The losing battle of the Sexes
- Happy is she who believed that the Lord would fulfill the promises he made to her. (Luke 1:45)
As I was writing last week, I realized the most troubling feature of our cultural and societal chaos, is wokeism. I also made the connection with another phenomenon: transgenderism. These terms have become so ubiquitous to our vocabulary and our conversation, that most of us would wish it would all just go away.
But it won’t just on its own. So it must be exposed and confronted for something it’s not, and never was: a solution to any legitimate social injustice. Finding a cohesive cultural defense against wokeism has been difficult because of its ability to alter, like a shapeshifter, to fit any narrative the culturati want to talk about. It’s intended to overwhelm.
Happily, some have begun to turn against the big bully and call it out for what it is: a cowardly trope with no real teeth. Just recently, I came across an educational alliance called Fairport Educational Alliance that is doing—from what I can tell—a very credible job of resisting and pushing back. Regarding the definition of wokeism, here is what they have published online:
“Wokeism is weaponized personal grievances masquerading as a genuine social concern. It’s defined by its fraudulent nature, as being distinct from legitimate social grievances. Wokeism only knows outrage — it knows not empathy for victims.”
If I may say so, that’s positively brilliant.
Ideologies are calculated to form cohesion and discipline in maintaining and promoting both loosely and rigidly held beliefs. In the political climate—and in America’s particularly, it’s the rigidly held ideologies that may either be tremendously beneficial, or deeply contentious and polarizing.
Ideologies can be both descriptive—what the world actually looks like—and prescriptive, how it ought to be. Ideologies are usually identified by the suffix “ism.”
Politically driven ideologies will include: Marxism, leftism, capitalism, liberalism (and) American liberalism, socialism, consumerism, populism, libertarianism, communism, anarchism, and even conservatism. Of course there are others, but these isms have endured, in most cases, for centuries. There are other isms that have been used to identify ideologies within the religious and spiritual realm. One of the sadly under-reported features of the twentieth century is the wholesale embrace of ideologies that describe religious-political hybrids.
One common feature of some of the most contentious political ideology can be described as very much like religions, with their attendant priests and high priests, acolytes, proselytes, and informal or formal canon. This would include the ideology of feminism.
Matt Walsh, (pictured) of the Daily Wire, exposed one such ideology—and its caustic effects on a very recent opinion piece he “subtly” titled, “Why Feminism Is One Of The Deadliest And Most Destructive Forces In Human History,” which he wove into his review of the latest blockbuster movie, “Barbie.”
[Note: this link is behind a paywall: The Daily Wire. I recommend trying it out yourself.]
Barbie—the movie—enjoyed immense success at the box-office for two reasons: it was heavily and effectively marketed to its target demographic, and also because its target market has embraced the very ism for which Walsh is so critical: Feminism.
Walsh’s claim that feminism is the most deadly and destructive force is found in this stunning statement:
“Let’s get, first, to the substance of my claim. As far as that goes, feminism’s status as a historically destructive force in human history is as clear as day. To begin with, if you accept that unborn babies are human beings (which obviously they are, because they can be nothing else), then we can directly blame feminism for 60 million deaths in the United States alone. When I pointed this out, Martina Navratilova, tennis legend and outspoken feminist, responded: ‘A fetus is not a baby, what a moronic thing to say. You spout about language used by the trans lobby and then do the same calling embryos babies! Hypocrite much?’”
But do all feminists think that a fetus is not human baby? In the late sixties and early seventies, many did because that was the dominant trope among feminists. Today, feminist organizations, like NARAL, avoid the discussion as much as possible, because science has proven that position is indefensible.
Abortions in the US—still the world’s leader in abortion statistics—have accounted for approximately one million reported deaths on average each year since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. If we were to add to this figure all the unreported surgical and chemical abortions, the totals would give the death toll from all the geo-political wars of the twentieth century a real run for the money.
Walsh continues: “In the past century, feminists have succeeded in destroying the nuclear family to a degree that American communists could only dream of. According to a study from Child Trends, just 9% of children lived with single parents in the 1960s, before the rise of modern feminism. By 2012, that number had increased to nearly 30%. In 2019, Pew found that the United States has the highest rate of children living in single-family homes of any country in the world.”
The conditioning from radical feminists for three generations has contributed to a nearly complete destruction of the nuclear family, covenantal conventional marriage, which would include men as leaders even in their own homes. Women are portrayed as “power figures” while men are consistently characterized as inferior and feeble minded in news and entertainment. Children brought into the world into even intact family households are conditioned to think dad has nothing to teach them. Young men Dylan Mulvaney and William (Lia) Thomas, might prefer to be young women, and young women like Chloe Cole had to testify before congress about her regrettable transgender surgeries?
“The messages to women about how to have a happy life as it relates to love and sex, work and family, have merely served to make women miserable; not only are they unhappier than their mothers and grandmothers ever were, [but] they are significantly more stressed out, much more so than men.” (The Federalist)
The radical feminist today doesn’t share the heritage of the social feminist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—who championed both civil rights and strong families. Now, instead, men and women are facing off as combatants. It’s in this social construct that the church faces the hard task of reconciling theology with feminist ideology. First of all, adding any philosophical descriptor to theology is immediately suspect. It implies such theology is interpreted with the deliberate intent of supporting an ideology; that the ideology comes first. Instead, as Christians, we must adjust our philosophy to match God’s words, never the other way around. With “feminist theology,” we are expected to embrace the theological interpretation in order to support “feminism.”
While feminist theology claims to seek the equality, justice, and liberation of women from what it perceives to be oppressive male systems of power and domination in religion, radical feminism seeks to obliterate it all.
But something much worse has happened: the obliteration of God’s perfect design-role for both men and women. From the first-wave feminism of Betty Friedan through Shulamith Firestone, [author of The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution] to today’s transgender ideology, the breakdown of feminist idealism should be obvious. From its “theology” lies a vast field of bitter acrimony, angry rhetoric, and millions of unhappy—or at least—disillusioned women, and ironically something almost monstrous: extraordinarily confused men who want be women.
- However, woman isn’t independent from man, and man isn’t independent from woman in the Lord. As woman came from man so also man comes from woman. But everything comes from God. (1 Corinthians 11:11-12)
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
