Two Narratives Collided In A Wood
Was it really because Christians are misogynists? Was it really because men don’t care about the happiness and health of their wives? Was it really because Evangelicals hated black people? Or is it because they—like the rest of the world—are staring into a genderless, plastic abyss wherein women and men are not who God says they are, whereby they must, the cultural law says they must, enact their desires or they will not be whole and healthy?
I made some dear (IRL) friends upset yesterday who have been helped by Gregoire’s previous book. The day was also one of unrelenting frustration whereby I spent the whole of it in the car driving people around instead of doing what I planned. I was not able to respond to anything, nor even beat back my own sink full of dishes, nor walk the dog, nor keep up online. I did manage to read a second chapter of Gregoire’s new book but I’d like to do two chapters in one post, so I’m going to pick that up tomorrow. Instead, I want to try to put words to something that I think is swirling around in the cultural air. This will be hard because I prefer to have a tweet or an article to bounce off of, but, it’s International Women’s Day—so let’s celebrate with a listicle.
One. An alluring and powerful narrative has formed about the plight of women and the reasons things are so bad today. It goes something like this: Christians have irreparably damaged their witness, the Christian faith, and the lives of women by their unacceptable view of marriage and sex; and Christians have damaged the Christian faith by their view of the Bible.
Where did this narrative come from? How did it form? It has two or three sources. The first source, I think, is the culture itself which, in a short time, radically shifted from one view of what it means to be human, to another. It took a whole century for the new view to become entrenched, but I really think contraception was the millstone that sunk a “biblical view of the family” under the sea for most people. Even if they had some idea with their heads about human relationships, what they knew with their bodies radically contradicted that view. In a world where women can control if and when they have children, the biological reality of being a woman is not meaningful or substantive enough to undergird and support a society.
The second source of this narrative was the Christian reaction to this change. Christians reacted strongly, as they should have. But, in many cases, wildly and with a hint of hysteria. As the western world shifted from a positive to a neutral to a negative view of Christianity, it is not surprising that those people who refused to shift away from “traditional” and biblical norms became the bad ones. Moreover, as the defacto conscience of the whole, they are discovering that they ought to be quiet, but that they may not go away. In family systems theory, the “biblical view of the family” is the trap that holds all the toxic fumes of the larger system. The western family needs Christianity as its scapegoat. It needs Christians to occasionally react in sorrow and outrage. But secular culture cannot absolutely get rid of Christianity or it will have to face who it is, and that’s not pretty, so of course it won’t do that.
In the usual way of these sorts of cultural shifts, the outside assault on the “biblical view of the family” was helped by the inside repudiation of it. Many “Christians” now unreservedly accept a secular view of what it means to be a self. Assumptions about the needs and requirements of this new kind of humanity, though largely, I would say (after reading just two chapters of Gregoire) unexamined, drive the internal “culture war” that Christians are enduring. Health—both physical and emotional—are at the center of these assumptions.
It is hard for me to overstate how deeply I feel this shift myself. That is because I came in and out of American culture at key moments and was able to observe how it was changing. Christians through time and space have not had this new assumption of “health” at the heart of their faith. And not just Christians either. Most cultures around the world continue not to pursue this idea of “health.”
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Compulsory Feminism
Male workforce participation has steadily declined under the anti-discrimination regime. It is presently under 70 percent, a historic low. Many would like to believe that we can address these problems while preserving the anti-discrimination sexual constitution. But the problem of a lack of marriageable men and other breakdowns in the male–female dance are endemic to the anti-discrimination constitution. Fewer men and women are as lovable as they were in preceding generations. Americans are proud of our anti-discrimination efforts, and our civil rights regime seems here to stay. All is not well, however, as the statistics above remind us. Elements of the anti-discrimination regime need to be scaled back at the least. Conservatives have refused to think about how to do such a scaling back. That must change.
For a long time, what Alexis de Tocqueville called the American “spirit of freedom” was balanced by settled norms that guided young men and women toward domestic life. These norms added up to a sexual constitution that rested on the foundational assumption that men and women had different and complementary roles. Tocqueville recognized that this constitution, which emphasized the virtues of restraint, service, and obedience in marriage, tempered America’s otherwise fissiparous individualism.
