Thanks to my four responders. I’ve done my best to understand their responses, as I’m sure they did their best to understand my essay.

I respond in two parts. My first response is directed at Alastair, Aaron, and Benjamin, all of whom I sense to be a bit to the right of me. My second response is directed at Rae, whom I sense to be a bit to the left of me. I commend both responses to both sides.  

Response to Alastair, Aaron, and Benjamin

Let me begin with a mea culpa. The famous Delphic maxim instructs us, “Know thyself.” But this Theopolis Conversation, I think, called for a modified version: “Know thy audience.” This I failed to do.  

My essay was originally written as a reprise of a semi-public address I gave at my church in Oak Park, Illinois—a near western suburb of Chicago. For those who don’t know Oak Park, it is a happily (and thoroughly) progressive community. The folks in my community, including some in my congregation, are not at all convinced that Christianity has historically been good for women (or black people, or immigrants, or the poor, etc.). My presentation was an effort to convince them otherwise.

How did the presentation go, you ask? On the whole, it went pretty well. If anything, it was thought a bit too conservative. But it did cause a few folks (at least) to consider that maybe (just maybe) Christianity wasn’t the oppressive tyrannical force they had been led to believe. That maybe (just maybe) the sexual revolution hadn’t been the best thing for women.

All of which is to say, my original presentation was not written to resource conservatives, but rather was an effort to help feminist-inclined progressives appreciate the “pro-woman” legacy of Christianity. The Theopolis audience, of course, is a different crowd. As such, I am happy to concede that my use of a talk aimed at progressives was ill advised for a Theopolis audience.  (Just in case anyone is unclear, the Theopolis audience is not full of secular feminists.)

All the same, I nonetheless commend my essay as an example of how to talk to progressives (not just about progressives). Because defeating feminism (an ideology) and convincing feminists (human beings) requires different strategies.

My original presentation was based on Augustine’s basic insight regarding the operation of the will. For Augustine, every action of the will is animated by a desire to obtain joy. Joy, of course, is found ultimately in God. He writes, “Those who think that the happy life is found elsewhere (than God) pursue another joy and not the true one. Nevertheless, their will remains drawn toward some image of the true joy.”[1] For Augustine, the problem is not that we have ceased to pursue joy, it’s that we have lost sight of where true joy is found.   

Thomas Aquinas follows the same line.[2] Thomas insists that it is impossible for the human soul to will anything other than happiness. As such, when faced with a choice between two paths, the will necessarily chooses the path perceived by the intellect to be the surest path to happiness. But, of course, the human intellect is often misguided. As such, even though the will can’t help but move toward happiness, it often inadvertently ends up choosing things that make it unhappy.

St. Catherine, following Augustine and Thomas, makes the same basic point (just about the entire Christian tradition makes this same basic point). She writes, “The soul cannot live without love, but always wants to love something, because she is made of love, and by love [God] created her.” [3] For Catherine, humans were made by a God of love and cannot help but love. Contrary to heavy-handed accounts of human depravity, sin has not erased the soul’s capacity for genuine love; it has misdirected this innate capacity toward the wrong ends. Which is to say, sin causes us to genuinely love the wrong things—to our own harm.

Joy, happiness, and love. All of these are true goods that the human heart cannot help but pursue. Even feminist hearts. Augustine again: “For certainly by sinning we lost both piety and happiness: but when we lost happiness, we did not lose the love of it.”[4]

When we follow the wisdom of the saints on this point (and I do), we understand that secular feminists are pursuing legitimate goods through wrong means. Secular feminism gets a lot of things wrong. But not everything. Feminists rightly object to male-misuses of power. Feminists rightly seek opportunities for women to be empowered so they can make essential contributions to the world.[5] These are true Christian goods. The problem with feminism is not simply that it’s seeking false goods, but that it’s seeking true goods in false ways. Feminism (since the second wave, especially) now (wrongly) thinks that the flourishing of women is best achieved by denying the import of bodily distinctions between men and women, by downplaying motherhood, and by obtaining increasing levels of radical autonomy (from men, especially). These are mistaken attempts to pursue true goods in wrong ways.

Christian conservatives need to demonstrate empathy with these goods if we want to put ourselves in a position to help secular feminists see that these goods can be better achieved by different means.

Take Chris Voss and the FBI, for instance.

