While women in many countries legitimately constitute an oppressed group that is consistently subjected to cruel and unjust treatment, this is not the case in most of the Western world. Affirming the proposition that “women in America are oppressed” requires us to redefine “oppression” not in terms of concrete unjust treatment, but in terms of more shadowy and contested social norms. The most relevant examples are male eldership within the church and male headship within marriage. Historically, feminists have seen such rules as a few of the many ways women are oppressed by “the Patriarchy.” To reach this conclusion prior to any analysis of what the Bible says on this subject is to shut the door to biblical correction.

Editor’s Note: The following article appears in the Spring 2024 issue of Eikon.
1. Introduction
With cultural conversations increasingly centered on the radical proposals of critical race theory and queer theory, discussions of gender and feminism seem almost obsolete. However, a deeper analysis reveals that contemporary feminism is a critical social theory which shares the same basic framework as its more extreme ideological cousins.
In this article, we provide a very brief historical overview of feminism, an explanation of how it falls under the umbrella of critical theory, a discussion of the overlap between contemporary feminism and evangelical egalitarianism, and a biblical response to both feminism and anti-feminist “red-pill” movements.[1]
2. The History of Feminism
Many feminists and historians analyze modern feminism in terms of three waves: the first began with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the second arrived in the 1960s around the time of the Equal Rights Amendment, and the third began in the 1990s.[2] We recognize that wave distinctions in feminism can be overstated and too neatly defined; nevertheless the prevalence of their usage compels us to employ them and give some brief explanation.
First-wave feminism centered on issues like women’s voting rights, property rights, the abolition of slavery, and the temperance movement. It culminated in the ratification of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, which granted universal female suffrage. Leaders within first-wave feminism included Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the United States and Emmeline Parkhurst in the United Kingdom.
Second-wave feminism was motivated by concerns around female economic, educational, and social empowerment. French Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique were both seminal texts of the second wave. Figures like Gloria Steinem galvanized and popularized the movement. Its legislative centerpiece was the Equal Rights Amendment, which was passed by Congress in 1971 but did not secure sufficient state support to amend the US Constitution.
Third-wave feminism, which began in the 1990s, embraced the critiques of womanist (black feminist) activists like bell hooks[3] and Audre Lorde, who argued that second-wave feminism had centered the concerns of middle-class white women. Highly relevant to third-wave feminism was the concept of “intersectionality,” a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989.[4] Intersectionality argues that our identities are complex and that race, class, and gender interact to produce unique forms of oppression.
Conventional wisdom among most conservative evangelicals today is that first-wave feminism was unequivocally good and foundationally Christian, while second- and third-wave feminism were more secular and problematic. The actual history, however, is more complicated (and uncomfortable). For example, in 1895, first-wave pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton published The Woman’s Bible, which, on its very first page, made statements like “instead of three male personages [within the Godhead], as generally represented, a Heavenly Father, Mother, and Son would seem more rational;” and “The first step in the elevation of woman to her true position [is] the recognition by the rising generation of an ideal Heavenly Mother, to whom their prayers should be addressed, as well as to a Father.”[5] Other prominent first-wave feminists embraced free love, female superiority, and various heterodox doctrinal positions.
We raise this issue not to poison the well against feminism, but to emphasize that Christians should be careful to distinguish between their support for particular goals within a movement and their support for the ideology or theology of said movement, a crucial point that we will return to later.
3. Critical Theory and Contemporary Feminism
The critical tradition began with Karl Marx and expanded through the work of prominent intellectuals like Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, Pierre Bourdieu, Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, and Kimberlé Crenshaw.[6] Critical theory today is a broad category that encompasses many different critical social theories: critical race theory, critical pedagogy, postcolonial theory, queer theory, etc. At its root, contemporary critical theory can be described in terms of four central ideas: the social binary, hegemonic power, lived experience, and social justice.[7]
