The question “has Christianity been good for women?” which Gerald Hiestand seeks to answer in his essay, can be understood in one of two ways. It could be taken as asking whether Christianity as it is described in the Scriptures has been good for women. That is, it is a question of content. Or the question could be asking whether Christianity as it has been lived out by people in history, has been good for women? In this case, it is a question of application or practice.
It is this latter sense that Hiestand addresses as he sketches the transforming effects Christianity had on Greco-Roman culture. Though this sense of the question has a complicated and uneven answer, as Hiestand concedes at points and as other respondents to his essay have pointed out, in general he concludes that it has been. He assumes the aims and goals of Christianity’s vision, e.g., “dignity, agency, and equality,” and then offers an account in which those aims or goals are largely achieved. He notes that this has been only partial in that it has not benefitted every woman equally or fully, but, he reasons, “if we zoom back and consider the long view, we can see that the healing power of Christianity has been profound in the West.”
Foundational to this second way of understanding the question, though, is the first way of understanding it. On its surface, the first sense of the question “has the biblical vision of Christianity (Christianity’s content) been good for women?” has a simple answer; I imagine readers of Theopolis Conversations take it for granted that biblical Christianity is good for women. But this question is actually rather complex because it requires us to construct positively a vision of Christianity that relates to women and their flourishing. It requires us to ask whether Scripture addresses, either explicitly or implicitly, what a woman is, if and how they are different from men, and how they are to flourish in the world. Constructing such a vision by answering questions like these has been fraught and challenging. Because of this, a biblical vision of what a woman is and how they are to flourish is frequently assumed, glossed over, or not constructed at all.
But the difficulty and reluctance encountered does not obviate the need for at least two reasons. First, the question of the content of a Christian vision is foundational because we can’t answer the second question, about practice, until we’ve accounted for the first. The content of the vision becomes the answer key for the actual history test.
Second, if we’re unclear on what the biblical conception of a woman is and the way in which she might flourish, we become susceptible to other value systems filling the void. A case in point is how frequently Christians unknowingly or uncritically let the aims and goals of feminism determine the standards of assessment. To be sure, Christians like Hiestand don’t look to feminism as a better alternative to that which Christianity provides. They simply see the two values systems as overlapping, even if incompletely. But if the biblical vision we assume champions precisely the values that nearly any educated, late-modern, Western individual would articulate, Christian or not, it might be asked if, when we stare down the well of a biblical conception of flourishing, we don’t see our own faces reflecting back at us.
Such an imposed value system may account for the disconnect, or yawning gap, between the near-total achievement of the feminist agenda and the perception by women themselves of a lack of flourishing. Recent research highlights the declining rates of happiness, especially among women.[1] Compared to the levels of their mothers or grandmothers, there has been a steady decline since the 1970s, and in ways that do not mirror happiness in men. Louise Perry’s work,[2] to which Hiestand referred, chronicles this as it relates to sex, but the discontent can be observed in other areas like relationships (given the lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates), family (if declining birth rates are an indicator), employment, social networks, and many more. If this is true for women over 25, it is emphatically so for young woman. Not only are young women not flourishing, concern for them has reached a crisis level. This despite freedoms and opportunities unsurpassed in human history. According to feminist metrics like agency, equality, and opportunity, women should be feeling as if they are thriving.
Minimally such a disconnect should cause us to go back to the first sense of the question “has Christianity been good for women” and assess the goals at which we are aiming. As one example, Hiestand’s essay seems to presuppose the goal of equality that is expressed as interchangeability between men and women. But we might ask whether the net payoff from the demonstrable gains in equality are woman who are flourishing. Again, Perry highlights the issue, one with which Hiestand agrees: women are not happy acting like men. But rather than concluding that undifferentiated equality may not be the panacea we expected, it is just more equality that we’re missing: men need to act more like women. Could it be, though, that our aims are misguided? [3] Could the maps we’ve drawn be wrong, or at least incomplete? To put a finer point on it, does the disconnect suggest the need to revisit the biblical vision we’ve constructed—or assumed? Does a biblical vision have more to offer than mere interchangeability between men and women?[4]
We ought to attend carefully to this last question because it goes to the heart of the challenge of whether Christianity has been good for women. Can we construct a Christian vision that addresses directly who and what a woman is, and how she might flourish? Most Christians would affirm we can, however measured their affirmation might be, and then move on. This includes Hiestand who concludes his essay with a telling, if provocative, comment. “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. But it is pointed toward the feminine. The Church, after all, is the Bride of Christ (emphasis original).” Setting aside whether or not this is the case, inherent in the statement is that there is something we can identify as “feminine.” There is some essence we can describe that is feminine, or proper to women.
