struck a chord in Lottie and she knew that day that her destiny was to become a missionary and to spread God's word. She mentioned that she was interested in going to China to follow in the destiny that God had set for her. Many thought that this move to China was extremely drastic, for how could a woman “raised in the midst of culture, society, and educational advantages” leave all of this behind for a foreign and unknown land only “to live in poverty and difficulty” (Creweburkeville.com p.1)? Disregarding other people's concerns, Lottie followed her vocation, and left for North China, following her younger sister, Edmonia, who had already been there for a year as a missionary.

In December 1873, Lottie Moon was greeted in Tengchow, China by two other missionaries in the North China Mission, which, at the time, consisted of Martha and T.P Crawford, Sally Holmes, and Edmonia Moon. There, she began working in a group with the other women missionaries that was known as Women's Work. “Women's work was in a sense a feminist movement, obviously, but is rationale and basic orientation were always evangelistic. The main goal was to save the souls of Chinese women, for their own sakes and because the men would eventually follow” (Hyatt p86). Lottie participated in Women's Work for the majority of the time that she was in China and saw it grow as an accepted missionary group. Upon arriving in Tengchow, she was instantly intrigued by the Chinese people, noting that they “depicted an interesting mixture of heathenism with advanced culture and ethical teachings” (Hyatt p96). The first few years in Tengchow were a period of personal adjustment where Lottie remained close to home and close to her sister. She initially tried to establish a boarding school for girls of upper-class families in Tengchow, but after 6 years, she only had 15 pupils (Creweburkeville.com p.1). While she saw an increasing number of students at her school, she didn't feel as though she was reaching out to enough people, and that, as a servant of God and His Word, she needed to do more. There were other important problems going on in Lottie's life during this same time period. One dealt with her sister, Edmonia, and the other with Dr. Crawford Toy.

Edmonia, who was still a young woman at age 19, was not adapting well to her missionary life in China. She constantly complained of different illnesses and shocked the other missionaries with her constantly obnoxious behavior. Not only was she becoming a problem to the North China Mission, but also the Chinese people found her overwhelming and rude. Eventually Edmonia became too much to bear and Lottie escorted her back to Virginia and stayed with her until she was well again. As soon as Edmonia had recovered, Lottie immediately requested more funds to be sent back to China and was returned on Christmas Eve. The other problem that Lottie faced involved her fiancé, Dr. Crawford Toy. After refusing his proposal several times, Lottie finally agreed to marry Dr. Toy, but the engagement was called off once again due to his religious beliefs. Dr. Toy was fascinated with Darwinism and the theory of evolution, all contradictory to Lottie's beliefs as well as her mission in China. She decided that she could not love a man who was not a follower of God as she was and broke off the engagement. She described her emotional conflict between God and Dr. Toy when she stated, “God had first claim on my life, and since the two conflicted, there could be no question about the result” (Hyatt p.99). This decision was also a huge turning point in Lottie's life in that it signified her complete devotion to God and the church as she surrendered herself to carrying out his will. But when she set off for China the second time, she was even more alone than ever for she lacked both her fiancé affections and her sister's support.

Lottie Moon faced many challenges during her time in China, including adapting to a new style of dress, speaking a new language, eating different food, and trying to understand a new culture with different traditions and ways of life than her own. Lottie eventually overcame these obstacles, as she became a fluent speaker of Chinese, she adapted their style of dress, and even angered a male missionary when she refused to shake his hand because it was a custom that the Chinese people thought to be weird (Hyatt p107). One of her biggest challenges in China was coping with the gender conflict. There, she clashed with the male leadership and refused to follow by their rules, demanding, “What women want who come to China is free opportunity to do the largest possible work. What women have a right to demand is perfect equality” (Jeffreys p1). Lottie was only allowed to teach God's word to women and children because it was uncustomary for a woman to preach to a man; so peasant women became the focus of her work. In reaching out to women and children, she hoped that some of her influence would rub off on the men since she wasn't able to reach them directly. However, later on in her life, pastors and men of high position came seeking her for conferences because, through her determination in spreading the word of God, she had become an inspiration to the people of North China whose lives she touched (Creweburkeville.com p3).

In total, Lottie spent four decades in China, dividing her time mainly between two towns, Tengchow and P'ingtu. While she traveled occasionally to surrounding villages, she considered both of these places her home. Her life in Tengchow was completely different from that in P'ingtu. Tengchow was a city that was wealthier, busier, and harder to reach the closed hearts of the citizens, whereas P'ingtu was much poorer but was home to a more devoted and open-minded community. Lottie was constantly torn between the two villages; she had the comfort of better-living and the support of her American missionaries in the city, but she had the attention and friendship of those in the country to aid in her ultimate mission. Also, when Lottie lived in Tengchow, she had a nice house that was referred to as “Little Cross Roads” by those who visited, but when she was in P'ingtu, she lived as a commoner in an attempt to reach the locals by becoming one of them. In P'ingtu Lottie initially picked up the habit of wearing the traditional dress and living without any of the luxuries that she had while living in the city. At first the village was opposed to her and ran down the street after her calling her “Old Devil Woman,” but she continued in her determined manner to prove to them that there was nothing special about her and this attitude eventually earned her the respect of the majority of the community and more friends than she had made in ten years of living in Tengchow. She also adjusted her method of reaching out to people, waiting now for them to approach her, and stated that “we need to make friends before we can make converts” (Hyatt p109). While she reached more people in P'ingtu, as she got older, Lottie remained in her house in Tengchow where she could receive the help of the other missionaries.

Another well-known trait of Lottie Moon was her prolific letter writing, which were often pleas for money in support of missions. “Most of her writing was directed toward Baptist women in appeal for foreign mission support. She saw that women were the ones who saved the Southern Methodist Church, so she believed they could do the same with the Baptist church” (Cobern p1). In fact, when she asked that all money in support of missionaries be handled solely by the women of the church, she spawned a religious, feminist movement in the United States by helping form the Women's Missionary Union. Her writings were printed in missionary magazines all over the world and helped raise awareness of her experiences in China as well as the need for more missionaries to China and all over the world. Probably her most famous letter was dated the 15th of September 1887, and it is credited with providing the inspiration for the creation of a Southern Baptist offering to support international missions, which later became the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. In part of this letter she wrote: “In a word, Southern Methodist women, in one year, have contributed to missions, clear of all expenses, nearly sixty-five thousand dollars! Doesn't this put us Baptist women to shame? For one, I confess I am heartily ashamed” (Moon p1). Part of Lottie's success as a missionary was her ability to touch the hearts of others through her writings to gain financial support, while at the same time inspiring others to become missionaries themselves to help spread God's message to foreign lands and even within the United States.

In 1912, nearly forty years after Lottie initially embarked to China, her mission came to an end. Due to the famine outbreaks that were occurring in China, Lottie contributed her salary as well as her inheritance in an effort to help out those in need by forming a relief service. Her savings dwindled away and her relief efforts were failing, and Lottie fell into a deep depression. In an attempt to sympathize with the people that she had grown to love in the country that she had grown to call home, she started starving herself. Her condition worsened and when the other missionaries became deeply concerned, they put her on a boat to be sent back to the Virginia where she could be nursed to health. However, on Christmas Eve, 1912, Charlotte Diggs Moon died aboard a ship while docked at a port in Japan. She was cremated according the Japanese law and the ashes were sent back to Virginia, where, on the marble marker next to her burial site the words were written, “Faithful unto Death,” and “Forty years a missionary of Southern Baptist Convention in China” (Creweburkeville.com, p2).

The teachings of Lottie Moon are so lasting because her ideas were so radical to the Chinese people and to the missionary in general. Being a Southern Belle from a wealthy and privileged family, she made radical feminist statements that caused controversy in missionary magazines all over the world. She once wrote “Simple justice demands that women should have equal rights with men in mission meetings and in the conduct of their work,” which some this as being “improper in her role as a female missionary” (Cobern p1). Her actions were also radical, as she once walked through an angry anti-Christian mob and demanded that “they would have to kill her first,” and eventually broke up the mob. In fact, during her four decades in China, she endured the bombings of the Japanese, lived through the ravages of the Civil War, and even convinced feuding warlords to cease-fire as she traveled across battlefields (Bridges p1). She was never afraid of death, for she always believed that she was in the hands of God and that when her time was over, then it was God's wish. Lottie also knew that she had to be different and have radical ideas in order for her to achieve her mission. If she had remained “in her proper role” as a woman, then Lottie Moon would be just another missionary who failed to convert people to the Gospel. And the institutions that came out of her extreme ideas and actions, such as the Women's Missionary Union and Women's Work, have ensured her immortality.

Lottie's influence is as prominent today, more than 100 years later, as it was when she was living in North China. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering donations totaled more than $120 million in the year 2001, where all of the proceeds go to support the missionary movement and missionaries who are currently abroad following in Lottie's footsteps (www.imb.org, p1). The first Lottie Moon Christmas Offering was collected in 1888, and the donations have been steadily increasing up to the current date. It is no coincidence that the Lottie Moon offering is during the Christmas season since all of her most important life events happened in the month of December: her birth, her first arrival in China, and her death. While Lottie gave everything she had to offer to the Chinese, ironically, it was her failure to arouse interest in others in giving to missions that insured her most lasting legacy (Jeffreys p1). Lottie's influence can still be seen in North China, where there is a great openness to the gospel. Now that her teachings have been rooted in North China for several generations, the people of North China have accepted the gospel and are traveling to other provinces in order to spread God's word and keep the memory of Lottie Moon alive (Bridges p1). The name of Lottie Moon has become a legend among missionaries and Baptists and she has been described as “setting her face like flint toward China and using every ounce of her life to tell the good news and wrap her God-filled life among the broken ones she met” (Rogers p1). Even in her death, she is still able to touch the lives of thousands each year by helping others continue her work to spread God's word and follow His destiny.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bridges, Erich. “The Power of a Life Freely Given.” International Missions Emphasis. . 1 Feb. 2002.

Cobern, Kristie. “Charlotte 'Lottie' Diggs Moon.” Women of Faith. 3 Feb. 2002 .

Hyatt, Jr., Irwin T. Our Ordered Lives Confess. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Jeffreys, Mary Ann. “Lottie Moon: A life poured out in China.” Crosswalk.com: The Intersection of Faith and Life. 2 Feb. 2002 .

“Meet Lottie Moon: One Rebellious Lady.” Crewe Burkeville Chamber of Commerce 5 November 2000. 2 February 2002 .

Moon, Lottie D. “The letter that started it all.” International Missions Emphasis. . 3 Feb. 2002.

Rogers, Jenny. “Jenny's Light and 'Lottie's China.'“ International Missions Emphasis. . 31 Jan. 2002

*

“In the last four decades, a feminist revolution has swept the globe,” observes W. Bradford Wilcox. Indeed, a rising tide of feminist concerns has reached almost every part of the world, with ideological feminism exerting its greatest influence in Western Europe and North America. The feminist revolution Wilcox describes has brought, he acknowledges, “many beneficial changes to our world.” Nevertheless, the same movement has “brought less welcome developments to the global scene,” and one of the most unwelcome of these developments is what Wilcox describes as “the androgynous impulse.”

W. Bradford Wilcox serves as Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and is the author of SOFT PATRIARCHS, NEW MEN: HOW CHRISTIANITY SHAPES FATHERS AND HUSBANDS. In the November 2005 issue of TOUCHSTONE magazine, Wilcox confronts the “androgynous impulse” in his article, “Reconcilable Differences: What Social Sciences Show About the Complementarity of the Sexes and Parenting.”

In one sense, androgyny -- the blending of the sexes and the denial of gender differences -- has been part of ideological feminism from the beginning. The androgynous have denied basic gender differences by suggesting that distinct roles for men and women, along with distinctive gifts and abilities, are a product of oppressive social conditioning. The suggestion that men and women differ in any basic respect -- other than the biological -- has been roundly denied and denounced.

Wilcox traces this “androgynous impulse” to international bodies associated with the United Nations. He documents the role played by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women [CEDAW]. “This committee has called on countries like Armenia and Belarus to end public policies and practices that support distinctive maternal roles for women, such as Mother's Day and maternal leave policies,” Wilcox reports. “Instead, it and other proponents of this type of feminist agenda would like to see public policies that promote an androgynous parenting ethic where fathers and mothers devote equal amounts of time to parenting, and parent with essentially the same style of parent-child interaction.”

In Great Britain, this is currently a matter of hot controversy. The British government is considering legislation that would equalize parental leave policies for men and women -- and would encourage men to stay at home with their young children so that their wives can re-enter the workplace. Similarly, the current government in Spain has argued for making paternal leave MANDATORY in order to equalize male and female roles.

Wilcox sees a big problem with this approach. “The primary problem with this androgynous impulse is that it does not recognize the unique talents that men and women bring to the most fundamental unit of society: the family. A growing body of social scientific evidence confirms what common sense and many of the world's religions tell us: Men and women do indeed bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise.”

Thus, Wilcox argues that governments should seek to protect rather than prohibit the distinctive and complementary parenting roles and styles that fathers and mothers represent.

For several years now, Bradford Wilcox has been producing some of the most interesting research in the social sciences. His path-breaking work SOFT PATRIARCHS, NEW MEN turned the conventional scholarly wisdom on its head. The prevailing orthodoxy in the social sciences assumed that conservative evangelical fathers would be less engaged with their children and more likely to be characterized by harsh and abusive parenting styles. Wilcox found the opposite to be the case -- evangelical Christian fathers tended to be MORE engaged and LESS harsh than the population at large.

Now, he turns his considerable talents and scholarship to the issue of the complementarity of the sexes in the task of parenting the young.

At the onset, Wilcox acknowledges that not every mother or every father will possess all of the sex-specific gifts he will describe. “Nevertheless, MOST fathers and mothers possess sex-specific talents related to parenting,” he insists, “and society should organize parenting and work roles to take advantage of the way in which these talents tend to be distributed in sex-specific ways.”

Beyond this, he argues that the task of raising children requires many different parenting talents, and one sex “tends to excel in each of them.” For this reason, “society should build on these comparative sex-specific advantages by letting each sex take the lead in the domains where it excels.” Of course, this means confronting the androgynous impulse head-on.

Wilcox first takes a look at the distinctive talents of mothers. Essentially, he explains that mothers bring three particular talents to the task of parenting: “their capacity to breastfeed, their ability to understand infants and children, and their ability to offer nurture and comfort to their children.”

Ideological feminism doesn't know what to do with breastfeeding. On the one hand, the discipline of breastfeeding requires a considerable investment of time on the part of the mother, making her rapid re-entry into the workplace unlikely. On the other hand, breastfeeding is understood to be tied to infant health and is a natural means for feeding and nurturing babies. As Wilcox explains, “The medical literature on the advantages of breastfeeding could not be clearer. Breast milk offers infants a range of sugars, nutrients, and antibodies unavailable in infant formula. It protects infants against at least eleven serious maladies, from ear infections to sudden infant death syndrome.” At this point, Wilcox acknowledges, “Mothers clearly have a very sex-specific advantage in parenting.” This is an advantage recognized, honored, and respected by most husbands.

Nevertheless, Wilcox insists that maternal advantages do not end with breastfeeding. He suggests that mothers excel in interpreting the physical and linguistic cues sent by their children. From the beginning, mothers are more sensitive to the distinctive cries of infants -- able to distinguish between a cry of pain and a cry for attention. Beyond this, mothers are better than fathers at interpreting the emotional state of their children. This maternal talent is extended throughout the child's school years and adolescence. As Wilcox recounts, “Adolescents report that their mothers know them better than their fathers do.”

Does biology play a part? Wilcox points to research that indicates that mothers “are primed by their hormones to engage in nurturing behavior such as hugging, praising, or cuddling.” Specifically, the hormone peptide oxytocin, released in a woman's body during pregnancy and breastfeeding, may make mothers more interested in bonding with children. Whatever the cause, mothers tend to be better at nurturing and seem to find greater enjoyment in the nurturing task. “Children know this,” Wilcox observes.

Fathers, on the other hand, “excel when it comes to discipline, play, and challenging their children to embrace life's challenges.” This “array of distinctive talents” indicates the importance of fathers to the parenting task.

Wilcox observes that mothers discipline their children more often than do fathers due to the larger amount of time they spend with the children. Nevertheless, “fathers do have a comparative advantage in this area,” Wilcox insists. He explains: “Typically, fathers engender more fear than mothers in their children because their comparatively greater physical strength and size, along with the pitch and inflection of their voice, telegraph toughness to their children. Fathers also are more assertive than mothers in their dealings with their children, and are less likely to bend family rules or principles for their children. In a word, fathers tend to be firmer and more compelling disciplinarians than mothers.”

This appears to be especially important in the raising of sons. Fathers “are more likely than mothers to get their boys to respond appropriately to their disciplinary strategy,” Wilcox argues, “both because of their uniquely firm approach to discipline and because boys seem more likely to respond to discipline from someone of the same sex.”