Chris Voss, author of Never Split the Difference, has become famous for his negotiation skills. He honed his craft during 24 years of working in the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit—four of which were spent as the FBI’s chief international hostage and kidnapping negotiator (2003-2007). Voss notes the evolution that has taken place in FBI negotiation strategy over the past decades. In “older” forms of FBI hostage negotiation, the negotiator adopted a forceful posture and aggressively issued threats. The results were sometimes successful, but often only served to alienate the negotiator from the perpetrator, resulting in violence. But during Voss’s tenure, the FBI reshaped its strategy around the (Augustinian) insight that effective negotiations require the negotiator to begin negotiating by recognizing a shared legitimate “good.” The perpetrator was seeking something good, even if in the wrong way. The job of the negotiator was to identify this good, empathize with the perpetrator’s pursuit of this good, and then help the perpetrator see that the good he (or she) was seeking could not be gained by robbing a bank and taking hostages, but could be more readily obtained through surrender. The FBI rightly saw that if the perpetrator had no confidence in the negotiator’s ability to understand and affirm the perpetrator’s perceived good, the perpetrator would be far less inclined to negotiate. Of course, sometimes force was the only option. But the FBI’s success rate in hostage negotiations is now around 95%.

The FBI’s more empathetic approach to negotiations is thoroughly incarnational. The Nicene fathers made the point that God condescends all the way down to our level. Even more than that, he became a part of creation himself. Not just halfway—with one foot in heaven, the other on earth; no, he entered the whole way into our blindness and helped us find our way back to the good our hearts were created to seek. As St. Athanasius argued in his defense of Nicaea, only the utterly infinite and transcendent God was great enough to become completely and utterly finite.

Mercifully, God does not simply stand in heaven and yell at us about all the ways we are doing things wrong; nor does he only issue dire threats from afar. (Though he does do these things, if he has to.) Instead, and above all, he enters into our humanity, meets us in our false pursuits of the true Good, and directs our will back toward the true Good—namely himself.

By the same logic, Christian conservativism needs to acknowledge secular feminism’s pursuit of true Christian goods, show that we sympathize with these goods (insofar as they are genuine goods), and try to direct feminists toward the proper means by which they can achieve these true goods. Only when we learn to see the true Christian goods that secular feminists are pursuing, will secular feminists maybe (just maybe) begin to listen to Christianity’s account of women. As Paul reminds us in Romans, God’s wrath makes us aware of our sin (Romans 1:18); but it is his kindness that leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4).

Not everyone is equally called to this diplomatic task. Some FBI agents have to stand guard around the perimeter, so the negotiator can do his work. But for those burdened with a heart for negotiating—for those who want to win progressives, not just defeat them—perhaps my essay can serve as a reminder that talking with energy about everything wrong with feminism, though important, will not win feminists. Yes, we must talk about the dangers of progressive ideology. And conservatives such as Alistair are really good at that. Keep at it. It’s important work. But it also behooves at least some of us to talk to feminists about conservativism; rather than simply talk about feminism to conservatives.

Of course, some theological conservatives don’t want to convert feminists; they just want to stomp on them. My essay (and this response) will be no help to such folks.

Thus far my conservative critics.

Response to Rae

I liked Rae’s response. Rae agrees with me that Christianity has been good for women, when considered in the long view. But she is less sanguine that Christianity is presently good for women. I am sympathetic to her critique. As I noted in my essay, I do not believe Christian Feminism has reached its zenith. Certainly, as Holland and Harper show, things are better (perhaps even much better) for women now than they were. But there is much more to female flourishing than increasing freedom from sexual assault.

All the same, it seems to me that Rae too quickly dismisses the hard work that conservative Christianity has done in securing the Christian Feminist high ground upon which women currently stand. Physical safety and bodily sanctity for women should not be brushed aside as “lifeless” contributions of Christian Feminism. I get that it’s not everything; but it’s not nothing.

Likewise, we shouldn’t too quickly dismiss the ongoing feminizing work that conservative Christianity has continued to do. Sociologist Brad Wilcox’s study on religion and gender makes this point. Wilcox’s research tests secular feminism’s claim of that conservative Protestant Christianity has been—since the gains of the sexual revolution—a “road block” for women’s progress and flourishing. Wilcox’s study examines three groups of men—conservative Protestant men, mainline Christian men, and non-religious men. His study shows that conservative Protestant men are “more progressive than their peers: they spend more time with their children; they are more likely to hug and praise their children; their wives report back higher levels of satisfaction with the appreciation, affection, and understanding they receive from their husbands; [conservative Protestant men] spend more time socializing with their wives… they have the lowest rates of domestic violence of any… group in this study.”[6] Wilcox observes that conservative Protestant Christianity has tended to resist the new gender norms of the sexual revolution, whereas the non-religious and the Protestant mainline have tended to embrace them.[7] The outcome has been counterintuitive for Wilcox—theologically conservative spaces have become more progressive, while theologically progressive and non-religious spaces have become less progressive. Wilcox published his research with the University of Chicago Press—hardly a bastion of pro-conservative ideology.

Wilcox’s study is now twenty years old, and is too dated to make definitive judgments about the current state of conservative Protestant Christianity. But Wilcox’s work shows that from 1960-2004 (the date of publication), the sociological spaces that stayed on the traditional Christian path became more progressive with respect to women and children. Whereas the sociological spaces that embraced the progressive assumptions of the sexual revolution became less progressive.

