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News

Woman who embraced feminism rejects it for Christianity

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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.

News

New study: the majority (69%) of divorces are initiated by women

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This new report from Live Science gives us some numbers about who initiates divorces most frequently.

It says:

Women are more likely than men to initiate divorce in the United States, but they are no more likely than men to initiate breakups in a dating relationship, a new study finds.

“The breakups of nonmarital heterosexual relationships in the U.S. are quite gender-neutral and fairly egalitarian,” study author Michael Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University, said in a statement. “This was a surprise because the only prior research that had been done on who wanted the breakup was research on marital divorces.”

Previous research had found that women are more likely to initiate divorce, at least in the United States, Europe and Australia. In the new study, Rosenfeld compared divorces to nonmarital breakups, in an effort to understand the driving forces behind each type of breakup.

To investigate, he looked at data from the 2009 to 2015 waves of How Couples Meet and Stay Together, a nationally representative survey spearheaded by Rosenfeld and his colleagues. The new study includes 2,262 adults, ages 19 to 64, who reported having opposite-sex partners in 2009. By 2015, 371 of the participants had broken up or gotten divorced.

Women initiated 69 percent of the 92 divorces, Rosenfeld found. But there was no statistically significant difference between women and men when it came to nonmarital breakups, regardless of whether they were living together, he said.

The Ruth Institute reports on a few studies:

Female unions seem to have the highest divorce rates, followed by male unions, followed by opposite sex unions.

“For Sweden, the divorce risk for partnerships of men is 50% higher than the risk for heterosexual marriages, and that the divorce risk for female partnerships is nearly double that for men.”

“For Norway, divorce risks are 77% higher in lesbian partnerships than in those of gay men.”  (The Norwegian data did not include a comparison with opposite sex couples.)

In California, the data is collected a little differently. The study looks at couples who describe themselves as partners, whether same sex or opposite sex. The study asks the question, how likely is it that these couples live in the same household five years later. Male couples were only 30% as likely, while female couples were less that 25% as likely, as heterosexual married couples, to be residing in the same household for five years.

It really seems as if there is something about women in particular that causes them to be unable to keep to commitments in their actions, despite what they might say with their words.

So I am seeing a couple of problems in young, unmarried women that might explain this.

Feminism is bad

First, there is the feminism. Feminism was the driving force behind no-fault divorce. Today, young unmarried women are being taught to view marriage as stifling to their freedom. So if they do get married, they are often resolved that marriage should not affect their freedom in any way. That is just not the way marriage works, though – both spouses need to be equally ready to have their freedom infringed upon by things that HAVE TO GET DONE. Lots of things that have to get done will not be fun, thrilling or amusing – and that’s why it’s good to be prepared to do them before you marry.

My friend Dina says that she only knows one happily married couple from among her friends. The most frequent case she sees is wife is working in order to pay for big house, two cars, etc. and wife is denying husband sex, which makes him disengage from the marriage. A working wife tends to not be as responsive to the needs of husband and kids as a non-working wife, probably in part due to work stress. There is an epidemic of sex-withholding by women, and it causes men to disengage from marriage because they feel unloved. Although women tend to rebel against the idea that the man’s bad behavior is their fault, and that there is a “contractual” nature to marriage, that is how marriage works. You cannot stay married, women, by just doing whatever you feel like, and NOT doing whatever you DON’T feel like. Men will disengage when their needs are not supplied, and that’s no fault of theirs. It’s your fault. Denying relationship obligations causes men to underperform.

Feminism is often linked closely to “independence”. There is a lot of confusion over what the word independence means among young, unmarried women. A man uses that word to mean “lack of financial dependence on parents, the state, etc. because of good decisions in education, career and finances”. But a woman means “not having to care about the needs of a man and the leadership of a man, or the needs of children while still getting what I want from men and children”. That attitude is not compatible with life-long married love.

Emotions are bad

Second, emotions. In my experience, young, unmarried women are less likely to have reasoned out their own life plan in a practical step-by-step manner. Instead, they tend to do whatever makes them feel good moment-by-moment without any realistic plan. One Christian woman was recently telling me how attracted she was to an atheist moral relativist who had been promiscuous from the age of 15. She explained that her emotions were kindled by his GQ looks, 6-pack abs, mysterious European accent, seductive manner and witty conversations. Although she is apparently a Christian, she doesn’t take Christianity seriously in her decisions about relationships and marriage.

Peer-approval and culture play a large part in determining what women think is attractive in a man, as well as their life goals, and women are driven by these cultural standards more than men who focus on honoring their commitments regardless of their emotions. In my experience, women struggle to make their day-to-day actions match their socially-acceptable goal of getting married “some day”. Marriage is for “some day” for today’s busy women, but fun and thrills is for today. “Live in the moment”, they often tell me. If you try to talk to them about roles and responsibilities in a marriage, they will withdraw and rebel. But marriage is about each spouse doing his or her job, and feeling content about what the couple is building together. You can’t make life-long married love from emotional craziness and pursuing fun and thrills with seductive promiscuous moral relativist atheists.

