How Medusas Are Made

As a single mom in the conservative right, I used to hear an awful lot about how horrible life would be for my children.

My newsfeed was perpetually cluttered with warnings about the statistical probabilities for fatherless children. And if the absence of a father wasn’t bad enough on its own, my choice to place my kids in the public school system would really seal their fate. I have a lot of thoughts about these broader conversations, most of which will have to be saved for another day. But the point I’m making is this:

In Christian circles, we all believe, to a pretty significant extent, that we have a clear duty to resist the world’s attempts to indoctrinate our children. We believe we need to identify the ideas and patterns that make our kids vulnerable. We believe we need to protect them against ideologies that war against their souls.

There’s no shortage of these warnings on the right when it comes to things like queer theory and CRT and other forms of intersectional Marxism that are swiftly creeping into our schools’ curriculum.

“Stop! There’s trouble this way! Danger ahead!” we scream to anyone who will listen. Or as Voddie Baucham put it, “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”

We innately understand that kids will begin to embrace the ideas to which they are repeatedly exposed from a young age. And we’re really pretty good at warning people about external threats.

But I’m here to scream “Mayday!” about some pervasive threats from inside the house, threats that way too many people fail to recognize because they’re wrapped in Christian lingo and presented as righteousness, when, in fact, they are little more than authoritarianism and misogyny that’s wreaking havoc on the people who claim to represent Christ. I’m here to warn you about the statistical probabilities of teaching boys to disrespect girls’ voices and experiences.

This past week, Joe Rigney wrote yet another article about how women are basically ruining the world with our weaponized empathy. He stole his thesis statement from Adam in Eden: “The woman thou didst give me did give me the fruit, and I did eat.” The article was just a whole lot of highfalutin words to communicate that men need to be in charge of everything because women’s feelings eclipse our logic and lead us perpetually astray, and men are the only ones with enough strength of character and moral courage to uphold orthodoxy. The end.

The article was chauvinistic crap. To most of the thinking world, it’s pretty easy to encounter an article like this, roll your eyes, and wonder what went wrong in the author’s relationship with his mother. It’s not a serious piece. Do women, as a general rule, tend to weaponize empathy in a way that leads to harm? Yes. I even wrote about this last week. But if we really want to play this game where we take the pervasive sins of one sex and use them as reasons to disqualify all members of that sex from Christian leadership, our pulpits would be empty.

“Sorry, guys, you can’t preach. Pastors of the male sex keep getting caught with their pants down, embroiled in countless sexual scandals. And men commit like 95% of the world’s violent and sexual crimes, so I guess that means you can’t be trusted with ministry.”

Do you see how silly this is?

The problem is how widely embraced it seems to be among many of the heavy hitters and leaders in the Reformed Christian world. Tons of popular Christian men are sharing this article as though it’s some groundbreaking work on par with Dickens or something, and they’re encouraging their congregations to do the same to the degree that overt chauvinism is being seamlessly, mindlessly woven into the fabric of so much Christian theology that no one even notices it when it rears its ugly head.

Perhaps the most controversial element of the article, though, is the image that accompanies it. It’s a depiction of the Greek Perseus holding the decapitated head of the monstrous Medusa.

The image is now something of a Rorschach ink test for Christian Twitter. Everybody’s talking about it. Some, like William Wolfe, see an image of victory over the evils of feminism. Ding! Dong! The witch is dead. As soon as feminism dies, the menfolk can get on with restoring the golden days of yesteryear when men ruled the world and women made the sandwiches.

But I don’t see victory when I observe this image. I see a confession. These men are telling us very plainly what they think about the fairer sex. Their message is crystal clear: “Obey us, or we will end you.” They used similar imaging in November when they published photos of burning Disney princesses, as though the greatest threat to Christian men are fictional women with power.

“But it’s Medusa,” you may argue. Why defend a shrieking banshee like Medusa?

I’m not defending Medusa at all. But I am going to tell you how Medusas are made. I am going to warn you that the callousness and chauvinism which men like Joe Rigney routinely display breeds feminism faster than virtually any other force on earth. I am going to tell you that indoctrinating the masses into chauvinism creates a cognitive dissonance that countless women try to overcorrect by turning to feminism.

Are you familiar with Medusa? Do you know what is arguably the most popular version of her story? Do you know why she was so angry and bitter? Do you know that she was a virgin when Neptune raped her and that she got punished for pursuing justice?

Do you know how often this happens in theobro churches? Do you know how many sexual predators have now been enabled in Joe Rigney’s back yard in Moscow? Do you know that his church leadership continues to punish and silence the women who seek justice for the harms committed against them? How much do you know about Steven Sitler or Jamin Wight or James Nance or Alex Lloyd?

According to Rigney, men are the only ones with enough strength to confront the wolves that threaten the church. Women, according to him, are too emotional to be useful in this capacity. The tragic irony is that he’s so emotionally invested in his self-concept as a righteous Christian warrior that he’s completely blind to the evil he continues to enable in his own camp. He’s not slaying wolves; he’s feeding them!

Just yesterday, I saw Owen Strachan tweet something to validate men in their roles as “protectors,” and I wanted to bash my head against a wall. Because in the same breath that Owen says this stuff about protecting women, he also lionizes men like John MacArthur, who have very public track records of completely failing to protect women who needed him most. In fact, when women like Eileen Gray, turned to him for justice and protection from their sexually violent husbands, he punished them for it. He rebuked Eileen for refusing to return to her marriage. He excommunicated her in front of thousands of people and made an example of her. He never apologized.

This is how Medusas are made. This is the formula. Because when the men who claim to represent God continually communicate nothing but contempt for an entire sex, it’s not too terribly surprising when the people breaking beneath that yoke of hatred turn to ideologies like feminism to try to find the dignity they so desperately need.

We don’t want to hear you talking about how men protect women. We want to see you actually doing it when it costs you your own idols.

If you think fatherlessness wreaks havoc on children, you’re right. But as much as fatherlessness breeds dysfunction, I would argue that chauvinism has the same net effect. In the church, we are only allowed to name one of these things as a threat because we’ve gotten so skilled at packaging the latter as “biblical living.”

Listen, I’ve spent hours and hours reviewing public school curriculum and creating parent guides to warn the masses about the threats of comprehensive sex ed and CRT and queer theory, etc. The threats outside the church are real. I won’t deny that. But, as an abuse survivor and advocate myself, I promise you that the threat of misogyny inside the church is every bit as destructive as anything outside our walls. Indoctrinating children into chauvinism and contempt for women will not end well for either sex.

As my best friend put it, “Patriarchy is feminism’s unholy father.” Let’s start there.

If you want to get rid of feminism, don’t start by beheading Medusa. Start by binding her wounds.