Has Christianity been good for women? I give my short answer at the beginning: yes.
I am not an expert on gender studies. Nor am I a woman. So I don’t contribute this essay as a scholar on either topic. But as a pastor, I am occupationally responsible to give a coherent account of the Christian religion and how it connects with relevant social issues.[1] And as it happens, the question of women’s rights and flourishing is a relevant social issue—not only for the culture at large, but especially so for my congregation. My congregation is located in a community that is quite progressive on cultural and social issues, feminism not least.
Let me say at the outset that I am supportive of the aims of the feminist cause—insofar as feminism has sought to improve women’s dignity, respect, opportunities, political rights, protections, and flourishing. I recognize the term “feminism” is fraught with all sorts of negative ideological baggage for conservatives. But “feminism” as such, can be construed as a series of variegated social movements, spanning (arguably) from Aristophane’s Lysistrata in the fifth century B.C. to contemporary third wave feminism and beyond. Clearly much of what falls under the rubric of “feminism” has been at odds with a Christian vision of female flourishing. Nonetheless, much of what the various feminist movements have sought has been consistent with the Christian vision of female dignity, agency, and equality—a point made by John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae.[2] Women have made significant progress in all these areas over the past hundred years, and I take it as axiomatic that these gains have been consistent with Christian ideals.
But what part has Christianity played in this narrative of female progress? My central claim is that Christianity has been good for women. This claim is not without controversy in feminist circles. The larger feminist culture in North America tells us that Christianity—especially in its more traditional forms—has been an obstacle to women’s progress (as well as an obstacle to the progress of minorities, and the poor, and immigrants, etc.). Generally speaking, the more progressive a social context, the more inclined it is to view traditional Christianity as a force for harm in the world. My aim in this essay is to challenge that thinking, and to argue that Christianity has indeed been a force for good for women.
To state my central claim a bit more provocatively, my argument is that Christianity has been more “feminist” than feminism. Properly understood, Christianity carries within itself a feminist impulse that is actually more responsible for the flourishing of women than its modern secular counterpart.
My argument is sweeping and will necessarily be given in summary form. It unfolds in four parts. In the first part, I will explore the world into which Christianity was born—the Greco Roman world of the first century. This will give us a baseline picture of the state of women’s flourishing at the dawn of western history. In the second part, I will note the key moves that Christianity made regarding sex and marriage that challenged and critiqued the Greco-Roman views of women. These moves amounted to an (albeit slow moving) sexual revolution within the Greco-Roman world. In part three, I will explore the results of this Christian sexual revolution for women. And finally, I will conclude by comparing the Christian sexual revolution of the first century with the secular sexual revolution of the twentieth century.
On to Rome and the first century.
Part 1: Rome and Women
Christianity was born into the tumult of the Roman Empire, which was itself deeply steeped in the long-standing Greco-Roman views of sex and power. This Greco-Roman culture was strongly patriarchal.[3] Male roman citizens were in the power position, and generally speaking, women had rights only insofar as they were related to a male Roman citizen—most typically their father or husband. Women could control their own property (which generally entailed the dowry they brought into their marriages), but they had no legal authority over their children. To be sure, the wife was deputized to manage the household affairs; but the father of the family was the paterfamilias—the head of household who had sole legal authority over every living soul in his house. The paterfamilias’ familial sovereignty was so complete, that he even had authority to put his children to death. When a baby was born, it would be placed on the floor. If the paterfamilias picked up the child, it would be kept as a member of the family. If he did not, it would not. The rejected child would be “exposed”—left outside to either die or be salvaged by slavers.
Beyond women’s domestic duties, they could not vote or serve in any kind of public life. They were given a limited education and were not generally taught to write. The ideal Roman woman was quiet and uneventful. The less one knew about a man’s wife or daughter, the more the wife or daughter embodied the Roman ideal.
Because property rights passed through inheritance—from a man to his sons—fathers were concerned to know that they were passing their property to their legitimate offspring. As such, female chastity was highly prized. Women’s lives were in most cases firmly regulated by their families, to ensure sexual fidelity to one’s husband (or future husband). Women—especially in the upper classes—did not typically go out into society unescorted.
In the Roman world, wives were not chiefly valued by their husbands for love, sex, and companionship.[4] A potential wife was valued principally for her procreative capacities, her social standing, and her ability to manage the affairs of the house. Many Roman men did not especially care for their wives and had as little sex with them as possible—only what was necessary to keep the family line going. Men often looked outside their marriages for sex and companionship.[5] Which meant that regarding chastity, there was a clear and unapologetic double standard. Sexual propriety for women meant only having sex with their husbands. Sexual propriety for men meant not having sex with someone else’s woman. Men, single or married, could have sex with whomever they wanted, provided they didn’t transgress the “guardianship” or “ownership” rights of another man (i.e., the woman’s father, husband, or slave master). Mistresses, prostitutes, and a man’s own slave girls (or boys) were socially acceptable outlets for male sexual desire.
Indeed, the idea of male chastity (as understood according to contemporary standards) wasn’t really an ideal in the larger Roman world. Tellingly, the Latin language did not even have a word to denote a male virgin. “Maidenhood” (i.e., virginhood) was a female reality, not a male reality.[6] Plutarch, a Roman philosopher from the second century, gives us a picture of the Roman double standard. His book Conjugal Precepts served as advice to young married couples. He writes to young brides:
The lawful wives of the Persian kings sit beside them at dinner, and eat with them. But when the kings wish to be merry and get drunk, they send their wives away, and send for their music-girls and concubines. They are right in what they do, because they do not concede any share in their licentiousness and debauchery to their wedded wives. If therefore a man in private life, who is incontinent and dissolute in regard to his pleasures, commits some peccadillo with a lover or a maidservant, his wedded wife ought not to be indignant or angry, but she should reason that it is because of his respect for her that he shares his debauchery, licentiousness, and wantonness with another woman.[7]
It goes without saying that Plutarch’s marriage advice falls woefully short by today’s standards. And perhaps most disturbing, there were no laws against rape, per se, in the Roman empire.[8] The laws against rape and sexual assault, such as they were, were related to the “citizenship rights” of the man to whom the woman (or boy, or slave) belonged. Sexual assault upon a wife, sister, daughter, or slave, was a punishable offense, but only insofar as it was a crime against the male citizen who had jurisdiction over the one assaulted. But a sexual assault upon a woman (or boy or beggar or prostitute) who had no male protector or guardian was not a crime.
I don’t want to convey that life for women in the Roman world was at every point a misery, or that sexual assault happened at every turn. A decent family (i.e., a wealthy family) could afford a woman meaningful protection. And no doubt some women were happy in their marriages. But women from poor families, women who were slaves (slavery comprised 10-30% of the Roman population), or women from non-citizen families, fared worse.[9] It was this second class that constituted the majority of women in the first century Roman empire. What was clear to everyone in the Roman world—to both men and women—was that it was a man’s world, in which Roman men had nearly all the rights and dignity; the Roman woman’s lesser rights—such as they were—were derivative from the rights of the males with which she was associated.
In sum, the context into which Christianity was born was a highly patriarchal context that left women often marginalized and oppressed.
Enter St. Paul.
