My friend Wes posted an article from Dalrock’s blog about how Spain is trying to get people to make babies after repeated laws punishing men for marrying and having children, such as forcing men to do housework, assuming that men are guilty of domestic violence without any evidence, making no-fault divorce more unfair for men, and now allowing children to sue their parents for maintenance throughout their 20s. Spain is feminist, and no sane, intelligent man marries and has children there.

That article was fine, so I decided to run through his last dozen posts. In many of them, he talked about how pastors, confronted with the decreasing numbers of marriage-minded men, were blind to the root cause of the problem: radical feminism. In fact, the pious pastors continued to blame men for refusing to marry like they did before radical feminism removed all the incentives for them to marry.

Let’s just take a look at this one.

Excerpt:

[…][O]ver the past decades we have witnessed an explosion in out of wedlock births.  Feminists have been entirely open about their desire to make single motherhood an attractive option for women, and after decades of social and legal “progress” 40% of all children are now born out of wedlock in the US.

For feminist Christians this isn’t a problem, as they can simply celebrate their victory while pushing for even more “progress”.  But for complementarians and other conservative Christians, this poses a huge challenge.  How can they appear to take biblical morality (and the welfare of innocent children) seriously while avoiding upsetting women in our thoroughly feminized culture?  There is only one answer, no matter how absurd it is.  The answer is to pretend that feminists aren’t really in the final mopping up stages in the culture war, and assert instead that what we are experiencing is a sudden and mysterious change in men.  Here is how Glenn Stanton, the Director of Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family (FotF), explains the incredible increase we are seeing in out of wedlock births*:

Women want to marry and have daddies for their babies.  But if they can’t find good men to commit themselves to, well…  Our most pressing social problem today is a man deficit.

The level of denial here is astonishing, and would be laughable if it weren’t entirely commonplace.  Even more astounding, often times the denial of feminism is expressed using feminist terminology, and even includes calls to join feminists in their push to re order our society**:

Whatever our views on specific economic policies, we must recognize that much economic hardship of women in our age is the result of men who abandon their commitments. We should eschew obnoxious “welfare queen” rhetoric and work with others of goodwill to seek economic and social measures to provide a safety net for single mothers and abused women in jeopardy. We should join with others, including secular feminists, in seeking legal protections against such manifestations of a rape culture as sexual harassment, prostitution, and sex slavery.

The quote above is from Dr. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

In the past, I’ve blogged about pastor Mark Driscoll, an otherwise excellent pastor, who was asked by a Christian woman in a premarital sexual relationship with a non-Christian man how to get him to commit to her. His answer was not to rebuke the woman for choosing a hawt bad boy because of her feelings of attraction. His answer was to bellow how dare this non-Christian man who signed up for recreational sex with this fake Christian woman not act as if he were actually a Christian man (even though she was not acting like a Christian woman). It’s rare (I mean really rare) to hear a sermon where the pastor actually says that prohibitions against premarital sex apply to men and women. Instead, you get people like Moore and Driscoll refusing to confront these sinful women, because that’s just too scary! It doesn’t matter if women’s choice of bad men has caused abortion, divorce, fatherlessness, etc. to skyrocket. Pious pastors can’t hold women accountable for putting feelings above the Bible – that would take courage, and the pious pastors don’t have that. Women need to be told that they should be focused on marriage when they are choosing men. They shouldn’t choose the exciting promiscuous binge-drinking bad boy with the spotty resume and the empty balance cheat. They should choose the man who can actually do the job.

50 Shades of Feminism

The refusal to apply the Bible to women’s decisions can be seen in the response from pious pastors to the widespread popularity of 50 Shades of Gray among Christian women.

Excerpt:

Christian women are just as enthralled with 50SOG as non Christian women are:

What is surprising is who is viewing the film and reading the book—and why in the world they even would. Many refer to the book as “mommy porn” because of its wild popularity among adult women. And ticket sales are briskest in the typically-conservative deep south…

…it’s also reaching our young daughters. According to IMDB (Internet Movie Database), the movie drew the highest reviews by far from girls under 18.

And just in case you’re wondering, a Barna survey found that women who identify themselves as Christians are reading the books at the same rate as the general public. It’s captivating women everywhere.

Christian women are reading these books for the same reason as non-Christian women: because they like the sociopath man.

What is the solution to this? To tell Christian women that their feelings of attraction are morally wrong? Oh no, that’s too frightening to the pious pastors. Women are protected when we tell them not to be responsible with alcohol, responsible with their choice of man, responsible with their sexual choices.

You would think that pious pastors would confront women about their attraction for 50 Shades, but they don’t. The solution is always to get the sane, moral men have to bullied to “man up” so that women don’t act badly. The pious pastors simply refuse to see what the problem is: women being taught that their feelings are a hotline to God’s will for their happiness, so that the rules don’t apply to them, and they can choose godless men and try to make things work out by giving them recreational sex. Pious pastors are flat out teaching women in their churches that God’s job is to make them happy, that their feelings are God speaking to them, that the Bible doesn’t apply to their decision making about men and marriage, and that if their crazy, emotional selfishness blows up in their faces, then it’s somehow the innocent male bystander’s fault that it happened.