In addition, fathers play with their children in a distinctive way. Fathers are more likely to be physically engaged with their children -- including infants and toddlers -- and to be involved in play just for the sake of play. This paternal play plays a role in building social skills and a sense of self-control. “The playful side to fathers teaches their children how to regulate their feelings and behavior as they interact with others,” Wilcox explains.

Fathers also play an important role in challenging children to face the outside world. “Compared to mothers, fathers are more likely to encourage their children to take up difficult tasks, to seek out novel experiences, and to endure pain and hardship without yielding,” Wilcox notes.

Interestingly, Wilcox argues that fathers' strengths in the arenas of discipline, play, and challenging behavior are tied to the distinctive position fathers fill in the family structure. “Because of the smaller role they play in procreation and because they do not have the same hormonal priming to engage in nurturing behavior as mothers do, fathers are -- to some degree -- more distant from their children and, more generally, from the daily emotional dynamics of family life than are mothers,” he asserts.

Some fathers may translate this distance into neglect. Nevertheless, the attentive father takes advantage of this distance “to engage their children in a distinctively fatherly way.” By this, Wilcox means that fathers often feel freer to challenge their children and to be firm in discipline. Accordingly, fathers are more likely to push their children toward an adventurous future.

Wilcox understands that the most controversial dimension of his research has to do with the distinctive role of fathers. He argues that boys “learn self-control ... from playing with and being disciplined by a loving father.” Thus, boys who live with engaged fathers are much less likely to demonstrate the overly-aggressive behavior of what is described as “compensatory masculinity.” Without the controlling influence of a father, boys are much more prone to translate masculinity into violent behavior.

But fathers also play an important role in the raising of girls. The research indicates that fathers fulfill a very important function in minimizing the likelihood that their daughters will be sexually active prior to marriage. As Wilcox explains, “Fathers also protect their daughters from premarital sexual activity by setting clear disciplinary lines for their daughters, monitoring their whereabouts, and by signaling to young men that sexual activity will not be tolerated.”

The androgynous impulse represents a pernicious influence in society at large. By denying that men and women bring distinctive gifts to the parenting tasks as fathers and mothers, those who push this agenda weaken the family and, if successful, would rob children of the complementary parenting styles they need.

Wilcox's point is clear -- the culture at large (and governmental authorities in particular) should respect rather than denigrate the distinctive parenting talents brought by mothers and fathers. His research should also serve to remind moms and dads of our shared responsibilities in the raising of our children. We should respect each other's distinctive talents and responsibilities.

Beyond this, Christians should understand that the Creator has created the family and the roles of mothers and fathers so that children would receive all that is necessary for them to be raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Above all, Christian parents should understand the gravity of this responsibility and should see the complementarity of the sexes as a testimony to the glory of God.

We are indebted to Bradford Wilcox for reminding us that moms AND dads are important. Just how confused must one be in order to miss this?

*

I recently had the opportunity to meet with several youth ministers from Southern Baptist churches here in Missouri. Each impressed me as having a deep commitment to biblical authority and personal passion for Jesus Christ. As we discussed the challenges facing current youth ministers, a concern all shared was the fact that many youth, including youth in evangelical churches, are dabbling in Wicca.

So, what is Wicca? The word “wicca” was an old English word which meant “shaman.” The word was reintroduced into popular usage by Englishman Gerald Gardner (1888-1964), who is widely considered to be the father of the modern religion known as Wicca.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Gardner began publicly advocating a revival of ancient pagan ideals. Gardner claimed to have received much of his belief system from a secret coven of witches which had continued a clandestine existence since pre-Christian times, a claim rejected by scholars today. More likely, Gardner simply combined various non-Christian beliefs he gathered from multiple sources into his own neo-pagan system, not the least of which included ideas from the notorious Aleister Crowley.

Wicca is pantheistic in its worldview. This means that it denies the Creator/creature distinction mandated by the Bible. Thus, at the core of Wicca is a form of nature worship. Gardner himself was a polytheist who advocated two gods: a male “horned god” and a female goddess. The number of devotees to Wicca has increased exponentially in the last two decades. As this has happened, more emphasis has been placed on the goddess of Wicca, especially among neo-pagan feminists who believe worshipping a goddess leads to more freedom for women. Some followers of Wicca self-identify as witches. It is not accurate to say that Wiccans are Satanists, though the religion is certainly unholy.

Two ethical implications of Wicca seem to make the religion particularly appealing to teens. First, Wicca advocates moral autonomy as opposed to accountability to the God of the Bible. Secondly, and following closely on the heels of the first, Wicca celebrates sexual licentiousness. For example, in her book “Philosophy of Wicca,” Wicca devotee Amber Laine Fisher plainly states the implications of goddess worship for sexual ethics:

Goddess religion and goddess spirituality endeavor to release us

from the taboos of sex and sexuality, to untie our hands, freeing

us from certain paradigms or ideals that we are taught to accept

as ‘normal.’ The general Western public fears homosexuality,

fears sadomasochism, fears polyamorous relationships. For

whatever reason (and there are many), we as a society have deemed

these types of behavior as socially unacceptable or at the very

best ‘fringe’ -– and for what reason? Who are we to decide what

is normal, what is healthy, what is appropriate for someone

else?

But Fisher misses the point. Trapped in her pantheistic prison, she is unable to acknowledge that God, who has revealed himself in the Bible and through Jesus Christ, defines appropriate sexual boundaries.

Sadly, some Christian teens and adults attempt to combine what they perceive to be the “best” in Wicca with the “best” in Christianity. In so doing, they are making the same mistake which led to Divine judgment in the Old Testament. Repeatedly, Ancient Israel attempted to combine worship of the one true God with the pagan sexual immorality of Baal and the other Canaanite deities. As a result, “The LORD rejected all the descendants of Israel and afflicted them and gave them into the hand of plunderers until He cast them out of His sight” (2 Kings 17:20).

By blurring the distinction between creature and creator, Wicca encourages sexual chaos, inter-generational conflict and violence. Paul makes clear the dangers of worshipping creation in Romans 1:18-32. Romans 1:25 in particular stresses the tragedy of nature worship: “For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” As a result, sexual chaos followed (Romans 1:26-27) as well as inter-generational conflict (“Disobedient to parents,” Romans 1:30) and violence (“envy, murder, strife,” Romans 1:29).

Books advocating Wicca are readily available at any Barnes & Noble or at thousands of locations on the Web. Pray our youth ministers will have the courage of Elijah on Mount Carmel as they face their own pagan confrontation.

________

Alan Branch is vice president for student development at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri.

Suppose you picked up a book about raising children, based on a “groundbreaking study” by a research psychologist, and on the back among the endorsements, you saw blurbs not by other psychologists or scholars, but from a novelist, an actress, and the former editor of People magazine. Do you think maybe you'd be a little concerned?

In the case of the new book RAISING BOYS WITHOUT MEN, by Peggy Drexler and Linden Gross, your concern would be fully justified, because those endorsements pretty much set the tone for what's inside. The book looks reassuring enough on the surface, with the Ph.D. after Peggy Drexler's name, and the list of prestigious universities where she's worked. But the old saw about judging a book by its cover has never been truer. Because despite that Ph.D. and all the rest of it, RAISING BOYS WITHOUT MEN is just about the most sloppily researched book I've ever come across.

And that's a very dangerous thing, because this book has the potential to mislead a lot of people who are honestly trying to do what's right for their families. The premise of RAISING BOYS WITHOUT MEN is that single moms or lesbian moms can raise their sons to be “exceptional men” even if the boys don't have a father figure in their lives. That's a premise that is very attractive to mothers who are going it on their own, for whatever reason.

But mothers who read this book looking for affirmation may not notice that what Drexler airily calls her “innovative and groundbreaking research” has major flaws. What she did was spend several years visiting, testing, and interviewing a group of single and lesbian mothers and their sons. She states that she also did the same with boys from traditional families — although, significantly, she gives these boys very little mention in the book.

And that was it. No nationwide surveys, no follow-up studies, very few objective measurements of behavior. Drexler does cite some scientific studies here and there, but she freely admits a lot of them are considered “controversial literature” — code for dubious.

Yet somehow Drexler managed to get this work approved as her dissertation, then published it in the journal Gender and Psychology, and finally — you guessed it — expanded it into a book. How was it that no one raised concerns about her research methods? Why didn't anyone notice that her research sample was made up of self-selected mothers in higher-income households whose childbearing was much more carefully planned than most? How did it escape everyone's notice that most of these boys are still in their preteens and teens, and there's been no opportunity yet to follow them into adulthood? Why did so many people ignore the fact that Drexler makes sweeping generalizations about the way mothers act and the way fathers act, and emphasizes only those facts that support her thesis while pushing aside those that don't?

Good questions. And they are never answered.

And what conclusions does Drexler reach from her carefully selected and airbrushed “facts”? Read “BreakPoint” tomorrow to find out just how far this supposedly reputable researcher was willing to go to support the cause of gay and lesbian parenting.

________

Copyright (c) 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

"The trouble with you is that you make your decisions on the basis of appearance. You must recognize that we belong to Christ." -- Job 14:5 NLT

Two weeks before Christmas, on December 12, 1840, a baby girl was born into an aristocratic plantation family in Albemarle County, Virginia. Her name was Charlotte Diggs Moon, but everyone called her “Lottie.” She grew to just four feet three inches, yet her intellect and force of personality were enormous. Lottie spoke six languages and earned a master's degree in education in 1861.

Lottie came from a family of dedicated Southern Baptists, but she became a staunch skeptic. Yet, it would be her intellect and skepticism that would bring her to faith one sleepless night in December 1858 as she pondered a message by Dr. John Broadus.

At age thirty-three, Lottie heard a call to missions “as clear as a bell.” In July 1873 the foreign mission board of the Southern Baptist Convention appointed her its first unmarried missionary to China. She tirelessly advocated for the needs of the people of China. In 1888 she persuaded SBC women to take an annual missions offering on Christmas Eve. By 1912, despite such gifts, thousands of people were dying every day in famine-ravaged Shantung Province.

At seventy-two, Lottie Moon was coming home. But that same night, aboard a ship off Japan, she died — of complications from starvation. A few months before she had written, “If I had a thousand lives, I would give them all for the women of China.” The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering continues to this day, and in 2005 aimed to raise $150 million.

________

Adapted from The One Year® Book Of Christian History by E. Michael and Sharon Rusten (Tyndale) pp 694-95

*

Are stay at home moms a threat to civilization? Those of you who are shocked by this question should take note of the fact that ABC's “Good Morning America” program devoted segments to this question on two successive days, featuring the arguments of Linda Hirshman, a prominent feminist thinker.

“I am saying an educated, competent adult's place is in the office,” Hirshman told “Good Morning America.” In other words, moms who stay at home with their children have given themselves to a calling that no educated or competent adult should desire or accept

Hirshman threw herself into the debate over motherhood last year, when she responded to a spate of media reports that indicated an amazing trend -- large numbers of highly educated young women on elite college and university campuses indicated that they did not intend to pursue a career outside the home, but to give themselves to being wives and mothers.

Hirshman's response was vehement and verbose. Writing in the pages of THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, Hirshman argued that “feminism has largely failed in its goals.” As she explained, “There are few women in the corridors of power, and marriage is essentially unchanged. The number of women at universities exceeds the number of men. But, more than a generation after feminism, the number of women in elite jobs just doesn't come close.”

According to Hirshman's diagnosis, this problem is largely traceable to the fact that too many women are staying at home with their children. In particular, she attacked the notion that women should feel free to choose motherhood as a life calling. In attacking “choice feminism,” Hirshman asserts that women who give themselves to mothering undermine the status of all women and threaten the emergence of an egalitarian civilization.

In her article in THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, Hirshman reviewed a wealth of data. Interestingly, the statistics she expects her readers to find so disappointing will be the cause of surprise and hope for those who value the family, parenthood, and the responsibility of child rearing. As she explains, the census numbers for all working mothers have fallen modestly since 1998, after having leveled off around 1990.

Concerned by these statistics, Hirshman decided to undertake some research of her own. She selected a sample of young women who had been identified as brides in the “Sunday Styles” section of THE NEW YORK TIMES in 1996. Hirshman believed that “the brilliantly educated and accomplished brides” of her sample would be indicative of the way this generation of young women is approaching career, marriage, and motherhood.

As Hirshman relates: “At marriage, they included a vice president of client communication, a gastroenterologist, a lawyer, an editor, and a marketing executive. In 2003 and 2004, I tracked them down and called them. I interviewed about 80 percent of the 41 women who announced their weddings over three Sundays in 1996. Around 40 years old, college graduates with careers: Who was more likely than they to be reaping feminism's promise of opportunity? Imagine my shock when I found almost all the brides from the first Sunday at home with their children. Statistical anomaly? Nope. Same result for the next Sunday. And the one after that.”

This section of her article is startling, to say the least. Like Hirshman, I must admit that I am surprised by her data. Nevertheless, the fact that so many talented, highly educated, and promising young women were giving themselves to motherhood is a source of genuine hope and encouragement.

Hirshman went on to describe additional findings in her research. “Ninety percent of the brides I found had had babies. Of the 30 with babies, five were still working full time. Twenty-five, or 85 percent, were not working full time. Of those not working full time, 10 were working part time but often a long way from their prior career paths. And half the married women with children were not working at all.”

Beyond Hirshman's data, research indicates that far more women than men drop out of the workforce to take care of their children. In addition to this, recent research indicates that women with graduate or professional degrees are only slightly more likely to remain in the workforce after having children than women with only one year of college. “When their children are infants (under a year), 54 percent of females with graduate or professional degrees are not working full time (18 percent are working part time and 36 percent are not working at all). Even among those who have children who are not infants, 41 percent are not working full time (18 percent are working part time and 23 percent are not working at all).”

From Hirshman's perspective, it only gets worse. “This isn't only about daycare,” she admits. “Half my TIMES brides quit BEFORE the first baby came. In interviews, at least half of them expressed a hope never to work again. None had realistic plans to work. More importantly, when they quit, they were already alienated from their work or at least not committed to a life of work.”

The very fact that these women turned their back on promising careers seems virtually inconceivable to Linda Hirshman. When a female MBA expressed her lack of connection with the men at her previous workplace who got so excited about making deals, Hirshman observes all this with incredulity.

In Hirshman's view, all this simply proves that the feminist revolution was not revolutionary enough. In other words, the revolution that opened the workplace to women did nothing, in her view, to fundamentally reshape marriage and the family power structure. “Why did this happen? The answer I discovered -- an answer neither feminist leaders nor women themselves want to face -- is that while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home.”

Thus, the problem of “the unreconstructed family” is the concern of Hirshman and many of her fellow feminists. Hirshman, retired as a distinguished visiting professor at Brandeis University, had previously taught academic courses on subjects such as “sexual bargaining.” Infused with the ideology of radical feminism, she now argues that the entire pattern of gender relations must be revolutionized.

“Great as liberal feminism was, once it retreated to choice the movement had no language to use on the gendered ideology of the family. Feminists could not say, 'Housekeeping and child-rearing in the nuclear family is not interesting and not socially validated. Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power, and honor.”

Clearly, what she argues that liberal feminism was unable to propose, she now intends to take up as her central argument. She clearly believes that housekeeping and child-rearing are NOT interesting and should NOT be socially validated.

In her appearance on “Good Morning America,” Hirshman attacked the notion that women can feel fulfilled and validated in the calling of motherhood. As the ABC report indicates, “Hirshman says working is also a matter of feeling fulfilled. She doesn't buy into the arguments of many homemakers who say taking care of the family is the most fulfilling thing they could imagine.” Hirshman's response is a demonstration of breathtaking arrogance. “I would like to see a description of their daily lives that substantiates that position,” she said. “One of the things I've done working on my book is to read a lot of the diaries online, and their description of their lives does not sound particularly interesting or fulfilling for a complicated person, for a complicated, educated person.”

Get that? Hirshman is telling America's moms that their work is fundamentally unimportant, uninteresting, and fundamentally unworthy of any “complicated” and “educated” person.

Women who stay at home with their children, turning their back on promising careers, “are letting down the team,” she asserts. They are rejecting the very feminist ideal that the radical ideologues have adopted and they are undermining the cause of all women, in Hirshman's condescending view.

Make no mistake -- Hirshman does not want women to have any real choice in the matter. “Choice feminism” is an abysmal failure, in her view, because it validates what should never be validated -- motherhood.

Her answer? “Women who want to have sex and children with men as well as good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power need guidance, and they need it early. Step one is simply to begin talking about flourishing. In so doing, feminism will be returning to its early, judgmental roots. This may anger some, but it should sound the alarm before the next generation winds up in the same situation. Next, feminists will have to start offering young women not choices and not utopian dreams but SOLUTIONS they can enact on their own. Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy.”