Part 2: Christianity and Women
The Christian ideal regarding sex and women—as seen most especially in the writings of St. Paul—could not have been more contrary to the vision of sex and women found in the Roman world. In Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus, he provides the following account of marriage:
22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. (Ephesians 5:22-33)
To modern ears, Paul’s call for the wife’s submission sounds excessively patriarchal. But when properly understood in the Greco-Roman context, Paul’s vision of marriage is shockingly progressive.
To begin, Paul likens the relationship between the husband and wife to the relationship between a head and its body. The husband and wife are an organic whole, Paul insists. They rise and fall together.[10] The head body metaphor was not exclusive to Paul. In the Roman context, the emperor was the head, and the state was the body.[11] In the Roman mind, the function of the body was to protect the head—even if it had to die to do so.[12] But Paul inverts this logic and says that in the Christian vision of marriage, the head exists for the sake of the body. The wife’s good, even above the husband’s good, is the chief end—the Aristotelian telos—of the marriage. As such, the husband’s goal in marriage, as the head of the body, is the body’s flourishing. What’s more, the telic nature of the wife (with respect to the husband) remained true, even if the husband had to give up his life for the sake of his wife. And this meant that in Christian marriages, the wife was not an expendable appendage, to be tossed aside when no longer suiting the purposes of the husband. Even a barren wife could not be tossed aside. The Christian husband, as the head of his wife, was to regard his wife as his own flesh and to pursue her flourishing above all others, including his own.
Most significantly, Paul grounds his vision of marriage in his understanding of the relationship between Christ and the Church. For Paul, human marriage was a living picture of God’s sacred plan of redemption—“a profound mystery” that “refers to Christ and the Church” (vs 32). Paul is saying that human marriage was ordained by God from the very beginning to forecast and reveal the unity and sacrificial love that Jesus has for his people, and the trust that Jesus’ people have in him. Thus, for Paul, the sanctity of human marriage was tied to the sanctity of what it represented.
But more can be said here.
In Paul’s typological vision of marriage, Jesus not only “rescued” humanity, but raised humanity up and seated humanity with him in the highest heavenly places.[13] Too many typological readings of Ephesians 5:19-33 fail to account for the fuller context of Paul’s Christ/Church typology in the rest of Ephesians. For Paul, Christ not only humbly descends to rescue his bride (the focus of 5:21-33); he also ascends back to his throne, taking his bride with him—where he seats her at his own right hand and grants her authority to rule and reign with him (the focus of 1:16-2:6). Failure to account for the “upward” ascent of Christ’s bride often results in benignly patronizing accounts of masculine power, wherein women are reduced to well-cared for adult children. Both incarnational movements—the downward descent and the upward ascent—need to be accounted for in typological accounts of Man and Woman. Which is to say, the story of Christianity is the story of how God came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ, died a sacrificial death on behalf of his beloved, united himself to her, and then raised her up and seated her with him in his place of dignity and authority over all creation. In contrast to Rome, the basic message that Christianity gave to Roman men was, “Note how Christ cares for, honors, and exalts the church. Go and do likewise for your wives.” And wives, for their part, were called to respect their husband’s sacrificial-exalting love.
This basic Christ/Church marital framework governed all Christian sexual ethics in three significant ways. First, divorce—which was quite common in the Greco-Roman world (and permissible even in the Judaism out of which Christianity came)—was no longer permissible for Christians. Christian marriage, as an expression of Christ’s devotion to the Church, was permanent and could only be broken by death, or by cases of sexual unfaithfulness. Social historians have made the point that this level of fidelity was not the norm in human history.[14] Even Jesus’ own disciples were shocked by it, when they first heard of it (Matthew 19:9-10).
Second, chastity became binding on men, just as much as it was on women. No more mistresses, no more prostitutes, no more slave girls or slave boys. And this wasn’t just the rule for married men. Not even single Christian men could take a mistress or visit the prostitutes or have a slave boy or girl. In the new Christian sexual ethic, the only legitimate outlet for male (or female) sexual expression was the marriage bed. This vision of male chastity was so sufficiently novel to Roman men that Paul had to admonish the Christian men of Corinth to stop visiting the prostitutes—not because the Corinthian men were consciously disobeying the Christian sexual ethic, but because it hadn’t yet fully occurred to them that visiting the prostitutes was inconsistent with Christian faith (1 Cor 6:12-20).
And third, Paul insisted that the sexual rights and pleasures of the marriage bed were to be enjoyed by the husband and wife equally (1 Cor 7:1-5). The marriage bed was holy and sacred, a profound venue for modeling the spiritual union between Christ and his church. Marriage was given as an aid to chastity, an appropriate outlet for natural sexual passion. As such, neither spouse was to deny the other their proper conjugal rights.
All of this meant that Christianity called for sexual equality between men and women, not by loosening the boundaries of female sexual propriety, but by tightening the boundaries of male sexual propriety. In nearly every respect, Christianity required Roman men to adhere to the same basic boundaries that Roman women had been adhering to all along: no sex outside of marriage. At the same time, Christianity actually loosened the Greco-Roman constraints on female marital sexual activity. No longer was sex only for procreation—and then only a few times a year. It was now to be enjoyed by both husbands and wives mutually on a consistent basis as a renewal of covenant love and as an aid to chastity.[15] All of this amounted to a vast “pro-woman” reorientation of sexual norms within the Christian communities.
Part 3: The Result
Christianity’s new sexual ethic had never been tried before (though Judaism came the closest), and was seemingly contrary to all natural male impulses. At first, the majority of converts to Christianity were women and the lower classes. Understandably so. The greatest beneficiaries of this new Christian sexual ethic were women and slaves and children—all those who were the most vulnerable to unrestrained male sexuality.[16] But for all of its novel (and exceedingly cruciform) requirements of male sexual continence, Roman men began to convert as well. By the start of the fourth century, Christianity had become sufficiently pervasive in the Roman empire that it was formally adopted as the official state religion (thanks in no small part to Constantine’s dream and his victory at the Milvian bridge). And along with the spread of Christianity came the spread of its sexual ethic.
And all of this benefited Roman women, not just Christian women. Christianity was teaching Roman culture—men not least—that women were to be treated as the bride of Jesus, and the daughters of God. That all women had dignity and value, regardless of their social station, class association, or relationship to a powerful man.
No one in recent years has made this point more persuasively than the British historian Tom Holland. In his most recent book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, Holland sets out to answer the singular question “How did we get from the patriarchal and violent Greco-Roman world of the first century, to the more pacific, democratic and more feminist world of today?” Holland’s answer is Christianity. In his book, Holland argues that the dominant influence in the western tradition which has given rise to the ideals so hallowed in the classical western tradition—ideals like fairness, compassion, equality for women and racial minorities—has been Christianity. Christianity, Holland argues, has rewritten the script about the proper use of power—male sexual power not least. Jesus’ sacrificial example—his life and death—taught his followers, who then taught the world, that power was to be used in service of the vulnerable and oppressed. Holland’s conclusion is all the more significant because he is not (at least at the time of writing) a Christian.
