Important Women
There was a recent video online that I found illustrative. It was clearly a scripted conversation told from a feminist perspective to try to make the traditional notions of marriage and family life look “oppressive” to women. The husband is expressing to his wife (who is wearing a police uniform) that he wishes that she would be a traditional stay-at-home wife. The wife rolls her eyes during his soliloquy (which is itself a parody of what real men who want traditional wives actually desire).
The comments were illustrative, including lots of “You go, Girl” girl-boss claptrap, calls for her to divorce him, and the like. Many said that the husband wanted his wife to be his mother. Of course, traditional husbands don’t want their wives to be their mothers, but they do want their wives to be their children’s mothers.
But the comment that jumped out at me was, “Why did he marry a strong, capable, important woman?” She quickly added the disclaimer, “I’m not saying stay at home type women aren’t strong and capable.” Notice that she didn’t add “important.”
Important women have careers, because in our culture, women are only important in the context of being useful: professional, making money, holding titles, boasting of degrees, and enjoying the social status of being a police officer, business owner, senator, neurosurgeon, judge, professor, lawyer, soldier, pilot, kickboxer, or member of an all-female shift of firefighters.
That’s what it means to have an “important woman” for a wife.
The wife who does not work a professional outside job, but instead creates a home for her husband, and, if she is able, who not only gives birth to her children, but nurses them, homeschools them, and has a lot of them - is simply not an “important wife.” And in fact, if a young girl is intelligent, almost no parent would encourage her to get married young and have lots of children. Yes, she could be a mom, but only after “getting her education” and doing something “important.” And really, one or two kids is quite enough. Raising six or eight is just not that “important” and would get in the way of a lucrative - and “important” - career. This is the dominant paradigm still clung to tenaciously by a certain generational cohort - though there are signs of their societal grip weakening and the cultural paradigm shifting.
Here we see a great confluence between the feminist contempt of “breeders” and the conservative Christian desire for feminine “importance” as defined by the world.
And reflecting the population collapse of western countries, as Christians of all denominations observe numerical decline, there are all kinds of “solutions” - including the tried and true “church growth” tactic of “ditch the liturgy” and turn our services into a kind of 21st century Vaudeville variety show, or Ted-Talk series, or night-club act. There is also the scientific management approach that seeks to apply sociological and psychological techniques to “grow the church,” as if we were talking about calculating the half-life of a radioactive isotope. There is the “best practices” corporate approach that operates based on pragmatism, marketing, advertising, branding, and seeking a magic-bullet franchise turn-key model that can be replicated (and this approach also includes the “leadership, leadership, leadership!” fetish). There is the “if you build it, they will come” approach that says we need to bypass seminary and crank out hoards of pastors assembly-line style and plant churches that will most certainly grow, because we can-do Americans believe in guaranteed against-all-odds success with the fervor of a Disney princess or the underdog in a Marvel movie.
But once again, the elephant in the parlor is the plummeting fecundity rate. It’s simple math. Fewer children means much fewer grandchildren, and exponentially fewer great-grandchildren. This means fewer paying into Social Security and Medicare, and more importantly, fewer Christians.
Those of us who came of age in the 1980s - who remember living in what would today be criminal parental neglect: riding bicycles in the street all day with no helmets, no water bottles, and no cell phones - we remember neighborhoods filled with children. My wife recently had a discussion with a fellow Canadian lady who remembered the hustle and bustle of children in her childhood neighborhood, which is today filled with a different kind of parent: those whose pampered “fur-babies” are found at the end of a tether. Children have become rare. They have been replaced by dogs.
And in western countries from what was once Christendom - including the cradles of the Reformation - have likewise become scarce of children - with the exception of the hordes of replacement-heathens who have been imported to keep the healthcare and social security programs afloat. And thanks to Christianity’s diminishing cultural influence, formerly Lutheran counties like Germany and Sweden now have to deal with entire cities of no-go and rape zones and swimming pools that have become grope-and-rape-entertainment centers for “new Europeans.” Churches are being replaced by mosques, and the few remaining Christians pat themselves on the back for their open-mindedness. The Muslims are having lots of children; the Christians (and the descendants of actual Christians) are not. Again, do the math.
We in the US are not as far-gone as Europe, but we are getting there.
The following article makes the argument that the reason we are seeing the precipitous population decline is that we have incentivized the fecundity crisis. We have robbed women who stay at home of status. The article is called, “It's embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom: Addressing the actual cause of collapsing fertility: status” by Johann Kurtz. I made a passing reference to this piece recently in a post. This article is really worth a read. We ignore this at our own peril.
Of course, the church should not reflect the world’s approach to what it means to be men and women, husbands and wives, and fathers and mothers. But if we are going to be honest, we do. Even in the “conservative” LCMS. We have drunk the Kool-Aid. It is the very air we breathe. Many of our new CPH-published theology books and Bible studies and Portals of Prayer devotions are now written by women. The synod now officially has Days of Appreciation for our lady Professional Church Workers, like deaconesses, DCE’s, and DPM’s - while, of course, the pastor’s wife, and the wives and mothers in the parish who volunteer, but don’t have paid church careers: the heroines whose hands quietly and without fanfare rock the cradle and change the world - are simply not considered to be “important women” in our church. Even our Mother’s Day petitions for the mothers in our congregations have to be watered-down to include non-mothers, lest we offend them. It is as though we have to qualify (if not nullify) every time we laud the housewives and the mothers in our midst - as though we’re secretly embarrassed by them. The message is being received loud and clear. Women in the LCMS know who is important, and who isn’t. Anyone who denies this isn’t listening to the “unimportant” women. And I know this to be true from women who are made to feel unimportant who have written to me and told me so. This should not be! We should be supporting and lauding these heroines.
Another interesting look at this issue of feminine careerism came in the form of conservative influencer Megyn Kelly expressing dismay that young Christian men desire stay-at-home wives - and an interesting conservative Christian response in found here.
It is high time that we shed the diabolical feminism that clings to us like the skin of a molting snake. We need to stop paying mere lip-service to womanhood, to wives, and to mothers - and quit sending the message that they are only important if they leave the home to work professionally for someone else - including for the church.
It’s a principle of Economics that you get more of what you subsidize. We have created a “market” for feminine careerism and for women to seek fulfillment, happiness, and status in becoming increasingly like men and giving up the godly and holy and important feminine vocation which God has given her in body and soul. We need to start incentivizing women to be whom God created them to be, and the church needs to stop aping the world’s sexual confusion.
Maybe we need to revisit our Table of Duties, and actually say the “embarrassing” part out loud, recognizing that as wives must submit to their husbands, the Bride of Christ must submit to the Word of her Lord instead of submitting to the world as our lord:
“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord” (Eph. 5:22), and,
“They were submissive to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her master. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear” (1 Peter 3:5–6).
We have lost our way. We are being judged for our feminism and worldliness. Let us repent, and make womanhood truly important, valued, and loved again. Let’s stop being prudish about marriage, sex, and family life. The rest will follow.