I’ve been busy making a new friend on Twitter recently, Kelley Keller. Kelley is interesting because she has a neat story of going pretty far down a feminist road, and then coming back out of it to return to Christianity. What’s interesting about her story is that she is using her experience to advise young women on what does and doesn’t work for them in the long term. Let’s take a look.

So, here is her article in Christian Post:

After high school, I bumped around a bit, ultimately landing in Erie, Pennsylvania, with my parents who’d relocated from my hometown in Florida. Penn State Erie was local, so I began classes in the Spring of 1993, a decision that changed my life forever.

Just two semesters in, I had been radicalized in the critical theories and loved every minute of it … until I didn’t.

Marxism had been mainstreamed on university campuses just a few years before I enrolled. Critical theory had replaced traditional theory, the gender sameness/difference debate was in full swing, and the newly organized LGBT movement had secured political power.

The gospel of Freud, Marx, Hegel, and Darwin replaced Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The salvation message of Jesus Christ was mere mythology invented by men to subordinate women. Christianity was a patriarchal discourse keeping women from escaping the evil prisons of the Gnostic demiurge who was blocking their access to the divine within.

Radical feminist Mary Daly wrote: “‘God’s plan’ is often a front for men’s plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.” Her claim seemed far-fetched, but maybe it had a kernel of truth? I started to believe her. I had no clue how to defend my anemic Christianity against these critics or their claims, so I was a sitting duck, a ripe recruit for the consciousness-raising cadres on campus.

Waking up to my own oppression as a woman whose body had been ill-considered and whose sexuality had been condemned to monogamy felt like the most honest thing I’d done in all of my life. I was laying bare the contradictions of my soul and asking anyone and everyone to help me make sense of them. The church was ineffective, the feminists took me in. Their position was well-articulated by Susie Bright: “When a young woman discovers her power, both sexual and intellectual, she unleashes her own voice, her righteousness.” I woke up to my voice and my victimhood and things were beginning to make sense. I became “woke.”

The next several years saw the exploration of intellectually seductive, albeit highly manipulative, thought forms that challenged me to examine the belief systems on which I was raised and that I’d trusted without question. I needed to test my newly acquired knowledge before self-amputating from everything, and possibly everyone, I knew.

Slowly, I began to resist Christianity, or at least what I understood Christianity to be, primarily on the grounds the moral straight jacket it required cramped my ability to break free from years of abusive oppression. I was finally on a path to self-righteousness. My liberation would come from leveraging my sexual and intellectual power in spite of the dominant ideologies (aka Christianity) that say women should stay home and make babies (even though they don’t say that at all). Freedom for women comes not from Christ’s atoning work on the cross, but through the grandiose release of collective libidinal energy from all of the whores next door.

Wow. I messaged Kelley a bit, and she mentioned that she was following Kate Millett. If you know who that is, then you know that you can’t go any further to the left than Kate Millett. She’s the far left feminist edge!

So here’s how she got out of it. She studied, and she found her views changing:

While studying, I learned the concept of worldview and its epic usefulness in understanding why we think the way we do. It was exactly what I needed to comprehend the hivemind infiltrating my inbox. It was also what I needed to finally understand the full story of Christianity, that is, historic biblical Christianity, not the littered mess of modern-day Christendom promoting counterfeit Christ throughout the culture.

By reverse engineering the range of worldviews underlying our modern ideas, I was able to work meticulously through the logical consequences that flow from their systematic implementation, from the beginning of time to the end of time. It wasn’t long before I realized that the biblical worldview, not a Marxist, Postmodernist, New Age, or another worldview, was the only internally consistent, sufficient, coherent, and complete one on the menu. Nothing else even came close, at least not without borrowing from the biblical worldview to fill in the missing parts, such as an inalienable pre-political right to life.

I was utterly dumbfounded. Not only was biblical Christianity true, it provided a comprehensive explanation for the world and everything in it. It provided rational answers to every question I could find about the nature and purpose of life. All I had to do was believe it.

This is the interesting part:

I’d never heard Christianity described this way, and I’m a little bummed it took so many years for me to hear it.

If you read the article, she had grown up in a church-going home. But, I don’t think she had ever been told that Christianity is a worldview, and you can have a lot of fun thinking about it and testing it and comparing it to other worldviews, using reason and evidence. And I think that’s why the feminism was so compelling to her. Christianity wasn’t presented to her in a way that engaged her mind. Then she got to college, and her mind was engaged by Marxism and feminism. It would have been wonderful if her parents had presented some thoughts about economics from say, Thomas Sowell, and then some thoughts on feminism from say, Jennifer Roback Morse. But they didn’t do that, and so she had to go the long way around.

And at the very bottom of the article, there’s this: “Kelley holds a J.D. from The Catholic University of America and is a D.Min. candidate in Christian Apologetics at Southern Evangelical Seminary. ” That’s a really good school. So, her change of mind resulted in a deep study of Christian apologetics. They take an evidential approach, so she will have fun doing that degree.

What I like about this experience of getting to know Kelley is that I was sort of tip-toeing around her, worrying what she would think of my tweets disagreeing with feminism. And I am delighted to report that she was fine with them. I get scared about people getting upset with me when I try to stick with the Bible on controversial issues. I don’t want to get fired or have my house burned down or whatever. I don’t want people to attribute all sorts of motives to me when I say things that make them feel bad.

So, it’s really great when you meet Christians who let you (gently) disagree with things that they’ve done, and are even warning other people based on their experiences. Kelley is going to be a lot more persuasive on these issues than people who have never thought about them, or experienced the limits of these secular left views. Instead of trying to defend her past, and attack people for judging what she did, she’s going to use her experiences to do Kingdom work for the Boss. She’s going to be great for us.

This is great! This is what makes Christianity so amazing. One minute, you are going in your own direction, and then the next minute, you can leverage those pre-Christian experiences to do amazing things in a completely different direction. It helps other people when you teach them how to avoid mistakes. We need people like Kelley to teach what they’ve learned to others.