Yet we encounter reluctance in pressing at all on defining or describing what it is to be a woman or what it is to be feminine. When differences between men and women are conceded, biology is typically as far as we are comfortable going.[5] But Hiestand’s statement implies more, however unintentionally. Femininity must entail more than sexual difference because the Church will not gestate new life nor feed a child through breast milk, at least not biologically. Hiestand’s point requires there to be something to femininity beyond biology, some essence that distinguishes women from men and femininity from masculinity.
Identifying this, recognizing this in a biblical vision of how a woman will flourish, seems to me to be the sine qua non for assessing whether or not Christianity in practice is good for women. Only then will we be able to assess the degree to which Christian practice has valued and valorized those things that constitute femininity. Only then can we gauge to what extent Christians have encouraged the formation of those characteristics or sensibilities or institutions or whatever natural to and good for women. Without identifying what femininity entails we are not able to determine whether Christian communities have structured families, churches, and social networks around the employment and use of these gifts and attributes. Nor can we adjudicate whether Christians have discouraged suppressing feminine virtue and lionizing masculine virtue only. And so on.
Without first constructing a positive account of the Christian vision as it relates to women and their flourishing, including identifying what makes a woman a woman, we will be unable to rightly assess whether or not Christianity has, in practice, been good for women.
[1] See the paper by the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman, The Socio Political Demography of Happiness (July 12, 2023), George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy & the State Working Paper No. 331. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4508123.
[2] Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022).
[3] Suggestive is University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox’s research that shows that the leading metric for happiness in woman is marriage and children. See Get Married: Why American Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, 2024).
[4] As Abigail Favale observes in The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (San Francisco, CA, Ignatius, 2022), 69, observes, even feminism demonstrates this tendency of making mens and women interchangeable, noting “freedom for women is cast as freedom from femaleness (emphasis original).”
[5] Favale, 120–21, is illustrative in her definition of a woman, “A woman is the kind of human being whose body is organized around the potential to gestate new life.”
The question “has Christianity been good for women?” which Gerald Hiestand seeks to answer in his essay, can be understood in one of two ways. It could be taken as asking whether Christianity as it is described in the Scriptures has been good for women. That is, it is a question of content. Or the question could be asking whether Christianity as it has been lived out by people in history, has been good for women? In this case, it is a question of application or practice.
It is this latter sense that Hiestand addresses as he sketches the transforming effects Christianity had on Greco-Roman culture. Though this sense of the question has a complicated and uneven answer, as Hiestand concedes at points and as other respondents to his essay have pointed out, in general he concludes that it has been. He assumes the aims and goals of Christianity’s vision, e.g., “dignity, agency, and equality,” and then offers an account in which those aims or goals are largely achieved. He notes that this has been only partial in that it has not benefitted every woman equally or fully, but, he reasons, “if we zoom back and consider the long view, we can see that the healing power of Christianity has been profound in the West.”
Foundational to this second way of understanding the question, though, is the first way of understanding it. On its surface, the first sense of the question “has the biblical vision of Christianity (Christianity’s content) been good for women?” has a simple answer; I imagine readers of Theopolis Conversations take it for granted that biblical Christianity is good for women. But this question is actually rather complex because it requires us to construct positively a vision of Christianity that relates to women and their flourishing. It requires us to ask whether Scripture addresses, either explicitly or implicitly, what a woman is, if and how they are different from men, and how they are to flourish in the world. Constructing such a vision by answering questions like these has been fraught and challenging. Because of this, a biblical vision of what a woman is and how they are to flourish is frequently assumed, glossed over, or not constructed at all.
But the difficulty and reluctance encountered does not obviate the need for at least two reasons. First, the question of the content of a Christian vision is foundational because we can’t answer the second question, about practice, until we’ve accounted for the first. The content of the vision becomes the answer key for the actual history test.
Second, if we’re unclear on what the biblical conception of a woman is and the way in which she might flourish, we become susceptible to other value systems filling the void. A case in point is how frequently Christians unknowingly or uncritically let the aims and goals of feminism determine the standards of assessment. To be sure, Christians like Hiestand don’t look to feminism as a better alternative to that which Christianity provides. They simply see the two values systems as overlapping, even if incompletely. But if the biblical vision we assume champions precisely the values that nearly any educated, late-modern, Western individual would articulate, Christian or not, it might be asked if, when we stare down the well of a biblical conception of flourishing, we don’t see our own faces reflecting back at us.