In the final chapter of Dominion, Holland applies his central thesis to the issue of sex and women—drawing particular attention to the #MeToo movement of 2018. Holland points out that even though the Old Roman world was full of Harvey Weinstein’s, Roman women without male guardians never bothered making their plight known because no one cared.[17] But today it is different. When victimized women voice their concerns, male heads roll. That never could have happened in the Roman world. The #MeToo movement succeeded, Holland argues, precisely because Christianity had taught western culture that men should control their sexual power and treat women with dignity and respect—and that if they failed to do so, justice should be served on behalf of the victimized women. Holland states: “Two thousand years of Christian sexual morality has resulted in men as well as women widely taking [the sanctity of the female body] for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force.”[18]
The irony, Holland notes, is that so many of the #MeToo supporters viewed Christianity as the generative source of women’s oppression, when in fact, it is Christianity that had been insisting for the past 2,000 years that men chastise their sexual powers and respect the sanctity of female bodies. Like a depth charger dropped deep beneath the surface of the turbulent Roman world (Holland’s simile), the shockwaves of Christianity have been rippling throughout the western world for the past two thousand years. Slowly but surely the Christian sexual ethic has been steadily unraveling the ugly sweater of tyrannical male sexual power.
And not only has this meant that women have been increasingly (even if not entirely) freed from male sexual oppression, even more significantly, it means that women have been freed up to make significant and meaningful contributions to the larger society—contributions that have benefited both women and men. Holland points out that Christianity’s constraining of male sexual tyranny has helped establish a more pacific western culture for women, which in turn has helped create a safer culture for children, which in turn has produced more affluent and humane societies—all of which have combined to afford women more opportunities, dignity, and respect.[19] The fact that today we have a female vice president, female supreme court justices, female business leaders, female doctors, female professors, and so forth—all bringing their unique female perspectives to these vital cultural roles—is downstream from Christianity.[20]
No one (certainly not I) would claim that Christianity has adequately constrained all male sexual power. Indeed, Christianity (and what has passed for Christianity) has often been a perpetrator of abuse. But if we zoom back and consider the long view, we can see that the healing power of Christianity has been profound in the West. The Christianization of the world constitutes a true Christian Feminism. Nowhere else in the world, and at no other time in human history, have women been afforded the kind of inherent dignity, freedoms, respect, and opportunities that we find in the western Christian tradition. Where else would we look? China? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? India? I am not suggesting that Christianity brought the western world to a feminist peak in the 1950’s. The world of Ward and June Cleaver is not the goal of Christian Feminism. But 1950 was better for women than 1850, which was better than 1750, which was better than 1650 and so forth. There remains more feminist, culture shaping work for Christianity to do. The best days of Christian Feminism lie in the future. But alas, the west has lost faith in the feminist power of Christianity. Which leads to my final thought.
Part 4: Comparing Sexual Revolutions
Starting in earnest in the 1960’s, western culture began to paint Christianity as the villain of the woman story—a patriarchal force to be pushed aside so we could better get on with the feminist cause. This, I contend, has been a mistake. Louise Perry’s new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution ably makes this point. Perry is not a Christian. She is a British journalist and campaigner who describes herself as a “common sense feminist.” Perry studied feminist theory at Oxford and supports gay marriage. But her experience as a mother, and her work in rape recovery centers, has inspired her to levy a devastating critique against the sexual revolution. According to Perry, the feminist complaint that set up the sexual revolution was the fact that women could not have sex like men—which is to say, could not have sex without consequences. Pregnancy (and its potential) complicated a woman’s career opportunities and trapped her in the confining roles of domestic servitude. Men were not burdened by such innate natural consequences. But then came the pill in the 1960’s, and the legalization of abortion in 1973. Suddenly, it seemed, women could have sex like men. The sexual revolution—which Perry correctly sees was enabled by advances in new technology, and not simply a shift in philosophy—was off to the races.[21]
But, Perry contends, despite the widespread availability of contraception, and the legalization of abortion, the sexual revolution has been—on the whole—a disaster for women. Just a few stats: from 1940-1960 the out of wedlock birth rate hovered around 5%. But beginning in 1960, the out of wedlock birth rate hockey-sticked to over 40%, where it now stands today.[22] Today, nearly half of all children born in the US are born to a single mom. Perry points out (and this is common knowledge to social scientists), that the quickest pathway to poverty for a woman is to be a single mom. In 2021, there were over 15 million single moms in the United States—a shocking and distressing number. Sexual liberation has pulled whole generations of women down into poverty, and their children along with them. And abortion, which no one on either side of the debate thinks is a good thing, has skyrocketed since the introduction of contraception. To date, there have been over 63 million abortions in the United States. As Perry frequently points out, the biggest losers in the sexual revolution have been children.
Perry goes on to lament the hook-up culture so pervasive since the sexual revolution. She points out that only about 8% of women and 33% of men have a high sociosexuality—i.e., they enjoy non-relational sex.[23] Which means that the vast majority of women (92%) and a significant majority of men (67%), don’t want to have hook up sex with someone they’ve only just met at the bar; they want an actual relationship. All the same, the entire hook up culture caters to the sexual preferences of the worst kinds of males (the 33%) who have the least amount of regard for what the vast majority of women prefer—leaving the vast majority of women, and the majority of men—dissatisfied with the status quo and often bereft of romantic relationships. Perry notes that the sexual revolution has most benefitted the 33% of men with high sociosexuality who happily approach sex without regard for the consequences. The liberal feminist project, Perry says, has valorized “having sex like a man” as the pathway to women’s liberation. But in Perry’s view, men who have sex without regard for consequences to women are assholes. Her whole book is asking the question, “Why should women want to have sex like assholes?” [24]
Instead, Perry calls for men to stop looking at porn, to say no to BDSM, to restrain their sexuality around women, and to reembrace chivalry. And she exhorts her fellow women to drop out of the hook-up culture, avoid one-night stands, and generally “listen to your mother” (the title of her concluding chapter). Monogamous marriage, she says, needs to make a recovery and should be supported and anchored by tougher anti-divorce laws, because monogamous marriages are the best environment for raising children, and produce the most stable economic cultures—both of which are beneficial for women.[25]
All of this, and Perry is not a Christian (though based on her recent podcasts, it sounds like the Spirit is astir). Yet the moral framework she argues for is strikingly consistent with St. Paul’s Christian sexual ethic. She writes, “A truly feminist project would demand that…men, not women, should adjust their sexual appetites.” [26] There is a deep irony here. The Christian sexual revolution of the first century sought equality between men and women by asking Roman men to restrain their sexuality to match the more naturally restrained sexuality of Roman women. But the modern sexual revolution seeks equality by encouraging modern women to loosen their sexual restraint to match the more naturally unrestrained sexuality of men. Or we can state it like this—the Christian Feminist sexual revolution asked (and continues to ask) men to model their sexual behavior after chaste women. The modern sexual revolution asks women to model their sexual behavior after unchaste men.
The proof is in the pudding. The Christian approach to equality has been making steady improvement for women for the past 2,000 years. It has stabilized societies, granted new dignity and opportunities to women, and has penalized (and continues to penalize) powerful men for tyrannical sexual behavior. In contrast, the secular feminist approach has been destabilizing in the lives of women and their children for the past 60 years—resulting in tens of millions of abortions and millions of single moms who are sliding into poverty with their children.
