Jenna Ellis: Gloria Steinem was perhaps the most recognizable face of feminism
Jenna Ellis: Welcome to On Demand with Jenna Ellis. This is the AFR exclusive podcast where we do a deep dive into the issues you care about from guests you love to hear from. And you may have heard that this week Gloria Steinem, perhaps the most recognizable face of modern American feminism, has died at the age of 92. And, you know, whatever we think of her politics, and we all have opinions, hopefully as Christians on her politics, it is difficult to overstate her influence on American culture. So Steinem came m of age in America where women faced very real legal, professional and cultural barriers. She spent decades insisting that women should be taken seriously as thinkers, professionals, political participants, and independent human beings, not simply regarded as accessories to men. There is a, ah, even a movement out there right now, especially in light of the Lindsey Clancy trial, suggesting that the 19th amendment, should be, withdrawn and we should be, we should repeal that. And and essentially it's, it's women that are causing all of the problems in society. I, of course, as a woman, tend to not think that. I think there's a lot, there are a lot of women who have gone into feminism wrong and we should talk about that. But we shouldn't go back to this categorical, deterministic sort of philosophy to say that all women are always liberal and all men are never liberal, because we know that that's just not true. So as Christians, we shouldn't be afraid to say where the feminist movement, it went wrong, of course, but where at least first wave feminism, not the second, third wave, and Gloria Steinem was mainly second wave feminism, but where the feminist movement got it wrong, but also identified, ah, something that was genuinely wrong with the culture. So women are not intellectually, spiritually or morally inferior to men. we bear the image of God equally. And Scripture is filled with women who are called gifted, entrusted with responsibility, and are used powerfully for his purposes. Biblical womanhood does not require women to be voiceless, powerless, uneducated or incapable of leadership. obviously there are roles in Scripture, that clearly are given exclusively to men, such as, pastors or teachers in the context of the ecclesia or the church. So Steinem's legacy forces us, I think, to confront a profound question that we should be talking about even more regularly. What happens when, when perhaps a legitimate concern for the dignity and equality. That's a very interesting, ah, very heavily loaded term of women becomes detached from the God who gives human beings their dignity in the first place. Because Steinem's feminism ultimately went much, much further. Than arguing simply that women aren't property and should have equal opportunity and equal protection under the law. abortion became foundational to her vision of female liberation, obviously completely wrong. And marriage and motherhood were increasingly treated, not simply as good choices that women could make, but as institutions and expectations from which women needed liberation and sexual autonomy became intertwined with the very definition of equality. And that's where the biblical view and secular feminism fundamentally part ways. So, to talk about this more, let's welcome in Jon Doyle, who is a host at the Blaze.
John Sutter: I think there needs to be a broader conversation about feminism
And, Jon, you know, I think that especially in light of the Lindsey Clancy trial right now where we're learning, just this morning as we're recording this podcast, that it's one lone man, among the 11. So there's nine women, three men, one lone man. Apparently that is the holdout to hold Clancy, actually guilty for the murder of her three children, which is what should happen. there's been a lot of posts and back and forth on social media saying, well, of course it's a man, because, you know, all the women are crazy. And, and we're. I see that we're kind of going down the conservative rabbit hole of reducing all of this to tribalism and a gender based conversation instead of a worldview based conversation.
John Doyle: I suppose so. I mean, I guess I would only say that while I don't support the kind of like, clickbaity, you know, gender war stuff that's become very popular over the last few years, I think there does have to be some kind of conversation about the political expressions of women in this country. I mean, you know, we can talk about Gloria Steinem and second and third wave feminism, but at the end of the day, you know, I don't believe that women are unintelligent. I believe that women have agency. And, you know, I think that women can come to their own conclusions. And if the conclusion that they're arriving at by their own volition are that, you know, the most important issue to them is the ability to access what they call reproductive, rights or contraception or abortion or whatever, or, you know, something like, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of women on the Internet are expressing sympathy for Lindsey Clancy, either saying that it was okay that she did it because she was, you know, experiencing postpartum depression, or that maybe her husband secretly did it. You know, I don't believe in being cruel or sexist by any means, but, I don't think that now is maybe the time to have a conversation about how we need to be nicer to women and stop accusing them of perhaps, you know, indulging in, things that are maybe a bit insane. I would be more curious to see why there are so many women who are entertaining this kind of stuff in the first place.