There is more. Hirshman argues that allowing motherhood as a choice is “bad for women individually.” Hirshman is ready to tell young women that they have no inherent RIGHT to choose a status lower, in Hirshman's view, from what they should seek and demand in the public sphere.

“A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one's capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one's own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world. Measured against these time-tested standards, the expensively educated upper-class moms will be leading lesser lives.”

This is stunning stuff. In Hirshman's view, a woman's choice to deploy her “capacities for speech and reason” as a mother is not prudent or acceptable. Beyond this, she seems to demonstrate an inherent dislike for children in general, and infants in particular. She accuses stay at home moms of “bearing most of the burden of the work always associated with the lowest caste.” She identifies these tasks as “sweeping and cleaning bodily waste,” and condemned mothers who were described in a press account as “vigilantly watching their babies for signs of excretion 24-7” as “untouchables” by choice.

The very fact that “Good Morning America” devoted two segments to Linda Hirshman and her attack on motherhood is a significant cultural development. Of course, the ABC program included voices that opposed Hirshman's arguments, but these arguments were considered newsworthy nonetheless.

Without doubt, Hirshman is speaking for a sizeable percentage of the cultural elite when she argues that “an educated, competent adult's place is in the office.” In the view of so many, the office and the professional workplace are the arenas where REAL life is lived and important work is done. The thought that motherhood could be a higher calling than law, medicine, finance, or any number of other professions is completely beyond her comprehension. Indeed, she sees the very logic of motherhood as undermining the entire feminist project.

Thus, when she argues that stay at home moms are “letting down the team,” she means to shame young women out of motherhood and back into the workplace. At the very least, she argues that mothers should have only one baby so that they can return to the workplace in short order.

The Christian response to this article must be a combination of refutation, amazement, and affirmation of motherhood. Hirshman's article and media appearances can serve to remind us all of the unspeakably high calling of motherhood and to the sacrifices that so many women make, day in and day out, to the raising of children, the nurture of the home, and the shaping of civilization itself.

I respond to Hirshman's arguments from a highly privileged position -- as the son, husband, and son-in-law of women who gave and give themselves to the calling of motherhood without reservation. They, like so many millions of other dedicated mothers, are the ones who demonstrate a wisdom and dedication that goes beyond anything a man can offer in terms of motherly intuition, loving devotion, and management challenges that would daunt the boldest FORTUNE 500 CEO.

Nevertheless, the best refutation of Hirshman's awful argument is the happiness experienced by so many mothers and the evidence of motherly love and attention in the lives of their children.

These women are not “letting down the team.” To the contrary, they are holding civilization together where civilization begins -- in the home.

*

The conventional wisdom reminds us that a man is often known by his enemies. The same is true for Christianity and, through centuries of heresy, schism, and apostasy, Christianity has collected a good number of enemies.

Now comes Matthew Fox, a former Dominican priest and current controversialist, who sets himself against orthodox Christianity and calls for “a new reformation” that would transform Christianity for the twenty-first century. Of course, it would also transform Christianity into something other than Christianity, but that is precisely what Fox intends.

Matthew Fox is no stranger to tumult and conflict. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1940, Fox was ordained a Roman Catholic priest of the Dominican order in 1967. After graduating from Aquinas Institute and the Institut Catholique de Paris, Fox became known for his method of combining non-Christian spiritualities with Christian symbolism. Fox's syncretism and rejection of core Christian beliefs led to conflict with the Vatican. From 1989 to 1990, Fox was officially silenced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Just three years later, he was expelled from the Dominican order.

In a statement published in his most recent book, Fox's conflict with the Vatican is described like this: “The principled objections to Fox's work on the part of the Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith were that he is a 'feminist theologian,' that he calls God 'Mother,' ... that he prefers 'Original Blessing' to 'Original Sin,' that he calls God 'child,' that he associates too closely with Native Americans, and that he does not condemn homosexuals.”

In more recent years, Fox established what he called the University of Creation Spirituality, now known as Wisdom University, based in Oakland, California. As the Web site of Wisdom University explains, “At most institutions of higher education, students engage in intense intellectual work, and success is largely based on one's ability to memorize information and capacity to express analytical thought. Art and physical exercise are generally optional electives. At Wisdom University, the pedagogy is designed to balance the body, head, heart and psyche as a single learning continuum. Each morning students begin with physical movement and chanting, called “body prayer.” They then engage in seminars on a range of relevant and intellectually challenging subjects, each of which has an extensive reading list and requires both pre-and post-papers. Each afternoon, students engage in 'art as meditation,' exploring a variety of intuitive and artistic expressions. Creativity is not an elective at Wisdom University. Like the wisdom schools in antiquity, learning is predicated on the unity of mind and heart, body and soul. The day is completed with a process session to help integrate the learning that is taking place on all levels.”

Now, for those unable to enroll at Wisdom University, Matthew Fox has brought his teachings to the masses in A NEW REFORMATION: CREATION SPIRITUALITY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHRISTIANITY. Of course, the book has a story, and that story is itself fascinating.

Scheduled to give a series of lectures in Germany, Fox realized that he would be speaking in the native land of Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger. The recent election of the pope, who was once head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that had silenced and censured Fox, offered the former Catholic priest his opportunity to stage a demonstration of his “creation spirituality” as an alternative to classical Christianity.

But what would Matthew Fox seize upon as his opportunity? “I prayed about it and one night, at 3:30 in the morning, I was awakened with an idea: Why not draw up some theses, just as Martin Luther had done five hundred years ago, that would speak to my concerns and those of the people from whom I was hearing? Why not reenact Luther's protest: the nailing of the theses to the church door in Wittenberg?”

As he recalls in his new book, he quickly sat down and drafted some of his own theses. By the time two hours had passed, “I found that I had poured ninety-five theses. One after another, they had tumbled out of me, and I was amazed.” In A NEW REFORMATION, Fox is now ready to share those many theses, which, he suggests, “represent a certain reformation -- and indeed transformation -- of church and religion for our times.”

Matthew Fox also decided to take his idea of ninety-five theses one step further -- he decided to hold a public event in Wittenberg, where he would nail a copy of his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg castle church. The plan did not go well. In Wittenberg, Fox and his cohorts were prevented from nailing the theses to the historic door and were required by civic authorities to stay at least forty-five feet away from the historic structure.

In the end, Fox was reduced to nailing his theses to a piece of leaning wood. Needless to say, the spectacle lacked something of the seriousness of Luther's call for a reformation of the church.

Matthew Fox clearly sees the Roman Catholic Church as the main target of his criticism. Nevertheless, his call for a new reformation is actually addressed to the entire Christian church, Protestants and other non-Roman Catholics included. Fox's catalogue of complaints against the Roman Catholic Church is long and laborious, including accusations of cover-ups of sexual scandals, the silencing of theological creativity, and injustice against the poor. When it comes to Protestantism, Fox describes the contemporary Protestant scene as “anemic, tired, boring, incurious, unadventurous, emasculated, compromising, confused, depressed, unmystical, lost, irrelevant, preoccupied with trivia, uninspired, one-dimensional, and burned out.” In response to all this, Fox calls for Christianity to “move from religion to spirituality.”

By now, most informed observers have learned to recognize what is being proposed when we encounter calls for “spirituality” rather than “religion.” In the contemporary context, this means the substitution of theological and philosophical creativity from orthodox Christianity -- the substitution of postmodern concepts of relativity for the notion of an objective truth.

Fox covers a host of concepts and proposes an odd mix of heresies within his ninety-five theses. He begins with the assertion that God is “both Mother and Father.” From this starting point he argues: “At this time in history God is more Mother than Father because the feminine is most missing and it is important to bring back gender balance.” Leaving aside for a moment the utter lack of biblical evidence or support for Fox's proposal, one stands back in amazement at his apparent confidence that he would determine when “gender balance” is restored once again.

He also argues that the older idea of God as a “Punitive Father” must be discarded. “God the Punitive Father is not a God worth honoring, but a false god and an idol that serves empire builders. The notion of punitive, all-male God, is contrary to the full nature of the Godhead, who is as much female and motherly as masculine and fatherly.”

In reality, Fox's theses range across a very disconnected landscape. Nonetheless, some are breathtakingly simple and clear in their rejection of classical Christianity. Take Fox's thesis 6, for example: “THEISM (the idea that God is 'out there' or above and beyond the universe) is false. All things are in God and God is in all things (PANENTHEISM).”

Other theses are virtually unintelligible. Fox argues that “Christians must distinguish between God (masculine and history, liberation and salvation) and Godhead (feminine and mystery, being and nonaction).” What can this possibly mean?

When Fox's theses are understandable, they are most often heretical. Like most modern heretics, Fox wants to make a clear distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” In his formulation: “Christians must distinguish between Jesus (a historical figure) and Christ (the experience of God-in-all-things).”

From there, Fox argues that “Christians must distinguish between Jesus and Paul.” Of course, no Christian I know has any difficulty distinguishing between the historical persons of Jesus and Paul. Nevertheless, Fox's point is clear. He wants to privilege the words of Jesus over the words of Paul. At the same time, Fox clearly does not want to privilege or to accept as authoritative ALL of the words of Jesus, for that matter -- just the ones that fit his model of Jesus as a teacher of universal “spirituality.”

Teachings about human sexuality are at least part of what brought Fox into direct conflict with the Catholic Church and its magisterial authorities. In his new book, Fox argues that human sexuality “is a sacred act and a spiritual experience, a THEOPHANY (revelation of the Divine), a mystical experience.” Sexuality is, of course, one of God's good gifts to humanity -- a gift to be exercised only within the Creator's intention and command, which means within the institution of marriage. In arguing that sex is itself a “spiritual act” Fox crosses over into genuinely heretical territory. Such teachings are part and parcel of many ancient paganisms, but not of biblical Christianity.

Some will note with interest that Fox sees theological seminaries as enemies of his proposals. “Seminaries as we know them, with their excessive emphasis on left-brain work, often kill and corrupt the mystical soul of the young instead of encouraging the mysticism and prophetic consciousness that is there. They should be replaced by wisdom schools,” he suggests.

In one sense, the proposals of Matthew Fox deserve little attention from orthodox Christians. After all, his rejection of biblical Christianity is so transparent that he poses little threat to the institutional church. In one sense, that assessment is probably accurate. There is little chance that Matthew Fox is going to officially be embraced by any branch of Christianity that is in any sense committed to the historic faith.

Yet, at the same time, there are two reasons why attention to Matthew Fox and his new book is worthwhile. In the first place, Fox's vision of “spirituality” as a substitute for doctrinal Christianity has gained ground in some very unexpected places -- even within the pews and pulpits of some churches that consider themselves evangelical. His minimizing of the truth question in favor of existential meaning is a hallmark of the postmodern age and its spirit is a contagion spreading through many churches.

Secondly, Fox's description of two rival visions of Christianity is, taken by itself, actually quite helpful. Why? Because it is good to know that those who reject historic biblical Christianity understand that their proposals represent a completely different religion. This is exactly the point made by J. Gresham Machen in his book, CHRISTIANITY AND LIBERALISM, written in the early twentieth century at the height of the Modernist controversy. Biblical Christianity and those movements that call themselves Christian but reject historic Christian doctrine do not differ in degree, but in kind -- they really are two different faiths.

“There are two Christianities in our midst,” Fox argues. As he explains, one vision of Christianity “worships a Punitive Father and teaches the doctrine of Original Sin.” The “other Christianity” rejects any notion of a God who will punish sin, and the very notion of sin itself. Instead, this rival to historic Christianity “recognizes the Original Blessing from which all being derives. It recognizes awe rather than sin and guilt, as the starting point of true religion. It thus marvels at today's scientific findings about the wonders of the fourteen-billion-year journey of the universe that has brought our being into existence and the wonders of our spiritual home, the earth. It prefers trust over fear and an understanding of a divinity who is source of all things, as much mother as father, as much female as male.”

On matters of sexuality, this “other Christianity” celebrates gays and lesbians as a normative part of creation. In making his argument, Fox makes the astounding (and completely undocumented) claim that there are 464 other species of animals which feature gay and lesbian populations.

Most persons will see Matthew Fox's “new reformation” for what it is -- an attempt to hijack the Christian faith in order to push his own panentheistic agenda. Nevertheless, we should note with care and concern that many of Fox's ideas have taken deep root in various sectors of Christianity. Those wondering where such trends might lead should pay close attention to Fox's admission that his ideas represent a completely new faith presented as an alternative to historic Christianity.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century was a serious attempt to recover and embrace historic biblical Christianity. Matthew Fox's “new reformation” is precisely the opposite -- an attempt to replace Christianity with a new form of paganism. Will today's Christians see this clearly?

The fault lines of controversy in contemporary Christianity range across a vast terrain of issues, but none seems quite so volatile as the question of gender. As Christians have been thinking and rethinking these issues in recent years, a clear pattern of divergence has appeared. At stake in this debate is something more important than the question of gender, for this controversy reaches the deepest questions of Christian identity and biblical authority.

For too long, those who hold to traditional understandings of manhood and womanhood, deeply rooted in both Scripture and tradition, have allowed themselves to be pushed into a defensive posture. Given the prevailing spirit of the age and the enormous cultural pressure toward conformity, traditionalists are now accused of being woefully out of step and hopelessly out of date. Now is a good time to reconsider the issues basic to this debate and to reassert the arguments for biblical manhood and womanhood.

The most basic question in this controversy comes down to this: Has God created human beings as male and female with a revealed intention for how we are to relate to each other? The secular world is now deeply committed to confusion on these matters. Denying the Creator, the secular worldview understands gender to be nothing more than the accidental byproduct of blind evolutionary process. Therefore, gender is reducible to nothing more than biology and, as the feminists famously argued, biology is not destiny.

This radical rebellion against a divinely-designed pattern of gender has now reached the outer limits of imagination. If gender is nothing more than a biological accident, and if human beings are therefore not morally bound to take gender as meaningful, then the radical gender theorists and homosexual rights advocates are correct after all. For, if gender is merely incidental to our basic humanity, then we must be free to make whatever adjustments, alterations, or transformations in gender relationships any generation might desire or demand.

The postmodern worldview embraces the notion of gender as a social construct. That is, postmodernists argue that our notions of what it means to be male and female are entirely due to what society has constructed as its theories of masculinity and femininity. Of course, the social construction of all truth is central to the postmodern mind, but when the issue is gender, the arguments become more volatile. The feminist argument is reducible to the claim that patriarchal forces in society have defined men and women so that all the differences ascribed to women represent efforts by men to protect their position of privilege.

Of course, the pervasiveness of this theory explains why radical feminism must necessarily be joined to the homosexual agenda. For, if gender is socially constructed, and therefore differences between men and women are nothing more than social convention, then heterosexuality becomes nothing more than a culturally-privileged form of sexuality.

The utopia envisioned by ideological feminists would be a world free from any concern for gender -- a world where masculinity and femininity are erased as antiquated notions, and an age in which the categories of male and female are malleable and negotiable. In the postmodern view, all structures are plastic and all principles are liquid. The influence of previous ages has molded us to believe that men and women are distinct in significant ways, but our newly liberated age will promise to free us from such misconceptions and point us toward a new world of transformed gender consciousness.

As Elizabeth Elliot once reflected: “Throughout the millennia of human history, up until the past two decades or so, people took for granted that the differences between men and women were so obvious as to need no comment. They accepted the way things were. But our easy assumptions have been assailed and confused, we have lost our bearings in a fog of rhetoric about something called equality, so that I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to belabor to educated people what was once perfectly obvious to the simplest peasant.”

In response to this, secular traditionalists argue that the historical experience of the human race affirms important distinctions between men and women and differing roles for the two sexes in both the family and in the larger society. The secular traditionalists have history on their side and their claim to authority is rooted in the accumulated wisdom of the ages. For evidence, these traditionalists would point to the consistent pattern of heterosexual marriage across cultures, and the undeniable historical reality that men have predominated in positions of leadership and that the roles of women have been largely defined around home, children, and family. Thus, these traditionalists warn that feminism poses a threat to social order and that the transformed gender consciousness that the feminists demand would lead to social anarchy.

Clearly, the traditionalists come to the debate with a strong argument. They do have history on their side and we must acknowledge that the historical experience of the human race is not insignificant. Some of the most honest feminist thinkers acknowledge that their very aim is to reverse this historical pattern and much of their scholarship is directed at identifying and excising this patriarchal pattern in the future. The problem with the secular traditionalist is that their argument is, in the end, essentially secular. Their argument is reducible to the claim that the inherited wisdom of human experience points to an oughtness and a moral imperative that should inform the present and the future. In the end, this argument, though powerful and seemingly meaningful, fails to persuade. Modern individuals have been trained from the cradle to believe that every generation makes itself anew and that the past is really past.

