Doug Ponder on Feminism

Rev. Ponder is a Southern Baptist minister from Virginia who had an article on the website Christ Over All from which I will take the liberty of heavily excerpting below:

If I had three wishes, I’d consider using the first to rid the world of feminism and the second to ensure that it never came back again. Perhaps that is a bit overstatement, but only by a little. For few movements have produced so pervasively devastating effects in society, in the home, and in the church as feminism has.[1] The pill and declining birth ratesabortion and the Orwellian language of “reproductive justice,” rampant cohabitation and single-parent householdsuntethered empathy and emasculated mentransgenderism and female priestesses in the church (which is ecclesial transgenderism)—all these rotten fruits stem from various facets of the feminist revolution.

Unfortunately, feminism has become so interwoven with the fabric of the modern West that few now recognize it for what it is; fewer still perceive the ways in which it radically departs from a scriptural vision for the sexes. Even confessionally conservative Christians lend their qualified support for the earliest waves of feminism. What could be wrong with women’s suffrage, they reason…

What is more, many Christians have failed to grasp the fundamental flaw of feminism and therefore have failed to perceive its inevitable end. In brief, feminism is built on a faulty notion of equality. As such, observable, natural differences between the sexes—gendered traits, tendencies, behavior, performance, responsibilities, privileges, etc.—are taken as indications of systemic sexual injustice, even when these differences are simply the asymmetrical (i.e., unequal or non-identical) design of our Creator. Thus each wave of feminism naturally led to the next. The sexes must become functionally interchangeable or else (on the feminist reckoning) they are not truly equal….

Christians must understand both the scriptural vision of the sexes and how feminism is a satanic departure from God’s good design…

(F)eminism sounds like an innocuous thing. Yet the devil, as they say, is in the details. Equal rights and opportunities may sound fine in the abstract, but once the particularities of God’s design are brought to bear upon the matter, the fundamental error of feminism becomes apparent. Men and women are not, and cannot ever be, equal in all respects. I hasten to add that this is not some he-man woman-haters’ statement about the world as some chauvinist wishes it would be; this is a statement about the way God’s world is—and has been from the very beginning…

Men and women have differing traits and tendencies,[15] differing strengths and weaknesses, and differing spheres of primary responsibilities that correspond with how God made the sexes…

(T)he reason women had hitherto been denied the “right”[18] to vote was not male chauvinism—despite progressive revisionist history—but considerations of how God designed men and women to work together as well as how God created the family, not the individual, to serve as the basis for human societies.[19] In God’s design, men are the heads of their families (1 Cor. 11:3Eph. 5:23) and thus are the representatives of their households…

(T)he issue is the contrast of visions between society as a collection of family units or society as an aggregate of individuals. 

Admittedly, this way of seeing God’s world is so foreign to modern minds that most people, even many Christians, recoil in horror over discussions about the nineteenth amendment that do not heap praises upon it as an unalloyed boon…

“The specific unintended consequences brought about by the causes of first wave feminism,” Rebekah Curtis explains, “were the loosening of nuclear family bonds and the transference of protection for weaker members of society from extended family to government. . . . Divorce, cohabitation, abortion, births out of wedlock, the habitual daily separation of young children from their parents, acceptance of homosexuality, and the denial of a person’s biological sex have all grown out of the societal prioritization of the individual, and the appointment of government as a protector of individuals in lieu of family.”

In other words, first wave feminism did not liberate women so much as it liberated men from the full weight of their God-given duties, empowering the government to perform functions that the Lord assigned to husbands and fathers. And all but the most blindly dogmatic can see how well the government has fared on this point…

The hopes attached to the pill also explain why feminists have been among the most ardent supporters of abortion. For if the pill could not guarantee a woman would never have to be a mother, except on her own terms, then (feminist logic insists) she must be able to kill any unwanted child…

By making motherhood virtually optional, and therefore avoidable, the full picture of what it means to be a woman gradually came to be separated from the vocations of wifedom and motherhood. The latter stations were now entirely elective,[31] even for marriedwomen (and, mutatis mutandis, for married men). Gone was the God-given vision of every son and brother as a potential husband and father, every daughter and sister a potential wife and woman…

(M)uch of what feminists of both sexes in the 1960s and 70s sought to overthrow in the name of “gender equality” was little more than rebellion against the differences between men and women within the order of God’s creation…

Several years ago an academic paper titled “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” published findings which showed that, despite having more freedoms and privileges than in any previous era, women today are less happy by many metrics than ever before.[34] More specifically, women’s self-reported happiness began its decline in the early 1970s, shortly after women had entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers…

Clearly something is amiss. Equally clearly, feminists do not grasp how their project has contributed to the suffering women (and men[36]) now endure… 

(W)e now find feminists debating not what women should be able to do but simply, “What is a woman?” Having rejected the Scriptures, scorned the wisdom of the past, and ignored the ways in which gender stereotypes[37] often highlight indelible facets of created design, feminists have ushered in a world where even men can be “women,” yet nobody can say what a woman was made to be…

(S)hould a genie ever grant me three wishes, I’d use the first to rid the world of feminism and the second to ensure it never returned. My third wish would be this: I would that everyone could see the glory of God’s design of all things, especially with the men and women he made in his image. But that cannot happen apart from recovering a full-orbed recognition that men and women really are different, along with an unblushing affirmation that God’s design of the sexes really is good…

From the beginning, the Lord has taught us how to understand what male and female mean. And the more scientists have studied the sexes, with the kind of humility and wonder that is appropriate for creatures peering into the mysteries of God’s design, the more they discover just how many differences God built into the fabric of our being…

God made man and woman with blessing in mind…

(I)nstead of pushing for a “gender equality” which reduces the diversity of God’s design to an undifferentiated sameness, Christians need to recapture the biblical vision of harmonious sexual asymmetry.[46] That is to say, we need to grasp that God really did make men and women different from each other for the mutual benefit of both. And we should not be ashamed of these differences.

Yet that is precisely what many Christians are guilty of today… instead of pushing for a “gender equality” which reduces the diversity of God’s design to an undifferentiated sameness, Christians need to recapture the biblical vision of harmonious sexual asymmetry.[46] That is to say, we need to grasp that God really did make men and women different from each other for the mutual benefit of both. And we should not be ashamed of these differences.

Yet that is precisely what many Christians are guilty of today…  

The church must learn to read (and practice) all of God’s Word without wincing.

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4 thoughts on “Doug Ponder on Feminism

  1. I could not agree more! As a woman who has managed to barely survive the sexual revolution once it really took hold in the 70s, I can see clearly in the rear view mirror of my life, just how damaging this deviation from God’s original intent has been. Socially, once the law that allowed only land owners (primarily men) to cast a vote was lost to suffrage, this opened the door for average citizens to vote for candidates that promised the most in hand-outs and benefits – this began the fracturing of American society. Only citizens with skin in the game, so to speak, should be allowed to vote and I would argue that should apply even today.
    As for all the other issue that have been birthed out of this movement away from the biblical model of marriage and family, this is exactly what “the devil is in the details” actually means. Society gave his a foothold and his cancer has grown into a genie too big to stuff back into the bottle.

    1. Exactly, Jan. We have all learned what a huge mistake this entire framework has been. One consequence of deviating from God’s design is that young adults are no longer reproducing. That creates a perceived imperative to import large numbers of immigrants via any means possible, creating an additional cascade of issues.

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