Jenna Ellis: Yeah, and I think that's a fair point. but we can't categorically suggest that, you know, all women are, in this bucket. I mean, I've been very outspoken. Allie Beth Stuckey has been very outspoken, Meg Basham. I mean, there are a lot of prominent, conservative biblical female voices that are pushing back on all of the, the women on TikTok. And. And that's just a sampling because, you know, you do have a, A wide swath of liberal women. And I think that needs to be addressed the worldview. But my point is just that we can't categorically say that women in general do not have the right view and that men in general, have the right view as well. Because, even in my own experience, I mean, there are a lot of men who, who see. Embrace, really a more feminist or fem. or maninist I guess is what they call it, which is such a stupid term, view of relationships and of marriage and family. And you know, you see that prolifically on social media as well, where, you know, men are becoming very beta in response, to the feminists who are perhaps pushing that, firstly in culture. So there's a problem overall with culture when there's such a wide swath of. Of both genders that are embracing this whole idea that gender roles and gender distinctions, aren't. Aren't really implicit in who we are as human beings made in God's image. And this is where I think the feminist movement, went too far. And so I think it's a great time to have this conversation because if it is primarily women, and I think it is that, at least on TikTok, that are viewing Lindsay Clancy as a sympathetic figure. And you have a lot of these moms on, on TikTok saying, you know, hashtag, same Lindsay, then the problem is implicit in. I think it's born out of this notion of women's liberation, of. Of pro abortion. And that's really the key at the heart of all of this, is that they don't want to be responsible ultimately for marriage, motherhood and family and the biblical design.
John Doyle: That's absolutely right. And you're seeing that increasingly with the younger generation, where now it's crazy to see. But you see more young men are reporting wanting to get married and have children, than young women are. Young women are trying to delay this into their early 30s, and then they want to spend their 20s, you know, dating around and working. And that's all fine. But, it is interesting to see that kind of inversion where, because of people like Gloria Steinem, who couldn't just offer kind of like you're saying, a sort of empowering message to women, saying, hey, you can be moms, you can work, you can do whatever you want. You're a woman, you know, you have agency. She specifically framed her argument in a way that was castigating traditional gender roles, which isn't so much concerned about, I don't know, labor division, but really just how God made us. You know, men tend to be a certain way, women tend to be a certain way, and that's fine. We're complementary. She wanted to erase that, and she wanted to say that anybody who is trying to behave that way is actually been brainwashed by the patriarchy. We need to be very suspicious of men generally, of institutions generally. And I, think that's certainly been corrosive as it's metastasized throughout the culture. I think that young men and women are very skeptical of each other, and that's certainly not healthy for any serious society.
Jenna Ellis: Oh, yeah, 100%. And, you know, feminism, and Gloria Steinem's version of what society should look like has, a low view of men and of the role of men in society and teaching women essentially in second and third wave feminism to be skeptical, always of men, to hate men, to always view men as the oppressors in this kind of Marxist paradigm where, you know, men are always oppressors and women are always oppressed. I see that going on in the Lindsey Clancy, sort of vision here that, you know, she must have had a justification and an excuse because she's an oppressed, stay at home mom. And it's just. It's the wrong view. And, you know, it. Also, the whole, typology of this and the whole world view reminds me as well of where, the. The push for gay marriage went really far. And I don't even think that the first wave obviously, of. Of advancing homosexual marriage with, Obergefell was biblical and should have even been there at all. But. But a lot of conservatives are recognizing that if they had just left it there, said, you know, we just want the same legal entitlement to a marriage certificate and had not pushed further into the trans movement, into surrogacy, into commodification of children. you know, all of these other things that we're talking about now, that's the same problem that Steinem was pushing, because the feminists increasingly argued in the 1960s that formal legal equality wasn't enough, because social institutions themselves perpetuated women's inequality. And so they, they had these expectations and these reversals of. Of marriage, of sexuality, of contraception, abortion. I mean, all of these things that the LGBTQ movement is also pushing.