The modern ethic of liberation, now so deeply and thoroughly embedded in the modern mind, suggests that the traditions of the past may indeed be a prison from which the present generation should demand release. This is where biblical traditionalists must enter the debate with vigor. We do share much common ground of argument with the secular traditionalists. Biblical traditionalists affirm that the historical experience of mankind should be informative of the present. We also affirm that the enduring pattern of differing roles between men and women, combined with the centrality of the natural family, does present a compelling argument that should be understood as both descriptive and prescriptive. Nevertheless, the biblical traditionalist's most fundamental argument goes far beyond history.

In this age of rampant confusion, we must recapture the biblical concept of manhood and womanhood. Our authority must be nothing less than the revealed Word of God. In this light, the pattern of history affirms what the Bible unquestionably reveals -- that God has made human beings in His image as male and female, and that the Creator has revealed His glory in both the sameness and the differences by which He establishes human beings as male and female.

Confronted by the biblical evidence, we must make a vitally important interpretive decision. We must choose between two unavoidable options: either the Bible is affirmed as the inerrant and infallible Word of God, and thus presents a comprehensive vision of true humanity in both unity and diversity, or we must claim that the Bible is, to one extent or another, compromised and warped by a patriarchal and male-dominated bias that must be overcome in the name of humanity.

For biblical traditionalists the choice is clear. We understand the Bible to present a beautiful portrait of complementarity between the sexes, with both men and women charged to reflect God's glory in a distinct way. Thus, there are very real distinctions that mark the difference between masculinity and femininity, male and female. Standing on biblical authority, we must critique both the present and the past when the biblical pattern has been compromised or denied. Likewise, we must point ourselves, our churches, and our children to the future, affirming that God's glory is at stake in our response of obedience or disobedience to His design.

For too long, those who hold to the biblical pattern of gender distinctions have allowed themselves to be silenced, marginalized, and embarrassed when confronted by new gender theorists. Now is the time to recapture the momentum, force the questions, and show this generation God's design in the biblical concept of manhood and womanhood. God's glory is shown to the world in the complementarity of men and women. This crucial challenge is a summons to Christian boldness in the present hour.

________

This commentary originally appeared on February 21, 2005

Are American evangelicals charting a new path into theological liberalism? That is the serious question posed by Wayne A. Grudem in EVANGELICAL FEMINISM: A NEW PATH TO LIBERALISM? This new book is one of the most urgently needed resources for evangelical Christianity, and it represents one of the most insightful and courageous theological works of our times.

Wayne Grudem is no stranger to controversy. Currently Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona, Grudem is the author of several important volumes on a range of theological issues. Most importantly, he is the author of his own SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY and EVANGELICAL FEMINISM AND BIBLICAL TRUTH. He also co-edited the landmark volume, RECOVERING BIBLICAL MANHOOD AND WOMANHOOD, with John Piper.

In EVANGELICAL FEMINISM, published by Crossway Books, Grudem argues that evangelical feminism now represents one of the greatest dangers to the continued orthodoxy of the evangelical movement. “I am concerned that evangelical feminism (also known as “egalitarianism”) has become a new path by which evangelicals are being drawn into theological liberalism,” he explains.

In this new book, Grudem considers twenty-five different patterns of argument put forth by evangelical feminists, and demonstrates that every single one of them either contradicts or compromises the authority of Scripture.

In considering the arguments put forth by evangelical feminists, Grudem is careful to avoid AD HOMINEM attacks on egalitarian scholars and spokespersons. Instead, he considers each of their arguments with considerable scholarly care and attention, drawing the logical conclusions from the methodological assumptions the egalitarian scholars embrace.

At the same time, Grudem is careful to specify and name the scholars whose proposals he considers, and the book is carefully footnoted and documented so that readers can follow the arguments for themselves. Grudem’s use of the term “theological liberalism” is certain to be controversial. After all, the very genesis of the evangelical movement in North America was grounded in an effort to avoid the errors of theological modernism and liberalism that had already, by the midpoint of the last century, overtaken the mainline Protestant denominations. Grudem defines theological liberalism as “a system of thinking that denies the complete truthfulness of the Bible as the Word of God and denies the unique and absolute authority of the Bible in our lives.” In defining evangelicalism over against theological liberalism in this way, Grudem returns to the Scripture Principle that stood as foundational to the evangelical movement.

Grudem is equally careful in defining evangelical feminism as “a movement that claims there are no unique leadership roles for men in marriage or in the church.”

A work like EVANGELICAL FEMINISM has been desperately needed, and Grudem’s new book arrives just in time. A new generation of younger evangelicals is facing the challenge of evangelical feminism just as the current and the larger culture are moving even more swiftly against biblical authority. Grudem understands that the temptation toward evangelical feminism is the same as that which has attracted so many theologians, pastors, and denominations in recent decades. As a matter of fact, he correctly observes that “evangelical feminists today have adopted many of the arguments earlier used by theological liberals to advocate the ordination of women and to reject male headship in marriage.” Interestingly, Grudem provides an historical overview which traces the emergence of evangelical feminism and egalitarian theory to 1974, when Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty published their work, ALL WE’RE MEANT TO BE and Paul Jewett of Fuller Theological Seminary published MAN AS MALE AND FEMALE. As Grudem observes, “While egalitarian positions have been evocated since the 1950s by theologically LIBERAL Protestant writers, no EVANGELICAL books took such a position until 1974.”

The mainline Protestant denominations began to ordain women in the mid-1950s, and it took some evangelicals less than twenty years to move in the same direction. Grudem’s concern is to demonstrate that the hermeneutical moves necessary to justify the ordination of women to the pastorate subvert biblical authority. Furthermore, these same interpretive maneuvers open the door for a complete reshaping of Christianity.

In a brief historical analysis, Grudem demonstrates that denominations move through “a predictable sequence” of theological liberalism. First, biblical inerrancy is abandoned. Then, in turn, the denomination endorses the ordination of women, rejects biblical teaching on male leadership in marriage, sidelines pastors who are opposed to the ordination of women, approves homosexual conduct as morally valid in at least some cases, ordains homosexuals, and elects homosexuals to “high leadership positions in the denomination.”

As Grudem observes, the Episcopal Church USA has, to this point, been alone in taking this sequential progression to its ultimate conclusion with the election of an openly gay bishop. Nevertheless, virtually all of the mainline Protestant denominations are embroiled in deep conflict over these very same questions. Indeed, these denominations have already moved so far along this line of progression that stopping at any point short of the ordination of homosexuals to ministry appears purely arbitrary.

The heart of EVANGELICAL FEMINISM is a consideration of the patterns of argument put forth by advocates of egalitarianism. Some evangelical feminists simply deny the authority of the Genesis account of creation, at least as this account deals with the creation of man and woman. Some, like Rebecca Groothuis argue that the Genesis account tells us “nothing about God’s view of gender” because the gender issues are simply rooted in the “patriarchal” nature of the Hebrew language. Of course, this means that biblical inerrancy is now compromised by the assertion that we cannot actually trust the language accurately to convey what God intended. Similarly, other figures argue that Genesis 1-3 can be relativized on the issue of gender relations by arguing that parts of the Genesis account are nothing more that literary devices.

Egalitarian theorists must deal with the Apostle Paul, and Grudem traces the move of Jewett and others in claiming that Paul must be understood as limited in his understanding of gender relations due to his own rabbinical training and the fact that he had not carefully resolved these issue by the time he wrote his epistles. Grudem documents how some figures make this argument by suggesting, for example, that Paul incorrectly understood Genesis 2-3, or that he willingly presented what he knew to be a false argument in order to reach his audience. As Grudem explains, if the Bible is the Word of God, then Paul’s interpretations of the Old Testament are also God’s interpretations “of his own Word.”

Again and again, Grudem allows the advocates of egalitarianism to reveal their own efforts to get around the clear teachings of Scripture on the different roles assigned to men and women. Gordon Fee, for example, argues that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 are “certainly not binding for Christians” because these verses, he argues, were not actually written by Paul, but were additions of a later scribe. As Grudem demonstrates, not one single ancient manuscript has ever omitted these verses.

One of the most important sections in EVANGELICAL FEMINISM is Grudem’s consideration of the so-called “trajectory hermeneutics” now gaining favor in many evangelical circles. Grudem traces this hermeneutic to Krister Stendahl, a former dean at Harvard Divinity School. As far back as 1958, Stendahl was arguing that the church must not be trapped in a first century understanding of gender issues, but must press forward to a new reality, even as the New Testament pressed beyond the Old. Thus, evangelical figures such as R.T. France have argued for the ordination of women on the basis of a “historical trajectory” traced from the Old Testament through the New Testament and pointing beyond to the present age.

This approach is made clear by David Thompson in a 1996 article: “Sensing the direction of the canonical dialogue and prayerfully struggling with it, God’s people conclude that they will most faithfully honor his Word by accepting the target already anticipated in Scripture and toward which the Scriptural trajectory was heading rather than the last entry in the biblical conversation.”

As Grudem observes, “This means that the teachings of the New Testament are no longer our final authority. Our authority now becomes OUR OWN IDEAS OF THE DIRECTION THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS HEADING but never quite reached.”

At this point, a crucial question arises. If this hermeneutical method is legitimate, how can we stop at the ordination of women? This is the very argument made by proponents of normalizing homosexuality and ordaining homosexuals to the ministry. If the New Testament is to be superseded by a later reality based in a more modern understanding, how can the church justify relativizing some texts without relativizing others?

Grudem also offers a careful critique of William Webb’s “redemptive-movement” approach, which, as he observes, casts the entire ethical structure of the New Testament into doubt. Grudem goes to some length to demonstrate that Webb’s approach undermines the church’s ability even to understand the New Testament text. Webb’s cumbersome and elaborate criteriology for deciding these issues puts the question outside the reach of all but a tiny priesthood of scholars. Even more importantly, it points to something outside the New Testament as our authority. As Grudem notes, this is “a huge step down the path toward liberalism.” In other chapters, Grudem considers the fact that many evangelical feminists claim the right to prioritize certain biblical texts, while relativizing others. Others attempt to dismiss certain passages as “disputed” in order to eliminate their functional authority in today’s church. Grudem effectively undermines these arguments, showing once again that the acceptance of these arguments requires the subversion or outright rejection of biblical authority. These maneuvers are absolutely incompatible with an affirmation of biblical inerrancy.

In a series of capable considerations, Grudems looks to a host of alternative arguments made on behalf of the ordination of women, ranging from those who claim an authority of experience or “calling” above Scripture to others who claim that women can teach and preach in the church so long as they do so under a male pastor’s authority.

Finally, Grudem returns to the issue of homosexuality, arguing that the hermeneutic employed to advocate egalitarianism leads, if pressed consistently, to the normalization of homosexuality as well. “The approval of homosexuality,” he notes, “is the final step along the path to liberalism.”

The great value of Wayne Grudem’s new book is its combination of cogent argument and fair presentation. Grudem is careful to acknowledge that many, if not most, evangelical feminists have not moved completely along the trajectory toward the full embrace of theological liberalism. Nevertheless, his surgical approach to their theological arguments and hermeneutical proposals reveals the clear and present danger to evangelical orthodoxy posed by egalitarian theory and practice. EVANGELICAL FEMINISM is truly a tract for the times -- a manifesto that should serve to awaken complacent evangelicals to the true nature of the egalitarian challenge. Furthermore, the book serves as an arsenal of arguments to use in revealing the crucial weaknesses of the egalitarian proposal.

Nothing less than the future of the Christian church in North America is at stake in this controversy. Evangelicals no longer have the luxury of believing that this controversy is nothing more than a dispute among scholars. EVANGELICAL FEMINISM: A NEW PATH TO LIBERALISM? has arrived just in time.

Imagine you are a man who hasn’t attended a church in years. You enjoy such activities as golfing, hunting and fishing on Sunday mornings. You think it’s more beneficial to spend time outdoors with a few of your closest friends than it is to be cooped up in a church building.

Now imagine that your wife has asked you to try going back to the local Southern Baptist church one more time. Do you think the average worship experience will entice you to come back?

Upon entering the service, worshippers sing what sound like sappy love songs to Jesus. The lyrics say things like, “Hold me close, let your love surround me,” “Jesus, I am so in love with you” and “I’m desperate for you, I’m lost without you.”

After the singing, church attendees hold hands for prayer and hear a sermon emphasizing concepts such as a “personal relationship” with Jesus, having “intimacy” with God and “sharing” their feelings with other Christians.

Finally, at the end of the service opportunities to serve in the church are announced. But these opportunities include only such things as singing in the choir, keeping the nursery, decorating bulletin boards and baking desserts for the next church potluck.

Would you, an unchurched man, find a church like this appealing and comfortable?

If you said no, you’re not alone. Increasingly, men are not involved in church.

The U.S. Congregational Life Survey says that while the U.S. population is split almost evenly between men and women, only 39 percent of all churchgoers are men. Referring to Americans in the mid-1990s, pollster George Barna wrote that “women are twice as likely to attend a church service during any given week. Women are also 50 percent more likely than men to say they are ‘religious’ and to state that they are ‘absolutely committed’ to the Christian faith.”

Lance Crowell, a church ministries associate with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention (SBTC), said the story is not much different across the Lone Star State.

“Even though there are men attending church, more women are connected to their churches at a level beyond mere Sunday morning attendance,” Crowell, who oversees men’s ministry for the SBTC, said. “Men are not coming at the same rate as women, but even beyond that a large percentage of those who are coming are not truly connecting, serving, and especially not leading.”

Many churches, Crowell said, do not realize their ministry style caters almost exclusively to women. But Baptists must reprioritize to reach men and, in turn, transform the church, he said.

“Several leaders in men’s ministry have noted how so many churches have catered to women in their style, look and programming,” he said. “This is largely because the ones who care the most in the church are often the women. We need to help churches, leaders and, of course, men, see that they are the first step in changing our churches and making a difference in the community.”

Leon Podles, in his book “The Church Impotent,” argued that the feminization of Christianity began in the Middle Ages. As a new, feminized piety increased in the church, men began to exit, he wrote. According to Podles, this feminized Christianity is dangerous for both the church and society.

“If the feminization of the Church continues, men will continue to seek their spiritual sustenance outside the churches, in false or inadequate religions, with highly damaging consequences for the church and society,” Podles wrote.

Despite its feminization, Christianity has the resources to attract men without compromising its message, Podles said. He suggested that in order to reach men, churches emphasize the struggle of the Christian life and brotherly love.

“Christianity has within it the resources that allow it to appeal to men, to show that not only will Christianity not undermine their masculinity, but it will also fulfill and perfect it,” he wrote.

Suggesting guys get together to talk about their feelings won’t cut it, according to Navigators leader Geoff Gorsuch.

“The word ‘feelings’ is a bad word for men,” Gorsuch told men’s ministry leaders. “You avoid that word. You just don’t go there if you are trying to start a men’s ministry group.”

Instead, he said, “Give him a challenge. Tell them we are going to meet together because we want to take the Christian life more seriously; we want to build better families or we want to change this community. You can’t get them there by saying you want to develop a deep, intimate group.”

At least some Texas churches are catering to the unique needs and personalities of men, with the goal of reaching them with the Gospel and then discipling them.

Buddy Griffin, minister of men and prayer at Sagemont Church in Houston, said portraying Christianity as weak or unmanly misrepresents Scripture, and his church has designed a program that trains hundreds of men each year to be disciples of Christ.

Sagemont strives to gear evangelism and discipleship programs uniquely to men. The church started a Men’s Fraternity program three years ago that has ballooned to more than 700 participants. A recent fishing tournament was designed to reach lost men and served as an entry point through which at least one lost man started attending the church regularly. Sagemont has even decorated its men’s restrooms according to themes that might interest some men -- including bass fishing, duck hunting and golf.

Sagemont currently has an average worship attendance that is 55 percent women and 45 percent men. But Griffin, who has worked with the SBTC to help other churches grow their men’s ministries, has a goal of reducing that gap each year until worship attendance is 51 percent male in 2014. Other goals include filling 70 percent of church leadership positions with men and matching 95 percent of the congregation’s fatherless boys with a man for mentorship.

“Where do men go to be cheered on for the noble and righteous things in life?” Griffin asked. “Men always go where the noise is. So we try to make a celebratory atmosphere among our men when they make godly choices.”

Rodney Thompson, a layman at First Baptist Church in Katy, Texas, emphasized that a top-notch men’s ministry is not only for mega-churches like Sagemont that have a full-time minister for men. First Baptist, which averages approximately 1,000 in worship, began a Men’s Fraternity program last year and plans to begin the program’s second year this fall. Additionally, the church holds a weekly morning men’s prayer time.

Thompson, who serves on the men’s ministry leadership team at First Baptist, said the key to reaching and discipling men at smaller churches is the pastor and other staff members. If men see staff members who have a strong work ethic, it will motivate them to join the work of ministry as well.

When men see ministerial staff “doing more than just the normal doing the announcements during the service and leading the music” and “not sitting behind the desk,” they will be motivated to make extra effort in church activities themselves, he said.

