"Christian" Patriarchy is Not the Solution to Feminism Run Amok

“And the man said, ‘The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me the fruit, and I did eat.”

The world’s gone mad.

We just had a full blown Congressional hearing to debate the existence and alleged activity of UFOs. A man just won the title of Miss Universe Netherlands. Some people are willing to spend in excess of $10,000 to see Taylor Swift in concert. And Donald Trump is still a possible contender for presidency.

Some things just don’t make a whole lot of sense.

And other things do. Take, for example, the backlash to feminism. I get it. As feminist inclined as I may personally be, I’m also an honest person, so I have to acknowledge that third wave feminism has run off the rails. When conservatives thumb their noses at it, I do understand a number of the objections, and the surplus of 60 million abortions coupled with the downright embarrassing feminist corporate sell-out of women’s hard fought sex-based rights are at the very top of the list. When even the pink pussy hats are taboo at the annual Women’s March because they’re “transphobic,” you know you’ve lost the reins of your own movement.

I maintain (and will always maintain) that true feminism was always and will always remain necessary. (If you struggle to understand this, I invite you to consider the plight of women in Afghanistan), and I think people on my side of the political divide are aggressively unfair and lacking in nuance when it comes to their approach to feminism, but I’m not blind to their legitimate grievances.

But here’s the deal, and I’ll say it without apology or qualification: I think waaaay too many conservatives are completely and utterly blind to a rapidly metastasizing cancer in our own camp: “Christian” patriarchy.

Now hear me out. Patriarchy is to the left as feminism is to the right. And neither side is entirely wrong in its criticism, however wrong they may be in their scope. I got into a spat with a pastor friend about this today, and while I consider him a dear friend and am committed to relationship despite our disagreement, his seemingly willful blindness on this topic makes me want to pull my hair out.

Here’s the somewhat buried thesis of this entire blog entry: “Christian” patriarchy is the future of the Christian right if more people don’t start wising up and pushing back soon. People tend to write it off as a fringe movement without any teeth. That’s a mistake. It’s rapidly growing in influence as it asserts itself as the solution to the global male identity crisis affecting our world. Journalist Christine Emba wrote a brilliant analysis of this problem, and I highly recommend it.

Suffice to say, though, that this particular “solution” is dangerous. It’s well-intended but ill-advised. Its primary appeal is the promise of order and control amidst a backdrop of total gender chaos, but in reality, it is actually a feeder program for the same toxic feminism it claims to oppose.

Toxic patriarchy is the root, liberal feminism the fruit. One always produces the other. But very few are naming this problem. They’re two broken wings of the same decrepit bird. But the right only wants to acknowledge feminism’s contributions to the problem. The right refuses to confront toxic patriarchy with the same vim and vigor. We refuse to address the problem at its root. We want to pluck the head off the dandelion and convince ourselves we’ve eradicated the weeds in our garden.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about—the example that ignited the feud between my pastor friend and me:

I sent him the following screenshot of an advertisement for an upcoming conference for Christian men.

I now not-so-affectionately refer to this group of individuals as the “seven beards of the apocalypse.”

If you aren’t engaged in evangeli-Twitter, you might never have heard of any of these men. You may be tempted to believe they’re fringe and unworthy of our collective attention, but I will reiterate that these guys are the future of the Christian right if we don’t start paying attention and pushing back post haste. They’re rapidly gaining in influence, having recently platformed on major right wing news networks and even colluding with the likes of guys like Jordan Peterson.

So I sent this photo to my friend with the caption, “Terrifying.”

And he responded with a message about how these guys aren’t perfect, but they’re mostly good men with noble motives.

This is the point at which I explain that almost every single man on this photo is a raging chauvinist and that most of them don’t even think women should have the right to vote.

I’ve warned people about Doug Wilson for over a decade. For those who don’t have time to read the documentation, suffice to say that Wilson is a self-ordained Presbyterian minister who essentially created his own denomination. He has a tremendous amount of influence and is linked or in charge of a number of organizations including Canon Press, Cross-Politic, It’s Good to Be a Man, Logos K-12, Greyfriar’s Seminary, New Saint Andrew’s College, the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, Omnibus Curriculum, and others.

Wilson has a lengthy and well documented track record of misogyny and abuse of power. He defended and covered for not one, but two pedophiles under his leadership. He wrote letters to the court on behalf of these rapists asking for leniency. He pawned one of them off on an unsuspecting woman in his congregation and performed their marriage ceremony, asking God to bless the union with children. The pedophile went on to sexually abuse his own child. Wilson wrote manipulative letters to the victims, encouraging their silence and warning them that publicizing their harm would bring shame to their families. One of the deacons from Wilson’s church defended the rapist in court.

Wilson has also published overtly racist materials, claiming that slaves in the American South actually had it pretty good and enjoyed warm relationships with their masters.

Instead of following the biblical mandate to love the lost, Wilson encourages his congregants to wash their hands of them. He has particularly harsh words to describe unbelieving women, making frequent reference to their breasts, and categorizing them in terms such as “cunts, harpies, lumberjack dykes, crones, waifs with manga eyes, and small breasted biddies.”

He recently wrote a book about a sex robot with soft core porn descriptors wherein the protagonist has descriptive sex with a doll.

In short, it takes a severe amount of spiritual blindness to turn a blind eye to the reality that this man is unfit for any degree of pastoral leadership, for which the biblical standard is “above reproach.”

Here he is peddling chauvinism for about the millionth time in broad daylight:

From Wilson, we learn that women were designed to make the sandwiches.

So let’s move to the next guy: Brian Sauve, another chauvinist extraordinaire, who has publicly declared that women have no business is pretty much any sphere of public life—not in politics, not in polemics, not in leadership, not even in teaching women’s Bible studies. He put a cherry on top of it all with the bold statement that basically every terrible thing that has ever happened in America is a direct result of women gaining the right to vote. I’m not kidding. You can hear him here:

I don’t know a ton about Joe Boot, so he gets a pass for now, but Joel Webbon does not. Here he is actively promoting the view that women ruined everything just like Eve ruined everything and should therefore not have the right to vote in the laws that govern them.

We can move on to Michael Foster, who, along with his heretic co-writer Bnonn Tennant (who was literally ex-communicated from his church) routinely writes misogynistic crap framed as orthodoxy. This one is personal for me, as both of these men have said overtly sexist things to me personally. Foster told me that my only purpose in this world is to have babies, that my intelligence is of questionable value since the menfolk are the thinkers, that women with college degrees are less valuable on the marriage market, and that women who work outside the home are failing their families. Here’s some of their marketing for their cult following

And let’s not forget Dale Partridge, who literally argues the downright heretical point that women don’t need sound theology as much as men do. He literally believes that the only theology women need to worry our pretty little heads about is to the theology concerning his (theologically errant) view on gender roles.

And my pastor friend cannot see how these guys contribute to the problem. He can’t understand that every time one of these guys opens his chauvinistic mouth, another feminist is born. He can’t understand that the solution he’s prescribing is the root of the problem to begin with.

So I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: There was no gender hierarchy in Eden, and there will be no gender hierarchy in heaven. Enmity between the sexes is a curse, not a cure. Women will not (and should not) submit to men who treat them with this kind of contempt and disrespect. Men will not play nice with women who don’t even have the self-respect to properly define sex.

Neither toxic, controlling patriarchy nor permissive, rebellious feminism will lead us where we need to go.

I wholeheartedly reject and rail against this type of oppression framed as godliness. These men need Jesus.