John Doyle: Yeah, I, think it's nice to think that, you know, radicals will eventually just be happy with what they have and go home. But unfortunately, when you make that concession that you can have two men get married, which is to say they can enter into the institution of marriage, which is, of course, something biblically ordained as a partnership between two, to become one flesh. When you entertain that, what you're essentially conceding is that the roles that God designed for man and woman are not meaningfully different. They're more or less interchangeable. And so, yeah, it doesn't really matter if two men get married. Anybody can get married. And so if you make that concession that the roles really aren't that significant, then what's really stopping somebody from saying, well, if that's true, then why can't somebody identify as a man or as a woman, even if they were born the opposite sex? I mean, how is that role so meaningfully different that you get to step in and objectively decide for them that their identification as such is incorrect? And so I think that we, unfortunately shot ourselves in the foot by, conceding to that and thinking that we could be left alone by these people.
Jenna Ellis: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's the same thing now with the radical socialist Democrats. I mean, you know, if you point to, any movement that maybe started, started at its inception, addressing a genuine social problem, but they were doing it for the wrong reasons, and it wasn't to return to, or perhaps create a better and more perfect union under a biblical worldview. If that's not the motivation, then you go off the rails very easily, and that metastasizes into something that is much uglier and much stronger. And. And so it's. It's not about, seeing. Okay, exactly where did feminism go off the rails? we should be saying, that even if there was a legitimate issue in the way that women were treated in society at the inception of feminism, the goal, even originally of feminism was not a biblical worldview. It wasn't to say, okay, how can we teach, society to more biblically look at women as, co inheritors of the promise, as, fully equal in dignity and worth? And how do we, make this ultimately more like Christ instead of more just, serving the selfish desires, frankly, of women?
Handmaid says Christian nationalism and feminism are pushing society completely off rails
And so, you know, this is where it gets tricky and I think where Christians need to, parse these issues very carefully. And you see that even with the Christian nationalist movement, right now, where, you know, the idea, of course, that we are a Christian nation, I agree with that. I'm a Christian. I'm, a patriot. So, you could say, you know, so people say, well, then, of course I'm a Christian nationalist. But that's not what the movement is ultimately about, which is to undermine the U.S. constitution, impose a total theocracy in a way that is completely unbiblical. And so I think for any of these, sorts of views, we have to start with the basic of what does the Bible say about this topic? And not just, where did some of these. These figures like Gloria Steinem and, you know, and even our contemporaries now, where are they getting off? We have to always address this from the biblical worldview. So, so where do you. Where do you think then? we are at in society where we have a lot of these movements? I mean, we've just identified four. I mean, the LGBT movement, feminism, the socialism, the dsa, and also Christian nationalism, in totally different ways, are pushing society completely off the rails. How do we get back to a biblical framework?
John Doyle: I am, by reflex, extremely skeptical of anybody who's trying to tell me that my ancestors were bad people. I've never seen that turn out in a good way. And so I think that we can look at a lot of these social movements and we can say, well, this movement started out and it was very common sense. Of course we have to address xyz. But what it turned into with something much different. If you and I were trying to, you know, paint the entire continental United States blue, we would start out by saying, hey, you know, it's just a couple states, right? I mean, obviously, what's wrong with having a few states painted completely blue? And then over time, we would kind of increase that, make that more proliferated. And so by the end of our projects, people would be like, wait a minute, I didn't agree to this. I just wanted a couple states painted entirely blue. The point I'm getting at is these people are very smart. These Radicals, these Marxists, they're intellectual types and they understand that social change is something that comes about gradually. And so it might be soothing to believe that these movements started out with good intentions, but unfortunately, I think that's not true. I mean, even the way that we conceive of America, pre feminism, you know, I don't believe that women shouldn't be educated. I don't believe that women should be, you know, second class citizens or anything. But that's how we view America before it was enriched by feminism. We think that nobody before feminists ever believed that women could be educated or work, but that's just not true. Even by 1900, women constituted something like one third of American college students. 20 years later, they were already at like 50% of undergraduate enrollees. By, I think, the mid 19th, century, excuse me, women were practicing law, teaching at universities, publishing, books, you know, so this idea that like, you know, the female voice was repressed until the 1920s is just false. It's just a, like an invention of feminists to convince you that if you don't sign on with them, you're going to be relegated to the Handmaid's Tale. It's just not true. Like, men and women got along decently well, certainly better 100 years ago than presently. women were working, they were educated. There were also mothers and wives. And everything seemed to more or less be like, okay, I mean, I understand they couldn't get access to credit cards and maybe we can talk about that, but I just don't buy the kind of historiography that were it not for people like Gloria Steinem or even the people who preceded her, women would be treated like, you know, the Handmaid's Tale. I think that's a lie. And I think that lie is so popular precisely because if you believe that, it's hard to disagree with feminism and, you know, you can disagree with, the excesses or how far you want to take it, but if you fundamentally agree that pre feminism, women were treated, you know, horribly by men in a predominantly Christian country, it's very difficult to push back on the things that they want to achieve politically. So I'm very skeptical of anybody who, yeah, tries to convince me that my great, great grandfather was actually evil. He may have been a devout Christian, his peers may have built the United States of America, but secretly he was evil and he was mean to my great, great grandma. Like, I just don't believe that.
