Biblical Womanhood and Its Cultured Despisers: More Media Venom

Establishment feminists in the mainstream media have recently born their claws at biblical womanhood, particularly as seen in the True Woman `08 conference, and they simply will not let go. The Guardian newspaper of London recently published one of the most vitriolic, bitterly-voiced objections to True Woman and other biblical womanhood "movements" within evangelicalism. Take a look at the salty language of Guardian columnist Cath Elliott as she describes women who, because they object to many of the tenets of modern feminism, "remain resistant to their own emancipation:"

"[These women are] a tiny minority who have been so indoctrinated by both gender and religious conditioning that they continue to see themselves as men's subordinates. These women defer to their men in all things; they believe their primary role in life is to produce children and to keep a tidy and happy home, and while they enjoy all the benefits that feminism has brought them, like the right to vote, the right to contraception and the right to escape their miserable marriages once the penny drops and they are finally awake to the drudgery that their lives have become, they regard feminists like me as the antichrist...In October of last year about 6,000 of these self-hating collaborators flocked to Chicago to take part in the True Woman Conference 08..."

"Self-hating collaborators?" Whoa. Elliott ramps up the rhetoric a bit later in her column: "The patriarchy movement is yet another brand of evangelical anti-feminism...biblical womanhood does exactly what it says on the tin: it sends women back to the dark ages." She calls the True Woman Manifesto a "misogynists' charter" and "illiberal, antiwoman nonsense." Elliott goes on to lump True Woman and biblical womanhood into the same category as "Taken in Handers," a movement that argues for the unquestioned sexual domination of wives by husbands. Elliott is correct in arguing that "Taken in Handers" deserves nothing but contempt; biblical complementarians do no affirm such ungodly abuse.

On the surface, Elliott's article does little but spew anger and hatred; it is a typical feminist rant, one that offers plenty of heat, but very little light. Elliott makes no effort to understand the Christian worldview that undergirds biblical womanhood, preferring to set up a straw man (or straw woman in this case, as Elliott would likely prefer).  

The women who took part in True Woman and scores of other Christian females are anything but "self-hating collaborators." No, they realize that they are by no means inferior to men because they read the Word of God which tells them that He has created them in His image and that they are equal in worth, honor and dignity with men. They are not "resistant to their own emancipation," but are women whose hearts have been set free by grace of God in Christ Jesus to enjoy genuine liberty. For example, many women view the raising of children and working in the home as a high calling and not as punishment or "being stuck inside with the kids" and kept from their rightful place in an office, as Elliott typifies their plight.

Sadly, Elliott and other angry feminists fail to see that it is they who are in bondage-captive to a deadly ideology that enthrones man, mocks the Word of God and sees the will to power (Elliott accuses complementarian wives of "ceding control to men in the domestic sphere"), and not the Gospel, as salvation. Her closing line is telling: "Even if a million women sign the True Woman charter, or if only a handful of women ever choose to identify as feminists, women's rights (as Elliott defines them!) are non-negotiable; we've already come this far, and we're not going back without a fight."

Little does she know that she fights not merely against patriarchy, but against an invincible Champion whose certain victory purchased for her a season of amnesty called "today" in which she and her views might be made new (2 Corinthians 5:17).