The Lessons of History: Conservative Feminism, Christian Witness, and Compromise

When we divorce our emotions we do not know how to be good listeners, we do not know how to show empathy. Instead, we think we are cowering to humanists or the nonbeliever and thus not effectively representing God. That is not always true, however. Learning to integrate our humanity with our theology does not make one an outright humanist. We have to understand that the gifts that God is giving us are to be used for His glory. So if I deny my emotions, I am not honoring God. I am actually suppressing a gift that He has given to me to have shared experiences with other human beings. That does not always mean it is going to lead to regeneration, but what it can mean is a reinforcement of biblical truth. And so in many moments where I am walking alongside those in mourning, I have followed the biblical admonition to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15). While I know that our God is sovereign, this may not be the time for introducing this theological reality. Instead, I am going to simply sit with you here and walk with you through your season of loss. In these moments, we become more holistic in our apologetic as we approach others with our head, heart, and then hands. In my context this often lays the foundation for future conversations where I can verbally and theologically engage believed heresies that have surfaced as I have gotten to know people.

Forrest: How is the theme ‘inhabiting the City of Man, being the City of God’ relevant to this cultural moment?

Horton: This is a conversation that I have with my students as I walk them through the nuances of Augustine’s theology. One of the components that I express to them about the City of God is that it helps us particularly in America because of our unique position. Throughout history, there has not been a democracy like ours. What I try to help students understand is that no matter who is in power in the executive, legislative, or judicial branches, no matter what their worldviews are, the global mission of Christ’s Church — to make disciples of every ethnicity — is still intact. The reality of living in the City of Man allows us to be kingdom previewers of the City of God. So, our mission to express what righteousness, holiness, justice, empathy, compassion, righteous indignation, and truth-telling are — these are kingdom attributes that Christ embodies perfectly. So even when we fail to do that, even when we miss opportunities, the good news is that Jesus’ perfect righteous never retreats from us. We are still forensically not guilty and our citizenship remains in heaven. The reality is that the country of our origin, whether here today or gone tomorrow, does not change the fact that we are called to make disciples.

Often the greatest pushback to this perspective is from my fellow Christians. The reason is the unholy weaving of the doctrine of Americanization that was employed mainstream in our culture, especially escalating post World War II, which meant that to be American is to be Christian, to dissolve your previous heritage, to take on a new heritage, and a new nationality. In the church, it is assumed that your identity in Christ has nothing to do with or has no room for dialogue on ethnicity, which is something we don't do with gender. If we did this with gender, we would have no skin in the game when it comes to the LGBTQ conversation or the sanctity of marriage conversation. We do not do it when it comes to economic stewardship because we talk about stewardship, employment, and work ethic, but when it comes to ethnicity all of a sudden, we are one in Christ. There is no Greek or Jew. But if we are only going to take a two-thirds interpretation of Galatians 3:28, then we need to be consistent. We either need to take a zero-third interpretation or a three-thirds interpretation. So the reason I feel led to dialogue with that in the City of God is because when we look at Revelation 21:44-26, it is the ethnicities which are bringing the honor of their cultures, heritage, and spiritual capital into the City of God to present to Him as a presentation for His glory. So the ethnicities of the regenerate, the full elect of God, the City of God, all the constituencies are a multiethnic, multilinguistic, multigenerational, populated city of those that God has elected and those whom He will save. Therefore, ethnicity remains present in the eternal state. This side of eternity, specifically in America, the church has bought into the lie that ethnicity causes division, and my pushback is the City of God shows us there is unity but still ethnicity. Thus, this is something we need to redeem as American Christians. It is a God-given gift. To affirm the ethnicity of a believer is not to usurp their identity in Christ, and I think this is an important counter to what many have believed stemming from the City of Man.