Jenna Ellis: Yeah. And, you know, it's, it's so important to go back and look at History, not through the lens of how, those who are perpetuating all of these different, false worldviews would paint it. I mean, it's the same thing as you were talking. It reminds me of, you know, where the black community is with, like, the 1619 Project and, BLM and all of these things, like trying to go back and paint a version of American history. And that is just totally false. And, you know. Yes. Did we have slavery for a while and is that wrong? Yes. But does that mean that, you know, even at the founders, even at the Constitutional Convention, I mean, the only reason for the, three fifths compromise was because they couldn't yet agree on slavery. It wasn't that all of the men there were saying, you know, yeah, we're 100% on board with this. And so to suggest that the entirety of the power in America was centralized, and still is is systemically racist. it's kind of the same thing where if you buy into the premise of the way that they are, these, these leftists and, you know, the propagators of these myths are framing the history, then inevitably their demand requires you to then concede to what they advocate for now. And that's a really excellent point, Jon. And we have to make sure that wherever we're at in society and our moment is now, that we always push for the biblical worldview and the framework, regardless of what has come before and regardless of what, people are pushing for in a secular framework now, we always need to have the Bible as our standard, not allowing them to either reinvent history or say that, you know, we need to perpetually apologize for the past, that, you know, white people are always the oppressors, men are always the oppressors, you know, all of those things. And so we can't possibly speak up for the biblical worldview of these issues because we still need to apologize for centuries past. we need to reject those lies.
John Doyle: Politics is downstream from culture; it has to start with culture
So, last question for you here, and I appreciate, this, this deeper dive here into this, you know, where. Where do you see the, the most impact that we could make as Christians into some of these things? Because I know there are so many different organizations, I mean, AFA Action included, that, you know, we try to push for a better policy. But as Breitbart, of course, famously said, politics is downstream from culture. I think it's more of a cultural rot problem than it is just pushing for policy. We should push for good policy, but it has to start with the culture.
John Doyle: Yeah, I think that's absolutely correct. I guess I would say, insofar as policy is concerned, the only reason that these people are able to, and by these people I just mean people who are, you know, working for the father of lies. The only way that they're able to make the country so back backwards is because they have at their disposal the greatest tool for disseminating propaganda in the history of the world, which is the smartphone. I mean, we are all now getting our information from short form video content on our smartphones. And so if you control that flow of information and everybody's tuned into it at all times all day, you can get people to start to believe things that are completely backwards. And so I don't know exactly. Obviously we have free speech. So I don't know how this would work out in terms of policy. But the ability for evil people to spread evil to everybody should probably be curtailed. And I know the founding fathers would agree with that, even though the intellectuals from which they derive their view of government believe that atheists shouldn't even be considered parts of, polite society, basically. So I think that's a big problem. So I think there's optimism on the basis of that. Like, insofar as we see everybody's crazy and believes crazy things, it's not because they've gone crazy by themselves, it's because they're tuned into the devices that are making them crazy. Other than that, I think the parents need to be very vigilant about what their kids are doing. Because, you know, if you raise your children properly and really try to instill these values into them, even if they go to college and they start to read about crazy stuff, I mean, that's gonna, it's gonna slide off them like water on a raincoat if they have, you know, a proper upbringing. But unfortunately, all too often I see parents think that they can just kind of coast and then for the first time in their kids lives, someone tries to connect with them and then they put bad ideas in their head and all of a sudden, you know, little Johnny comes back for Thanksgiving dinner and he's a Marxist and so we definitely want to avoid that.