The social binary divides society into oppressed groups and oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and other identity markers. Oppressor groups are identified by their hegemonic power, that is, their ability to impose their values and norms on culture in a way that makes them seem “natural” and “objective.” These values then justify the dominance of the ruling class (men, whites, heterosexuals, Christians, the able-bodied, etc.). However, through their lived experience of injustice, oppressed people (people of color, women, LGBTQ people, non-Christians, the disabled, etc.) can recognize these hegemonic norms as arbitrary and oppressive and can work for social justice, the dismantling of systems and structures (e.g. white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, Christian hegemony, ableism, etc.) which perpetuate the social binary.
Scholars recognize that contemporary feminism is a critical social theory because it applies these specific ideas to the subject of sex and gender.
First, feminism has always understood women as a collectively subordinated group in need of liberation. Feminist scholar Deborah Cameron writes that despite the historical and geographical diversity of feminist movements, they all share two minimal feminist ideas: “1. That women occupy a subordinate position in society” and “2. That the subordination of women . . . can and should be changed through political action.”[8]
Second, feminism in all its iterations has believed that female emancipation doesn’t merely require legal equality, but also necessitates a change in social norms and commonly accepted views of gender. This emphasis grew in importance during feminism’s second wave but, as we saw in the Stanton quote above, was present even in first-wave feminism.
Third, consciousness-raising and the importance of “embodied knowledges” became increasingly central during second-wave feminism. Influenced by New Left thought, feminists turned to Marxist theories of “false consciousness” to explain the resistance they encountered not just from men, but from many women as well. They argued that men who rejected feminism were trying to protect their patriarchal power and privilege, while women who rejected feminism were suffering from internalized misogyny.
Finally, the importance of intersectionality to contemporary feminism cannot be overstated. In fact, according to feminist scholar Kathy Davis, “‘intersectionality’ — the interaction of multiple identities and experiences of exclusion and subordination — has been heralded as one of the most important contributions to feminist scholarship.”[9] Intersectionality does not merely suggest but requires that feminists work for the liberation of all marginalized groups, whether people of color, or the poor, or the disabled, or the LGBTQ community. This insistence is part and parcel to feminist theory. As bell hooks asserts, “eradicating the cultural basis of group oppression would mean that race and class oppression would be recognized as feminist issues with as much relevance as sexism.”[10] Such solidarity is especially noticeable in feminist support for the demands of transgender women (i.e., biological men who identify as women) even when they conflict with women’s interests (e.g., sex-segregated prisons or locker rooms or sports).
4. Critical Theory and Egalitarianism
The relationship between contemporary feminism and egalitarianism (the belief that there are no God-ordained gender roles in either the church or the family) is complex. While non-evangelical egalitarians are more likely to explicitly claim the label of “feminist,” evangelical egalitarians often resist it.
In recent years, however, evangelical egalitarians have increasingly adopted a feminist ideological framework regardless of their attitude towards the label.
One case in point is Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood, which includes numerous statements that show strong affinity with critical ideas.[11] For instance, she repeatedly appeals to the idea that sexism is one of many interlocking systems of oppression. She writes “patriarchy walks with structural racism and systemic oppression” (33), that “patriarchy is part of an interwoven system of oppression that includes racism” (34), that “[p]atriarchy and racism are ‘interlocking systems of oppression’” (208), and that misogyny “especially hurts those already marginalized by economics, education, race, and even religion” (212). Note that “patriarchy” here means “complementarianism” because Barr explicitly equates the two: “Complementarianism is patriarchy” (13).
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Written by Perry L. Glanzer |
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
We find the understanding of Christian contentment in a well-known passage from Philippians 4 where Paul states, “for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty….I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” As more mature believers will often note for young believers who throw around the last verse, Paul is talking about leaning upon God’s strength to be content. We desperately need God to do it.

