The President of New Saint Andrews College, Benjamin R. Merkle, recently issued a brutal rebuke of feminism, which he argues can be incredibly detrimental to both men and women of faith. In the short clip posted by Apologia Studios, Merkle highlights just a few of the crucial issues with feminist thinking.
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“Feminism in its excess fulfills all the wildest dreams of the sinful side of men,” he argued. “I get sex with no commitment. I get no consequences for all of my lusts. She carries all those for me now — she gets the abortions. I don’t have to take any responsibility.”
Merkle, who holds a Ph.D. from Oxford University, also pointed out another issue related to men adopting feminist views as a way to sidestep their responsibility as providers and protectors.
“I have no financial commitment,” he said, “because I have got her to think that for me to pay her bill is to demean her.”
https://www.facebook.com/ApologiaStudios/videos/1476276062518690/
Of course, some would suggest that this is a quite narrow view of feminism and appears to be directed at the secular form of this contentious ideology. But there are some who argue that Christian feminism is a very different thing. Wendy Alsup explains this view in her recent piece for Christianity Today:
God’s feminist ideals don’t correlate one to one with the world’s secular ones; in fact, it is nearly impossible to value women and put forth their needs and rights correctly without first valuing the God in whose image they were made. But understand that any rights we should demand for women worldwide arise from the fact that God created them with those rights and that only he can rightly limit them.
Alsup notes that it is extremely important to distinguish between faith-based feminist thought and the militant secular feminism that has engulfed much of the progressive world.
We must note the differences in a secular, modern Western view of feminism and the justice for women that Scripture models. The fork in the road seems to center on the concept of independence. Western women’s rights discussions often focus on the fact that woman is an autonomous self and no one can tell her what to do. In the case of abortion, the Supreme Court gave the woman absolute rights over her body. The desires of the father and the welfare of the baby must take a lesser place than her desires for herself. Her autonomy from others is the highest ideal, and woe to those who attempt to influence society against such a choice.
The Bible never supports such independence.
Alsup argues that the Bible explains the process of human creation as completely dependent on the hand of God, and further emphasizes the interdependence between man and woman.
“Instead of a social justice that gives woman complete independence from man, God wrote a story that advocates social justice in interdependent relationships between men and women,” she writes. “God lifts up women but not in a way that frees woman from dependence on man or man from dependence on woman. The Bible’s instructions to men and women work in covenants of mutual responsibility—be it the covenant relationship of Christian marriage, the covenant relationship of the church, or both—not in barriers between them.”
(H/T: Apologia Studios)