Faculty Contribution

Mary Macdonald Ogden Instructor of History College of Arts & Sciences, Liberty University

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY: CONSERVATIVE FEMINISM, CHRISTIAN WITNESS, AND COMPROMISE

Feminist icon Betty Friedan said, “Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.” The war today is among women, not against them. This was made clear in the reaction to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. On Sept. 25, 2020, The Nation labeled Barrett an extremist who ignored “the moral and ethical underpinnings of her faith when they conflict with the cruel requirements of conservative dogma.”1 A month later, minutes after the Senate confirmation, the National Organization of Women published a statement claiming Barrett as “groomed to overturn many of the important equality gains of the last 60 years” — namely the Affordable Care Act, abortion funding, LGBTQIA+ rights, and environmental protections — and warned, “We know what’s at stake — everything.”2

Anti-Barrett media oozed deep vitriol. Denounced as “one weird woman with weird ideas and weird religion,” Barrett’s Catholicism and conservative feminism are choices that remove her from a seat at the feminist table. For a woman who embodies feminist achievement — mother of seven, legal scholar, and newly minted Supreme Court justice — the great question is why?

The vicious attacks reveal deep fissures among women about what is and is not feminist.

Somewhere along the way in women’s push for equality, feminism “mutated into a forceful enumeration of partisan positions that one must adhere to as a verified feminist,” and rather than living up to the feminist goal of inclusivity and equity, it morphed into an exclusive club.3 If feminism in its simplest form is advocacy for women’s rights on the basis of equality, then why is conservative feminism so polarizing?

Wil Lou Gray, 1905, Vanderbilt University, center row 2.

A recent journalist framed the answer clearly:

“Conservative feminism” is not only a nonsensical term, but an oxymoron. Feminism at its core is about dismantling long-standing patriarchal power structures and protecting women’s freedom in the pursuit of gender equality. This is not what Barrett’s judicial history reflects … she does not seem to believe in women’s freedom to make their own choices about their bodies.4

Body politics are the dividing line in the contest between who’s in and who’s out of the feminist collective. French scholar Michel Foucault captured the centrality of the body in the politics of oppression when claiming it as an “object and target of power, a field on which the hierarchies of power are displayed and inscribed.” Only in the past fifty years, after decades of activism, have women in the United States gained political and social equality and control over discourse about the female body. Among the greatest achievement of the women’s movement was the power of choice. But choice about work, family, education, politics, and the body is a contested idea, especially when choice is used to choose poorly. Who determines what is a good and bad choice is key to explaining why some women are hailed as icons of female empowerment and others dismissed. Conservative feminism is relegated to the latter category because of its rejection of sexual politics.

What is conservative feminism? It is a form of feminism that builds on “rather than repudiating — the ideals and institutions of Western culture” to promote justice.5 It is not anti-male, anti-family, or subordinate to patriarchy, but it does seek equality while recognizing the innate differences between men and women, childbearing chief among these. To alleviate fears at the start, I’m not advocating for a feminism associated with abortion, radical overhaul of society and its morals, or a call to “dismantle the patriarchy.” Nor do I think a conservative or Christian feminism leads to such outcomes. In her seminal essay “The New Conservative Feminism,” Judith Stacey saw conservative feminism as a significant threat to the women’s movement because it shared common roots with radical feminist activism in the pursuit of economic, political, and legal equality. Stacey viewed it as a “reactionary response to a broad social crisis in family and personal life” and the “unresolved tensions between androgyny and celebrating traditional female and maternal values.”6 Conservative feminism revealed the weaknesses of the women’s movement and in turn offered what today is often referred to as difference feminism.

