Oh No, A Feminism

In Which I Solve the Problem but No One Will Care

File: Interior of a church in the Sestiere San Marco, Venice (1887), by Luigi Cima.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

[I’m so sorry! There is so much chaos and noise here, I can’t read this out! Someday I’ll build myself a soundproof cupboard, but today is apparently not that day.]

Yesterday, if you caught our Livestream, we talked about an Extremely Significant (to a small number of people) controversy on X over the weekend. Ligon Duncan made this announcement:

Proud of Becca Davis ~ a recent @ReformTheoSem grad now working as an editor at @crossway. Becca studied & was a Teaching Assistant at @RTSJackson

And, because it’s 2025 and the words of the decade are “fatuous” and “oh come on,” someone named Nate Schlomann spotted a feminism and responded with this:

A Christian man and father should have that job, and evangelicalism is surely worse off because that’s not the case. Our institutions are sick, and I’m not going to hesitate to say such things anymore.

The interweb began to work itself into a froth, and so he doubled down:

I’m not even considering instruction/authority. Who knows how the job is setup. What I’m talking about is the feminization of evangelicalism. That of all people we ought to be employing married fathers to influence our products. If we weren’t so unhealthy I’m sure she’d be a wife and mother at home. I’m honestly not picking on the individual situation. It’s a societal issue. But our public praise and posture from leaders like Ligon is so feminist.

And again:

I don’t care if you think I’m mean. We’re not doing feminism anymore.

And again:

You can assume we're all just misogynists, or you can actually consider why so many people resonate with this post. I didn't explain much, so there are many angles, I'm sure. It has almost nothing to do with a lady having a job. The details are incidental. We are constantly bombarded with these subtle reminders that our society is structured to fail men, women, and families. It's such a hill to get back to where we need to get to, and our institutions are working against us. It's such a simple thing with many layers of meaning to say that a family man, a father should have that job. And yet we can't; it's forbidden. We shouldn't even think it. Yet, it should be obvious that Christian editing should be dominated by Christian fathers. I'm not going to spell it out further, it's beneath me to do so. And why shouldn't our institutions not be prioritizing fathers providing for households in hiring? Is this not better than handing out more careers to young women who should be wives and mothers? Of course this is reasonable, and yet we know it's not even a consideration any longer. These are very obvious "building blocks of society" things, and yet they are considered crazy and misogynistic to talk about or think. We're bombarded with these little reminders of how upside down our world is and sometimes we just need to say, "Actually, no" even if everyone thinks we're crazy for it.

I probably got some of those out of order. So anyway, because we know Becca and her family, and I used to wake up at 6 in the morning to go to Denny’s for breakfast with her sweet mother, who I miss very much and never get to see except once every five years or so because we live so far away from each other, I rolled my eyes so hard this almost happened to me:

Then I didn’t pay any more attention because I’m kind of snowed under by my life and don’t have time to follow what’s going on Twitter through a whole 24-hour period, and rely on updates from others. So I missed it when Matt tweeted this:

I would not normally wade into the present discussion going on about this post, but I think I should in this case. I know Becca and her family. They attended Good Shepherd for about 6 years before moving out of the area. They are a wonderful and godly family and Becca is a selfless and devoted young woman. There is not a hint of feminism in any of them and her father, a good friend of mine, instilled in all of them growing up an abiding love for the created differences between men and women and what those differences mean for men and for women. I don't at all see how a single Christian woman working as an editor for a Christian publisher or a TA in any way undermines the biblical roles or has anything to do with feminism.

Apparently, there are still fights going on his page, where I can’t go because I’m trying to get caught up on the Pugcast, which I let fall because of my recent Shroud of Turin obsession. And, goodness, I guess I will make a listicle of my irritation.

1. I guess it must be pretty surprising to the entire world that Christians haven’t been able to sort out how to be male and female in a placid and happy way. This, of course, is an irony, because the entire world is as confused as anyone. I was recently at the DMV, as I think I said last week, and after standing in line for about an hour, I arrived at the little glass separation between me and the officer of the state, and, for probably the first time in a while, I couldn’t tell if the person was a man or a woman. In the first place, the person was wearing a mask. In the second, the voice was obviously hormonally altered, but in which direction I couldn’t quite be sure. And, in the third place, the dress was so non-descript and drab that I could find no indication whatsoever as to sex. The “gender,” of course, was “non-binary.” Now, this person was friendliness itself, and transacted my business pleasantly and efficiently. We chatted about how cars are certain to be deep holes in which to pour money and light it on fire. What is essential to remember, for every Christian person alive today, is that the wider context of discussion about sex roles is one of almost a hundred years of tumult, strife, confusion, subversion, demoralization, decadence, technology, philosophical pedantry, and godlessness. So if Christians are not able to forbear bitter and recriminatory dustups on Twitter, I don’t think we should feel too alarmed about it. Compared to other subcultures in the West, we’re probably doing better than most.

2. That said, I do find it pretty annoying. The idea that it would be objectionable that a young Christian woman would be employed by a Christian business in the service of God’s Kingdom is as irritating as Beth Allison Barr thinking that women would have definitely been ordained had it not been for the Southern Baptists making them all be pastors’ wives. What a mess.