Jenna Ellis: Yeah, well, really well said. Well, Jon Doyle, really appreciate your commentary and weighing in on these issues that are so critical to, America. You can follow him on X and also at the Blaze. Thanks so much.
John Doyle: Thank you.
The biblical worldview offers something that neither sexism nor secular feminism can provide
Jenna Ellis: All right, so ultimately this is where the biblical worldview offers something that neither sexism nor secular feminism can provide, which is the truth. Christianity does not begin with the question how much power should a woman have, or, how can men and women coexist? It begins with a much more foundational and fundamental question. Who is a woman and where does her value come from? Scripture answers that on the very first page of the Bible. Male and female, he created them different but equal. Both are made in the image of God, equal in dignity, equal in moral agency, equal in our need for salvation, and equal heirs of the grace of life. And also very different. So that also means that Christians should never defend the mistreatment, marginalization, or artificial limitation of women under the guise of traditional values. But neither should we accept the secular feminist premise that a woman becomes free only when she is liberated from these institutions of marriage, motherhood, biological reality, sexual morality, or especially all of this comes under the authority of God. So the great mistake of modern feminism was not recognizing that women deserve dignity and opportunity. It is the framework that it was built upon that is completely incongruent with the biblical worldview. And it was attempting to ground that dignity in autonomy rather than in the image of God. And autonomy eventually becomes its own kind of bondage. Because if freedom means answering to no authority outside ourselves, then there is no objective standard left to tell us what human flourishing actually is. I mean, this is the same thing that some are arguing, with man in general, that we need to be free and liberated from God in society. The whole premise, God is dead, and, and we're better off without him. We need to create our own reality in our image. that's essentially what women are trying to do by excising God and men out of their lives. And what men do all the time by subjugating women or excising God out of their lives and having no authority. The biblical vision is better and it is truthful. So a woman doesn't need to imitate a man to be equal to him. She doesn't need to reject motherhood or marriage to be accomplished. And she definitely doesn't need sexual liberation to be free. She doesn't need the destruction and killing of, her unborn child in order to participate equally in society. Dignity has never been bestowed by feminism, government, culture, or men. It's always been bestowed by God. And that's why the Christian response to feminism shouldn't be to simply turn the clock backward or have these conversations on a secular humanist playing field. Because otherwise, we've lost the debate before we've even began. We need to point toward something higher, a society in which women are exercising the gifts that God has given them while recognizing that genuine freedom is, is not freedom. From God's design, it's freedom to flourish within it. And that is the Christian life. For a man or a woman, that is the Christian life. So, as always, we cover some, some pretty heavy topics on this podcast. And I hope that this has encouraged you to think more biblically. And we always ask for suggestions on topics or guests. If you'd like to reach me and my team at Jenna at the. @afr.net and I will see you next week here on demand.
