Real Christianity and feminism are incompatible. Yet, do the churches around the West do enough to contain it? Liberal denominations, as we all know, bowed their knees to Baal long ago, but what about the "conservative, Bible-believing" churches? What is your opinion?
Sunday, September 13, 2026
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Unfortunately, the churches (even so-called traditional, conservative ones) are ill-equipped to deal with feminism because many of them think that opposing abortion is good enough.
ReplyDeleteThe more hardcore traditionalists/conservatives might take this one step further, and actively oppose feminism as whatever the loudest feminist activists are pushing at the moment. But they forget about the rest.
They don't understand the difference between activist feminism and cultural feminism.
Feminism is just gender liberalism and/or gender egalitarianism. Activists push the cutting edge, but they are really working, in practice, to drag the culture in their directions. This is how liberalism and egalitarianism works!
The traditional, conservative churches, in practice, don't have a problem with cultural feminism (and don't even think of it as feminism) because they already embrace, in general, both liberalism and egalitarianism, regardless of whatever they might say they believe.
They lack the tools to fight cultural feminism because their faith in God is mixed with their faith in the secular (liberal/egalitarian) system. They don't even understand this!
Yes, I agree. The question is, why though? Why do traditional churches support feminism and liberalism? Some people would say that modern churches treat women as sinless while constantly attacking men. I'm not sure whether I agree but most churches do their best to fit in with the secular society somehow.
ReplyDeleteThe question of why is something that I've been trying to figure out, too.
ReplyDeleteThere are all kinds of historical and philosophical reasons why the traditionalists and conservatives have continuously allowed liberalism to seep in, but what it all comes down to is that people like liberalism.
Liberalism is comfortable and easy. Egalitarianism is nice and empowering. Capitalism makes everyone wealthy. Throw modernism into the mix, and life is easy, rich, and free for the people in these churches. People like it, and it has the added benefit of proclaiming that the people have RIGHTS to these things.
To some degree or another, conservatives and traditionalists want some of the wealth and luxury of liberalism, and because they are comfortably part of this system of wealth, they have absorbed, one way or another, the notion that people have these rights.
It's a spiritual dissonance. "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
And to be fair, I struggle against this situation, too.
Then why doesn't it affect Muslims? Why don't they fall for it en masse? What is it specifically that we are doing wrong? When I look at countries like Turkey, they are secular officially, and the elites are pretty liberal, but the common folk still stick to the faith of their fathers. While in Europe, the moment Christianity stopped being the official state ideology, the majority of people just happily dropped it. And yes, even in the Protestant countries, full of "born again" Christians, unlike these "evil" Catholics. One of the chief complaints of Luther during the Reformation was that the Church didn't teach common people the proper Christian doctrine, and was just content with them attending Mass and paying church tax. Well, it appears that the Protestants didn't do a much better job, either. Unlike the Muslim countries, where it's mostly vice versa, The governments want to liberalise, while the common folk take the religious dogmas very seriously.
ReplyDeleteWell said...
ReplyDeleteYou're right, some religions, traditions, or ethnicities resist liberalization more than others, but I don't think any of them are able to resist completely. Liberalism is now present in all of them.
The West is most susceptible. Liberalism was born in the West, and thrived there first. Why is that?
Liberalism seems to function as a kind of secular Christianity. It offers the kinds of promises that Christianity makes, offering a worldly, personal salvation for every class of people equally.
Early liberalism really did seem to wrap neatly around Christian morals and organic community/ethnicity, though the corruption inherent to it began right away. So long as liberal values adhered to general Christian ideals, just about everyone who adopted it did grow physically healthier, wealthier, and more comfortable for several decades. (But how much of that had to do with liberalism vs. how much about Christianity itself?)
Then over time, for most Western Christians, liberalism didn't seem to even need Christianity or God anymore. That's why they (we) dropped the Faith, or warped it beyond recognition.
So why are Muslims better at resisting liberalism?
In the later 20th century, and especially in the 21st, the "progress" of liberal values started to become so individualistic, so egalitarian, and so disgustingly perverse that liberalism became toxic, with decreasing material returns. The social contract (more liberal garbage) is failing.
Any common people who haven't already absorbed the liberal mindset now reject it instinctively, if not explicitly. Most of these are non-Westerners. Now some non-Western nations that haven't already completely embraced liberalism are trying to reverse course, but the world order is trying to stop them. Some nations are succeeding better than others.
As you pointed out, Turkey is a good example of a country that partially converted to liberalism but is now trying to reverse course. Erdogan's party depends on rural, ethnically Turkish areas right now, but electorally he rules very narrowly. Liberalism will kill his country, too, if he or someone else doesn't stop it. But if he abandons democracy altogether, he risks civil or external war and wrecking his country economically. (Isn't this the challenge we all have, even at the personal level!) Turkey is kind of at a tipping point.
Overall, it seems like the earlier in history a people adopted liberalism, the harder it is for such people, especially Christians (even 'traditionalists') to untangle themselves from the liberal mindset and system. It runs too deep. It's easier for people who have kept their traditional ethnic/community ties to pull themselves out of it, though many will happily exploit it if they can, and liberalism still poses a threat.
Specifically, Western Christians often mean well, but our collective error as Christians is accepting worldly ideologies as idols and not withdrawing in our hearts from its system. As Christians, our walks in the Faith and in life have abandoned the ways Christians understood them for the bulk of our history, and we too often place our true faith in the secular system. Most deep-down believe, "I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing." But "no one can serve two masters."
That comment was much longer than I realized. I didn't mean to be a windbag!
ReplyDeleteOh I don't mind;) Considering Turkey, any country which challenges liberalism runs a huge risk to be attacked and destroyed, but that's another topic for discussion altogether.
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about it lately, and it appears to me that there was a sustained attack on Western Christianity, both Catholics and Protestants. Catholics got Vatican II which weakened the doctrine of mortal sin (now it's grave matter which only sometimes can be a mortal sin). Protestants got once saved always saved, no matter how you live your life. And the liberal variety of Protestantism did away with the doctrine of Hell altogether.
But I think that our problems run deeper. The societies which seem the best at avoiding liberalism are tribal and clannish. The last clannish society in the West that I know of was Scottish Highlands and the English did everything to destroy it because the clans kept rebelling against them. Nowadays most people don't even care about the extended family/their siblings any more and nuclear family is under attack, too. Western governments want the society of atomised isolated consumers, you know, rugged individuals. Such people could never really challenge them.