Scott Moody, pastor of First Baptist Church in Silsbee, Texas, has found Thompson’s thoughts on ministerial work ethic to be true. In the past year, Moody has dedicated himself to organizing and starting a Men’s Fraternity program at his church, which averages 400 in worship.

Glenview Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, also has focused much of its men’s ministry effort in a Men’s Fraternity program. The church, which averages 1,500 in worship, has completed two years of Men’s Fraternity, averaging approximately 125 men each year.

“I never have seen anything that really has impacted men and their families like this,” said Jim Kendrick, Glenview’s associate pastor for pastoral care ministries. “The pastor is constantly having wives saying, ‘That’s one of the best things you’ve ever done to bring the Men’s Fraternity in.’”

In addition to Men’s Fraternity, the church tries to make sure some of the congregation’s décor is friendly to men. When a deacon recently enlisted his wife to help decorate the men’s ministry bulletin board, Kendrick objected, telling the deacon the bulletin board needed to be designed by a man.

“I said, ‘I don’t want a men’s bulletin board that looks like females (designed it). We want people to look at that and know it’s a man’s bulletin board,’” Kendrick said.

Glenview also hosts men’s movie nights. At a recent movie night men ate hamburgers and watched “Facing the Giants.”

Reaching men has not been limited to larger churches. Ridgewood Baptist Church in Port Arthur, Texas, averages 180 in worship and has launched a thriving men’s ministry. Ridgewood offers Men’s Fraternity as one option in its Sunday night program of classes, and it plans beginning in August to hold Men’s Encouragement Nights in homes periodically. The encouragement nights will involve men and their sons and include a challenge for men to live out God’s calling on their lives.

Taking a page from Sagemont, Ridgewood is remodeling its men’s restroom in a Western theme.

“A lot of times men come and they feel like there’s nothing for them,” Kyle Campasi, Ridgewood’s pastor of pastoral care, said. “They feel like there’s something for women, something for children, something for youth, but nothing for them. This is one small step we’re taking right now to make it feel more manly.”

One of the biggest challenges for Ridgewood is teaching men to embrace their God-ordained roles in the family and the church, Campasi said.

“We see a lot of women stepping up and trying to take leadership because their husbands aren’t doing what they’re called to do,” he said. “So going back to the teaching of the roles is what we’re fighting for.... We’re for the teaching of what the Gospel says the role of a husband and the role of a father should be.”

At Heritage Baptist Church in Mansfield, Texas, Pastor Steve Garrick said the church intentionally keeps the number of church activities to a minimum so that men have the time to be “the pastors of their own house.” Families, he said, can become splintered among many different weekly church activities.

“We don’t want to undermine the family by ministering to its various segments, rather than to the family as a whole.” On those occasions when men are needed to assume leadership for particular areas of church ministry, Garrick said the matter is addressed directly at a men’s meeting, instructing and encouraging, while not chiding, the men to assume their role as leaders.

Heritage Baptist laid the groundwork for such an expectation of men when Garrick took them through a course from the life of David, emphasizing how he showed initiative and leadership. “This has helped us define leadership, and to counteract the passive role that is often exemplified for men in the world.” The concept is also addressed in premarital counseling, he said. “We want our families starting off right.”

Churches, Garrick said, must do a better job of teaching the role of men and women in the home and church, declaring confidence in the inspired Word of God.

“To be honest, we men generally don’t want to hear this instruction because it goes against the grain of our sinful nature,” he said. “Our tendency is to try to be 18-year-old teenagers, and responsibilities only get in the way.”

Furthermore, a feminist culture adds some resistance, he said. “Male leadership is condemned as patriarchy, and this makes men hesitant to assert themselves as leaders. We cannot let modern revolt against biblical mores undermine our confidence in the inspired instructions of the Word,” Garrick insisted.

Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, has adopted a multifaceted approach to men’s ministry. A Bible study at 6:30 each Friday morning that reaches 400-700 men weekly, men’s small groups and a mentoring program known as Project Timothy make up the discipleship aspect of the church’s men’s ministry.

An annual sportsman’s feast along with regular service opportunities outside the church walls are among the most important evangelistic ministries for men at Prestonwood.

“Our sportsman’s feast is designed as outreach,” said Bill Borinstein, Prestonwood’s minister of spiritual development. “We challenge our guys to buy a table and fill it up with unchurched men. Last year we had 1,400 men come to that. Each year we’ve had it, we’ve had numbers of salvations and rededications and commitments.”

The men’s ministry’s mission statement at Prestonwood is “to biblically equip men to be the spiritual leaders in their home, their church and their place of business.” Borinstein said the ministry strives to fulfill that mission by preaching the Word of God and exalting Christ.

“We feel like when we start challenging people, we’re going to push them away,” he said of typical men’s ministries. “But I think the exact opposite happens.”

________

David Roach is a freelance writer in Louisville, Ky. This story first appeared in the Southern Baptist Texan, online at www.texanonline.net.

HUMAN EVENTS magazine asked "a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders" to identify the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. The list:

1. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO by Karl Marx

2. MEIN KAMPF by Adolf Hitler

3. QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN MAO by Mao Zedong

4. THE KINSEY REPORTS by Alfred Kinsey

5. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION by John Dewey

6. DAS KAPITAL by Karl Marx

7. THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE by Betty Friedan

8. THE COURSE OF POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY by Auguste Compte

9. BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL by Friedrich Nietzsche

10. GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes

It's hard to argue with that list, but it seems a bit weighted toward economics. I would argue for putting THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES by Charles Darwin in the top ten, and COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA by Margaret Mead wouldn't be far behind.

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SOURCE: TEN MOST HARMFUL BOOKS OF THE 19th AND 20th CENTURIES, Human Events, May 31, 2005

Hollywood’s female superhero myth attempts to influence the way our culture looks at women, shaping them into a one-size-fits-all mold, ignoring the great and subtle differences between the sexes. But women’s strength manifests in many different forms, and Christianity is rich with a variety of examples. Why not check those out?

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Coming to theaters yet again: One more action flick with warring women in the lead role. But most of these movies only obscure real feminine strength.

“Anything you can do I can do better!” sang the title character in the 1950 “Annie, Get Your Gun.” That could be the motto of most of the female leads in blockbuster movies today. Consider Rey, played by Daisy Ridley in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” She’s hailed as an empowering role model for girls, but critics have pointed out how closely she follows the infamous “Mary Sue” trope — an adolescent with no prior experience whose improbable powers and skills save the day.

In the original trilogy, Luke Skywalker lost his hand the first time he confronted the bad guy. Rey, meanwhile, easily bests her story’s villain, despite never having picked up a lightsaber before.

Writing at “Mere Orthodoxy,” Alistair Roberts points to a pantheon of recent heroines from Merida, Katniss, and Black Widow, to Jyn Erso in the upcoming “Star Wars: Rogue I” — all of whom are more than equals to men in combat. These 98-pound kung fu masters routinely make guys look like clumsy idiots, all while showing off petite, department-store model figures.

This “strong female character” cliché, says Roberts, teaches audiences that in order to prove their equal dignity, ladies must be able to best men in hand-to-hand combat. But these portrayals, he argues, aren’t just “failures of imagination” that pit women against men in a “zero sum game.” They also fly in the face of biology.

There’s a reason traditional values taught us to despise men who hit women. Because on average, women simply aren’t capable of fighting back, much less kicking men around the way they do in these movies. Roberts points to studies published in journals of sports medicine and applied physiology showing that men have, on average, ninety percent greater upper body strength, sixty-five percent greater lower body strength, and are twenty-two percent faster. The average man, researchers concluded, is stronger than 99.9 percent of women.

Ignoring this results in more than just corny fights scenes. The belief that men and women aren’t meaningfully different has real-world consequences. We recently told you about transgender fighter Fallon Fox, who brutally injured Tamikka Brents in women’s mixed martial arts. Brents was being treated for facial fractures and a concussion.

And the Marine Corps recently proposed a plan that would allow women to pass the physical fitness test without completing pullups. One anonymous officer admitted that pullups are important metrics of combat readiness, but said allowing women to skip this exercise would positively impact their military careers.

This mindset undoubtedly contributes to our willingness to place women in danger. And if men and women belong together in the boxing ring and the battlefield, hey, why not the bathroom, too?

Even worse, we’ve become blind to the very feminine strengths that the Bible praises. Think of Deborah and Jael in the book of Judges. Think of Sarah, commended twice in the New Testament for her faith, or the Hebrew midwives, whose courage and value for human life saved an entire generation. Think of Hannah, whose patient longing for a child ushered in the kingdom over which Jesus would reign. Think of the loyalty of Ruth, and of Mary, who at a tender age welcomed God’s promise to save the world.

And look at history, too. My colleague Eric Metaxas tells of seven women in his book by that name. As Eric wrote in the introduction to the book, “When I consider the seven women I chose, I see that most of them were great for reasons that derive precisely from their being women, not in spite of it.” In other words, their accomplishments are not gender neutral but are rooted in their singularity as women. Amen! And their lives are so much richer than the stereotyped strong female characters in today’s movies. Even if they weren’t good with a lightsaber.

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RESOURCES

Why We Should Jettison the “Strong Female Character”

Alastair Roberts | Mereorthodoxy.com | April 18, 2016

Female Marine Pullup Failure Doesn’t Mean Women Aren’t Strong

Mollie Hemingway | The Federalist | January 3, 2014

5 Strong Women From The Bible

David Peach | whatchristianswanttoknow.com

7 Women: And the Secret of Their Greatness

Eric Metaxas | Thomas Nelson | September 2015

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Copyright (c) 2016 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The accelerating fragmentation of the strife-torn Episcopal Church USA, in which several parishes and even a few dioceses are opting out of the church, isn’t simply about gay bishops, the blessing of same-sex unions or the election of a woman as presiding bishop. It also is about the meltdown of liberal Christianity.

Embraced by the leadership of all the mainline Protestant denominations, as well as large segments of American Catholicism, liberal Christianity has been hailed by its boosters for 40 years as the future of the Christian church.

Instead, as all but a few die-hards now admit, all the mainline churches and movements within churches that have blurred doctrine and softened moral precepts are demographically declining and, in the case of the Episcopal Church, disintegrating.

It is not entirely coincidental that at about the same time that Episcopalians, at their general convention in Columbus, Ohio, were thumbing their noses at a directive from the worldwide Anglican Communion that they “repent” of confirming the openly gay Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire three years ago, the Presbyterian Church USA, at its general assembly in Birmingham, Ala., was turning itself into the laughingstock of the blogosphere by tacitly approving alternative designations for the supposedly sexist Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Among the suggested names were “Mother, Child and Womb” and “Rock, Redeemer and Friend.” Moved by the spirit of the Presbyterian revisionists, Beliefnet blogger Rod Dreher held a “Name That Trinity” contest. Entries included “Rock, Scissors and Paper” and “Larry, Curly and Moe.”

Following the Episcopalian lead, the Presbyterians also voted to give local congregations the freedom to ordain openly cohabiting gay and lesbian ministers and endorsed the legalization of medical marijuana. (The latter may be a good idea, but it is hard to see how it falls under the theological purview of a Christian denomination.)

The Presbyterian Church USA is famous for its 1993 conference, cosponsored with the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and other mainline churches, in which participants “reimagined” God as “Our Maker Sophia” and held a feminist-inspired “milk and honey” ritual designed to replace traditional bread-and-wine Communion.

As if to one-up the Presbyterians in jettisoning age-old elements of Christian belief, the Episcopalians at Columbus overwhelmingly refused even to consider a resolution affirming that Jesus Christ is Lord. When a Christian church cannot bring itself to endorse a bedrock Christian theological statement repeatedly found in the New Testament, it is not a serious Christian church. It’s a Church of What’s Happening Now, conferring a feel-good imprimatur on whatever the liberal elements of secular society deem permissible or politically correct.

You want to have gay sex? Be a female bishop? Change God’s name to Sophia? Go ahead. The just-elected Episcopal presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, is a one-woman combination of all these things, having voted for Robinson, blessed same-sex couples in her Nevada diocese, prayed to a female Jesus at the Columbus convention and invited former Newark, N.J., bishop John Shelby Spong, famous for denying Christ’s divinity, to address her priests.

When a church doesn’t take itself seriously, neither do its members. It is hard to believe that as recently as 1960, members of mainline churches -- Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and the like -- accounted for 40% of all American Protestants. Today, it’s more like 12% (17 million out of 135 million). Some of the precipitous decline is due to lower birthrates among the generally blue-state mainliners, but it also is clear that millions of mainline adherents (and especially their children) have simply walked out of the pews never to return. According to the Hartford Institute for Religious Research, in 1965, there were 3.4 million Episcopalians; now, there are 2.3 million. The number of Presbyterians fell from 4.3 million in 1965 to 2.5 million today. Compare that with 16 million members reported by the Southern Baptists.

When your religion says “whatever” on doctrinal matters, regards Jesus as just another wise teacher, refuses on principle to evangelize and lets you do pretty much what you want, it’s a short step to deciding that one of the things you don’t want to do is get up on Sunday morning and go to church.

It doesn’t help matters that the mainline churches were pioneers in ordaining women to the clergy, to the point that 25% of all Episcopal priests these days are female, as are 29% of all Presbyterian pastors, according to the two churches. A causal connection between a critical mass of female clergy and a mass exodus from the churches, especially among men, would be difficult to establish, but is it entirely a coincidence? Sociologist Rodney Stark (“The Rise of Christianity”) and historian Philip Jenkins (“The Next Christendom”) contend that the more demands, ethical and doctrinal, that a faith places upon its adherents, the deeper the adherents’ commitment to that faith. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, which preach biblical morality, have no trouble saying that Jesus is Lord, and they generally eschew women’s ordination. The churches are growing robustly, both in the United States and around the world.

Despite the fact that median Sunday attendance at Episcopal churches is 80 worshipers, the Episcopal Church, as a whole, is financially equipped to carry on for some time, thanks to its inventory of vintage real estate and huge endowments left over from the days (no more!) when it was the Republican Party at prayer. Furthermore, it has offset some of its demographic losses by attracting disaffected liberal Catholics and gays and lesbians. The less endowed Presbyterian Church USA is in deeper trouble. Just before its general assembly in Birmingham, it announced that it would eliminate 75 jobs to meet a $9.15-million budget cut at its headquarters, the third such round of job cuts in four years.

The Episcopalians have smells, bells, needlework cushions and colorfully garbed, Catholic-looking bishops as draws, but who, under the present circumstances, wants to become a Presbyterian?

Still, it must be galling to Episcopal liberals that many of the parishes and dioceses (including that of San Joaquin, Calif.) that want to pull out of the Episcopal Church USA are growing instead of shrinking, have live people in the pews who pay for the upkeep of their churches and don’t have to rely on dead rich people. The 21-year-old Christ Church Episcopal in Plano, Texas, for example, is one of the largest Episcopal churches in the country. Its 2,200 worshipers on any given Sunday are about equal to the number of active Episcopalians in Jefferts Schori’s entire Nevada diocese.

It’s no surprise that Christ Church, like the other dissident parishes, preaches a very conservative theology. Its break from the national church came after Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Communion, proposed a two-tier membership in which the Episcopal Church USA and other churches that decline to adhere to traditional biblical standards would have “associate” status in the communion. The dissidents hope to retain full communication with Canterbury by establishing oversight by non-U.S. Anglican bishops.

As for the rest of the Episcopalians, the phrase “deck chairs on the Titanic” comes to mind. A number of liberal Episcopal websites are devoted these days to dissing Peter Akinola, outspoken primate of the Anglican diocese of Nigeria, who, like the vast majority of the world’s 77 million Anglicans reported by the Anglican Communion, believes that “homosexual practice” is “incompatible with Scripture” (those words are from the communion’s 1998 resolution at the Lambeth conference of bishops). Akinola might have the numbers on his side, but he is now the Voldemort -- no, make that the Karl Rove -- of the U.S. Episcopal world. Other liberals fume over a feeble last-minute resolution in Columbus calling for “restraint” in consecrating bishops whose lifestyle might offend “the wider church” -- a resolution immediately ignored when a second openly cohabitating gay man was nominated for bishop of Newark.

So this is the liberal Christianity that was supposed to be the Christianity of the future: disarray, schism, rapidly falling numbers of adherents, a collapse of Christology and national meetings that rival those of the Modern Language Association for their potential for cheap laughs. And they keep telling the Catholic Church that it had better get with the liberal program -- ordain women, bless gay unions and so forth -- or die. Sure.

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Charlotte Allen is Catholicism editor for Beliefnet and the author of “The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.”

Anne Eggebroten visited Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and what she found there shocked her. As a matter of fact, she was so shocked that she wrote about that experience in the July 2010 edition of SOJOURNERS magazine. Readers of her article are likely to experience a shock of their own — they will be shocked that Eggebroten could actually have been surprised by what she found there.