Jenna Ellis: Gloria Steinem was perhaps the most recognizable face of feminism
Jenna Ellis: Welcome to On Demand with Jenna Ellis. This is the AFR exclusive podcast where we do a deep dive into the issues you care about from guests you love to hear from. And you may have heard that this week Gloria Steinem, perhaps the most recognizable face of modern American feminism, has died at the age of 92. And, you know, whatever we think of her politics, and we all have opinions, hopefully as Christians on her politics, it is difficult to overstate her influence on American culture. So Steinem came m of age in America where women faced very real legal, professional and cultural barriers. She spent decades insisting that women should be taken seriously as thinkers, professionals, political participants, and independent human beings, not simply regarded as accessories to men. There is a, ah, even a movement out there right now, especially in light of the Lindsey Clancy trial, suggesting that the 19th amendment, should be, withdrawn and we should be, we should repeal that. And and essentially it's, it's women that are causing all of the problems in society. I, of course, as a woman, tend to not think that. I think there's a lot, there are a lot of women who have gone into feminism wrong and we should talk about that. But we shouldn't go back to this categorical, deterministic sort of philosophy to say that all women are always liberal and all men are never liberal, because we know that that's just not true. So as Christians, we shouldn't be afraid to say where the feminist movement, it went wrong, of course, but where at least first wave feminism, not the second, third wave, and Gloria Steinem was mainly second wave feminism, but where the feminist movement got it wrong, but also identified, ah, something that was genuinely wrong with the culture. So women are not intellectually, spiritually or morally inferior to men. we bear the image of God equally. And Scripture is filled with women who are called gifted, entrusted with responsibility, and are used powerfully for his purposes. Biblical womanhood does not require women to be voiceless, powerless, uneducated or incapable of leadership. obviously there are roles in Scripture, that clearly are given exclusively to men, such as, pastors or teachers in the context of the ecclesia or the church. So Steinem's legacy forces us, I think, to confront a profound question that we should be talking about even more regularly. What happens when, when perhaps a legitimate concern for the dignity and equality. That's a very interesting, ah, very heavily loaded term of women becomes detached from the God who gives human beings their dignity in the first place. Because Steinem's feminism ultimately went much, much further. Than arguing simply that women aren't property and should have equal opportunity and equal protection under the law. abortion became foundational to her vision of female liberation, obviously completely wrong. And marriage and motherhood were increasingly treated, not simply as good choices that women could make, but as institutions and expectations from which women needed liberation and sexual autonomy became intertwined with the very definition of equality. And that's where the biblical view and secular feminism fundamentally part ways. So, to talk about this more, let's welcome in Jon Doyle, who is a host at the Blaze.
John Sutter: I think there needs to be a broader conversation about feminism
And, Jon, you know, I think that especially in light of the Lindsey Clancy trial right now where we're learning, just this morning as we're recording this podcast, that it's one lone man, among the 11. So there's nine women, three men, one lone man. Apparently that is the holdout to hold Clancy, actually guilty for the murder of her three children, which is what should happen. there's been a lot of posts and back and forth on social media saying, well, of course it's a man, because, you know, all the women are crazy. And, and we're. I see that we're kind of going down the conservative rabbit hole of reducing all of this to tribalism and a gender based conversation instead of a worldview based conversation.
John Doyle: I suppose so. I mean, I guess I would only say that while I don't support the kind of like, clickbaity, you know, gender war stuff that's become very popular over the last few years, I think there does have to be some kind of conversation about the political expressions of women in this country. I mean, you know, we can talk about Gloria Steinem and second and third wave feminism, but at the end of the day, you know, I don't believe that women are unintelligent. I believe that women have agency. And, you know, I think that women can come to their own conclusions. And if the conclusion that they're arriving at by their own volition are that, you know, the most important issue to them is the ability to access what they call reproductive, rights or contraception or abortion or whatever, or, you know, something like, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of women on the Internet are expressing sympathy for Lindsey Clancy, either saying that it was okay that she did it because she was, you know, experiencing postpartum depression, or that maybe her husband secretly did it. You know, I don't believe in being cruel or sexist by any means, but, I don't think that now is maybe the time to have a conversation about how we need to be nicer to women and stop accusing them of perhaps, you know, indulging in, things that are maybe a bit insane. I would be more curious to see why there are so many women who are entertaining this kind of stuff in the first place.
