And, feminism, why should there be anything more said about this ever? Well, because other people are saying stuff, and so the conversation never seems to move on to anything else.

The question that’s been percolating in my own mind, that I suppose I should genuinely try to answer, is, What business do I have, rejecting the meme of Feminism, when I have surely benefited to the nth degree by its cultural priorities over the last century? Shouldn’t my gratitude extend to a more nuanced articulation of what it is and it’s importance for everyone, rather than a flippant, “I’m not a feminist” as I have fallen into the way of saying.

Because surely I have benefited. I have various higher levels of education. I’m not strapped to my kitchen (well, that’s not true, I am, but so is my husband). I am allowed to fling an impossible number of words around in this forum. I have the freedom to go around town driving a car and wearing whatever I want. I am allowed to vote and run for public office, and even, should I so desire, work outside the home. I am not belittled and maligned in anyway because of my gender.

Certainly, I would be willing to gather up a tepid offering of praise to the vagaries of the age, and a most sincere thanks to the women who worked so devotedly on behalf of women they would never meet, whose lives they wanted to impact. When I told my children, a couple of weeks ago, that 100 years ago women in this country couldn’t vote, they were rightly shocked, and it was nice to give honor where honor was due, to women who stuck their necks out and fought for something worthy.

But, like any good human endeavor and striving, feminism didn’t stay there, did it. Feminism isn’t any more about the freedom of women to comfortably inhabit the wide open space of cultural engagement, to get an education and strive after productivity and the betterment of humanity. If that was what feminism is, then we would all be fussing a lot lot more about women in other contexts who don’t enjoy our freedom, and in general be caring about the humanity of all people everywhere.

And that isn’t on the menu of modern feminism. Show me where I’m wrong. But my experience of the feminist agenda is that 1. It is stridently political and contrary to the Christian gospel 2. It includes the dehumanization of men and infants 3. It has fallen into the pit of embracing and promoting the victim status culture so much the rage these days.

Christian women, who take the bible seriously and don’t read it with their fingers crossed and Bart Ehrman in their pocket, have to acknowledge that the humanity of the individual is a gift from God, and that every single individual’s humanity matters. That’s the baseline. So there can’t be the de-gendering of men because of all the icky testosterone. But neither can there be the chattel-izing of children, neither killing them nor reducing them to virtue signaling. When we were The Other, the war was perhaps worth fighting. But we are no longer The Other. All the stubborn blindness to our humanity has been transferred to other groups.

More also, because the humanity of others is only one side of the coin, the divinity of God has been chucked by the wayside. God is God. But modern feminism doesn’t acknowledge that remarkable fact. And God being God, he is allowed to order humanity as he wills. When you make being a woman the main thing, and jettison the habitation of scripturally defined gendered roles, you are setting yourself above God himself, and making it impossible to see the central tenant of Christianity–the incarnation of God into the world, the cross, and the saving of the world. What everybody likes to call Egalitarianism subverts the images that God himself paints into humanity to reflect his own glory.

Now, we could disagree vigorously about what Biblically Inhabited Gender Roles look like. I’m only on chapter three of my Epic of Biblical Womanhood and am struggling mightily not to let the book fall from my nerveless fingers and give up. Ms. Evans giant straw biblical woman needs to be huffed and puffed and blown right over. And maybe I’ll get to it sometime. But it would sure help the conversation if we could agree, at least, that God is the Head, and we are all subordinate to him.

To say it in the plainest way possible. Modern feminist categories have fallen into the way of idolatry, the way all human categories eventually do. An idolatry that dehumanizes the other and breaks people and systems apart rather than putting them back together. And it’s gotten to be so bad that I, as a Christian, am unwilling to brand myself with that label. Feminism, at its core, is inconsistent with my Christianity. So while I’m grateful for the sacrifice of the women of yesteryear, I’m not willing to compromise with a rigid political agenda that doesn’t build up the humanity of massive portions of the human family.

The modern iteration of feminism has squandered its own heritage. It is in the pigsty of cultural rot. I prefer the clean, cool, rich comfort of the Father’s house, even though He identifies himself with male gendered pronouns. Better one day in those courts than a thousand spent elsewhere.