How to pick a woman who won’t divorce you

Young men, I advise you to choose wives who have had to do things that they did not feel like doing. That can involve things like getting a STEM degree, getting a job in STEM, moving out of her parents’ house, getting a “boring” job that helps her pay off her debts, keeping commitments when she doesn’t feel like it, and caring for other people and even animals.

Basically, the more the woman has ground down any narcissism and hedonism she may have, by having to do nasty calculus and horrid lab work, the better. The more accustomed she is to constraints, responsibilities, expectations and obligations, the less likely it is that she’ll divorce you for unhappiness. And all of this goes for men, as well. STEM degree, STEM job, save money, serve others, give to charity.

Marriage is not the time for people to be carried away by their emotions. It’s an enterprise, and it works when both people are rational, practical, hard-working and self-controlled.

News

New study: virgins have happiest marriages, more sex partners means more unhappiness

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Although we live in a culture that is dominated by the thoughts and opinions of secular leftists, science provides useful information for those who want defend Biblical morality. Consider the issue of sexuality and marriage. Secular leftists claim that sex outside of marriage is natural, and produces happiness. Bible believing Christians and Jews say chastity is best. Who is right?

Here is the latest study authored by Dr. Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah. His previous book on relationships was published by Oxford University Press. In his analysis of the data, Wolfinger controlled for divorce rates, religiosity, and socioeconomic status.

Here’s the most important graph:

Study: virgins have the happiest marriages, more partners means less happiness
Study: virgins have the happiest marriages, more partners means less happiness

Other factors that increased marital happiness: having a 4-year college degree (5%), having a salary > 78K (5%), regular church attendance (6%). Notice that women are more dissatisfied with marriage (in general) than men are, and they tend to blame the spouse they freely chose for that unhappiness.

The Federalist also reported on previous research relevant to this study:

Psychologists Galena K. Rhoades and Scott M. Stanley found that women who have had sex with someone other than their husband report statistically significant drops in marital quality over those who don’t. A 2004 study by sociologist Jay Teachman showed that intimate premarital activities such as cohabitation and intercourse increased the rate of marital dissolution by anywhere between 28 and 109 percent, depending on the activity.

Wolfinger also noted in a previous study that only 5% of women were virgins when they married.

Wolfinger noted that a possible explanation for the link between promiscuity and unhappiness is that people look back on their past partners and compare their spouse unfavorably to them. This is especially the case with women. My concern about this is that feminism has taught women to try to increase their social standing by having hook-up sex with attractive bad boys. If those women ever marry, they do it when they are older, less fertile, and less attractive. The husband they eventually “settle” for will (in their minds) always compare unfavorably to the hot bad boys they had sex with when they were younger and prettier. This, I believe, is what leads to their unhappiness with the man they chose to marry.

More partners also means more marital instability

In a previous post, I blogged about several studies linking virginity to marital stability. Couples who don’t have sex before marriage, or even who delayed it, reported better communication, higher satisfaction, better quality sex, and a lower chance of divorce.

Men ought to be aware of this research when they are choosing a spouse. Women initiate 69% of divorces, and the most common reason given is “unhappiness”. Well, now we know what’s causing that unhappiness – a high number of sexual partners prior to marrying. Smart men should prefer a virgin, for the increased happiness and increased stability. A large number of past sexual partners teaches women that relationships are engines for them to be happy, not commitments that are permanent and exclusive. They’ll have internalized the view that relationships are not commitments to invest in self-sacrificially. The pattern will be: “if it doesn’t make me feel happy right now, then it should be ended”. It will be seen as the man’s fault that she is unhappy, even if the study I talked about above shows the real reason is her past promiscuity. Men who aren’t serious about evaluating the character of the women for the marriage enterprise are running the risk of divorce, it’s that simple.

The best way to make sure that you have a clear head when evaluating a woman is to stay sober, and keep her hands off of you. When a man refuses to let a woman cloud his judgment with sex, then she is forced to learn how to love him in marriage-oriented ways, e.g. – help him, support him, and submit to his leadership. Male chastity encourages women who have been influenced by feminism to abandon selfishness, fun-seeking, and thrill-seeking, so that they learn to care for others. Male chastity also helps a man to resist older women who chose bad boys in their teens and 20s and want to get married to a good provider in their 30s. The studies discussed above clearly show that such women are more likely to be unhappy, and their future marriages are more likely to be unstable. Avoid them. You don’t want to be in a marriage to someone who isn’t very good at it, because she never prepared herself for it.