3. There are, at least from my vantage point, some pretty easy ways out of this particular dumpster fire of the vanities, but I don’t think Christians will take them because so much is at stake. In fact, I think I could “easily” solve all the misery between men and women in the next fifty years. And if not in all of evangelicalism, I could probably at least fix the problems of the ACNA and certainly places like Crossway and maybe even TGC.

4. It won’t happen, though, because even though my ideas are very sensible, what is on the table is too socially, economically, emotionally, and theologically painful.

5. But, why not? What have I got to lose at this point? Except for maybe some followers on Substack and the love and approbation of all my friends? Here goes. Here are all the issues at stake and how to fix them.

   1. One of the biggest problems of the modern broadly evangelical world is that the only high-status job that matters is that of the pastor. Nobody says this, of course. Mostly, we all saw on about the importance of “the ministry of the laity” and “the imago dei.” But if it were not so, would it not, then, be the case that no woman would be caught dead doing something so crass as trying to be the minister? Things are so off kilter, and authority and hierarchy are so confused, and the economic and social realities of most people are so unacknowledged, that if you love Jesus, pretty much the only thing you might want to do is work in the church, and because the most important person who works in the church is the pastor and nothing else is as interesting and special, women feel “less than” all the time. Their “lived reality,” for the most part, is low-grade patronization. And no, I’m not turning into a feminist here. It’s just an obvious fact, though one deeply embarrassing to talk about.

   2. Another huge problem, as I see it, is that a lot of lay people—men and women both—are spiritually starving because so much preaching is subpar and the liturgical life of many churches is in virtual chaos. To really “be fed,” you have to find some celebrity online to listen to, and that person often makes more sense and is more articulate than the person you listen to on Sunday. I’m making huge generalizations here, of course. The preacher I listen to every week is brilliant, and you can tell that by the fact that I don’t have time to listen to sermons online. Sometimes I do it out of a vague curiosity, but I am not spiritually starving. I am well-fed enough to do meaningful and productive work in a variety of areas. There are excellent preachers out there, and not every Christian feels like this, but broadly speaking, I don’t think what I’m observing is that controversial.

   3. Two circumstances entirely broke the relationship between men and women in protestantism, and the genie really can’t be put back in the bottle, though maybe it could be invited to keep its big mouth shut on occasion. Those circumstances were, first, widespread acceptance of the pill and, second, women’s ordination. Wherever these two abide, bitter recriminations will endure.

   4. How do you get the genie to shut up, the Twitter arguments to calm down, the progressive girl-bosses to go away, the right-wing misogynists to melt into the background? It will only take a hundred years, but:

      1. First, you stop talking quite so much about it. Constant outrage drowns out the real-life situations in which men and women are getting along with each other just fine.

      2. Second, you grandfather WO out of places where it exists. I know what I’m saying will sound bitter to many faithful women who exercise ordained ministry in places like the ACNA and are in no way “feminist” in the manner of people like Paige Connell. It will mean giving up something real and meaningful, and it will feel humiliating and useless to do so. Nevertheless, it is the path of most lasting peace, for if, like me, you really view it as “non-essential,” then it would be good to give it up for the sake of unity in the body.

      3. Third, you admit that women innately have power and authority within the kingdom of God and are not subservient imbeciles. This is the place where those stridently against WO need to give a little—or a great deal. The fact is, for “complementarianism” to work well ( and really, all churches are complementarian because there are no women bishops in any churches that matter), people need to feel that they are equal and that they are not being put down, but, rather, are willingly submitting to a hierarchical order that, in point of fact, is not onerous in the least because they aren’t being told about it every second of every day.

      4. Fourth, you de-emphasize the status of the pastor—something he can do himself by neither being supercilious nor domineering, but just being a normal person who knows if he doesn’t do a good job, he won’t have a church anymore.

      5. You BudLight the concept of the celebrity pastor.

      6. You figure out that women have to exist in the world as it is, that they go to college, they hold jobs, they have intellectual pursuits, they have souls, they are even, sometimes Queens of England and other European nations, they have gifts, they can learn Biblical languages, they need venues of theological and biblical expression, they need high-status ministry opportunities, not all of them can or should be mothers, that being a mother is very low-status in cultural terms at least at the moment, and that everyone is poor and needs to put food on the table. At the very least, men could stop speaking disrespectfully about women, and women could stop speaking disrespectfully to men.

      7. You recover some old-fashioned gentility.

      8. You make the use of hormonal birth control so questionable (which it is anyway) that no one does it. Also, you stop lecturing everyone, which is basically what I’m doing now—sorry.

So there you are! Problem solved! Of course, this will not happen because the WO people really believe in it, and the reaction against the WO people is so continually fierce, and there’s nothing else of significance to do. And because that’s the case, all other church adjacent jobs are constantly under the microscope, and bitterness abounds. If there were no WO, people who are worried about it all the time would have to think about something else. If there were no WO, meaningful work would appear, like moss upon a stone. If there were no WO, the sense of women always being on the back foot, of having to justify their every move, of being defensive, would gradually dissipate, and some other tribulation would take its place.

So that’s too bad. And on that note, I gotta run. Have a nice day!