In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We interrupt our regular scheduled recycled Friday post to bring you a news flash from the Survey Center on American Life: Young Women Are Leaving Church in Unprecedented Numbers.
Tom: I was momentarily troubled, but I kept reading only to realize the women departing evangelical churches in droves are all feminists. At that point, I started to get excited.
I also figured I should call in my comrade-in-arms Immanuel Can to moderate my misogynistic enthusiasm with his usual balanced and biblical viewpoint. IC, check this out!
Immanuel Can: Okay, let me start with the obvious: let’s concede feminism drove a lot of men out of the churches. Those it did not drive out may be fewer, but they are not likely to be driven out now if they’ve lasted this long. Who’s left that could be leaving now? Only the women. So I could make the argument that this is both inevitable and unsurprising.
Tom: You could, and I wouldn’t debate you about it.
Portrait of a Feminist
I know you read the post, but our readers may not have pulled it up, so I just wanted to make crystal clear the sort of person the Survey Center has identified as typically writing off evangelical churches these days in large numbers. She’s a young woman who feels churches treat her unequally, meaning that her church does not allow women to serve in leadership positions and offers them little formal authority. She identifies as liberal and pro-choice, and she resents the perceived “negative treatment of gay and lesbian people” by the churches.
Tell me, IC, if you can, why on earth any serious gathering to the name of Jesus Christ could possibly want such an individual to reconsider her position and stay? I mean, of course, apart from a 100% reversal of everything she appears to value most?
IC: I note that the authors of this article also write, “Even as rates of religious disaffiliation have risen, conservative churches have been able to hold on to their members”, which suggests it’s mostly the mainline churches that are in trouble again. Then they add, “but they are facing more of an uphill battle keeping this current generation of young women in the pews.” I’m not at all sure that the type of women of whom they are speaking are even IN the pews of conservative churches. I think they left long ago.
Tom: That’s a good point. I mean, first of all, I don’t know any pro-abortion evangelical women. None at all. I do know a few who are a bit soft on the gay thing because they don’t understand it and don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. But you’re right: the women who genuinely leaned far left were gone from evangelical churches decades ago, or at least if they stayed, they hid their inclinations well.
IC: But I note that they’re trying to say something about younger women, in particular — “Gen Z’s”, they call them — but when you look at their charts, the resentment expressed by their young women is not hugely greater than that of the older generations. Feminists have never liked churches, and I don’t think they’re ever going to. They can only coexist if a woman drops her feminism or the church drops its biblical principles … and then there’s no reason at all for them to WANT to coexist any longer.
The Feminized Evangelical
Tom: Now, I think we should probably recognize that while precious few evangelical women would admit to being third-wave feminists, evangelical churches have become increasingly feminized over the last fifty years. If you watch YouTube, evangelical platforms are the domain of soft men who tell women things they want to hear: egalitarianism in the home, “servant leadership” for their husbands and elders, the expectation that their daughters will be university educated and career oriented, patriarchy is bad, and so on. When we read in the first paragraph that until recently “it was men more than women who were abandoning their faith commitments”, this is why. Feminized churches have little to offer men. If they will not uphold biblical values in the church, home and society, we will usually walk rather than put up with it. They also have very little to offer women looking for biblical leadership and a countercultural church.
IC: Agreed. It all really reminds me of one of the least feminist passages of the New Testament, in 2 Timothy 3:6-7, which is about the “captivating” of “weak women” by doctrinally-phony and sexually-predacious leaders of the last days. What happened when the men left the church was not, in most cases, female pastoring. Instead, one male took over the role of spiritual leader for the entire congregation or ministry, which his female admirers then dominated. He became their guru, and then led them into various mistakes and, in some cases, corruption and depravity as well. We could go down the list of gamma-gurus who became figureheads for a time, then “proceeded from bad to worse”, often becoming sexually exploitive as well, and eventually dragged the testimony of their congregations and ministry into the trash can. It’s all very shameful, so I won’t name names. I could, though. And I’m sure you could too, Tom.