This virtue is not on any of the lists of character qualities for character education in public schools. One will also not find it on lists of virtues compiled by positive psychology scholars. Yet, it is perhaps one of the most important missing virtues among North American college students today. For example, Christian Smith found that “between one-half to two-thirds of young, emerging adults (18-23) said that their well-being can be measured by what they own, that buying more things would make them happier.”1 Perhaps one has guessed, but I am talking about the virtue of contentment.
According to Google n-gram, the use of the word “contented” has been in continual decline since 1791, and “contentment” has been waning since 1925. Due to Christian writers, there are still recent books written about it,2 but the virtue has received surprisingly little attention from the wider scholarly world. It has been especially neglected in positive psychology. I found less than a dozen studies in this field examining contentment, and all of these were written within the last decade and associated with two key authors.3
Thus, it is not surprising that one of these studies, a 2021 proposal for how to measure contentment empirically, had to plow new ground by creating one of the first-ever measures of contentment.4 In this post, I will evaluate the definition behind the measure and the measurement itself by comparing it to the Christian understanding of contentment. I find that there is nothing more helpful in seeing the limits of common grace/natural law than examining positive psychological measures of various virtues and comparing them to a conception of the virtue defined by the Biblical tradition.
Measuring Contentment
To begin, it is interesting to see how the scholars define contentment. They describe it as “an emotion that arises from the perception of completeness in life.”5 Thus, although this definition acknowledges a cognitive aspect (“the perception of completeness in life”) as a trigger for the emotion, contentment is seen primarily as an emotion. The scholars do not mention how this habitual perception might be transformed into a habitual affection that then transforms one’s behavior—a habit that would be the essence of the virtue of contentment.
Thus, the scale they developed, the PEACE Scale, is not so much a measure of the virtue of contentment, but “a stable and reliable, one-factor measure of the emotion of contentment.” Below are fifteen items “that generally captured the construct of contentment” as they defined it.6

I am satisfied with everything that life has to offer each and every moment.
I feel contentment in my daily life.
I feel content with who I am.
I feel contentment and peace no matter what is going on in my external environment.
I often feel an unshakable sense of peace and contentment.
I feel a deep sense of contentment even during difficult situations in life.
Even though I may work throughout the day, I feel content with everything I do.
I feel content with my life regardless of whether others accept me or not.
Everything is exactly as it should be.
I am content with what I have.
I feel balanced in my relationships with others.
Overall, my relationships with others are easy to manage.
I do not desire anything more in my relationships with others.
I would be content with my life even if I lost all of my status, wealth, and achievements.
When I feel stressed, I stop what I am doing and take care of myself.7

Does this scale measure the Christian virtue of contentment? Not really.
We find the understanding of Christian contentment in a well-known passage from Philippians 4:11b–13 where Paul states:
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If you are a mature, grounded Christian in a good church, with a good sense of discernment, you can find a number of helpful things from the world of Moscow. But there’s a difference between snacking on Moscow once you are already full of good Christian discipleship and feasting on Moscow for three square meals a day. I fear that much of the appeal of Moscow is an appeal to what is worldly in us. As we’ve seen, the mood is often irreverent, rebellious, and full of devil-may-care playground taunts. That doesn’t make us better Christians. 

“Each of the great world civilizations,” Christopher Dawson wrote in his classic work from the 1940s on Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, “has been faced with the problem of reconciling the aggressive ethos of the warrior with the moral ideals of a universal religion. But in none of them has the tension been so vital and intense as in medieval Christendom and nowhere have the results been more important for the history of culture.” At the heart of Dawson’s provocative thesis is the insistence that Western European culture was the coming together of two cultures, two social traditions, and two spiritual worlds. The cultural formation of Europe combined “the war society of the barbarian kingdom with its cult of heroism and aggression,” leavened by “the peace society of the Christian Church with its ideals of asceticism and renunciation and its high theological culture.”

Arguably, the Crusades expressed the best and the worst of this synthesis. There were times when the fusion of warrior-heroism and Christian virtue produced something noble and exemplary during the centuries-long effort to reclaim the Holy Land. And there were times when the fusion failed and produced something ugly and lamentable. But even the failures teach us about the aspirational ideals of Christendom. We cannot understand the rise of Western culture without the religious unity imposed by the Christian Church in the Middle Ages, and likewise, we cannot understand the flourishing of Christendom unless we understand that it grew up out of the soil of warrior kings and barbarian kingdoms.