Conclusion
To my progressive Christian brothers and sisters concerned about the cause of women (and children) in the world, I say to you, don’t lose faith in Christianity’s feminist vision of chastity, marriage, and sexuality. It has been working. Slowly but surely, Christianity has been transforming western culture in a pro-woman direction. To give up now is to give up on the only thing in western human history that has been able to move the needle toward a sustainable culture-wide freedom and liberation for women. The sexual restraint to which Christianity mutually calls both men and women is difficult, to be sure. And it is increasingly no longer in vogue in the larger culture. But all the same, the Christian sexual ethic is life-giving for both men and women—and most especially for children. Stay the course.
To my conservative Christian brothers and sisters, I invite you to consider that the arc of redemptive history bends toward the feminine. It is powered and guarded by the masculine, to be sure.[27] But it is pointed toward the feminine. The Church, after all, is the Bride of Christ. Which is why the larger Christian tradition has rightly valorized Mary as the one who most clearly and ably models the proper human response to God.[28] Christianity, properly understood, is concerned with the flourishing of women, for women represent the true Woman—who is all humanity—the Church. To loosely quote Chesterton: “Some men are men, and some men are women. But Man is a Woman.” And it is this Woman—the Church—whom Jesus has saved and raised (and is saving and raising) to sit at his own right hand, “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion” (Ephesians 1:21) where she will “judge the angels” (1 Corinthians 6:3) and “reign with him forever and ever” (Revelation 22:5). Christianity has been, and continues to be, earnestly striving for a world in which women can reach their full potential as queens of the world—just as the Church is the Queen of Heaven.
God loves us. He is dedicated to making the world a better place for women, for children, for all the vulnerable and oppressed. He is actively creating a world of dignity and honor and mutual respect. A world where men and women are valued as children of God, and where all of us—both men and women—constitute the Bride of Christ and are co-heirs of the grace of eternal life to come.
Gerald Hiestand (PhD Classics, University of Reading) is Senior Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church and the board chair and co-founder of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
[1] This essay was originally presented as a community-public address at Calvary Memorial Church, in Oak Park, Illinois on January 8, 2023. It has been updated and modified for publication on Theopolis.
[2] John Paul II calls for a “new feminism” in Evangelium Vitae. He does not mean that Christianity should finally get around to being feminist, but that Christianity should, in a renewed way, live into its inherent pro-woman, feminist nature. In this way, John Paul II’s call for a “new feminism” is akin to his call for a “new evangelism.”
[3] For scholarly treatments of the plight of women in the first century Roman world, see Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 19-79; Ken M. Campbell, ed., Marriage and Family in the Biblical World (Downers Grove, Il.: IVP Academic, 2003), 132-82. For a popular narrative treatment, see Holly Beers, A Week in the Life of a Greco-Roman Woman (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2019).
[4] Notably, the great Roman general Pompey was roundly criticized for his affection and enthusiasm for his young wife. The ideal Roman man was independent and martial; beholding to a woman—whether a mistress or a wife—was seen as weak an effeminate.
[5] Though this did not mean that all Roman marriages were devoid of love and companionship. Sometimes an intimate marriage would form over time, even if intimacy was not the original motivation for the marraige. Harper, Sin to Shame, 61-70.
[6] Harper, Sin to Shame, 52.
[7] Plutarch, Conjugal Precepts, 16.
[8] Nghiem L. Nguyen, “Roman Rape: An Overview of Roman Rape Laws from the Republican Period to Justinian’s Reign,” in Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, 13.1 (2006), 75-112.
[9] Harper observes the close connection between slavery and prostitution, noting that nearly all prostitutes (both male and female) were slaves; the sex trade was a subset of the slave trade. Slavery into prostitution was an unspeakably horrible—and socially accepted—reality. Harper, Sin to Shame, 50-61.
[10] In the larger typological context, Paul’s use of the “head/body” metaphor is meant (primarily) to underscore the organic union between the husband and the wife; less so was it intended to clarify who was in charge of who (a point that needed no clarification in the Greco-Roman context).
[11] Seneca calls Nero the “head” of the Roman army, whose job it was to kill and be killed for the sake of the emperor. Seneca, Letters to Clement, 1.4.3. See Michelle Lee Barnewall’s for her helpful comments on this point in Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate (Gand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2016), 154-56.
[12] Seneca, Letters to Clement, 1.3.4.
[13] This is, in my mind, the chief error of many complementarian accounts of gender. See my “Put Pain Like that Beyond My Power: A Christocentric Theodicy with Respect to the Inequality of Male and Female Power” in Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson, eds., Beauty, Order, and Mystery: A Christian Vision of Human Sexuality (Downers Grove, Il.: IVP Academic, 2017), 101-118.
[14] “Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022), 181.
[15] In fairness, a positive account of marital sex took only its first few hesitant steps in the early church. For many church fathers, procreation remained the only legitimate motivation for marital sexual relations. To see the full beauty of Christian marital sexuality, I commend the work of John Paul II in his magisterial Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body.
[16] Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (Great Britan, Little Brown, 2019), 125-26, recounts the effect of Christianity’s sexual ethic on women and children.
[17] A point painfully seen in Cicero’s defense of Gnaeus Plancius, a young man whose political opponents charged him with bribery and corruption. Plancius’ opponents also (for good measure) tried to smear him with the rape of an actress, to which Cicero replied, “O how elegantly must his youth have been passed! The only thing which is imputed to him is one that there was not much harm in.” And the matter was dropped. The preceding account is taken from Jack Lindsay, The Ancient World: Manners and Morals (New York: G. P Putnam’s Sons, 1968), 202.
[18] Holland, Dominion, 515.
[19] See Holland, Dominion, 262-75, 499-525; Perry, Case Against, 181-82; and Catholic scholar Erika Bachiochi excellent’s book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021). Bachiochi, quoting the eighteenth-century feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, writes, “The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies the degrade and destroy women” (48).
[20] On this point, I commend the work of Bachiochi, The Rights of Women, who draws upon the work of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, to show how progress in women’s political and legal rights is consistent with a robust prioritization of motherhood and family.
[21] Carl Truman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2020) is a master stroke in chronicling the philosophical shifts that have made possible the contemporary sexual ethics—most especially the sexual ethics related to the trans movement. But Truman’s book—correct though it is—does not give sufficient attention to the advent of, and widespread acceptance of, birth control—especially within Protestant Christianity. It was the technological advance in reliable contraception, even more so than enlightenment philosophy, that made the sexual revolution possible. This point is made accurately by Perry, Case Against, 6ff.
[22] Correlation may not be causation, but it’s not nothing. See page 5 of “Non-Marital Births: An Overview” prepared by the Congressional Research Service, which can be accessed at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43667/4.
[23] Perry, Case Against, 73-78.
[24] Perry, Case Against, 71.
[25] Perry, Case Against, 180-85.
[26] Perry, Case Against, 79.
[27] In short, patriarchy is for feminism. This fact constitutes a chief rationale for male-only ordination—the subject of which is my upcoming address at the 2024 Theopolis Conference.
[28] A point made beautifully by Eastern Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Yonkers, NY.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018), 99-114.
