Autonomy and Justice

David French’s laughable assertion that US society has become increasingly fair and just as women have gained political power (presumably along with other nations traveling the social justice path) has gotten me thinking about the relative importance of autonomy and justice, and how the Bible speaks about these two goals our society claims to find most desirable.

We’d all like a little more self-determination, right? And who apart from criminals rejects justice?

The Only Possible Metric

I pointed out in last Sunday’s post that the only possible metric by which one might argue that flooding Congress, workplaces and voting booths with women has improved society is the greater autonomy now available to women. That seems to be French’s thought: that more choices for women equals greater justice. This is also the strategic emphasis of pro-abortionists. We never stop hearing about a woman’s “right to choose”.

There’s no argument about one thing: the right to vote and an increasing presence in decision making in all quarters of Western society has certainly resulted in greater female autonomy. Meanwhile, justice in the West has suffered immeasurably, most obviously justice for the never-to-be-born.

Once again, this series is not about trashing all things feminine or pitting women against men; the world does enough of that. I’m far more interested in this uncritical acceptance of greater autonomy as a universal good that French’s comment reflects, and in comparing the value he puts on self-determination with that which the Bible puts on it. Let’s do some of that.

What’s Happened to the US Since 1920

Let’s start with a few observations about the feminization of American institutions through which this increasing autonomy has been achieved, including one necessary repeat from a previous post:

One: No Straw Men. American society was far from just in 1920, prior to which only men were involved in its governance. In comparing justice in today’s society with those of yore, we are not talking about the difference between black and white, right and wrong or anything so binary. We are talking about the difference between regularly displeasing God and circling the drain on the fourth flush: differing degrees of bad, sometimes awful. Let’s not oversimplify.

Two: Worse by Almost Every Metric. Overall, justice is way, way down. American society was vastly more just in 1920 than in 2025. Nobody can convincingly dispute this. Since 1920, America has seen over sixty million abortions, out of control immigration, the sexual revolution, the welfare state, innumerable foreign wars, educational decline, the disintegration of the nuclear family, the near-bankruptcy of almost all social programs, a weaponized LGBTQ movement, and increases in drug abuse, divorce, child abandonment, single motherhood, female depression, male suicide, and myriad other social ills. These include the end of the rule of law and the evolution of democracy into a managed mechanism for prioritizing the putative rights of tiny minorities over the actual will of the people. It’s impossible to argue cogently that prizing empathy over rationality, safety over risk and cohesion over competition — rejigged priorities all notably feminine — has improved the West.

Three: Prioritizing is Not Achieving. Pursuit of these feminine objectives has failed miserably. (1) America’s newfound faux-empathy simply transfers value to previously ignored minorities while devaluing those previously valued. Empathy for some is always lack of empathy for others, and social justice for some is invariably injustice for the newly disenfranchised. (2) America has not become safer even though safety has been the underlying motive in much recent social upheaval. We might reasonably make the argument that taking women out from under the protection of fathers, brothers and husbands and placing them under the protection of government has made women less safe and happy than at any time in human history. They are drugging themselves into oblivion in unprecedented numbers. (3) Nothing is less cohesive than a society made up of multiple races and cultures entirely failing to integrate into any sort of unified American identity. That’s where we’re at: the crumbling feet of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue.

Four: Even the Improvements are Arguable. All apparent improvements in society brought about by greater female participation in decision making have their downsides. I observed one area in which women have brought an improvement: civility in the workplace. There are others. (Not the emancipation of blacks. Slavery was abolished in 1865, long before women had any say about it.) Yet even the comparative civility of the 2020s workplace masks a few rank unpleasantries. We are not civil to one another because we are better, more Christian people or because we have learned not to hate or not to make racist or sexist assumptions; we are civil because the alternative is being sacked and becoming unemployable and broke, no matter our level of competence. So even greater civility is a mixed blessing, a coat of whitewash over a decaying corpse, an illusion maintained only by force.