Dawson’s thesis, though concerned with the rise of Western culture in the Middle Ages, is instructive for our own age. For many of us, it looks as if Western culture has been overrun—whether by Muslim immigration in Europe, critical theory in our universities, sexual degradation in our popular culture, violence in our streets, or plain old anti-Western vitriol in the hearts of many Westerners who have no idea how much more miserable the world would be if their deluded wishes came true. If this is the world we live in—or even something generally headed in this fearful direction—the question we in the Christian West are wrestling with (or should be wrestling with) is what to do now.

The Appeal of the Moscow Mood

Which brings me to the reason you are likely reading this article in the first place, and that is the name “Doug Wilson” in the title. “So, what do you think about Doug Wilson?” is a question I’ve been asked many times during my years in pastoral ministry. I’d say the questioners have been pretty evenly split between “I’m asking because I really like him,” “I’m asking because I hope you don’t like him,” and “I’m asking because I’m not sure what to think.” Even now, I’d rather not be writing this piece because (1) it takes a lot of time, (2) I’m not looking to get into a long, drawn-out debate with Wilson or his followers, and (3) I know a lot of good Christians who have been helped by Wilson and by the people and institutions in his orbit. I’m answering the question now in hopes that I might help those who appreciate some of what Wilson says but also feel like something isn’t quite right.

By any measure, one has to marvel at the literary, digital, and institutional output that has come out of Moscow, Idaho in the past several decades. While some internet cranks are wannabees trying to make a name for themselves by trying to tear down what others have built up, Wilson is to be commended for establishing an ecosystem of schools, churches, media offerings, and publishing ventures. For a scholarly and fair assessment of what Wilson has tried to do in Moscow, I recommend Crawford Gribben’s excellent book Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Wilson also deserves credit for being unafraid to take unpopular positions. True, he often seems to enjoy stating his unpopular positions in the most unpopular ways (more on that later), but no one is going to accuse Wilson of being a spineless Evangellyfish. He offers the world and the church an angular, muscular, forthright Christianity in an age of compromise and defection. On top of that, Wilson has a family that loves him and loves Christ.

Moreover, Wilson understands that opposition to Christ—his word, his gospel, and his Lordship—is not to be taken lightly. Many Christians are witnessing the disintegration of our Western world, and the Christian consensus that used to hold sway, and they are thinking to themselves, “This is terrible. I can’t believe this is happening.” To the Christians with these concerns—and I count myself among them—Doug Wilson says, “Yes, it is really bad, and let’s do something about it.”

I’m convinced the appeal of Moscow is visceral more than intellectual. That’s not meant to be a knock on the smart people in Moscow or attracted to Moscow. It is to say, however, that people are not mainly moving to Idaho because they now understand Revelation 20 in a different way, or because they did a deep word study on ta ethne in the Great Commission, or even because of a well-thought-out political philosophy of Christian Nationalism. Those things matter to Wilson and his followers, but I believe postmillennialism and Christian Nationalism are lagging indicators, not leading indicators. That is, people come to those particular intellectual convictions because they were first attracted to the cultural aesthetic and the political posture that Wilson so skillfully embodies. In short, people are moving to Moscow—whether literally or spiritually—because of a mood. It’s a mood that says, “We are not giving up, and we are not giving in. We can do better than negotiate the terms of our surrender. The infidels have taken over our Christian laws, our Christian heritage, and our Christian lands, and we are coming to take them back.”

Where the Mood Misfires

And yet, for all that is understandable and sometimes commendable about the Moscow mood, there are also serious problems. In my criticisms that follow I’m not going to focus on historical or theological disagreements I may have with Wilson. I won’t be touching on Federal Vision, or paedocommunion, or his views on the antebellum South, or his arguments for Christian Nationalism, or his particular brand of postmillennialism. My concerns are not so much with one or two conclusions that Christians may reach if Wilson becomes their intellectual mentor. My bigger concern is with the long-term spiritual effects of admiring and imitating the Moscow mood. For the mood that attracts people to Moscow is too often incompatible with Christian virtue, inconsiderate of other Christians, and ultimately inconsistent with the stated aims of Wilson’s Christendom project.