In “The Persistence of Patriarchy,” Eggebroten writes about “the wide reach” of complementarian views of manhood and womanhood among conservative Christians. Her article is subtitled: “Hard to believe, but some churches are still teaching about male headship.” Hard to believe?

Can anyone really be surprised that this is so? In some sense, it might be surprising to the generally liberal readership of SOJOURNERS, but it can hardly be surprising to anyone with the slightest attachment to evangelical Christianity. Nevertheless, Anne Eggebroten’s article represents what I call a “NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC moment” — an example of someone discovering the obvious and thinking it exotic and strange. It is like a reporter returning from travel to far country to explain the strange tribe of people she found there — evangelical Christians believing what the Christian church has for 2,000 years believed the Bible to teach and require. So ... what is so exotic?

She begins her article at Grace Community Church in California, where, in her words, “God is male, all the pastors, deacons, and elders are male, and women are taught to live in submission to men.” That is a snappy introduction, to be sure, but it requires some unpacking. When Eggebroten says that, at this well-known evangelical church “God is male,” she is echoing the arguments of the late radical feminist Mary Daly, who famously asserted that “if God is male, then male is God.” At Grace Community Church, as in the Bible, references to God are masculine, but God is not claimed to be male. Interestingly, she also missed the fact that Grace considers the role of the deacon in terms of service, rather than authority, so women in fact do serve as deacons with responsibility for particular ministries.

Nevertheless, Eggebroten is certainly onto something here, especially when Grace Community Church is contrasted with the Episcopal congregation visited by her husband on that same Sunday. In that church, a woman is preaching the sermon. We can’t miss the point when Eggebroten writes:

These two different worlds exist side by side: congregations

where men and women are equal partners in service of Jesus

Christ, and others where gender hierarchy is taught as God’s will

and the only truly biblical option. On Sunday morning we all

drive past one flavor of gender teaching to worship in another.

Well, on this Sunday Anne Eggebroten did NOT drive past Grace Community Church. Instead, she heard a sermon by Dr. John MacArthur, who for more than 40 years has served as pastor of the church. Beyond that, MacArthur has become one of the most respected and influential preachers of our times, with perhaps the most widely-disseminated ministry of exposition in the history of the Christian church.

Eggebroten enjoyed the sermon, remarking that MacArthur’s message was “excellent.” She added, “I guess that’s how megachurches get started.” Well, one can hope.

The central part of her report from the trenches at Grace Community Church comes from an experience at a visitors’ reception after the sermon. Eggebroten asks a woman there (a physical therapist with a degree from the school where Eggebroten teaches), “Is women’s submission to their husbands stressed in this church?” The answer, of course, was YES.

It appears that Eggebroten could hardly have been surprised, for she wrote:

At least things aren’t as extreme as they sound on the church Web

site. There, I had listened to Anna Sanders lecture women on how

to live in submission to their husbands. “We need to beat down

our desire to be right and have our own way,” she had said,

citing John Piper, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and Martha Peace — all

authors published in the last decade. “It’s his way, his rights,

his expectations, and his plans. ... Be a helper.”

So, there was little ground for surprise when Eggebroten asked the question at the visitors’ reception. But there was more to come. She writes, “I’m stunned to find that the 300-student Master’s Seminary on the church campus enrolls only men.”

Well, let’s see. The Master’s Seminary, according to it’s own mission statement, “exists to advance the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ by equipping men to be pastors and/or trainers of pastors.” The logic is simple and straight-forward. The church believes that the Bible restricts the office of pastor to men. The Master’s Seminary trains only pastors and trainers of pastors, thus it limits admissions to men. What could possibly be stunning about that?

As Eggebroten acknowledges, seminaries that train for roles beyond the pastorate may enroll women for those programs without compromising this conviction. But Master’s does not offer those programs, so what is possibly shocking?

In the course of her article, Eggebroten continues her reports of conversations with members of the complementarian tribe before getting to the more deeply theological portion of her essay. In this passage she gets to the core issue:

Here’s the question: Is God permanently committed to the kinds of

social hierarchy that existed in the first and second millennium

B.C.E. and continued until recently, when education and voting

were opened to women? Or does the vision of Paul in Galatians

3:28 — ”There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave

or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are

one in Christ Jesus” — take precedence?

At this point the agenda becomes clear. Eggebroten argues that the church has simply perpetuated the patriarchal traditions of the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures that formed the social context for the early Christian church. Against these she contrasts the Apostle Paul’s beautiful declaration in Galatians 3:28 — “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

But this is the kind of sloppy and agenda-driven exegesis that reveals the desperation of those who would reject the New Testament’s limitation of the office of pastor to men. In Galatians 3:28 Paul is clearly speaking of salvation — not of service in the church. Paul is declaring to believers the great good news that “in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” [verse 26]. He concludes by affirming, “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” [verse 29].

To read Galatians 3:28 the way Eggebroten reads the verse, you would have to believe that the Apostle Paul was in direct contradiction with himself, when he restricts the teaching office to men in letters such as 1 Timothy and Titus.

Or ... you can try to deny that Paul actually wrote those latter letters. Eggebroten accuses conservative evangelicals of ignoring “evidence that the ‘pastoral epistles’ (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) were written in honor of Paul long after he died and reflect a second-century debate over women’s roles in the church – whether to conform to social customs for the sake of winning converts, or to advocate radical social equality (and even celibacy) in the last days before the Second Coming.”

What this reveals, of course, is the argument of many evangelical feminists that we can discard the teachings of the Pastoral Epistles. We can keep the Apostle Paul we like (taking Galatians 3:28 out of context, for example) and disregard the Paul we do not like.

Nor are the Pastoral Epistles the only biblical texts subverted by this line of argument. With reference to 1 Corinthians 14:35 (“Let a woman learn in silence with full submission”), Eggebroten suggests, among other options, that “verses 34-35 began as someone’s marginal comment, later copied right into the text.”

With this approach to the Bible, you can simply discard any text you dislike. Just dismiss it as a marginal comment, or deny that Paul even authored the text. This is where the denial of biblical inerrancy inevitably leads — the text of the Bible is deconstructed right before our eyes.

“So what is the will of God for women today: silence or preaching, subjection or mutual submission?,” Eggebroten asks. She adds, “Many Christians in all denominations, including evangelicals aren’t even asking this question any more — yet the neo-patriarchal movement remains widespread.”

The answer to that question, as Eggebroten’s essay helps to clarify, depends on your view of Scripture. In order to reach her conclusions, you must accept her evasions of the biblical text. If you are willing to do that on this question, you will be willing to do so on other issues as well. The central issue is, and will ever remain, the authority of Scripture.

Anne Eggebroten has written a fascinating report that, like so many others of its kind, reveals more about the reporter than the reported. Eggebroten teaches religion at California State University, Northridge, and she is a founding member of the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus. In her other writings she has, for example, profiled “the reality of abortion as a morally responsible choice being made by countless Christian women of all denominations.”

In what sense can any of this be bent to fit within evangelical identity? This essay reveals again how these arguments — and the magazine that publishes them — are so very distant from the beliefs of most evangelicals. If there is anything genuinely shocking about this article, it is the fact that the writer would attempt to lay claim on evangelicalism.

In yet another twisted use of Scripture, Eggebroten concludes by citing Galatians 5:1, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” As Paul asserts, in Christ we are free from the slavery of attempting to prove our righteousness by the Law. Paul is not liberating the Church from the Bible.

In the end, that is the real issue. There are Christians who would demand to be liberated from the Bible? Now THAT is what really should be shocking.

Of all the Christmas images, the one that best evokes the meaning and feeling of the Incarnation is the Madonna with Child. There, in the love between Mary and the infant Jesus, the mystery of God-made-man fuses with humanity’s primordial experiences of birth and mother love and nurtures the faith, however fragile, that peace on earth is possible among men of good will. Little wonder, then, that in the iconography of the Christian church, Mary is second only to Jesus as an object of love and devotion.

Over the last quarter century, however, the cult of Mary has cooled perceptibly, especially among better-educated Roman Catholics. One reason is the reform movement of Vatican Council II. Heeding Pope John XXIII’s warning that “the Madonna is not pleased when she is put above her son,” the council fathers curbed excessive Mariolatry and reminded the faithful that Jesus alone is source and center of Christian worship. More important, Pope Paul VI’s anti-birth-control encyclical and the feminist movement of the ‘70s soured many Catholic women on the Virgin Mother model they were told to emulate in their youth. “Mary embodied domesticity, a piety that was the enemy of intellectuality and a purity that seemed to deny female sexuality,” explains Catholic novelist Mary Gordon, 29. “If a Catholic girl rejected these things, she rejected Mary too.” Despite such an enormous cultural change, the Virgin Mary is beginning to recapture the Christian imagination in new and often arresting ways. Overcoming their longstanding bias against Mariology, Protestants have joined Catholic and Orthodox scholars in exploring the meaning of Mary in the New Testament and the role Marian piety might play in a reunited Christianity. In several recent books and symposiums, Protestants have discovered that the New Testament does contain a theology of Mary, while Catholic scholars now acknowledge that there is little basis in the Bible for Catholic dogmas of Mary’s Immaculate Conception (the belief that she was born without sin) or her bodily assumption into heaven.

Free Agent: Among the new breed of independent Catholic nuns, Mary’s virginity has become a source of feminist pride. “Because she was asked to become the Mother of Jesus without the intervention of man, she responded to the call of God as a person, without biological differentiation,” says Sister Barbara Thomas, a past president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. “She did this as a free agent, not bound by physical dependence upon man’s cooperation, nor by social constraint to seek a man’s approval.” Perhaps the boldest effort to reinterpret the Virgin is “The Mary Myth” (Seabury Press), in which sociologist Father Andrew Greeley acknowledges the historical and psychological links of Mary with pre-Christian goddesses. Explains Greeley: “Mary is the Catholic Christian religion’s symbol which reveals to us that the Ultimate is androgynous, that in God there is both male and female, both pursuit and seduction, both ingenious plan Pieta: and passionate tenderness.”

‘New Eve’: Much of the current interest in the Virgin is frankly analytical — an effort to discover how and why she emerged as the dominant female image in Western art and culture. Curiously, the New Testament contains little information about the historical Mary and some Scriptural passages are even negative. The few times Mary meets her son during his public ministry, Jesus emphasizes that his true kinship is no longer with his blood relatives but with the new family of his disciples. Most of the later Christian ideas of Mary are derived from Luke’s account of the conception and birth of Jesus. Through her acceptance of God’s call to be mother of the Messiah, Mary becomes in Luke’s hands the “New Eve” who symbolizes the link between the old Israel and the “New Israel” of believers in Christ. Only in A.D. 431, at the Council of Ephesus, did the early church fathers give Mary her first additional title: “Mother of God.” Today’s scholars suggest several reasons why Mary became a powerful religious symbol. Greeley believes that the early Christians had a psychological need to express the feminine side of God, which their Hebrew forefathers suppressed. Historians point out that Christianity absorbed the religions of its pagan converts. Marian feast days fit easily into seasonal celebrations of ancient fertility goddesses. And in the East, where devotion to Mary developed earlier than in the West, images of Mary bore a striking resemblance to the seated figures of Near Eastern “great Mothers.” As a potent symbol of later Christian civilization, Mary became an icon reflecting shifting cultural values. Ascetics, who regarded even marital sex as sinful, extolled her purity. Mystics found in her total obedience to God the prototype of the single soul’s rapturous union with the divine, and monks stressed her perpetual virginity. Meanwhile, the mass of average believers revered her more accessible human qualities - forebearance, compassion, maternal love and turned to her as “mediator” of Christ’s saving graces. “Whenever Jesus takes on the image of the stern judge or excessively suffering Saviour, popular devotion has swung to Mary as one who is more approachable to humankind,” observes Notre Dame University theologian James Burtchaell.

By the Middle Ages, Mary had attained an unofficial cultic status that neatly paralleled Jesus’ own. Her Immaculate Conception echoed his Ascension. She was “Queen of Heaven” and he was “Christ the King.” Her prayer was the “Ave Maria,” his was “The Lord’s Prayer.” Not surprisingly, then, the Protestant reformers rejected the cult of Mary because it conflicted with key Reformation themes. Among them: fidelity to Scripture alone, Jesus as the sole mediator between God and man and rejection of the monastic life in favor of the Christian family. In reaction, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, with the Jesuits taking the lead, enhanced Mary as a symbol of Catholic commitment.

Apparitions: “Since the nineteenth century, Marianism and papalism have gone hand in hand and given each other mutual support,” says liberal Catholic theologian Hans Kung. In an unusual assertion of papal teaching authority, Pope Pius IX in 1854 proclaimed the Immaculate Conception a dogma of the Catholic faith and sixteen years later led a victorious papal faction at Vatican Council I, which declared the dogma of papal infallibility. Meanwhile, a curious cleavage in Christian sensibility developed among rank-and-file Christians. Whereas untutored Protestant revivalists were apt to hear the call of “the Lord,” Catholic adolescents, such as Bernadette of Lourdes, claimed to see apparitions of the Virgin.

Psychologically and ecclesiastically, Marianism peaked in 1950 when Pope Pius XII, the last Roman Pontiff to rule as an absolute monarch, proclaimed as Catholic dogma the bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. Although some Mariologists anticipated even grander pronouncements by the Pontiff, none has been forthcoming. Instead, Vatican Council II chose to simplify the essentials of faith. Today, Mary is seen as a symbol of radical Christian hope — the first of humankind to be redeemed and fully glorified by her perfect faith in Christ, but totally subordinate to her son. In return, at least some Protestant ecumenists, such as Baptist theologian Arthur Crabtree, have begun to include Mary in their prayers as “a unique member of the church and model for all Christians.”

Relevance: But the real question is whether ordinary men and women will find in Mary a relevance for their own lives. The story of Mary in history reveals different meanings of the Virgin Mother for different generations. Certainly the times are ripe for an appreciation of the feminine side of all human beings — and of God as well. And the Christmas story reminds us that Mary was not only the mother of the Messiah but a courageous woman in her own right who suffered for her singular response to God’s call.

[A skeptic's attack on the Bible's treatment of women]

It seems to be a fact that all primates live in male dominated societies. There have been very few female dominated societies among mankind, and fewer still that hold male and female as equals. That’s why it took until the 1920s for most woman to get the vote in Western civilization.

The feminist movement has made a lot of inroads in the last century, but it is difficult to fight literally centuries of being considered inferior and even evil by men in society. It is even harder to fight the religions that foster and resign as holy that very concept.

That is why it strikes me as strange that more woman are religious than men, and yet men dominate religion. The bible and the church fathers from all three major religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all find woman repugnant with only one duty, to produce male off spring and cater to the men in their lives. They are property.

The list of passages putting down woman in the bible is almost endless. To me it is amazing that woman can believe and pass on this information about themselves and even agree with it. No wonder that woman often suffer from low self esteem and low self worth.

Society is changing, but religion does not. Let’s look at some of the biblical history of this oppression. Genesis 1:27 tells us man and woman were created at the same time, meaning that they would have been equal and both created in God’s image. This was due to one of the factions of Judaism who believed that to be true. But they were not the majority and lost the battle to another group who brought us Eve.

In the Eve story god says it is not good that Adam does not have a partner. It seems he created all other animals male and female but he produced man in the image of god so he was alone. After showing Adam all the animals in the field, Adam still couldn’t find a suitable mate. Little wonder.

So does god create a woman from clay and breathe life into her too? No. He takes on of Adam’s ribs and makes her in the image of man, instead of the image of god. She is called woman, because she is made from man. Let the oppression begin. In Genesis 3:16 it tells us: “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

1 Corinthians 11:3: “Christ is the head of every man, and a husband the head of his wife, and the head of Christ is God.”

1 Corinthians 11:7-9: ”For a man is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman but woman for man. For this reason, and because of the angels, the woman ought to have a sign of authority on her head.”

1 Corinthians 14:34-35: “...women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says, If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.”

Ephesians 5:22-24: “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife...wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

In the Middle East it is common for men to have more than one wife. Usually the wealthy have more than one as a status symbol. The more money he has the more woman he can rule. Many of the old biblical figures had more than one wife. David had many wives, for example.

In the Garden of Eden story it is Eve who eats of the forbidden fruit, and then gives it to Adam. For ever after woman are seen as evil in the bible.

Thomas Aquinas said: “As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence.”

Augustine wrote: “What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman......I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.”

But the Protestant Church has nothing to brag about either. Martin Luther wrote: “If they [women] become tired or even die, that does not matter. Let them die in childbirth, that’s why they are there.” Nice guy.

Fundamentalism is no different: Jerry Falwell “Most of these feminists are radical, frustrated lesbians, many of them, and man-haters, and failures in their relationships with men, and who have declared war on the male gender. The Biblical condemnation of feminism has to do with its radical philosophy and goals. That’s the bottom line.” Go Jerry go.

