Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, March 22, 2024
Review of  “How Feminism Ends”… “if this is the end of feminism, then it doesn’t quite feel fair. If women are finally “free,” then why is it still so hard to be female? And why, after all of our hard work, are the best parts of history still made by males?”

Ginerva Davis has a very interesting review of French writer Emmanuel Todd’s book The Lineages of the Feminine in the new issue of American Affairs. It’s titled, provocatively, “How Feminism Ends”
Todd is a self-described liberal, and supports the right of adults to change their gender and, to the extent it is now medically possible, their sex. But in the places where our current moment is excessive, or historically aberrant, Todd finds an unambiguous common thread: the presence of females.
Females control the universities where such sex-denying work is produced. Females are disproportionately concentrated in the academic fields—anthropology, biology, sociology—that have most radically changed their ideas on sex and gender (in contrast, history, a more male-dominated field, has stayed largely above the fray). A female sociologist wrote the book about how menopause is a social construct; a different female anthropologist wrote another study Todd cites which argues that females should, actually, have evolved to be taller and stronger than males. (Todd responds that “natural selection is there only to be lamented over.”)
Females increasingly control the levers of cultural power; if a topic feels “ideologically central,” then it is because females made it so. At the very least, they constitute the majority of reporters who cover health, social issues, and family policy. The “gender ideology” Todd abhors runs through numer­ous female-dominated professions: it is promoted by journalists, legitimized by doctors, and codified into law by a growing number of female government officials. Todd also finds that it is almost always “mothers” (i.e., female parents) who have the final say over medical treatment for their children. And so while debates about “gender-af­firming” care tend to be sex-neutral—“parents” making decisions about the bodies of their “children”—much of the contemporary “transgender movement” amounts to a trend of older females helping younger ones escape their sex.
…
The result, Todd argues, is a split consciousness on the status of “women.” Males see women everywhere: women police them in HR departments, mock them in the news, and, to add insult to injury, continue to insist that they are members of a protected class.
Females, however, are still haunted by a lack of female “greatness”—the same problem posed, seventy-five years ago, by Beauvoir. They work under male bosses. Their countries are run by mostly male leaders. Males continue to define the cutting edge in tech­nology and industry, while females play catch-up in remedial programs (“Women in tech!” “Women in business!”). And even the most liberated female must still take her pills, and count her cycle, and watch her fertility “window” while pretending that she doesn’t care. The female condition, one of constant self-monitoring and self-suppression, is now oddly similar to that of the gender-dysphoric, which is perhaps why we females are so obsessed with them (I never felt quite so understood as a female until I read the work of Andrea Long Chu, whom Todd cites as a leading chronicler of the transgender experience). It also seems designed to create a degree of self-loathing: females are constantly set up to compete at tasks at which they are slightly disadvantaged, and are promised a life which, any rational mind will quickly discover, they will never achieve. Social media aside, it is unsurprising that a growing num­ber of women now report that they hate themselves.
Todd argues that the recent wave of Western feminist agitation that we have witnessed in the past decade (#MeToo in America, #BalanceTonPorc in France) is not the result of a massive backslide in female liberation but the opposite—external barriers to female equal­ity are falling by the year. Women are waking up to their new condition and finding it a bit upsetting. And they are looking desperately for something, anything, else to blame—femicide in a foreign country, their still-male bosses, and even the word “woman” itself.
Because if this is the end of feminism, then it doesn’t quite feel fair. If women are finally “free,” then why is it still so hard to be female? And why, after all of our hard work, are the best parts of history still made by males?
In another recent article, Stella Tsantekidou writes on “the desperation of female neediness.”
Do you know what it’s like to be a woman who wants a relationship but can’t get one? It is incredibly common and yet hardly acknowledged.
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However much we who love Jesus may want to, we don’t get to redefine the words of Scripture to make them more palatable. We don’t get to embrace various ideologies that lead to a view of the person that destroys and then throws it away. We can’t take our own ideas of goodness and impose them over what God has already said is good. We can’t do that because we will have to answer to our Sovereign on the last day when he returns again in power and great glory. While Christians in the West may enjoy the benefits of a pluralistic society that grants them the freedom to worship without fear, they are nevertheless constrained by the True Shepherd to the painful wilderness of obedience. 