Has Christianity been good for women? I give my short answer at the beginning: yes.
I am not an expert on gender studies. Nor am I a woman. So I don’t contribute this essay as a scholar on either topic. But as a pastor, I am occupationally responsible to give a coherent account of the Christian religion and how it connects with relevant social issues.[1] And as it happens, the question of women’s rights and flourishing is a relevant social issue—not only for the culture at large, but especially so for my congregation. My congregation is located in a community that is quite progressive on cultural and social issues, feminism not least.
Let me say at the outset that I am supportive of the aims of the feminist cause—insofar as feminism has sought to improve women’s dignity, respect, opportunities, political rights, protections, and flourishing. I recognize the term “feminism” is fraught with all sorts of negative ideological baggage for conservatives. But “feminism” as such, can be construed as a series of variegated social movements, spanning (arguably) from Aristophane’s Lysistrata in the fifth century B.C. to contemporary third wave feminism and beyond. Clearly much of what falls under the rubric of “feminism” has been at odds with a Christian vision of female flourishing. Nonetheless, much of what the various feminist movements have sought has been consistent with the Christian vision of female dignity, agency, and equality—a point made by John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae.[2] Women have made significant progress in all these areas over the past hundred years, and I take it as axiomatic that these gains have been consistent with Christian ideals.
But what part has Christianity played in this narrative of female progress? My central claim is that Christianity has been good for women. This claim is not without controversy in feminist circles. The larger feminist culture in North America tells us that Christianity—especially in its more traditional forms—has been an obstacle to women’s progress (as well as an obstacle to the progress of minorities, and the poor, and immigrants, etc.). Generally speaking, the more progressive a social context, the more inclined it is to view traditional Christianity as a force for harm in the world. My aim in this essay is to challenge that thinking, and to argue that Christianity has indeed been a force for good for women.
To state my central claim a bit more provocatively, my argument is that Christianity has been more “feminist” than feminism. Properly understood, Christianity carries within itself a feminist impulse that is actually more responsible for the flourishing of women than its modern secular counterpart.
My argument is sweeping and will necessarily be given in summary form. It unfolds in four parts. In the first part, I will explore the world into which Christianity was born—the Greco Roman world of the first century. This will give us a baseline picture of the state of women’s flourishing at the dawn of western history. In the second part, I will note the key moves that Christianity made regarding sex and marriage that challenged and critiqued the Greco-Roman views of women. These moves amounted to an (albeit slow moving) sexual revolution within the Greco-Roman world. In part three, I will explore the results of this Christian sexual revolution for women. And finally, I will conclude by comparing the Christian sexual revolution of the first century with the secular sexual revolution of the twentieth century.
On to Rome and the first century.
Part 1: Rome and Women
Christianity was born into the tumult of the Roman Empire, which was itself deeply steeped in the long-standing Greco-Roman views of sex and power. This Greco-Roman culture was strongly patriarchal.[3] Male roman citizens were in the power position, and generally speaking, women had rights only insofar as they were related to a male Roman citizen—most typically their father or husband. Women could control their own property (which generally entailed the dowry they brought into their marriages), but they had no legal authority over their children. To be sure, the wife was deputized to manage the household affairs; but the father of the family was the paterfamilias—the head of household who had sole legal authority over every living soul in his house. The paterfamilias’ familial sovereignty was so complete, that he even had authority to put his children to death. When a baby was born, it would be placed on the floor. If the paterfamilias picked up the child, it would be kept as a member of the family. If he did not, it would not. The rejected child would be “exposed”—left outside to either die or be salvaged by slavers.
Beyond women’s domestic duties, they could not vote or serve in any kind of public life. They were given a limited education and were not generally taught to write. The ideal Roman woman was quiet and uneventful. The less one knew about a man’s wife or daughter, the more the wife or daughter embodied the Roman ideal.
Because property rights passed through inheritance—from a man to his sons—fathers were concerned to know that they were passing their property to their legitimate offspring. As such, female chastity was highly prized. Women’s lives were in most cases firmly regulated by their families, to ensure sexual fidelity to one’s husband (or future husband). Women—especially in the upper classes—did not typically go out into society unescorted.
In the Roman world, wives were not chiefly valued by their husbands for love, sex, and companionship.[4] A potential wife was valued principally for her procreative capacities, her social standing, and her ability to manage the affairs of the house. Many Roman men did not especially care for their wives and had as little sex with them as possible—only what was necessary to keep the family line going. Men often looked outside their marriages for sex and companionship.[5] Which meant that regarding chastity, there was a clear and unapologetic double standard. Sexual propriety for women meant only having sex with their husbands. Sexual propriety for men meant not having sex with someone else’s woman. Men, single or married, could have sex with whomever they wanted, provided they didn’t transgress the “guardianship” or “ownership” rights of another man (i.e., the woman’s father, husband, or slave master). Mistresses, prostitutes, and a man’s own slave girls (or boys) were socially acceptable outlets for male sexual desire.
Indeed, the idea of male chastity (as understood according to contemporary standards) wasn’t really an ideal in the larger Roman world. Tellingly, the Latin language did not even have a word to denote a male virgin. “Maidenhood” (i.e., virginhood) was a female reality, not a male reality.[6] Plutarch, a Roman philosopher from the second century, gives us a picture of the Roman double standard. His book Conjugal Precepts served as advice to young married couples. He writes to young brides:
The lawful wives of the Persian kings sit beside them at dinner, and eat with them. But when the kings wish to be merry and get drunk, they send their wives away, and send for their music-girls and concubines. They are right in what they do, because they do not concede any share in their licentiousness and debauchery to their wedded wives. If therefore a man in private life, who is incontinent and dissolute in regard to his pleasures, commits some peccadillo with a lover or a maidservant, his wedded wife ought not to be indignant or angry, but she should reason that it is because of his respect for her that he shares his debauchery, licentiousness, and wantonness with another woman.[7]
It goes without saying that Plutarch’s marriage advice falls woefully short by today’s standards. And perhaps most disturbing, there were no laws against rape, per se, in the Roman empire.[8] The laws against rape and sexual assault, such as they were, were related to the “citizenship rights” of the man to whom the woman (or boy, or slave) belonged. Sexual assault upon a wife, sister, daughter, or slave, was a punishable offense, but only insofar as it was a crime against the male citizen who had jurisdiction over the one assaulted. But a sexual assault upon a woman (or boy or beggar or prostitute) who had no male protector or guardian was not a crime.
I don’t want to convey that life for women in the Roman world was at every point a misery, or that sexual assault happened at every turn. A decent family (i.e., a wealthy family) could afford a woman meaningful protection. And no doubt some women were happy in their marriages. But women from poor families, women who were slaves (slavery comprised 10-30% of the Roman population), or women from non-citizen families, fared worse.[9] It was this second class that constituted the majority of women in the first century Roman empire. What was clear to everyone in the Roman world—to both men and women—was that it was a man’s world, in which Roman men had nearly all the rights and dignity; the Roman woman’s lesser rights—such as they were—were derivative from the rights of the males with which she was associated.
In sum, the context into which Christianity was born was a highly patriarchal context that left women often marginalized and oppressed.
Enter St. Paul.