Rather than expounding these claims in abstract terms, let’s look at a couple of concrete examples.

Five years ago, Doug Wilson and Canon Press started something they call No Quarter November (NQN). The idea is that during November, in addition to giving away free resources, Wilson and his crew will show no mercy (give no quarter) to their enemies. Each year, in advance of NQN, Wilson puts out a promotional video. They always involve a good deal of fire and more than a little sarcasm.

The 2023 NQN video ends with a Clint Eastwood-style closeup of Wilson puffing a massive cigar, strapping on a giant flamethrower, and setting ablaze an assortment of Disney characters and media logos. Here’s what Wilson says in the first half of the video:

Welcome back to No Quarter November.

For eleven months out of the year, I’m notoriously timid—as cautious and polite as a Southern Baptist raising funds for the ERLC. But the month of November is a time for taking no prisoners and for granting “no quarter.” If you think of my blog as a shotgun, this is the month when I saw off all my typical careful qualifications and blast away with a double-barreled shorty.

Everything we do this month will be focused on one singular goal. We want to help you apocalypse-proof your family.

But why should you listen to me about such things? Well, when it comes to culture war and culture building, we’ve been at this for half a century now—much longer than such things have been cool to talk about in the green room at G3.

Like my parents taught me: a strong family isn’t possible without quick, full, and honest confession of sin, without any wussy excuse making. And especially now, it’s just as important not to confess and repent of things that aren’t really sins, because lying is bad and so is being a wuss.

You really should watch the four-minute video if you haven’t already. Notice several things about the mood.

First, it strikes a tone that is deliberately sarcastic and just a little bit naughty. No one really thinks Wilson is timid and cautious the rest of the year. That’s the sarcasm. The naughty part is that Wilson uses the words “wussy” and “wuss”—adolescent slang for someone weak and effeminate. These are words most Christian parents don’t allow their kids to use, since the terms probably originated as a combination of “wimp” and another word I won’t mention.

Second, the video takes cheap shots at other Christians. Wilson’s sarcastic bite is not first directed toward the wicked, the hardhearted, or the forces of evil in our world. He takes a swipe at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and at the G3 Conference. Both are conservative Baptist groups—groups, we might add, that would be on the same side as Wilson in almost every important cultural battle. It’s fine if Wilson wants to disagree with these groups; they’ve disagreed with him at times. But Wilson doesn’t mention them in the video in order to make a serious argument. He uses them for a punchline. If you like Wilson you are supposed to think “Oh no, he didn’t?! That’s hilarious.” And if you like the ERLC or G3, you are supposed to be triggered, because if Moscow can watch their opponents get triggered, that is also funny. When serious criticism is leveled at Moscow, the response often includes a smattering of mockery and memes. This isn’t Wilson using his famous “serrated edge” to make a prophetic point against a godless culture. This is intentionally making fun of other Christians for a quick chuckle.

Third, the point of NQN is explicitly about culture warring and culture building. Rightly understood, it is good to do both these things. But it is instructive to see that Wilson’s stated aim is to “help you apocalypse-proof your home.” I think it’s safe to say this is what Wilson aims to do not just in November (in an intensified fashion), but during the other eleven months of the year, and in Wilson’s mind preparing for the apocalypse means doing battle against the forces of leftism in our world. Wilson’s public persona is largely about commenting on the culture, pushing back on the culture, lampooning the culture, and getting Christians ready for the coming cultural collapse.

Fourth, the video is squarely focused on Wilson himself. On one level, this is not surprising. Christian institutions and organizations often use their founder, president, or leading voice as the “face” of the ministry. But the focus here is not on Wilson as the conduit of biblical teaching and doctrinal truth, or even as the instrument of helpful cultural analysis.

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