The Church Year is drawing to a swift close and the final Sunday, Christ the King, is upon us. Besides being a moment to sing some glorious hymns, it is also a fitting hour to make a most essential declaration–that Christ is the ruler over the world, over time, over nations and kingdoms, but most of all over every plan and inclination of every person.
It is a most comforting certainty for Christians that, if Christ is King, while of course it matters what the governments of the world do, it also doesn’t matter. Twitter may fall to the dust, Trump may get his account back, the price of gas may go up even higher, Congress may enact any kind of law, but none of it unthrones the Lord nor nullifies the truth that the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Lest we become too comfortable, however, because Christ is King, it absolutely does matter what Christians do and say. It is the Church—not the world—whose concerns and anxieties are shaped by Christ being King. If you’re scrolling for depressing signs of dark times, look at what Christians are saying and doing.
Which makes this particular piece by David French—a person I have studiously avoided on the internet for fear of failing in winsomeness—all the more bad. It is titled, “Pluralism Has Life Left in It Yet: The Respect for Marriage Act, and the harmony between religious liberty and LGBTQ rights.” After discussing what happened before and after Obergefell and what it all means, French writes this:
The bill doesn’t give either side everything, but it still contains crucial provisions that can comfort (almost) everyone. First, it states that “no person acting under color of State law” can deny “full faith and credit to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State pertaining to a marriage between 2 individuals, on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals.” In plain English, that means if your marriage was legal in the state where you’re married, then government officials from other states and localities can’t refuse to recognize the validity of that marriage on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin. And what of religious freedom? The bill does two important things. First, it declares that “[n]othing in this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, shall be construed to diminish or abrogate a religious liberty or conscience protection otherwise available to an individual or organization under the Constitution of the United States or Federal law.” This is an important provision and distinctly different from the Democratic approach to the Equality Act, which limited the reach of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In other words, the bill explicitly diminished religious-freedom protections under federal law. The Respect for Marriage Act does no such thing.
I wandered around Twitter, looking for what other people think about the new law, and found this long fact check that paints a much gloomier picture for religious people. What impresses me about the piece by French, however, isn’t so much what he says about the law, but the sort of desultory tone with which he says it. After six years of moral teaching online about the failures of Christians here is nary an indication that what we might be facing is not a petty quarrel between two morally neutral sides. It is as if, to quote almost everyone on Twitter, French doesn’t know what time it is. It is as if the tenseness with which people across the ideological divide are warily considering each other has entirely escaped his notice. Thus, amazingly, he concludes the piece this way:
The magic of the American republic is that it can create space for people who possess deeply different world views to live together, work together, and thrive together, even as they stay true to their different religious faiths and moral convictions. The Senate’s Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t solve every issue in America’s culture war (much less every issue related to marriage), but it’s a bipartisan step in the right direction. It demonstrates that compromise still works, and that pluralism has life left in it yet.
As so many people online said in various pithy ways, tell that to that cake baker, or to all the people who lost their Twitter accounts for noticing that some people pretending to be women are actually men. Or rather, look at the way that denominations are splitting apart. Open your eyes to the ways that gender ideology eats up and destroys not only individual people, but communities and families.
If I hadn’t just spent the last three months going back through the archives imbibing an immense amount of Auron MacIntyre’s content I would have maybe—minus the bit about calling the American republic “magic,” an astonishing claim, given the last six years—taken hope from French’s idea that “pluralism has life left in it yet.” What was I supposed to do? Believe my lying eyes?
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, October 16, 2023
Biblical critical theory takes a very different approach. Read Isaiah and Paul and you immediately see that the purpose of their critiques is the restoration of God’s creation and its fulfillment in God’s covenant. Natural law and similar concepts can give us a substantive picture of the moral structure of creation. The Book of Proverbs outlines that architecture in detail. The greater fulfillment is even more concrete, given at Sinai for Jews and enacted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for Christians…. Compare this vision to that of Marcuse. For him and other modern theorists, the purpose of critical theory is revolution undertaken in the nebulous hope that something new and just will emerge from the wreckage.

