On National Review today, Colleen Campbell asks the question that must vex feminists: why, after years of feminists railing against the church, do women continue to proclaim religious faith at a much higher rate than men?
Campbell is writing from the Vatican, where she's attending a conference on women in Catholicism. Much of what she says is relevant for women of all Christian faiths.
In our homeschool this week we've been studying the early suffragists, like Nellie McClung in Canada and Susan B. Anthony in the States, who linked women's rights with God and the family. They were fighting to preserve the family in its proper form: to protect women from abuse, alcoholism, and abandonment. It was Christ that led them to do this.
Today's feminists, the kind I studied under in university, hate God because He made us different. But the feminists don't offer real liberation at all.
Radical feminists often reserve their fiercest hostility for Christianity. So it was particularly refreshing to hear erudite German philosopher Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz challenge the modern conventional wisdom that Christianity is to blame for women’s oppression. As Gerl-Falkovitz noted, the ancient belief systems for which today’s feminist neo-pagans pine did little to elevate women’s status. In those systems, as in much of the Islamic world today, women were regarded as the objects, not subjects, of rights. Women in the ancient world were identified with beauty and breeding, but their common humanity largely was overlooked.
And what about today? How has sexual liberation helped us? Now women will sleep with anyone and everyone, and then wonder why boys won't commit and why their heart is broken. It is modern feminists who have given us Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, as they try to turn us into men when it relates to our sex drives.
We are not the same. And that is a good thing. And it is only in Christ that we have true dignity, not in throwing off our virtue so that we can proclaim a false liberation.
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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