So what does the Old Testament tell us about woman? Well here’s a general indicator. When the men of Sodom gathered to demand Lot send out his visitors so they can rape them, what does Lot offer to do instead? “I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes.” Really? Rape them if you think it is a good thing to do? Really? And god let him live?

But he wasn’t the only one. The same story is told in Judges 19:16: “Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing.” Don’t harm the man, but you can have these lowly woman.

All through Exodus woman are treated like property. In fact, the ten commandments tells us they are property. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” Wife and ox ... same thing. Woman were property and nothing more. Woman were often sold or given away, even to servants. Exodus 21:2-4: “If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing....If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself.”

Exodus 21:7: “And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.” She was also never given her freedom, while men only had to serve 6 years. If a man raped a woman but her father would not give her to the rapist, the rapist had to pay compensation. Again. Woman are clearly property according to the OT.

They are also unclean. When they have a menstrual cycle they are to hide in a hut away from everyone else. Men are forbidden to go near her. She is not allowed to go into the priesthood nor even learn the Torah. That’s for men only. Numbers 3:15 tells us only males were taken in the census. “Number the children of Levi after the house of their fathers, by their families: every male from a month old and upward shalt thou number them.” Deuteronomy 22:28-29 tells us that a virgin who has been raped is required to marry her rapist.

Woman are temptresses and evil. Genesis 19:30-36 tells us about Lots daughters who get him so drunk he doesn’t know what he is doing, so they can have children. He didn’t know what he was doing? Judges 16 tells us Delilah seduced Samson to find out what made him so strong, and eventually kills him. 1 Kings tells us Solomon’s wives are the ones who convince him to worship false idols. It wasn’t his idea. Same as Adam who wimps out and blames Eve for his eating of the fruit. Men just don’t take blame in the bible. It’s always the woman.

What did Paul have to say? : 1 Corinthians 14:34-35: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.”

1 Timothy 2:11-14: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.”

St. Tertullian in the second century said it all: “Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil’s gateway: You are the unsealer of the forbidden tree: You are the first deserter of the divine law: You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert even the Son of God had to die.”

How can any woman with a bit of self respect be a Christian? It astounds me.

When was the last time you heard a feminist defend masculinity? It’s a “man bites dog” story.

You probably won’t see her on Fox News. And she doesn’t have a column in National Review. But a lesbian academic trained at Yale, Camille Paglia, who describes herself as a “notorious Amazon feminist,” is an unlikely prophet of cultural doom. And maybe that’s why we should listen to what she has to say.

In a wide-ranging interview in the Wall Street Journal, Paglia says most feminists today deny the basic differences between the sexes, and as a consequence are setting us up for a huge fall. “What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” she says.

How? Well, Paglia says, many members of the cultural elite have no experience in the military and in fact disdain military service, a traditionally male province. “These people don’t think in military ways,” Paglia says, “so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind ... . They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.”

Friends, as our friend Chuck Colson would say, this isn’t primarily a knowledge problem. It’s a worldview problem. Paglia says modern feminists pass that misunderstanding onto the rest of us at the earliest opportunity — in kindergarten.

“Primary-school education is a crock, basically,” Paglia warns. “They’re making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters.” As the Journal article relates, “she sees the tacit elevation of ‘female values’ — such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation — as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.”

And the same thing happens, she says, all the way to college. “The PC gender politics things,” Paglia says, “the way gender is being taught in the universities ... is all about neutralization of maleness.” Another prominent feminist, Christina Hoff Sommers, who first alerted us to the ongoing “war against boys” in the culture, agrees, saying, “Boys are languishing academically, while girls are soaring.”

Male neutralization, Paglia says, includes the idea that men and women are biologically the same and that gender is nothing but a social construct. And this is why we shouldn’t be surprised that California schools have started to allow kindergartners with supposed “gender identity” issues to go to whichever bathroom they choose.

Paglia warns us that men have “no models of manhood” in our culture, adding: “Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There’s nothing left. There’s no room for anything manly right now.” The culture, this feminist admits, needs men and it will die without them. Wow.

So what to do about it? Paglia suggests a “revalorization” of traditionally masculine trades, such as construction, electrical, and plumbing work, which pay well enough but don’t come with the PC cache of a college degree. Well, that’s a start, but what I’d really like to see is a “revalorization” of traditionally masculine virtues.

We have too many guys, even in the church, afraid to be men. We need men not afraid to be strong risk-takers, to be courageous, to take responsibility, who are self-controlled, gentle leaders and willing providers. We need these real men in our homes and the public square, in churches and in neighborhoods. Remember, God made us male and female. We need both.

Now I realize I may be walking on thin ice here, because virtue is not gender specific. Women can also be strong! I pray my own daughters will be bold risk-takers for the kingdom — but as women, not as men.

Come to BreakPoint.org for some strong Christian resources and good reads on masculinity, what it means to be a man — for men and for boys ... because we need strong women and strong men. In fact, Western civilization depends upon it. Just ask Camille Paglia.

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Copyright (c) 2014 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

One of the charges leveled at the Bible and at Christianity is that it devalues women. In support of this belief, certain proof-texts are often trotted out.

One such passage is Leviticus 27:1-8. In this passage, Moses gives the Israelites instructions for how to “redeem” a person who has been dedicated to the LORD’s service. In Old Testament Israel, it was possible to make a vow dedicating yourself or one of your children to the LORD. This person then served full time in the temple. You see an example of this in 1 Samuel chapter one. Samuel’s mother Hannah dedicates him to the LORD’s service and Samuel goes to live in the temple beginning right after he’s weaned, eventually becoming Israel’s last Judge before the monarchy is established.

However, in this passage in Leviticus, Moses explains how, by paying a specified amount to the Temple, the person dedicated to the LORD can be released from the vow. A value is specified for each type of person with the value to redeem females set lower than the value for males. Gottcha! The Bible says women are worth less than men!

But, there’s more to it than that. As you read the passage, notice there are differing values for several categories of people. The most valuable is a male between the ages of 20–60. After that is a female in that age range. Then for younger males and females there are lower values – the younger the person the lower the value. The same is true for those in advanced age. People over 60 are valued less then people between 20–60. But still, within each age group, the value placed on females is less than that placed on males.

While that seems to say women are not as valuable to God as men, I submit these amounts have nothing to do with the intrinsic worth of the individuals. This is a value based on financial or productivity considerations. In an agrarian, manual-labor intensive society, young, strong men were worth more to the culture than were women, children and the aged. Even when younger or older, a man, because of his strength, was worth more compared to a woman of the same age. But, it’s interesting to note, a woman in the prime of health (between the ages of 20–60) is worth more than an older or younger male.

A similar principle is seen later in the chapter with regard to valuing land (Leviticus 27:22-25). The closer in time to the year of Jubilee, the less was required to redeem the land because there was less productive time left before the land reverted to the original owner. Exact same parcel of land but differing values for redemption based on the amount of productive output expected.

So what’s being recognized here is that young, strong men are worth more when you have manual labor to do than are their female counterparts.

You have similar valuations based on skills today. A doctor is “worth” more from a financial standpoint than a sales clerk. It has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the person but with what they bring to the culture skills-wise. Sometimes the value is based on circumstances.

Is a plumber “worth” more than a doctor? Yes, if I have a broken pipe pouring water into my basement.

Is a young man in ancient Israel “worth” more than a woman? Yes, if I have a field to plow.

While the Bible speaks of differing roles for men and women, it does not teach that men and women have different worth in the eyes of God simply because of their gender.

It’s time to reconsider one of the most ridiculed women in American history.

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Adapted from Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition by Mark Lawrence Schrad. © Oxford University Press 2021 and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Kiowa, Kansas, Thursday, June 7, 1900, 8:30 a.m.

For weeks before the vigilante rampage that would make her a household name, 53-year-old Carrie Amelia Nation quietly walked the roadsides near the successful hotel she owned and operated in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Deep in contemplation, she scoured the ground, picking up palm-sized rocks and brickbats. Purposeful and deliberative, she smuggled home those that had the right feel and heft, wrapping each one in old newsprint to look like innocent parcels.

“I did this until I got quite a pile,” she recalled.

Carrie (later “Carry”) A. Nation was a God-fearing Christian of the purest sort — which brought her into frequent conflict with the organized church. For her, justice, love, and benevolence were not things to be talked about on Sunday and forgotten the rest of the week. At her upscale hotel, she fed, clothed, and lodged the downtrodden and destitute — both white folks and Black — in some cases for years at a time. Harboring and defending the undesirables and castoffs of the community irked her more “respectable” fellow parishioners. First, she was expelled from the local Methodist church; then the Episcopal church. When the preacher in the pulpit of the Medicine Lodge Christian Church denounced her neighbor as an “adultress” in the middle of services — based on nothing but the word of the woman’s alcoholic husband — Carrie could not keep quiet. She shouted down the unjust allegation, and the preacher himself, in front of the entire congregation.

Imagine the scene as church elders tried — and failed! — to drag her bodily from the pews. And while they couldn’t physically throw her out of the sanctuary that day, they did later expel her from the parish.

No matter. Carrie still rode the width and breadth of Barber County, Kansas, collecting donations of food and clothing. She pressured storekeepers to donate additional groceries for the needy, lest she step onto the street and publicly denounce them as “thieving gougers of widows and orphans.” They usually complied.

As a volunteer jail evangelist, Carrie also served the penitent — bringing comfort, consolation, and the promise of heavenly salvation. To each inmate, she’d ask, what was the cause of your misery and woe? To a man, the answer came back: “drink.”

This was strange. “Dry” Kansas had been under statewide prohibition for 20 years. If there were no legal saloons anywhere in the state, where did they get their booze? A contrite inmate explained that anyone could get whiskey in the town of Kiowa, on the border with the Oklahoma Territory.

Moved, Carrie pleaded the remorseful man’s case to the bailiff, but the bailiff wasn’t listening. She then went to the county attorney to argue that the ones who should be behind bars are the unscrupulous men in Kiowa, running illegal saloons in open defiance of the law. The attorney “seemed very much annoyed because I asked him to do what he swore he would do,” she recalled: He was oath-bound to arrest these illegal “jointers” and “dive-keepers.” But he refused, even after Carrie filled his desktop with samples of the contraband whiskey she’d procured from Kiowa herself.

Determined, she took the train to Topeka and besought the state attorney general, also to no avail. The governor too “would not do his duty.” Having exhausted every legal remedy, Nation rightly concluded that the government of “Kansas was in the power of the bitter foe to the constitution” — the liquor business — that paid bribes and kickbacks at all levels of local, state, and federal government to keep its illicit profits flowing.

As president of the county Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, Nation had already exhausted every nonviolent means of moral suasion against the liquor men: pleading with tavern-keepers, writing letters, signing petitions, organizing temperance marches, and praying in front of illegal saloons. Nothing worked. And since women couldn’t vote, she had no electoral recourse either. Women were legally powerless.

So, on the night of June 6, 1900, Carrie hitched up her buggy and rode the 20 miles south to Kiowa. Early the next morning, she visited the unlicensed, illegal bar of Mr. Dobson, whose own brother was the county sheriff.

“Mr. Dobson, I told you last spring to close this place, you did not do it, now I have come down with another remonstrance,” Carrie said. “Get out of the way, I do not want to strike you, but I am going to break this place up.”

Hard and fast, she hurled bricks and stones at the whiskey bottles, glass mugs and tumblers, and the giant mirror behind the bar. The men — confused and terrified — huddled in the corner. When she ran out of her own projectiles, she grabbed pool balls and billiard cues to smash up the room.

Then she did the same to the saloon across the street.

And then a third.

Carrie was always clear that her attack was not against the booze in those bottles, nor the pitiable addicts getting drunk at 8:30 that Thursday morning, but against the predatory liquor traffic and the government that abetted it. “The smashing in Kansas was intended to strike the head of this nation the hardest blow, for every saloon I smashed in Kansas had a license from the head of this government which made the head of the government more responsible than the dive-keeper,” she wrote. “I broke up three of these dives that day, broke the windows on the outside to prove that the man who rents his house is a partner also with the man who sells.”

The man who sells.

Carrie Nation’s foe was not the drink or the drinker, but “the man who sells.” This is important.

By the time she was done with the third saloon, a sizable crowd had grown in the streets, watching in bewilderment and amusement. The authorities did not know what to do. “I have destroyed three of your places of business,” she declared to the onlookers, “and if I have broken a statute of Kansas, put me in jail; if I am not a lawbreaker your mayor and your councilmen are. You must arrest one of us, for if I am not a criminal, they are.”

The town marshal, mayor, and city attorney huddled up, and ultimately decided against pressing charges. Carrie returned home triumphant. Papers across the nation carried the sensational news, making Carrie Nation an instant celebrity. Back home, the political community was stirred to action. One by one, the unlicensed dives of Barber County, Kansas, were shuttered, their proprietors convicted. Carrie didn’t have to say a word.

Mrs. Nation then set her sights on the illegal saloons of Wichita. At 8 sharp on the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 28, she sauntered into the bar at the Carey Hotel, the most luxurious lodging in the city. “I decided to go to the Carey for several reasons,” she said. “It was the most dangerous, being the finest. The low doggery will take the low and keep them low, but these so-called respectable ones will take the respectable, make them low, then kick them out.”

The drunks fled when Carrie started hurling rocks at the opulent glass mirror, and through a life-size oil painting of a buck-naked Cleopatra across from it. The shellshocked bartender didn’t even move as she brandished an iron rod and smashed all the bottles in the mahogany sideboards. She then set the barflies at the saloon across the street to flight in a similar fashion. By 8:30 a.m., she was behind bars, having done some $3,000 in damage.

Carrie was jailed for three weeks — forced to sleep without a pillow on the concrete floor, as the winter drafts poured in — without ever being charged for a crime. After springing her on a writ of habeas corpus, her cold and loveless second husband of 25 years, David Nation, joked that she could do far more damage with a hatchet than with a rock.

“That is the most sensible thing you have said since I married you,” she laughed. Within a year, David filed for divorce. Carrie donated her entire alimony to found a home for drunkards’ wives in Kansas City — the first domestic violence shelter in the state.

Carrie Nation had no need for wealth, luxury, and status, and no patience for those who pursued them. She lived “as harshly and simply and self-denyingly as Leo Tolstoy,” she said in admiration of the world-famous writer, who was likewise excommunicated for decrying the man who sells liquor.

Now armed with a hatchet that would become her iconic trademark, Nation made her way to Enterprise, Kansas, at the request of women’s groups there. Enterprise saloon-keeper John Schilling knew that chivalry and decorum prevented a man from laying a finger on Mrs. Nation, even as she wrecked his illegal bar, loudly berated him, and shamed his trade from the street corner.

But that didn’t stop his wife, Belle Schilling, from walking up and punching Carrie square in the face. Saying nothing, Carrie staggered to a nearby butcher. She emerged, holding a chunk of raw beef over her swollen black eye, and kept right on preaching. Four prostitutes paid by the Schillings then kicked Nation to the gutter, pulled out her hair, and beat her bloody with sticks and whips.

Nevertheless, she persisted: Over the next 10 years until her death in 1911, Carrie Nation was arrested 32 separate times. Once she was apprehended under the dome of the U.S. Capitol, after haranguing senators for “representing the interests of the brewers and distillers” over their own constituents. At least her Capitol arrest was orderly.

In Kentucky, a barkeeper smashed the 58-year-old grandmother over the head with a chair. In London, she was pelted with rotten eggs. At Coney Island, a hail of peanuts and hot dogs preceded an angry New York lynch mob. It was hardly the only attempt to hang Carrie Nation from the nearest tree. Despite persistent death threats, she fought on, secure in her faith, fully embracing the dangers of her activism. She was ready to die for the cause, and many men wished she would. When a barkeeper sweating red with rage once pushed his pistol into her temple, she brushed him aside: “I am not afraid of your gun. Maybe it would be a good thing for a saloon-keeper to kill Carry Nation.” Much like the abolitionist martyr John Brown, she was certain her murder would prompt the entire nation to rise up and “smash the dives.”

Why Carrie Nation undertook her violent “hatchetations,” as she called them, has been the subject of endless speculation by generations of historians and amateur psychiatrists. She was easy to mock as a Bible-thumping “crank,” “a freak,” “a lunatic,” or a “puritanical killjoy,” with all the baggage each of those terms carries.

In his 1959 article “Crazy Carry the Party Pooper,” David Shaw claimed (allegedly with the full weight of midcentury science to back him) that Nation’s activism stemmed from the “glandular difficulties of the menopause that allowed suppressed forces to erupt violently.” Vaginas and hormones have long been men’s favorite excuses for women who step out of line and defy patriarchal norms. It has the added effect of belittling women’s actual motivations along the way. But it wasn’t just armchair Freuds dropping such misogynist and degrading accusations; the two most influential and widely read biographies blame menopause for Nation’s supposedly “warped” focus on “the dangers of sexual irregularity.” Bestselling author Andrew Sinclair’s Prohibition: The Era of Excess (1962) faulted Nation’s “suppressed sexual desire,” which was “perverted into an itching curiosity about vice, an aggressive prurience which found its outlet in violence, exhibitionism, and self-imposed martyrdom.”