A more modern interpretation could argue that rather than a branch from a common root, it was a concurrent movement rooted in the values of the religious right and conservativism, and manifest in the politics of women like Phyllis Schlafley. This group aggressively opposed the The National Plan of Action crafted for the 1977 Houston Conference that included reforms in divorce and rape laws, tax-funded abortion, access to childcare, end to discriminatory insurance practices, and most significantly, civil rights for lesbians, a group historically labeled mentally ill for their sexual orientation. Jimmy Carter did not support the plan for fear of alienating Christians, and the opposition gained support from the Republican Party, effectively leading Reagan and later Bush to reject abortion and adopt the pro-life, pro-family values entrenched today in conservative politics.7

The roots of women’s push for equality in United States history stem back to the origins of the Republic and passed through many thresholds in the 19th and 20th centuries that crystallized reforms specific to women, suffrage among the most significant. When historicizing women’s rights movements, the early 20th century is one of these important thresholds. Between 1880 and 1920 the largest number of single, educated women in United States history chose public work over marriage and the household. As a result, the period is often referred to as the era of the single woman, a time that intersected with the rise of eugenics and mass immigration, tremendous urbanization, industrialization, and tangent cultural shifts.

Although the majority of these educated women — both black and white — were of a higher socioeconomic class than their laboring sisters, they used clubs, churches, civic groups, and community organizations to agitate for reforms in education, healthcare, suffrage, and prohibition. Their efforts manifest in federal policies like the 18th and 19th Amendments, compulsory education and child labor laws, and for many, support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Progressives, as they were known, looked to government to create moral reform. The watershed moment of these efforts was the New Deal in the 1930s, and from that point to the present, government at both the state and federal level assumed control of public welfare funded by tax dollars, an issue prior to the 1930s the responsibility of charitable, faith-based groups.

It was the Methodist faith that drove reform before government engaged in public welfare. Reformers

created the infrastructure that the state eventually assumed control over, evolving into tax funded programs like Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, subsidized housing, childcare, Planned Parenthood, and public education by the late 20th century. The progressive feminists of the early 20th century planted the seeds that prefigured the expansion of the federal government and the radical changes in women’s equality under the law. What is significant about this early wave of women activists is the role of Christianity and the church as seedbeds of collective action and the source of the values that shaped the reform to uplift those in need.

South Carolina’s Wil Lou Gray (1883-1984) is a great example of the single, educated, reform-minded activist who worked to elevate and improve the lives of her fellow statesmen long before federal and state money funded public service. She used her church, women's clubs, civic groups, and powerful friends and family to achieve what is nothing short of a remarkable ascendance to a leadership role in South Carolina state government before women had the right to vote. She dedicated her career to the uplifting of people in her state through programs she designed from within the structure of state government and then validated with social science research, using northern philanthropic and educational institutions for money and academic credibility.8

Progress is political, and the mechanics of how change happens matters. In a moment when violence, COVID-19, contests over public space, groupthink, and lack of dialogue about critical national issues accent every hour of every day, Gray’s work and legacy reveal the transformative power of belief in shared humanity, God's grace, and the transcendence of the human spirit over the barriers of isms. Her willingness to compromise on some issues but stand firm on others made her a force to be reckoned with, yet in her work she remained aligned with religious values of Methodism and regional custom.

Gray stood at the forefront of opposition to the status quo that fueled progressive changes in the South. Her resistance was not aggressive or overtly radical as displayed in later decades like the sixties, but rather a skilled, political move orchestrated from inside state government that opened the way for educational access for all people in her region. By challenging the status quo, she confronted the very essence of who she was in terms of heritage, class, and race. The values, traditions and social inequalities that defined her place in the social fabric of her region also endowed her with connections and status that made her capable of achieving what she did. The very systems that empowered her to direct the economic, social, and political progress of the state were ironically the exact ones that limited her as a woman. She did not dismantle the structural inequalities that defined the social system that made her who she was, but she was aware of how these inequalities stagnated progress. She used her access to power to create opportunities that otherwise would not have been afforded to the disadvantaged poor of her state, and in doing so, created a special space for herself in the social fabric of a hypergendered region. She was part of a disparate group of Southern educators, intellectuals, writers, and artists who challenged the grim social realities of illiteracy, poverty, and racism by advocating regional progress.