Part 2: Christianity and Women
The Christian ideal regarding sex and women—as seen most especially in the writings of St. Paul—could not have been more contrary to the vision of sex and women found in the Roman world. In Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus, he provides the following account of marriage:
22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. (Ephesians 5:22-33)
To modern ears, Paul’s call for the wife’s submission sounds excessively patriarchal. But when properly understood in the Greco-Roman context, Paul’s vision of marriage is shockingly progressive.
To begin, Paul likens the relationship between the husband and wife to the relationship between a head and its body. The husband and wife are an organic whole, Paul insists. They rise and fall together.[10] The head body metaphor was not exclusive to Paul. In the Roman context, the emperor was the head, and the state was the body.[11] In the Roman mind, the function of the body was to protect the head—even if it had to die to do so.[12] But Paul inverts this logic and says that in the Christian vision of marriage, the head exists for the sake of the body. The wife’s good, even above the husband’s good, is the chief end—the Aristotelian telos—of the marriage. As such, the husband’s goal in marriage, as the head of the body, is the body’s flourishing. What’s more, the telic nature of the wife (with respect to the husband) remained true, even if the husband had to give up his life for the sake of his wife. And this meant that in Christian marriages, the wife was not an expendable appendage, to be tossed aside when no longer suiting the purposes of the husband. Even a barren wife could not be tossed aside. The Christian husband, as the head of his wife, was to regard his wife as his own flesh and to pursue her flourishing above all others, including his own.
Most significantly, Paul grounds his vision of marriage in his understanding of the relationship between Christ and the Church. For Paul, human marriage was a living picture of God’s sacred plan of redemption—“a profound mystery” that “refers to Christ and the Church” (vs 32). Paul is saying that human marriage was ordained by God from the very beginning to forecast and reveal the unity and sacrificial love that Jesus has for his people, and the trust that Jesus’ people have in him. Thus, for Paul, the sanctity of human marriage was tied to the sanctity of what it represented.
But more can be said here.
In Paul’s typological vision of marriage, Jesus not only “rescued” humanity, but raised humanity up and seated humanity with him in the highest heavenly places.[13] Too many typological readings of Ephesians 5:19-33 fail to account for the fuller context of Paul’s Christ/Church typology in the rest of Ephesians. For Paul, Christ not only humbly descends to rescue his bride (the focus of 5:21-33); he also ascends back to his throne, taking his bride with him—where he seats her at his own right hand and grants her authority to rule and reign with him (the focus of 1:16-2:6). Failure to account for the “upward” ascent of Christ’s bride often results in benignly patronizing accounts of masculine power, wherein women are reduced to well-cared for adult children. Both incarnational movements—the downward descent and the upward ascent—need to be accounted for in typological accounts of Man and Woman. Which is to say, the story of Christianity is the story of how God came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ, died a sacrificial death on behalf of his beloved, united himself to her, and then raised her up and seated her with him in his place of dignity and authority over all creation. In contrast to Rome, the basic message that Christianity gave to Roman men was, “Note how Christ cares for, honors, and exalts the church. Go and do likewise for your wives.” And wives, for their part, were called to respect their husband’s sacrificial-exalting love.
This basic Christ/Church marital framework governed all Christian sexual ethics in three significant ways. First, divorce—which was quite common in the Greco-Roman world (and permissible even in the Judaism out of which Christianity came)—was no longer permissible for Christians. Christian marriage, as an expression of Christ’s devotion to the Church, was permanent and could only be broken by death, or by cases of sexual unfaithfulness. Social historians have made the point that this level of fidelity was not the norm in human history.[14] Even Jesus’ own disciples were shocked by it, when they first heard of it (Matthew 19:9-10).
Second, chastity became binding on men, just as much as it was on women. No more mistresses, no more prostitutes, no more slave girls or slave boys. And this wasn’t just the rule for married men. Not even single Christian men could take a mistress or visit the prostitutes or have a slave boy or girl. In the new Christian sexual ethic, the only legitimate outlet for male (or female) sexual expression was the marriage bed. This vision of male chastity was so sufficiently novel to Roman men that Paul had to admonish the Christian men of Corinth to stop visiting the prostitutes—not because the Corinthian men were consciously disobeying the Christian sexual ethic, but because it hadn’t yet fully occurred to them that visiting the prostitutes was inconsistent with Christian faith (1 Cor 6:12-20).
And third, Paul insisted that the sexual rights and pleasures of the marriage bed were to be enjoyed by the husband and wife equally (1 Cor 7:1-5). The marriage bed was holy and sacred, a profound venue for modeling the spiritual union between Christ and his church. Marriage was given as an aid to chastity, an appropriate outlet for natural sexual passion. As such, neither spouse was to deny the other their proper conjugal rights.
All of this meant that Christianity called for sexual equality between men and women, not by loosening the boundaries of female sexual propriety, but by tightening the boundaries of male sexual propriety. In nearly every respect, Christianity required Roman men to adhere to the same basic boundaries that Roman women had been adhering to all along: no sex outside of marriage. At the same time, Christianity actually loosened the Greco-Roman constraints on female marital sexual activity. No longer was sex only for procreation—and then only a few times a year. It was now to be enjoyed by both husbands and wives mutually on a consistent basis as a renewal of covenant love and as an aid to chastity.[15] All of this amounted to a vast “pro-woman” reorientation of sexual norms within the Christian communities.
Part 3: The Result
Christianity’s new sexual ethic had never been tried before (though Judaism came the closest), and was seemingly contrary to all natural male impulses. At first, the majority of converts to Christianity were women and the lower classes. Understandably so. The greatest beneficiaries of this new Christian sexual ethic were women and slaves and children—all those who were the most vulnerable to unrestrained male sexuality.[16] But for all of its novel (and exceedingly cruciform) requirements of male sexual continence, Roman men began to convert as well. By the start of the fourth century, Christianity had become sufficiently pervasive in the Roman empire that it was formally adopted as the official state religion (thanks in no small part to Constantine’s dream and his victory at the Milvian bridge). And along with the spread of Christianity came the spread of its sexual ethic.
And all of this benefited Roman women, not just Christian women. Christianity was teaching Roman culture—men not least—that women were to be treated as the bride of Jesus, and the daughters of God. That all women had dignity and value, regardless of their social station, class association, or relationship to a powerful man.
No one in recent years has made this point more persuasively than the British historian Tom Holland. In his most recent book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, Holland sets out to answer the singular question “How did we get from the patriarchal and violent Greco-Roman world of the first century, to the more pacific, democratic and more feminist world of today?” Holland’s answer is Christianity. In his book, Holland argues that the dominant influence in the western tradition which has given rise to the ideals so hallowed in the classical western tradition—ideals like fairness, compassion, equality for women and racial minorities—has been Christianity. Christianity, Holland argues, has rewritten the script about the proper use of power—male sexual power not least. Jesus’ sacrificial example—his life and death—taught his followers, who then taught the world, that power was to be used in service of the vulnerable and oppressed. Holland’s conclusion is all the more significant because he is not (at least at the time of writing) a Christian.