Tom: That repeating pattern, as you say, started in the late first century. We’ve seen it again at least twice in the past ten years with well-known ministries. The difference from what’s happening now is this: Catholicism apart, institutional churches are increasingly run by women. Assemblies of God ordained their first woman in 1914, the Methodists and Presbyterians in 1956, the Lutherans in 1970 and the Episcopal Church in 1976. So now we have a generation of young women raised in other mainline denominations that don’t have strong biblical role models and solid New Testament teaching about the sex roles, and these girls are saying, “Why not me too? I want my turn behind the pulpit.” Those denominations, however feeble they may be at this stage, have yet to oblige.
Reaching a Wildly Progressive Demographic
But really, there’s a lot more to it than leadership issues and sex roles. According to the survey, it’s not primarily about the desire for leadership. After all, these women are leaving the faith entirely, not just trading conservative denominations for liberal churches they can dominate more easily. Much of the survey focused on feminist views about the woman’s role in the work force, an increase among young women in acceptance of abortion as an option, 30% of young women identifying as something other than “straight”, and a lack of interest among young women in the current generation about having children and families.
Should evangelical churches be concerned about trying to reach this wildly progressive demographic, IC?
IC: Concerned with their salvation? Certainly. But that’s not really what’s in view here. Here, the article is comparing the culture of worldly women with the climate of church. As they write, “Much of this dissonance [that young women say they experience] stems from growing up in a culture that has become more diverse and accepting of people with distinctive lifestyles and identities.” But there’s another way to say this: “Much of the dissonance between worldly young women and the church is produced by a culture that is increasingly permissive of sin.” In that latter framing, the problem’s not with the church; it’s with where the culture is taking young women.
Tom: I absolutely agree. What I’m thinking is that unless these young women, who have been indoctrinated into feminism from birth, undergo a major worldview shift — starting with salvation, but continuing in a countercultural church atmosphere that strongly teaches traditional biblical values for women, surrounded by young Christian women who are genuinely committed to living differently from their society — then the church is not going to be able to help these young ladies one bit.
Let me give you a typical example. The soft male pastor we caricatured earlier will have nothing useful to say to these women. His bright idea will be to start a weekly meeting for young career-oriented women showing them how to be more fulfilled in the workplace. Something like that is entirely useless, because it basically accepts feminist careerism as its starting point and tries to graft a few random Christian values onto it. That never works. You can’t serve two masters, and you can’t find fulfillment in a role for which you were not designed, and which even men do not find particularly fulfilling.
The Sick Search for a Doctor
If the church has any message for young feminists, I would say it’s for the women who have already tried the feminist lifestyle and found it makes them miserable. This is the audience for whom confidently-affirmed biblical values may have the greatest appeal. Confront disillusioned feminists with serious Christian women their own age who have gone a different way and are making it work. I like that idea.
IC: Unfortunately, the feminist lie remains plausible until young women reach their thirties or so. The feminist scheme can look like a solid plan for maximizing opportunities, education, income, independence, freedom, and fun … until it’s not. And it has absolutely no space in it for any spiritual values, other than Theosophy, Wicca or goddess worship of various kinds, which remain optional anyway.
Tom: I agree. The age factor means these disillusioned feminists will probably have devoted their prime childbearing years to the workforce, their virginity to the university carousel, their greatest youthful energies to the fires of the corporate altar for the best part of a decade, and their default belief systems to the ramblings of crazy, man-hating cat ladies. That’s a lot of baggage to deal with that I’m sure they would rather do without.
Hey, I’m open to a better way if you’ve got one. I’d love it if the church could successfully weaponize wisdom: a barrage of shrewd dialectical arguments in favor of biblical womanhood, attracting twenty-something feminists before they wreck their lives. But these are women … dialectic is not a strong point.
Do Otherwise
IC: A better way? Well, “do otherwise” is probably good advice; we need to stop compromising with the feminist propaganda, and start being confidently countercultural. I think this involves a more scriptural understanding of both masculinity and femininity, practiced heroically. And then … let the chips fall where they may.
Tom: I like your phrase “practiced heroically”. Confidence in the word of God is part of the answer to being more attractive to the world. It seems to have worked out well for Daniel.
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