So yes, I agree that more work remains to be done; the house of Christian Feminism is not complete. And yes, I agree we should lament that Christ—our heavenly husband—has not yet finished his work of reconstruction. But we should not lose faith in his commitment and skill. Tenacious (even costly) commitment to the conservative path of traditional Christianity is the surest path to female flourishing. Which should not surprise us. Jesus taught us that we die in order to live, that we must lose our lives in order to find them. Let’s stay the course and keep trusting our husband’s handiwork.

But the above will not entirely satisfy the concern I sense in Rae’s response. Rae’s fundamental concern, as I understand it, is not that the house of Christian Feminism remains unfinished, but that my account of Christian feminism is too masculine. Rae asks, “Is [Hiestand’s version of Christian Feminism] in truth a narration to men that offers no vision to women?” Her primary grievance with my essay seems to be that my articulation of Christian feminism ascribes too much agency to men as the primary cause of female flourishing, and thus is really just patriarchy in disguise.

First, let me say “guilty as charged.” Christianity turned Greco-Roman patriarchy into cruciform patriarchy. Christianity’s vision of cruciform power has been the lynch-pin of female flourishing in the western world. This is Holland’s point, of course. But John Paul II makes a similar point in his Male and Female He Created Them. For John Paul II, there is an inherent “reciprocity” between male and female. Men and women need each other. But for John Paul II, the man is the “guardian” of this reciprocity. The man has a “special responsibility” to “maintain the balance” of the man and woman’s mutual dependence, and to “reestablish” it if it becomes violated.[8] So yes, men and women are equal in the eyes of God; but the burden of preserving this equality in the eyes of the world rest largely with men behaving as Christians. If men go rogue, they take the whole world with them.

As such, my essay was mainly dedicated to showing how Christianity has shaped the “guardians” of reciprocity in a cruciform manner. But it was not an essay that gave an account of the reciprocity thus guarded. Such an account needs to be given. I can only sketch out a few thoughts here.

To begin, a full vision of Christian Feminism is not simply “stand by and let men take care of you.” As I note in my essay, too many conservative visions of women flourishing stop with benign male protection. In such accounts, women are viewed as little more than well-cared for adult children. Likewise, too many Pauline typological accounts of marriage view the wife (implicitly or explicitly) as the husband’s “creature” who passively receives the husband’s divine care. Christ—represented by the husband—is divine and eternal; the church—represented by the wife—is earthly and finite. In such accounts, the relationship always and only runs in one direction. Christ has everything to offer the Church, but the Church has nothing to offer Christ (not anything he really needs, anyway). She is nice but not necessary. By the same logic, men have everything to offer women; women have nothing to offer men (not anything men really need, anyway). Women are nice, but not necessary.

But such an account of Paul’s typology misconstrues the nature of the Christ/Church relationship. The wonder and mystery of the Christ/Church relationship is that Christ, in his sacrificial “one-spirit” care for the Church, put himself in need of the Church. He has made the Church—quite beyond reason or expectation—his actual body. And insofar as she is his body, he does not enact his will in the world apart from her. Yes, the branches need the vine in order to produce fruit. But vines can’t grow fruit without branches.

Conservative spaces often lose sight of the fact that Christ uses his power to make the Church powerful in such a way that he becomes dependent on the Church’s use of his own power for the accomplishing of his will in the world. The Church has something truly vital to offer Christ, and women have something truly vital to offer men. Failure to account for that truly vital something will inevitably lead to a diminished account of femininity. In my view, Protestant squeamishness about the Church’s divinization lies at the heart of the Protestant hesitancy to embrace a truly Christian Feminism. In the same way that conservative Protestantism tends to resist the deification of the Church, so too it tends to resist the exaltation of the woman.  

All of which is to say, Rae is right that Christian Feminism has to be more than a vision of male proactivity, and female passivity. This particular Theopolis conversation asked, “Has Christianity been good for women?” Perhaps another Theopolis conversation could ask “Have women been good for Christianity?”—which is just another way of asking, “Has the Church been Good for Jesus?” Until this question has been asked and properly answered, the vision of Christian Feminism will remain under-articulated.  

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] Augustine, Confessions, 10.

[2] Aquinas, Summa, I-II q.13.

[3] Catherine, The Dialogue, 31.

[4] Augustine, City of God, 22.30.

[5] Of course, some conservatives don’t think women have essential contributions to make to the world, but only the home. I invite them to consider the Christ/Church typology in which Christ empowers the Church (his bride) to make contributions to the world, not just to him. The task of Christianizing the world is a joint effort between Jesus and his Bride.

[6] W. Brad Wilcox, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago, Il.: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 206-207.

[7] Wilcox, Soft Patriarchs, 190.

[8] John Paul II, Male and Female He Created Them, 261.