Feminism is a lie and certainly not a Christian virtue.
I nearly choked on my lunch when I read a well-known Christian author state that Jesus was a feminist and went into great detail on how he would be in full support of modern day feminism.
Yet as the fruits of modern-day feminism show, they are the exact opposite of what Christ taught and preached.
What precisely is feminism? Besides being the most popular word in 2017, feminism is defined as “the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes”. However as virtuous as that sounds, practically speaking, the modern-day feminist hardly resembles their foremothers of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the early 20th century. Instead of actually fighting for obvious inequality such as voting restriction based on gender and civil rights, the feminist today has a completely different agenda.
What is that agenda? To force women to become ideologues who must believe themselves to be the victim of the “White Patriarchal” system, embrace the LGBTQ lifestyle, support abortion-on-demand, gun control and various other leftist ideals, all of which are in direct contradiction to Christ. Women who may have a differing opinion on matters such as marriage or pro-life issues, are immediately shamed by modern feminism and considered a “traitor” to the gender and if a man (like myself), dares to critique the movement, well, you can probably guess the response.
This generation of feminism is not about equality between genders rather it is about the superiority of women at the expense of emasculating men. The idea that “anything you can do, I can do better, therefore, you are not needed” pervades the movement as a whole. To take it even further in this wave of feminism, men are not only not needed but the very presence of masculinity of any form is a detriment to progress, dangerous to society and must be eradicated at all cost. Although they wouldn’t go so far as to say that we should kill all male children (even though as stated earlier, feminism today is militantly pro-choice), instead they opt to conform every male into the image of a woman. He must think, learn and act like a woman in order to be accepted and valued in society, therefore losing all distinction of what makes a man, male.
Does that sound like equality or virtuous to you? Hardly.
Jesus did, however, rattle societal norms when it comes to gender dynamics. In the gospels, we see that Christ treated women and men the same and was not a respecter of persons.
In one of the most stunning examples of this is found in the gospel of John, chapter 4:1-43. It records that Jesus, after a bit of traveling, finds himself in Samaria. In the heat of a noonday sun, he rests near a well and sees a woman drawing water from it. After asking for a drink, they engage in some pointed conversation with Jesus speaking to her heart and her having been forever changed by the encounter.
It is fascinating to observe that in this chance meeting, Jesus does so many things that were out of the norm of Jewish society. First, Jesus treats this woman as a person. Not as an object or piece of property, but as someone of value. Second, Jesus shatters the ethnic barrier between Jew and Samaritan because, in that day, it was incredibly taboo for a Jew to walk on the same side of the street as a Samaritan, let alone have a chat in the afternoon. Thirdly, not only was Jesus speaking to a Samaritan woman, but one who was a five-time divorcee. The main reason why she was drawing water in the hottest part of the day was that she would have avoided the looks and humiliating words from the locals because of her living situation.
This woman’s gender, ethnicity, and circumstance did not prevent Christ from showing her the truth in love as he did with his male counterparts.
Where modern-day feminism fails is that it is woefully hypocritical and instead of actually talking about inequality, it has degenerated to a man-hating, race-baiting and militantly leftist movement of which Jesus is against.
Instead of trying to fix the problem between genders by emasculating men and shaming women, let’s take Jesus’ approach: love people and point them to him because he is the only one that can provide the real answer.