Such an imposed value system may account for the disconnect, or yawning gap, between the near-total achievement of the feminist agenda and the perception by women themselves of a lack of flourishing. Recent research highlights the declining rates of happiness, especially among women.[1] Compared to the levels of their mothers or grandmothers, there has been a steady decline since the 1970s, and in ways that do not mirror happiness in men. Louise Perry’s work,[2] to which Hiestand referred, chronicles this as it relates to sex, but the discontent can be observed in other areas like relationships (given the lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates), family (if declining birth rates are an indicator), employment, social networks, and many more. If this is true for women over 25, it is emphatically so for young woman. Not only are young women not flourishing, concern for them has reached a crisis level. This despite freedoms and opportunities unsurpassed in human history. According to feminist metrics like agency, equality, and opportunity, women should be feeling as if they are thriving.
Minimally such a disconnect should cause us to go back to the first sense of the question “has Christianity been good for women” and assess the goals at which we are aiming. As one example, Hiestand’s essay seems to presuppose the goal of equality that is expressed as interchangeability between men and women. But we might ask whether the net payoff from the demonstrable gains in equality are woman who are flourishing. Again, Perry highlights the issue, one with which Hiestand agrees: women are not happy acting like men. But rather than concluding that undifferentiated equality may not be the panacea we expected, it is just more equality that we’re missing: men need to act more like women. Could it be, though, that our aims are misguided? [3] Could the maps we’ve drawn be wrong, or at least incomplete? To put a finer point on it, does the disconnect suggest the need to revisit the biblical vision we’ve constructed—or assumed? Does a biblical vision have more to offer than mere interchangeability between men and women?[4]
We ought to attend carefully to this last question because it goes to the heart of the challenge of whether Christianity has been good for women. Can we construct a Christian vision that addresses directly who and what a woman is, and how she might flourish? Most Christians would affirm we can, however measured their affirmation might be, and then move on. This includes Hiestand who concludes his essay with a telling, if provocative, comment. “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. But it is pointed toward the feminine. The Church, after all, is the Bride of Christ (emphasis original).” Setting aside whether or not this is the case, inherent in the statement is that there is something we can identify as “feminine.” There is some essence we can describe that is feminine, or proper to women.
Yet we encounter reluctance in pressing at all on defining or describing what it is to be a woman or what it is to be feminine. When differences between men and women are conceded, biology is typically as far as we are comfortable going.[5] But Hiestand’s statement implies more, however unintentionally. Femininity must entail more than sexual difference because the Church will not gestate new life nor feed a child through breast milk, at least not biologically. Hiestand’s point requires there to be something to femininity beyond biology, some essence that distinguishes women from men and femininity from masculinity.
Identifying this, recognizing this in a biblical vision of how a woman will flourish, seems to me to be the sine qua non for assessing whether or not Christianity in practice is good for women. Only then will we be able to assess the degree to which Christian practice has valued and valorized those things that constitute femininity. Only then can we gauge to what extent Christians have encouraged the formation of those characteristics or sensibilities or institutions or whatever natural to and good for women. Without identifying what femininity entails we are not able to determine whether Christian communities have structured families, churches, and social networks around the employment and use of these gifts and attributes. Nor can we adjudicate whether Christians have discouraged suppressing feminine virtue and lionizing masculine virtue only. And so on.
Without first constructing a positive account of the Christian vision as it relates to women and their flourishing, including identifying what makes a woman a woman, we will be unable to rightly assess whether or not Christianity has, in practice, been good for women.
[1] See the paper by the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman, The Socio Political Demography of Happiness (July 12, 2023), George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy & the State Working Paper No. 331. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4508123.
[2] Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2022).
[3] Suggestive is University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox’s research that shows that the leading metric for happiness in woman is marriage and children. See Get Married: Why American Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, 2024).
[4] As Abigail Favale observes in The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (San Francisco, CA, Ignatius, 2022), 69, observes, even feminism demonstrates this tendency of making mens and women interchangeable, noting “freedom for women is cast as freedom from femaleness (emphasis original).”
[5] Favale, 120–21, is illustrative in her definition of a woman, “A woman is the kind of human being whose body is organized around the potential to gestate new life.”
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