As debates over critical race theory rage on, both in society and within the church, one important point seems to have been missed by all sides: Many of the most important biblical writers were among the sharpest critical theorists of their day. I may be naive to imagine that an appreciation of the theological resources available to those who wish to hone their analysis of society might move the current discussions forward—given that so many presume that race, class, gender, sexual identity, and the rest exhaust our critical tools. But Christians, at least, should acknowledge Isaiah and Paul as more fruitful interlocutors than Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Isaiah never read The German Ideology of Marx and Engels. Yet he had a clear grasp of how falsehood can supplant truth and lead to the perversion of a culture, a perversion that alienates men and women from themselves, from nature, and from reality. Isaiah’s complaint echoes through his prophecy: Israel had created—we might say socially constructed—gods to replace the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. These social constructions were given material form as idols, and Israelite society, history, and cultic life were reconfigured around their purported power. Isaiah’s divine commission was to expose idolatry as a system of falsehoods—not just deceptions about the true nature of God, but also lies about who should dominate. Injustices flourish when men’s worship is perverted. Moreover, the consciousness of the people was so seared by their wickedness that God told Isaiah at the outset that they would be blind and deaf to his critique of their culture. One could rightly say that Israel was captive to “systemic idolatry.”
In chapter 44, Isaiah describes a man who cuts down a tree and uses half of it to make a fire to cook dinner while fashioning the other half into a god, which he then worships. The critique is powerful. The prophet uses the man’s actions in order to expose the absurdity of his idolatrous behavior. Rather, as later critical theorists might point to the conflict between Jefferson’s proclamation of natural rights in the Declaration and his ownership of slaves, Isaiah here lays bare the internal contradictions of Israelite idolatry, mocking the self-deceptions as Marx would millennia later when commenting on the ideological mystifications of class domination.
The apostle Paul continues in the Old Testament’s critical tradition. In Romans 1, he points to the fact that fallen man has perverted his religious instinct and its natural orientation to worship of the true God. This perversion occurs because we fabricate idols, and by venerating them we direct our attention away from God the creator. Instead of looking upward, idolatrous man looks downward and is bewitched by and enslaved to worldly lusts. Paul recounts the disastrous consequences: the abandonment of natural sexual relations between men and women, and then all manner of wickedness, from envy to actual murder. Our moral depravity and social dysfunctions arise from a fundamental rejection of the truth of God in favor of the lies of idols.
The cultural criticism offered by Isaiah and Paul has two key elements. First, although the criticism shows the perversions of what we now call “systems” or culturally constructed patterns of behavior, it brings into focus our culpability. Yes, the Israelites of Isaiah’s day were embedded in systemic idolatry, as were the people of Paul’s day (and our own day as well). But this “social conditioning” does not exculpate. We are idolaters because we want to be. We are not hapless tools of a system that dominates our individual agency and thus absolves us of any responsibility. Isaiah notes the zeal with which Israel embraces idolatry. Paul links the lust of sexual sin to panting after idols. We want to reject God and create our own gods. Thus, the biblical critique is not only cultural but also spiritual. It convicts idolaters of their personal responsibility for the system within which they operate, a system within which they happily live, even as it contradicts the moral structure of the world God created.
Because the scriptural mode of critique focuses on culpability, the second key element follows: repentance and forgiveness. Isaiah and Paul are aiming to dismantle idolatry as a social system in the way so many call for activism on behalf of “social justice.” They are calling for idolaters to turn from their idolatry and seek forgiveness from God, forgiveness that will not be withheld, because the God of Israel is a merciful God. Again and again, Isaiah calls the people to turn in repentance from their false gods, a perverted worship that causes the grave injustices he recounts. If Israel will return to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then peace and justice have a chance. Paul’s purpose is the same. He seeks to convict his readers of the dead end of worldliness that flows from worshiping graven images (bondage to sin and death) so that they will turn in repentance and faith to Jesus Christ. In other words, biblical critical theory does not end in “critique”; it aims at transformation through grace.
Secular critical theory ranges from old-fashioned Marxist critical theory based on economic factors to feminist and gay theories of forms of false consciousness that entail repressive social mores. In one way or another, modern critical theory focuses on social construction and the manipulative nature of the dominant narratives cultures tell themselves; the results are not unlike the critiques of idolatry that Isaiah and Paul advance. So it’s not surprising that Christians are attracted to critical theory. Like the Bible’s prophetic tradition, it refuses to take the world at face value and seeks to unmask the discourses of power that structure social relations. Furthermore, the purpose of secular critical theories—which is not merely to expose the world’s ideological captivity but to effect its transformation—resonates with what Isaiah and Paul are doing.