Jenna Ellis: Yeah, and I think that's a fair point. but we can't categorically suggest that, you know, all women are, in this bucket. I mean, I've been very outspoken. Allie Beth Stuckey has been very outspoken, Meg Basham. I mean, there are a lot of prominent, conservative biblical female voices that are pushing back on all of the, the women on TikTok. And. And that's just a sampling because, you know, you do have a, A wide swath of liberal women. And I think that needs to be addressed the worldview. But my point is just that we can't categorically say that women in general do not have the right view and that men in general, have the right view as well. Because, even in my own experience, I mean, there are a lot of men who, who see. Embrace, really a more feminist or fem. or maninist I guess is what they call it, which is such a stupid term, view of relationships and of marriage and family. And you know, you see that prolifically on social media as well, where, you know, men are becoming very beta in response, to the feminists who are perhaps pushing that, firstly in culture. So there's a problem overall with culture when there's such a wide swath of. Of both genders that are embracing this whole idea that gender roles and gender distinctions, aren't. Aren't really implicit in who we are as human beings made in God's image. And this is where I think the feminist movement, went too far. And so I think it's a great time to have this conversation because if it is primarily women, and I think it is that, at least on TikTok, that are viewing Lindsay Clancy as a sympathetic figure. And you have a lot of these moms on, on TikTok saying, you know, hashtag, same Lindsay, then the problem is implicit in. I think it's born out of this notion of women's liberation, of. Of pro abortion. And that's really the key at the heart of all of this, is that they don't want to be responsible ultimately for marriage, motherhood and family and the biblical design.
John Doyle: That's absolutely right. And you're seeing that increasingly with the younger generation, where now it's crazy to see. But you see more young men are reporting wanting to get married and have children, than young women are. Young women are trying to delay this into their early 30s, and then they want to spend their 20s, you know, dating around and working. And that's all fine. But, it is interesting to see that kind of inversion where, because of people like Gloria Steinem, who couldn't just offer kind of like you're saying, a sort of empowering message to women, saying, hey, you can be moms, you can work, you can do whatever you want. You're a woman, you know, you have agency. She specifically framed her argument in a way that was castigating traditional gender roles, which isn't so much concerned about, I don't know, labor division, but really just how God made us. You know, men tend to be a certain way, women tend to be a certain way, and that's fine. We're complementary. She wanted to erase that, and she wanted to say that anybody who is trying to behave that way is actually been brainwashed by the patriarchy. We need to be very suspicious of men generally, of institutions generally. And I, think that's certainly been corrosive as it's metastasized throughout the culture. I think that young men and women are very skeptical of each other, and that's certainly not healthy for any serious society.
Jenna Ellis: Oh, yeah, 100%. And, you know, feminism, and Gloria Steinem's version of what society should look like has, a low view of men and of the role of men in society and teaching women essentially in second and third wave feminism to be skeptical, always of men, to hate men, to always view men as the oppressors in this kind of Marxist paradigm where, you know, men are always oppressors and women are always oppressed. I see that going on in the Lindsey Clancy, sort of vision here that, you know, she must have had a justification and an excuse because she's an oppressed, stay at home mom. And it's just. It's the wrong view. And, you know, it. Also, the whole, typology of this and the whole world view reminds me as well of where, the. The push for gay marriage went really far. And I don't even think that the first wave obviously, of. Of advancing homosexual marriage with, Obergefell was biblical and should have even been there at all. But. But a lot of conservatives are recognizing that if they had just left it there, said, you know, we just want the same legal entitlement to a marriage certificate and had not pushed further into the trans movement, into surrogacy, into commodification of children. you know, all of these other things that we're talking about now, that's the same problem that Steinem was pushing, because the feminists increasingly argued in the 1960s that formal legal equality wasn't enough, because social institutions themselves perpetuated women's inequality. And so they, they had these expectations and these reversals of. Of marriage, of sexuality, of contraception, abortion. I mean, all of these things that the LGBTQ movement is also pushing.
John Doyle: Yeah, I, think it's nice to think that, you know, radicals will eventually just be happy with what they have and go home. But unfortunately, when you make that concession that you can have two men get married, which is to say they can enter into the institution of marriage, which is, of course, something biblically ordained as a partnership between two, to become one flesh. When you entertain that, what you're essentially conceding is that the roles that God designed for man and woman are not meaningfully different. They're more or less interchangeable. And so, yeah, it doesn't really matter if two men get married. Anybody can get married. And so if you make that concession that the roles really aren't that significant, then what's really stopping somebody from saying, well, if that's true, then why can't somebody identify as a man or as a woman, even if they were born the opposite sex? I mean, how is that role so meaningfully different that you get to step in and objectively decide for them that their identification as such is incorrect? And so I think that we, unfortunately shot ourselves in the foot by, conceding to that and thinking that we could be left alone by these people.