Generations of writers and historians — almost all men — dismissed her as just plain insane: a “demented woman,” “psychotic from an early age,” suffering from a “personal history of disease and convulsion,” and a “well-defined strain of madness.” Unsurprisingly, the chauvinist equation outspoken woman = crazy woman has a long history.

Even Daniel Okrent’s masterful Last Call (2011) — winner of the American Historical Association’s prize for the best book on American history, and basis for the influential Ken Burns/Lynn Novick Prohibition documentary series — trivializes Nation as an ugly, incoherent lunatic. “Carry Amelia Moore Gloyd Nation was 6 feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache. Her mother believed herself to be Queen Victoria,” Okrent writes. “Her religious passions led her to sit on her organ bench and talk to Christ.”

By playing up her eccentricities, mocking her femininity, fundamentally misconstruing her religious beliefs, and laughing off her convictions, historians have made Carrie Nation a paper cutout of the temperance movement: easily crumpled up and thrown away, without ever needing to consider that her grievances actually had merit. Saloon-keepers were acting illegally. Politicians and law enforcement were corrupted by taking bribes to look the other way. Women were marginalized, disenfranchised, and powerless to stop it. A predatory liquor traffic was making money hand over fist by getting men addicted, and then bleeding them and their families to death.

Carrie had experienced all of this firsthand. Her first husband, Dr. Charles Gloyd, was a handsome and decorated Union Army physician. She idolized him. He adored her. They wrote romantic — even salacious — love letters to each other. But it wasn’t to last. Even as a newlywed, Gloyd locked himself up at the tavern or Masonic lodge, drinking till dawn, leaving his forlorn bride “hungry for his caresses and love.” In 1869, after just 16 months of marriage, her beloved died from alcoholism, leaving Carrie with only her sorrow, a new baby, and a disapproving mother-in-law to care for. A widow at the age of 22, she was penniless, hopeless, and powerless before the law. But from those depths of poverty and despair, she became self-reliant, strong, and willing to fight against unjust subjugation on behalf of the subjugated.

So when it came to her motivations, Carrie Nation always declared them clearly and consistently: “You wouldn’t give me the vote, so I had to use a rock!”

What’s strange is that we still refuse to hear her, believe her, or take her seriously.

“She did not pick up her hatchet because she had suddenly gone to some psychological deep end,” writes professor Fran Grace in her Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life (2001) — the most thorough Nation biography, and notably the only one written by a woman. She was not a “cranky, insane woman traumatized by menopausal changes.” Rather than a rampaging fundamentalist, she gave everything of herself to those who had none, and worked tirelessly to defend those who could not defend themselves.

When Nation toured the United Kingdom in 1908 to 1909, many Brits were shocked that the woman they met “was not like any preconceived ideas of the violent and notorious saloon smasher” portrayed in the newspapers. They lauded her “remarkable wit,” her “strenuous vigor,” her “good sense of humor, a wise, general outlook upon life, a kindly, even modest, and unassuming manner,” with “the light of a visionary in her eyes.”

Nor was she some uncompromising puritan, even when it came to booze. Once, when a contrarian physician tried to convince her that alcohol was harmless — maybe even healthful — the prohibitionist Nation took it as a challenge. She began chugging down one bottle of Schlitz Malt after another. Horrified, the doctor begged her to stop, before this supposedly “healthful” drink gave her alcohol poisoning. She made her point. She had no time for apologists and equivocators.

She did make time, however, for empathy and persuasion. Once, following a lecture in Chicago, she headed to the red-light district, itching for a fight. There she was surprised to find her own grandson, Riley White, tending bar.

“Go in and smash it if you want to,” he sheepishly told her.

No. She would not.

Instead, she held a closed-door meeting inside: just Carrie, the saloon-keepers, and a few girls who’d been ensnared into a prostitution ring. “They treated me well and the women called me grandma. Poor women, they are dragged down by devils,” she said. “It was the most remarkable meeting I ever had. Saloon-keepers and harlots have a much better chance of heaven than hypocrites who are in the church. I have no use for women who are afraid they will soil their skirts in trying to lift up their fallen sisters.”

Her fearlessness in leaving the privileged confines of the church to go slumming in the gutters, saloons, theaters, burlesque houses, and other bastions of misogyny certainly invited men’s scorn.

“You poor, deluded, hysterical, half-crazed, religious maniac,” one guy said to her. “I do not believe you are so much to blame for your present state of raving imbecility as the unsexed men [and their] so-called temperance crusades seem to have completely upset the molecules of your brains, that is of course, providing you have any.” This was hardly an isolated incident: Hecklers and newsmen alike portrayed her as old, unattractive, mannish, and “unsexed.” While in reality she stood just over 5 feet tall, even today, she’s frequently depicted “as a hyperthyroid Amazon of nearly six feet, who required ‘policemen seven feet high’ to handle her.” Still, she took every withering slight with remarkable grace.

Carrie was not some Bible-thumping “holy crone on a broomstick” seeking to legislate morality or “discipline” individual behavior. If anything, she was a populist progressive. Rooted in communal consciousness and agrarian self-help, she fought tirelessly for good governance, women’s rights, civil rights, and cleaning the corruption out of the body politic. She matched her words with deeds time and again. In addition to her battered women’s shelter in Kansas City, when she retired to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, she established “Hatchet Hall.” Part rest home for the impoverished elderly, part safe haven for women fleeing abusive husbands, and part home school for their children, Nation built an intergenerational, self-reliant, sister-based commune that was ages ahead of its time.

She did not view drinking as a sin or the drinker as a sinner. Instead, like the prostitute, the prisoner, and the slave, the drinker was the victim, to be forgiven, loved, and nurtured. The true sinner was the enslaver of men: the drink seller. And she would use all means at her disposal from prayer and persuasion to hatchetation to get the man who sells to change his ways.

Nor was her activism some crazy aberration: Disenfranchised and disempowered women had been smashing saloons across the country for decades. In 1855, 15 women were jailed for smashing a saloon in Illinois. The young lawyer who secured their acquittal went by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

Carrie Nation was a devout Christian, but she was not inflexible or dogmatic. A strict sectarian would never be caught exploring the mysteries of rival faiths; Carrie, however, thoughtfully invited the sage counsels of Catholic priests. Around the dinner table, she and the Jewish guests who frequented her hotel grappled with ethical and theological questions late into the night. She came away from such encounters professing a deep admiration for Jewish self-sacrifice, which would have further horrified the evangelicals who’d already thrown her out of every Protestant church in town. From a young age, she scoffed at the self-righteous exclusivism of those claiming to be the one true church, and repeatedly expressed her “contempt for popular preaching.”

Nor was she some racist. As a child in antebellum Kentucky, Carrie’s hardscrabble mother insisted that she live in the slaves’ quarters, where she attended subversive slave meetings about white tyranny and worshipped with them in secret. She “imbibed some of their superstitions,” Nation remembered, as well as their loud expressiveness in church, which further irritated her prairie white churchgoers. She did not discriminate in employing Black people, housing them, or serving them through her charity work, often donating her lecture proceeds to the Black African Methodist Episcopal Church. When she did speak at churches that denied Blacks, she demanded that all be admitted entry. If that made racists uncomfortable, well, then they could leave. And they usually did — just before they’d return with more numbers to run Carrie and her Black acolytes out of town.

And yes, Carrie Nation claimed that God spoke to her and told her to “go to Kiowa” and make war on the saloons, though that does not invalidate her activism. After all, two years prior, in 1898, President William McKinley claimed that God spoke to him and commanded him to make war on Spain, take their colonial possessions, “and civilize and Christianize them,” but we don’t teach that the Spanish-American War was due to McKinley’s supposed insanity or menopausal hot flashes.

Carrie Nation wasn’t “crazy.” She was a fierce and impassioned warrior-mother, who saw no inconsistency between those roles. She was Wonder Woman in a frock. A trailblazing social activist, she was the embodiment of the feminist empowerment mantra that “well-behaved women seldom make history.” Perhaps we should start recognizing her as such.

As a leftist lesbian professor, I despised Christians. Then I somehow became one.

________

The word Jesus stuck in my throat like an elephant tusk; no matter how hard I choked, I couldn’t hack it out. Those who professed the name commanded my pity and wrath. As a university professor, I tired of students who seemed to believe that “knowing Jesus” meant knowing little else. Christians in particular were bad readers, always seizing opportunities to insert a Bible verse into a conversation with the same point as a punctuation mark: to end it rather than deepen it.

Stupid. Pointless. Menacing. That’s what I thought of Christians and their god Jesus, who in paintings looked as powerful as a Breck Shampoo commercial model.

As a professor of English and women’s studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. And I probably could have stomached Jesus and his band of warriors if it weren’t for how other cultural forces buttressed the Christian Right. Pat Robertson’s quip from the 1992 Republican National Convention pushed me over the edge: “Feminism,” he sneered, “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” Indeed. The surround sound of Christian dogma co-mingling with Republican politics demanded my attention.

After my tenure book was published, I used my post to advance the understandable allegiances of a leftist lesbian professor. My life was happy, meaningful, and full. My partner and I shared many vital interests: aids activism, children’s health and literacy, Golden Retriever rescue, our Unitarian Universalist church, to name a few. Even if you believed the ghost stories promulgated by Robertson and his ilk, it was hard to argue that my partner and I were anything but good citizens and caregivers. The GLBT community values hospitality and applies it with skill, sacrifice, and integrity.

I began researching the Religious Right and their politics of hatred against queers like me. To do this, I would need to read the one book that had, in my estimation, gotten so many people off track: the Bible. While on the lookout for some Bible scholar to aid me in my research, I launched my first attack on the unholy trinity of Jesus, Republican politics, and patriarchy, in the form of an article in the local newspaper about Promise Keepers. It was 1997.

The article generated many rejoinders, so many that I kept a Xerox box on each side of my desk: one for hate mail, one for fan mail. But one letter I received defied my filing system. It was from the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged me to explore the kind of questions I admire: How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God? Ken didn’t argue with my article; rather, he asked me to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it. I didn’t know how to respond to it, so I threw it away.

Later that night, I fished it out of the recycling bin and put it back on my desk, where it stared at me for a week, confronting me with the worldview divide that demanded a response. As a postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview, but Christianity is a supernatural worldview. Ken’s letter punctured the integrity of my research project without him knowing it.

Friends with the Enemy

With the letter, Ken initiated two years of bringing the church to me, a heathen. Oh, I had seen my share of Bible verses on placards at Gay Pride marches. That Christians who mocked me on Gay Pride Day were happy that I and everyone I loved were going to hell was clear as blue sky. That is not what Ken did. He did not mock. He engaged. So when his letter invited me to get together for dinner, I accepted. My motives at the time were straightforward: Surely this will be good for my research.

Something else happened. Ken and his wife, Floy, and I became friends. They entered my world. They met my friends. We did book exchanges. We talked openly about sexuality and politics. They did not act as if such conversations were polluting them. They did not treat me like a blank slate. When we ate together, Ken prayed in a way I had never heard before. His prayers were intimate. Vulnerable. He repented of his sin in front of me. He thanked God for all things. Ken’s God was holy and firm, yet full of mercy. And because Ken and Floy did not invite me to church, I knew it was safe to be friends.

I started reading the Bible. I read the way a glutton devours. I read it many times that first year in multiple translations. At a dinner gathering my partner and I were hosting, my transgendered friend J cornered me in the kitchen. She put her large hand over mine. “This Bible reading is changing you, Rosaria,” she warned.

With tremors, I whispered, “J, what if it is true? What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord? What if we are all in trouble?”

J exhaled deeply. “Rosaria,” she said, “I was a Presbyterian minister for 15 years. I prayed that God would heal me, but he didn’t. If you want, I will pray for you.”

I continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea that it was inspired. But the Bible got to be bigger inside me than I. It overflowed into my world. I fought against it with all my might. Then, one Sunday morning, I rose from the bed of my lesbian lover, and an hour later sat in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. Conspicuous with my butch haircut, I reminded myself that I came to meet God, not fit in. The image that came in like waves, of me and everyone I loved suffering in hell, vomited into my consciousness and gripped me in its teeth.

I fought with everything I had.

I did not want this.

I did not ask for this.

I counted the costs. And I did not like the math on the other side of the equal sign.

But God’s promises rolled in like sets of waves into my world. One Lord’s Day, Ken preached on John 7:17: “If anyone wills to do [God’s] will, he shall know concerning the doctrine” (NKJV). This verse exposed the quicksand in which my feet were stuck. I was a thinker. I was paid to read books and write about them. I expected that in all areas of life, understanding came before obedience. And I wanted God to show me, on my terms, why homosexuality was a sin. I wanted to be the judge, not one being judged.

But the verse promised understanding after obedience. I wrestled with the question: Did I really want to understand homosexuality from God’s point of view, or did I just want to argue with him? I prayed that night that God would give me the willingness to obey before I understood. I prayed long into the unfolding of day. When I looked in the mirror, I looked the same. But when I looked into my heart through the lens of the Bible, I wondered, Am I a lesbian, or has this all been a case of mistaken identity? If Jesus could split the world asunder, divide marrow from soul, could he make my true identity prevail? Who am I? Who will God have me to be?

Then, one ordinary day, I came to Jesus, openhanded and naked. In this war of worldviews, Ken was there. Floy was there. The church that had been praying for me for years was there. Jesus triumphed. And I was a broken mess. Conversion was a train wreck. I did not want to lose everything that I loved. But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world. I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, he could make right my world. I drank, tentatively at first, then passionately, of the solace of the Holy Spirit. I rested in private peace, then community, and today in the shelter of a covenant family, where one calls me “wife” and many call me “mother.”

I have not forgotten the blood Jesus surrendered for this life.

And my former life lurks in the edges of my heart, shiny and still like a knife.

________

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Crown & Covenant). She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina, where her husband pastors the First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Durham.

===============

Version used in Holwick sermon on 11/17/13:

Rosaria Champagne was a college professor of English and women’s studies. She was a liberal, a feminist - and a lesbian. She had no respect for Christians, especially after Pat Robertson quipped at the 1992 Republican National Convention, “Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” After that, Rosaria made it her personal quest to challenge the Religious Right.

In 1997 she wrote an article in a local newspaper critical of the Promise Keepers. The article generated a lot of response so she put a Xerox box on each side of her desk: one for hate mail, one for fan mail. But one letter she received defied her filing system. It was from Ken Smith, the pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged her with questions like: How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God?

Ken didn’t argue with her article; rather, he asked her to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it. She didn’t know how to respond to it, so she threw it away. Later that night, she fished it out of the recycling bin and put it back on her desk. With the letter, Ken initiated two years of bringing Christ to a heathen. So when he invited her to get together for dinner, she accepted. Her motives at the time were straightforward: Surely this will be good for her research.

Something else happened. Ken and his wife, Floy, became her friends. When they ate together, Ken prayed in a way she had never heard before. His prayers were intimate. Ken’s God was holy and firm, yet full of mercy.

Rosaria started reading the Bible. She read it many times that first year in multiple translations. Her friends began to notice. A transgendered friend named “J” cornered her in the kitchen. She warned her, “This Bible reading is changing you, Rosaria.” With tremors, Rosaria whispered, “J, what if it is true? What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord? What if we are all in trouble?” “Rosaria,” she said, “I was a Presbyterian minister for 15 years. I prayed that God would heal me, but he didn’t.”

Rosaria continued reading the Bible, all the while fighting the idea that it was inspired. Then, one Sunday morning, she rose from the bed of her lesbian lover, drove an hour and sat in a pew at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. She was conspicuous with her butch haircut, but reminded herself that she came to meet God, not fit in. She continued to attend the church, continued to question.

One Sunday, Ken preached on John 7:17: “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” This verse exposed the quicksand in which Rosaria’s feet were stuck. She was a thinker. She expected that in all areas of life, understanding came before obedience. And she wanted God to show her, on her terms, why homosexuality was a sin. She wanted to be the judge, not one being judged.

But the verse promised understanding after obedience. She prayed that night that God would give her the willingness to obey before she understood. She prayed a long time. In the morning, when she looked in the mirror, she looked the same. But when she looked into her heart through the lens of the Bible, she wondered, Am I a lesbian, or has this all been a case of mistaken identity? Who am I? Who will God have me to be?

She describes her conversion as a train wreck. She did not want to lose everything that she loved. But she weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, he could make her world right. Today, Rosaria lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is married to a Presbyterian minister.

Christians shouldn’t build walls to keep people out. We should let God break down those walls so they can come in. He did it with Rosaria. He did it with Ruth he can do it with you.