In the final chapter of Dominion, Holland applies his central thesis to the issue of sex and women—drawing particular attention to the #MeToo movement of 2018. Holland points out that even though the Old Roman world was full of Harvey Weinstein’s, Roman women without male guardians never bothered making their plight known because no one cared.[17] But today it is different. When victimized women voice their concerns, male heads roll. That never could have happened in the Roman world. The #MeToo movement succeeded, Holland argues, precisely because Christianity had taught western culture that men should control their sexual power and treat women with dignity and respect—and that if they failed to do so, justice should be served on behalf of the victimized women. Holland states: “Two thousand years of Christian sexual morality has resulted in men as well as women widely taking [the sanctity of the female body] for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force.”[18]
The irony, Holland notes, is that so many of the #MeToo supporters viewed Christianity as the generative source of women’s oppression, when in fact, it is Christianity that had been insisting for the past 2,000 years that men chastise their sexual powers and respect the sanctity of female bodies. Like a depth charger dropped deep beneath the surface of the turbulent Roman world (Holland’s simile), the shockwaves of Christianity have been rippling throughout the western world for the past two thousand years. Slowly but surely the Christian sexual ethic has been steadily unraveling the ugly sweater of tyrannical male sexual power.
And not only has this meant that women have been increasingly (even if not entirely) freed from male sexual oppression, even more significantly, it means that women have been freed up to make significant and meaningful contributions to the larger society—contributions that have benefited both women and men. Holland points out that Christianity’s constraining of male sexual tyranny has helped establish a more pacific western culture for women, which in turn has helped create a safer culture for children, which in turn has produced more affluent and humane societies—all of which have combined to afford women more opportunities, dignity, and respect.[19] The fact that today we have a female vice president, female supreme court justices, female business leaders, female doctors, female professors, and so forth—all bringing their unique female perspectives to these vital cultural roles—is downstream from Christianity.[20]
No one (certainly not I) would claim that Christianity has adequately constrained all male sexual power. Indeed, Christianity (and what has passed for Christianity) has often been a perpetrator of abuse. But if we zoom back and consider the long view, we can see that the healing power of Christianity has been profound in the West. The Christianization of the world constitutes a true Christian Feminism. Nowhere else in the world, and at no other time in human history, have women been afforded the kind of inherent dignity, freedoms, respect, and opportunities that we find in the western Christian tradition. Where else would we look? China? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? India? I am not suggesting that Christianity brought the western world to a feminist peak in the 1950’s. The world of Ward and June Cleaver is not the goal of Christian Feminism. But 1950 was better for women than 1850, which was better than 1750, which was better than 1650 and so forth. There remains more feminist, culture shaping work for Christianity to do. The best days of Christian Feminism lie in the future. But alas, the west has lost faith in the feminist power of Christianity. Which leads to my final thought.
Part 4: Comparing Sexual Revolutions
Starting in earnest in the 1960’s, western culture began to paint Christianity as the villain of the woman story—a patriarchal force to be pushed aside so we could better get on with the feminist cause. This, I contend, has been a mistake. Louise Perry’s new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution ably makes this point. Perry is not a Christian. She is a British journalist and campaigner who describes herself as a “common sense feminist.” Perry studied feminist theory at Oxford and supports gay marriage. But her experience as a mother, and her work in rape recovery centers, has inspired her to levy a devastating critique against the sexual revolution. According to Perry, the feminist complaint that set up the sexual revolution was the fact that women could not have sex like men—which is to say, could not have sex without consequences. Pregnancy (and its potential) complicated a woman’s career opportunities and trapped her in the confining roles of domestic servitude. Men were not burdened by such innate natural consequences. But then came the pill in the 1960’s, and the legalization of abortion in 1973. Suddenly, it seemed, women could have sex like men. The sexual revolution—which Perry correctly sees was enabled by advances in new technology, and not simply a shift in philosophy—was off to the races.[21]
But, Perry contends, despite the widespread availability of contraception, and the legalization of abortion, the sexual revolution has been—on the whole—a disaster for women. Just a few stats: from 1940-1960 the out of wedlock birth rate hovered around 5%. But beginning in 1960, the out of wedlock birth rate hockey-sticked to over 40%, where it now stands today.[22] Today, nearly half of all children born in the US are born to a single mom. Perry points out (and this is common knowledge to social scientists), that the quickest pathway to poverty for a woman is to be a single mom. In 2021, there were over 15 million single moms in the United States—a shocking and distressing number. Sexual liberation has pulled whole generations of women down into poverty, and their children along with them. And abortion, which no one on either side of the debate thinks is a good thing, has skyrocketed since the introduction of contraception. To date, there have been over 63 million abortions in the United States. As Perry frequently points out, the biggest losers in the sexual revolution have been children.
Perry goes on to lament the hook-up culture so pervasive since the sexual revolution. She points out that only about 8% of women and 33% of men have a high sociosexuality—i.e., they enjoy non-relational sex.[23] Which means that the vast majority of women (92%) and a significant majority of men (67%), don’t want to have hook up sex with someone they’ve only just met at the bar; they want an actual relationship. All the same, the entire hook up culture caters to the sexual preferences of the worst kinds of males (the 33%) who have the least amount of regard for what the vast majority of women prefer—leaving the vast majority of women, and the majority of men—dissatisfied with the status quo and often bereft of romantic relationships. Perry notes that the sexual revolution has most benefitted the 33% of men with high sociosexuality who happily approach sex without regard for the consequences. The liberal feminist project, Perry says, has valorized “having sex like a man” as the pathway to women’s liberation. But in Perry’s view, men who have sex without regard for consequences to women are assholes. Her whole book is asking the question, “Why should women want to have sex like assholes?” [24]
Instead, Perry calls for men to stop looking at porn, to say no to BDSM, to restrain their sexuality around women, and to reembrace chivalry. And she exhorts her fellow women to drop out of the hook-up culture, avoid one-night stands, and generally “listen to your mother” (the title of her concluding chapter). Monogamous marriage, she says, needs to make a recovery and should be supported and anchored by tougher anti-divorce laws, because monogamous marriages are the best environment for raising children, and produce the most stable economic cultures—both of which are beneficial for women.[25]
All of this, and Perry is not a Christian (though based on her recent podcasts, it sounds like the Spirit is astir). Yet the moral framework she argues for is strikingly consistent with St. Paul’s Christian sexual ethic. She writes, “A truly feminist project would demand that…men, not women, should adjust their sexual appetites.” [26] There is a deep irony here. The Christian sexual revolution of the first century sought equality between men and women by asking Roman men to restrain their sexuality to match the more naturally restrained sexuality of Roman women. But the modern sexual revolution seeks equality by encouraging modern women to loosen their sexual restraint to match the more naturally unrestrained sexuality of men. Or we can state it like this—the Christian Feminist sexual revolution asked (and continues to ask) men to model their sexual behavior after chaste women. The modern sexual revolution asks women to model their sexual behavior after unchaste men.
The proof is in the pudding. The Christian approach to equality has been making steady improvement for women for the past 2,000 years. It has stabilized societies, granted new dignity and opportunities to women, and has penalized (and continues to penalize) powerful men for tyrannical sexual behavior. In contrast, the secular feminist approach has been destabilizing in the lives of women and their children for the past 60 years—resulting in tens of millions of abortions and millions of single moms who are sliding into poverty with their children.