The old sexual constitution was not static—the male–female dance in America took different forms at different times—but it was partly patriarchal and partly democratic. Tocqueville observed that American marriages were “democratic” in the sense that they did not perpetuate the rigid hierarchies of the Old World, nor did they give unlimited power to fathers and husbands. Nevertheless, American husbands and wives did different kinds of work. The husband functioned as the public face of the family and was the titular head, while the wife was responsible for the domestic sphere and buttressed the husband in his endeavors in the workplace and public sphere. The patriarchal nature of this settlement, however, is evident in the simple facts that men, not women, were expected to propose marriage and head families and that wives took their husband’s surnames.
But for two generations we’ve been undergoing a far-reaching transformation of the male–female dance. The foundational premise of the old sexual constitution—that men and women have different and complementary roles—is widely repudiated. A great deal has been written about the cultural forces driving this transformation, from the colonizing of family relations by the market mentality to the sexual revolution. What remains largely unexamined, however, is the role of government power in the replacement of the soft patriarchy that formerly guided men and women toward stable, complementary roles. That power has been deployed on behalf of a sexual constitution designed to promote sexual interchangeability.
Put simply: Civil rights law and related court decisions have criminalized the old sexual constitution. The Gloria Steinems and Hugh Hefners did not simply convince mainstream American society to discard the time-honored patterns. Our society was transformed because feminist ideas became compulsory, backed up by the threat of legal punishment for those who continued to act as if men and women were different.
Understandably, few wish to make such a blunt observation. Americans glorify civil rights laws and cheer the country’s battle for racial justice. But the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not just about race. It also prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex. It thereby established the main mechanism for the public deconstruction of sex roles within the family. Since 1964, civil rights laws, infused with anti-discrimination ideas and propounded by interest groups and intellectuals, have reshaped sexual relations in America. Today’s basic assumptions about sex, sexual relations, gender, and family life are not the result of public persuasion or the triumph of feminism in the “marketplace of ideas.” They are the creatures of what Jennifer Roback Morse calls the sexual state, products of civil rights laws set in place decades ago.
Anti-discrimination laws are not the sole cause of the reshaping of sexual relations, of course. Already in the nineteenth century, public schooling had transferred a main function of domestic life, the education of children, to the state. Divorce by mutual consent had become common before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Obscenity regulation was loosened. All of these reforms went with the grain of democratic individualism, which, as Tocqueville recognized, runs against the habits and virtues necessary for family life.But anti-discrimination dramatically amplified this trend. America’s historic sexual constitution shaped men to be community leaders, responsible providers, and husbands, and encouraged women to prioritize homemaking and motherhood, though many still worked. Employers reinforced this constitution. An estimated 65 percent of all employers and more than 80 percent of industrial companies paid family wages to their largely male workforces in 1960, according to Allan Carlson’s research. In this economic arrangement, women were not obliged to work outside the home, nor were children sent to day care. Want ads would often specify the need for male applicants, whereas other jobs would seek female applicants. The culture dovetailed with employment practices. Churches reinforced the man-at-work and woman-prioritizing-home pattern, as did advertisers, television, and Hollywood generally.
Civil society developed institutions that presumed the male–female difference. Men-only clubs catered to businessmen, while female organizations such as the League of Women Voters drew on the philanthropic ambitions of well-to-do women. There were Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Boys played sports. The sexes often mixed, but few doubted that boys required different outlets and activities than did girls, partly because married men and married women fulfilled different social needs and patterns.
A restrictive legal infrastructure sometimes supported the old sexual constitution. In some states, laws prohibited women from entering certain professions. (Illinois common law from the nineteenth century prevented women from earning licenses to practice law in state courts, a prohibition the Supreme Court blessed in Bradwell v. Illinois [1873].) This was not a “barefoot and pregnant” sexual constitution, as many feminist critics claim, nor did it rest on any notion that women could not do such jobs. Just over half of four-year colleges and universities enrolled women in 1900, a number that jumped to nearly two-thirds by the end of World War I. But society tilted toward educating men for leadership, in order to prepare them for public leadership and their roles in family life. Many Ivy League schools did not admit women until the 1960s or 1970s. Medical schools and law schools trailed undergraduate institutions in going co-ed.
The old sexual constitution is now illegal and stigmatized in nearly all its aspects. It has been replaced by an anti-discrimination sexual constitution.