But we do well to remember John Henry Newman’s observation on the nature of heresy: It seizes on one aspect of the truth and presses it at the expense of all others. Secular critical theory is not made necessarily incompatible with Christianity by the substance of its affirmations (although it may be incompatible in respect to some). Taken as a whole, the critical turn in modernity is incompatible with Christianity because it takes a part of the truth and presents it as the whole truth. By advancing a comprehensive theory based on partial truths, it ends up opposing the truth.
The basic hopelessness of the visions espoused by modern critical theorists offers the clearest instance of this opposition. Christianity is a religion of hope, and our hope has a definite shape and content: repentance, faith in Christ, and the consummation of all things in him. By contrast, secular critical theory is utopian in the literal sense of urging us to work to create a “nowhere,” a state of fulfillment lacking in content.
From the early days of the Frankfurt School, which spawned many strands of today’s academic cultural critique, critical theory has been marked by an inability to articulate a positive social vision in anything but the vaguest terms. The lack of a positive vision occurs because, unlike Christianity, critical theory denies that the world has an intrinsic moral shape. The mavens of critique have no conception of the good that needs to be restored. Thus, the positive criteria for social change remain undefined beyond reference to vague but appealing language such as equity, inclusion, and social justice.
In a 1937 essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Max Horkheimer offered an account of critical theory that summarized its purpose and ambition: “For all its insight into the individual steps in social change and for all the agreement of its elements with the most advanced traditional theories, the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for the abolition of social injustice.”
Two things are striking about this statement. First, Horkheimer makes clear that critical theory is not simply a descriptive approach to interpreting the world. The mere unmasking and analyzing of social relations in terms of manipulation and exploitation is not the goal. The purpose, to borrow a famous phrase from Karl Marx, is not to describe the world but to change it. So far, so good, for a gospel-informed critique of society likewise seeks to midwife transformation, or in Christian language, “conversion.” But, second, Horkheimer expresses this aspiration with a purely negative formulation: the abolition of social injustice. That is a nicely apophatic phrase. The negation of injustice does not produce a substantial positive vision. Horkheimer does not tell the reader exactly—or even approximately—what the hoped-for future entails.
Herbert Marcuse was Horkheimer’s colleague. Perhaps the most culturally influential member of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse was more sanguine about the possibility of realizing heaven on earth. Indeed, he was an unabashed utopian, speaking at times of the abolition of repression. But, like most utopians, he was singularly incapable of giving a positive definition of the wonderland he sought to build. Instead, he filled out his utopian vision with a series of repudiations of everything about modern society that he did not like, combined with wishful pronouncements that everything would be wonderful once corrupt capitalist society had been demolished. Here is a good example:
Marxism must risk defining freedom in such a way that people become conscious of and recognize it as something that is nowhere already in existence. And precisely because the so-called utopian possibilities are not at all utopian but rather the determinate socio-historical negation of what exists, a very real and very pragmatic opposition is required of us if we are to make ourselves and others conscious of these possibilities and the forces that hinder and deny them. An opposition is required that is free of all illusion but also of all defeatism, for through its mere existence defeatism betrays the possibility of freedom to the status quo.
In plain English, Marcuse is saying that we must struggle to achieve nothing that actually exists. Thus hoping in something defined entirely by opposition to that which does exist, the utopian (critical theoretical) project must pit itself implacably against all that is. In short, the goal of Marcuse’s critical theory and of those theories descended from it can be described only in negative terms: anti-capitalism, anti-patriarchy, anti-racism, and so forth. The emphasis falls on dismantling institutions, social relations, or moral codes that stand in the way of the vague but hoped-for future.
There is an obvious problem here: How can the critical theorist define social justice if all that exists is by definition unjust, infected by capitalism, systemic racism, patriarchy, or some other structural injustice? Lacking an account of the moral order of creation, he cannot do so positively. The hope of modern critical theory is that, when everything has been torn down, social justice will emerge. Liberated from the now-vanquished unjust system, like Rousseau’s primitive man untainted by civilization, we will recover our original integrity.
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