Five: Correlation is Not Causation, BUT... Not all the comparative negatives of 2020s society are directly attributable to the feminization of the electorate, but we must acknowledge that despite increasing participation in decision making from women for over a century, things are absolutely not getting better. Feminization has produced no overall improvement in the operation of Western societies while introducing numerous innovations that paralyze and imperil them.

Six: The Core Element. If we had to distill the feminization of Western society down to a single core element, it is this: the inability to say no to or to make hard decisions about the rights of some allegedly underprivileged segment of the electorate. That is almost every decision made these days. Outside of Christ, the feminized mindset invariably craves approval, paying any price to maintain the illusion that people are applauding it for doing the right thing, including the destruction of its own society.

Seven: Spiritual vs. Physical Autonomy. Every human being is born spiritually autonomous. It’s a privilege the Lord has granted us by his grace that we are neither condemned nor rewarded in eternity for things other people have done. Each of us will give an account of himself to God. I point this out because some confuse freedom of conscience before God with self-determination in this life. In fact, every conscience is free, no matter what other human beings think or do. Men may make you pay for expressing certain opinions, but maintaining our freedom of conscience to act in good faith toward God is well worth dying over. Many have done it without regret. Nobody can stop you believing anything you want, though they will certainly try.

Autonomy as a Zero Sum Game

The solitary metric by which one might argue for the moral value of feminization, then, is autonomy. By this, we mean only female autonomy, of course. Women are freer than ever, and that, say (some) women, is a good thing. Yet a woman’s newly discovered right to choose in any area by definition eliminates the man’s. At best he gets consulted and his arguments dismissed. Increasing her options always comes at the expense of his; it’s a zero sum game.

Christians must concede that choice itself cannot be a transcendent value. Autonomy for its own sake has no moral component. Even God has things he cannot do, choices he cannot and will not make. Why should human beings be different?

So then, autonomy is not justice. Perhaps that was obvious to you. It’s self-evidently obscure to many in our society. Increasing the former is no guarantee of the latter. One of the most unjust periods in Israel’s lengthy history was that of the judges, when “every man did what was right in his own eyes”. Autonomy is no recipe for equity.

What Does Scripture Say

Here we need to come back to what the scriptures teach about autonomy and justice.

The writers of scripture value justice at the highest possible levels. Abraham was chosen to father a nation because he loved justice. All the psalmists commend it. The word and its cognates appear over 200 times in the OT and 80 times in the NT, always approvingly. Justice in any society is a must if God is to be honored.

Autonomy, by comparison, is an irrelevancy for Christians. Far from viewing slavery as a handicap to a new believer and a grave evil in need of remediation, Paul tells new believers in slavery to continue as if they are unconcerned by its apparent limitations. “He who was called in the Lord as a bondservant is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a bondservant of Christ.” No autonomy, no matter.

The values of the early believers simply did not mirror ours. For them, autonomy was nice to have if offered to you, but not worth prioritizing over anything that really mattered, like personal testimony or doing right.

Autonomy and Injustice

We worship a God who became man, who humbled himself, made himself of no reputation, and took upon himself the form of a servant. One who did not think his intrinsic equality with God a thing to be grasped. One who voluntarily discarded his autonomy and put his fate in the hands of others: not just the hands of the loving Father who directed his decision making every moment of his life, but also the “hands of lawless men”. These abused, tortured and killed him, producing the greatest injustice in history.

Still, he would not insist on his own way. We might say a little autonomy might have served him better. We’d be wrong. More importantly, it would not have served us better.

It seems self-evident that the participation of greater numbers in the choice making process of our nations is only beneficial when those making the choices have the mindset of Christ. When self-interest and high time preferences characterize the electorate, male or female, we are always going to have major problems.

More choices, and especially more choosers, are no improvement unless we learn to make the hard choices justly and dispassionately.