The anti-discrimination sexual constitution rejects the central assumptions of its predecessor: the ancient convictions that men and women are different, that this difference justifies distinct sex roles for the sake of orderly marriage, and that society should support each sex in best fulfilling those roles. In its place, we are urged to organize society around the premise that “women, first and foremost, are human beings” who “must have the chance to develop their fullest human potential” and come into “full participation in the mainstream of American society,” as the 1966 National Organization for Women’s Statement of Purpose reads. This premise propounds a sexless, egalitarian understanding of “human dignity.” Men and women are not different in meaningful ways, and any social pattern that presumes difference amounts to wrongful discrimination. Guided by this assumption, the anti-discrimination sexual constitution seeks to destroy social support for different sex roles in society and the family. All institutions must be rebuilt on the basis of a feminist equality.
The first ambition of the anti-discrimination sexual constitution was to encourage women to enter the workforce through the promotion of equal pay, affirmative action for women, public support for day care expenses, and reform of workplace mores.
The Equal Pay Act of 1963, which prohibited employers from supporting the traditional family with higher pay and easier advancement for male heads of households, marked the beginning of this effort. More would remain “to be done to achieve full equality of economic opportunity” for women, said President John F. Kennedy after signing the bill into law. The next step was taken in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Title VII of that act prohibits sex discrimination in hiring and promotion, and it created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for enforcement. In 1972, Congress extended the protections of Title VII to government employers and to businesses with fifteen employees (previously the limit was twenty-five).
Congress later added tax incentives for working mothers. President Richard Nixon vetoed the creation of federally funded public childcare centers in 1971. He worried that they would create “communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” Instead, Nixon endorsed programs in which middle- and upper-class families received tax deductions for day care expenses. (In time, poor families would receive government programs for childcare, such as Head Start.) Upper-middle-class feminists wanted public day care; they got public subsidies for private day care.
Aggressive affirmative action and set-aside programs aimed to increase female participation in the economy. Goals that at least 5 or 10 percent of government contractors be minority- or women-owned businesses became common. Several agencies exist within federal departments to promote such contracting. Public-sector affirmative action programs for women were blessed in Johnson v. Transportation Agency, Santa Clara County (1987), in which the Court ruled that being female could be used as a plus factor in determining promotions. Such programs operate in the private sector as well, where the specter of lawsuits encourages employers to achieve numerical goals that demonstrate the absence of discrimination.
Family-friendly employment practices now run afoul of civil rights law as defined by Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp. (1971). The Martin Marietta Corporation would not hire mothers with young children, but it would hire similarly situated men. Ida Phillips, a mother of seven, wanted a job there, was denied, and sued under Title VII. The district court judge defended Martin Marietta’s right to discriminate on the grounds that “the responsibilities of men and women with small children are not the same, and employers are entitled to recognize those different responsibilities in establishing hiring policies.” The Supreme Court, however, reversed the decision. In effect, the Court held that hiring practices must not reinforce social norms that establish male and female responsibilities in family life.
The Phillips case points to the second ambition of the anti-discrimination sexual constitution: the legal effort to eradicate stereotypes. Under Phillips, private companies that acted as if men and women had different responsibilities within the family were said to operate on the basis of benighted stereotypes. Reed v. Reed (1971) and Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) applied the anti-discrimination principle to end public support for sex roles within the family. Reed concerned a dispute between a separated couple over who would administer the estate of their deceased son. In its decision, the Court held that laws based on the assumption that husbands and wives have different roles within the family employed “inaccurate stereotypes of the capacities and sensibilities of women.” Frontiero concerned benefits for spouses of military officers, whereby civilian males married to deployed women received fewer benefits than civilian wives with deployed husbands; the Court broadly ruled illegal any effort to reinforce sex roles through government benefits. Laws giving women greater benefits reflected a “romantic paternalism” that put, as the Court writes, “women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”
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I’ve Never Killed Anyone… Right?
The slide towards hate starts several dials below spewing expletives. We as Christians need to examine our hearts when it comes to engaging with those who disagree with us, especially those whose purposes aim to subvert and shatter the Christian worldview. What do we want for these people? Do we actually want their salvation, or do we just want them out of the way? If we let a gospel of sacrifice set our pattern in answering these questions, it will unravel threads of murder.