Conclusion
To my progressive Christian brothers and sisters concerned about the cause of women (and children) in the world, I say to you, don’t lose faith in Christianity’s feminist vision of chastity, marriage, and sexuality. It has been working. Slowly but surely, Christianity has been transforming western culture in a pro-woman direction. To give up now is to give up on the only thing in western human history that has been able to move the needle toward a sustainable culture-wide freedom and liberation for women. The sexual restraint to which Christianity mutually calls both men and women is difficult, to be sure. And it is increasingly no longer in vogue in the larger culture. But all the same, the Christian sexual ethic is life-giving for both men and women—and most especially for children. Stay the course.
To my conservative Christian brothers and sisters, I invite you to consider that the arc of redemptive history bends toward the feminine. It is powered and guarded by the masculine, to be sure.[27] But it is pointed toward the feminine. The Church, after all, is the Bride of Christ. Which is why the larger Christian tradition has rightly valorized Mary as the one who most clearly and ably models the proper human response to God.[28] Christianity, properly understood, is concerned with the flourishing of women, for women represent the true Woman—who is all humanity—the Church. To loosely quote Chesterton: “Some men are men, and some men are women. But Man is a Woman.” And it is this Woman—the Church—whom Jesus has saved and raised (and is saving and raising) to sit at his own right hand, “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion” (Ephesians 1:21) where she will “judge the angels” (1 Corinthians 6:3) and “reign with him forever and ever” (Revelation 22:5). Christianity has been, and continues to be, earnestly striving for a world in which women can reach their full potential as queens of the world—just as the Church is the Queen of Heaven.
God loves us. He is dedicated to making the world a better place for women, for children, for all the vulnerable and oppressed. He is actively creating a world of dignity and honor and mutual respect. A world where men and women are valued as children of God, and where all of us—both men and women—constitute the Bride of Christ and are co-heirs of the grace of eternal life to come.
Gerald Hiestand (PhD Classics, University of Reading) is Senior Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church and the board chair and co-founder of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
[1] This essay was originally presented as a community-public address at Calvary Memorial Church, in Oak Park, Illinois on January 8, 2023. It has been updated and modified for publication on Theopolis.
[2] John Paul II calls for a “new feminism” in Evangelium Vitae. He does not mean that Christianity should finally get around to being feminist, but that Christianity should, in a renewed way, live into its inherent pro-woman, feminist nature. In this way, John Paul II’s call for a “new feminism” is akin to his call for a “new evangelism.”
[3] For scholarly treatments of the plight of women in the first century Roman world, see Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 19-79; Ken M. Campbell, ed., Marriage and Family in the Biblical World (Downers Grove, Il.: IVP Academic, 2003), 132-82. For a popular narrative treatment, see Holly Beers, A Week in the Life of a Greco-Roman Woman (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2019).
[4] Notably, the great Roman general Pompey was roundly criticized for his affection and enthusiasm for his young wife. The ideal Roman man was independent and martial; beholding to a woman—whether a mistress or a wife—was seen as weak an effeminate.
[5] Though this did not mean that all Roman marriages were devoid of love and companionship. Sometimes an intimate marriage would form over time, even if intimacy was not the original motivation for the marraige. Harper, Sin to Shame, 61-70.
[6] Harper, Sin to Shame, 52.
[7] Plutarch, Conjugal Precepts, 16.
[8] Nghiem L. Nguyen, “Roman Rape: An Overview of Roman Rape Laws from the Republican Period to Justinian’s Reign,” in Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, 13.1 (2006), 75-112.
[9] Harper observes the close connection between slavery and prostitution, noting that nearly all prostitutes (both male and female) were slaves; the sex trade was a subset of the slave trade. Slavery into prostitution was an unspeakably horrible—and socially accepted—reality. Harper, Sin to Shame, 50-61.
[10] In the larger typological context, Paul’s use of the “head/body” metaphor is meant (primarily) to underscore the organic union between the husband and the wife; less so was it intended to clarify who was in charge of who (a point that needed no clarification in the Greco-Roman context).
[11] Seneca calls Nero the “head” of the Roman army, whose job it was to kill and be killed for the sake of the emperor. Seneca, Letters to Clement, 1.4.3. See Michelle Lee Barnewall’s for her helpful comments on this point in Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate (Gand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2016), 154-56.
[12] Seneca, Letters to Clement, 1.3.4.
[13] This is, in my mind, the chief error of many complementarian accounts of gender. See my “Put Pain Like that Beyond My Power: A Christocentric Theodicy with Respect to the Inequality of Male and Female Power” in Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson, eds., Beauty, Order, and Mystery: A Christian Vision of Human Sexuality (Downers Grove, Il.: IVP Academic, 2017), 101-118.
[14] “Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022), 181.
[15] In fairness, a positive account of marital sex took only its first few hesitant steps in the early church. For many church fathers, procreation remained the only legitimate motivation for marital sexual relations. To see the full beauty of Christian marital sexuality, I commend the work of John Paul II in his magisterial Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body.
[16] Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (Great Britan, Little Brown, 2019), 125-26, recounts the effect of Christianity’s sexual ethic on women and children.
[17] A point painfully seen in Cicero’s defense of Gnaeus Plancius, a young man whose political opponents charged him with bribery and corruption. Plancius’ opponents also (for good measure) tried to smear him with the rape of an actress, to which Cicero replied, “O how elegantly must his youth have been passed! The only thing which is imputed to him is one that there was not much harm in.” And the matter was dropped. The preceding account is taken from Jack Lindsay, The Ancient World: Manners and Morals (New York: G. P Putnam's Sons, 1968), 202.
[18] Holland, Dominion, 515.
[19] See Holland, Dominion, 262-75, 499-525; Perry, Case Against, 181-82; and Catholic scholar Erika Bachiochi excellent’s book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021). Bachiochi, quoting the eighteenth-century feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, writes, “The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies the degrade and destroy women” (48).
[20] On this point, I commend the work of Bachiochi, The Rights of Women, who draws upon the work of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, to show how progress in women’s political and legal rights is consistent with a robust prioritization of motherhood and family.
[21] Carl Truman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2020) is a master stroke in chronicling the philosophical shifts that have made possible the contemporary sexual ethics—most especially the sexual ethics related to the trans movement. But Truman’s book—correct though it is—does not give sufficient attention to the advent of, and widespread acceptance of, birth control—especially within Protestant Christianity. It was the technological advance in reliable contraception, even more so than enlightenment philosophy, that made the sexual revolution possible. This point is made accurately by Perry, Case Against, 6ff.
[22] Correlation may not be causation, but it’s not nothing. See page 5 of “Non-Marital Births: An Overview” prepared by the Congressional Research Service, which can be accessed at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43667/4.
[23] Perry, Case Against, 73-78.
[24] Perry, Case Against, 71.
[25] Perry, Case Against, 180-85.
[26] Perry, Case Against, 79.
[27] In short, patriarchy is for feminism. This fact constitutes a chief rationale for male-only ordination—the subject of which is my upcoming address at the 2024 Theopolis Conference.
[28] A point made beautifully by Eastern Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Yonkers, NY.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018), 99-114.
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