“You shall not murder”
“Have you lived a good life?”
“Well, I’ve never killed anyone.”
Christians know that line won’t stand up in God’s courtroom. We quickly pivot away from murder to press the sin issue from other angles. “Have you loved God perfectly, every moment of your life? Have you ever coveted something? Have you ever lusted?” When we swing the spotlight to focus on catching surface sins, the nuances of murder scuttle away to nest in the safe, dark shadows under the bed. So while Christians point the finger at the more obvious and ostentatious sins of the world around us (usually sex and greed), we unwittingly harbor and nurture some of the very sins that make us most repulsive to unbelievers, namely murder.
Jesus raises the bar on murder to such a height that we hardly know what to make of it. In Matthew 5:22, he traces murder down to the root of anger, even a hasty insult. Because the final fruition of murder seems to come so far downstream from anger, we wave away our outbursts. And the dismissal has some merit. Anger is not the same as murder, and we’ll cause all manner of difficulties if we treat the two exactly the same. Anger has a progression. Somewhere along a progression of repeated surges of anger directed against a single target, that anger congeals into hatred. When that happens, a Christian has more than dipped his toe in the stream of murder; he’s starting to wade.
You don’t hate anybody, do you? That depends. In-person, or online? Are we talking about an individual or a collective identity group? A person’s online digital persona and reputation often comes to represent just as much, if not more, of their identity than their physical presence.
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The Single’s Training Ground
Our whole life, then, needs to be committed to pursuing purity in everything we think, say, and do. We have been made blameless by His Son, but we still have a responsibility to live blamelessly until we become like Him in glory. And that must motivate us to pursue holiness in the fear of the Lord. As you fix your eyes on Christ, identify the sins that entangle you, repent, ask for His help to overcome them by His Spirit, and then take diligent effort to mortify them as we renew our minds with His holy Word.
You have been entered into the marathon. You have been given a number. You have taken your mark. The starting gun has been fired.
Uh oh.
This particular marathon will prove to be much harder and longer than the norm. Twenty-six miles, shortness of breath, leg cramps, and moments of regret somewhere in the middle will seem mild comparatively. Because, while the race has a clear starting time and location, the end point plus the terrain and challenges in between is entirely unknown.
Single believer, how do you feel about being signed up for this marathon called “The Christian Life?” Unlike the tug of war where you are at the mercy of whichever team proves the strongest, the results of this event are entirely up to you. Instead of being stuck on a rope and mercilessly tugged back and forth, you are running to break a rope at the end of this marathon that says in big letters CHRISTLIKENESS. (Be honest…did you think I was going to say marriage?)
Whether you knew what you were getting yourself into or not, you’re in this race for the long haul. Therefore, it’s important to know how to run it well. How you train will make all the difference whether you’re on the track, in the mountains, or on the pavement at any mile marker (at least that’s what I have been told…).
So how do we train well and thus help ourselves continue pressing on regardless of what’s along the route?
Cultivate habits of godly obedience (1 Cor. 9:25-27; 1 Tim. 4:7-8).
Do you consistently practice the spiritual disciplines?
Do you regularly attend and serve the local church?
Men, do you seek to emulate the 1 Timothy 3 elder qualifications?
And women the Proverbs 31 woman?
Do you faithfully use your time and money?
Do you work for the glory of God?
Make these actions and attitudes a normal part of your training routine. Every good runner has specific exercises and diets to help increase their strength and stamina. Neglecting our spiritual muscles will only make it harder to get back into the routine or to run the race later as the terrain changes and the challenges come. Identify where you are weak and then discipline yourself to pursue obedience in that area. Let it become natural and a joy to open the Word, go to church on Sunday, be a faithful steward and servant, and let your light shine before men in all aspects of life.
Pursue discipleship (1 Cor. 11:1; Tit. 2:3-6; Heb 11:1).
Do you have at least one person in your life that you can learn from as you both seek to imitate Christ, either formally or informally?
Do you seek to gain wisdom from older saints in how to continue pursuing godliness?
Have you humbly acknowledged you desperately need others’ perspective into your training schedule to help you see your potential weaknesses?
Every good runner needs a coach. Take time to identify who can be that for you. Pray the Lord would help you find a man or woman in your life that is a little ahead of you in their race. Perhaps it’s a parent, a pastor, or an older saint.
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