Jenna Ellis: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's the same thing now with the radical socialist Democrats. I mean, you know, if you point to, any movement that maybe started, started at its inception, addressing a genuine social problem, but they were doing it for the wrong reasons, and it wasn't to return to, or perhaps create a better and more perfect union under a biblical worldview. If that's not the motivation, then you go off the rails very easily, and that metastasizes into something that is much uglier and much stronger. And. And so it's. It's not about, seeing. Okay, exactly where did feminism go off the rails? we should be saying, that even if there was a legitimate issue in the way that women were treated in society at the inception of feminism, the goal, even originally of feminism was not a biblical worldview. It wasn't to say, okay, how can we teach, society to more biblically look at women as, co inheritors of the promise, as, fully equal in dignity and worth? And how do we, make this ultimately more like Christ instead of more just, serving the selfish desires, frankly, of women?
Handmaid says Christian nationalism and feminism are pushing society completely off rails
And so, you know, this is where it gets tricky and I think where Christians need to, parse these issues very carefully. And you see that even with the Christian nationalist movement, right now, where, you know, the idea, of course, that we are a Christian nation, I agree with that. I'm a Christian. I'm, a patriot. So, you could say, you know, so people say, well, then, of course I'm a Christian nationalist. But that's not what the movement is ultimately about, which is to undermine the U.S. constitution, impose a total theocracy in a way that is completely unbiblical. And so I think for any of these, sorts of views, we have to start with the basic of what does the Bible say about this topic? And not just, where did some of these. These figures like Gloria Steinem and, you know, and even our contemporaries now, where are they getting off? We have to always address this from the biblical worldview. So, so where do you. Where do you think then? we are at in society where we have a lot of these movements? I mean, we've just identified four. I mean, the LGBT movement, feminism, the socialism, the dsa, and also Christian nationalism, in totally different ways, are pushing society completely off the rails. How do we get back to a biblical framework?
John Doyle: I am, by reflex, extremely skeptical of anybody who's trying to tell me that my ancestors were bad people. I've never seen that turn out in a good way. And so I think that we can look at a lot of these social movements and we can say, well, this movement started out and it was very common sense. Of course we have to address xyz. But what it turned into with something much different. If you and I were trying to, you know, paint the entire continental United States blue, we would start out by saying, hey, you know, it's just a couple states, right? I mean, obviously, what's wrong with having a few states painted completely blue? And then over time, we would kind of increase that, make that more proliferated. And so by the end of our projects, people would be like, wait a minute, I didn't agree to this. I just wanted a couple states painted entirely blue. The point I'm getting at is these people are very smart. These Radicals, these Marxists, they're intellectual types and they understand that social change is something that comes about gradually. And so it might be soothing to believe that these movements started out with good intentions, but unfortunately, I think that's not true. I mean, even the way that we conceive of America, pre feminism, you know, I don't believe that women shouldn't be educated. I don't believe that women should be, you know, second class citizens or anything. But that's how we view America before it was enriched by feminism. We think that nobody before feminists ever believed that women could be educated or work, but that's just not true. Even by 1900, women constituted something like one third of American college students. 20 years later, they were already at like 50% of undergraduate enrollees. By, I think, the mid 19th, century, excuse me, women were practicing law, teaching at universities, publishing, books, you know, so this idea that like, you know, the female voice was repressed until the 1920s is just false. It's just a, like an invention of feminists to convince you that if you don't sign on with them, you're going to be relegated to the Handmaid's Tale. It's just not true. Like, men and women got along decently well, certainly better 100 years ago than presently. women were working, they were educated. There were also mothers and wives. And everything seemed to more or less be like, okay, I mean, I understand they couldn't get access to credit cards and maybe we can talk about that, but I just don't buy the kind of historiography that were it not for people like Gloria Steinem or even the people who preceded her, women would be treated like, you know, the Handmaid's Tale. I think that's a lie. And I think that lie is so popular precisely because if you believe that, it's hard to disagree with feminism and, you know, you can disagree with, the excesses or how far you want to take it, but if you fundamentally agree that pre feminism, women were treated, you know, horribly by men in a predominantly Christian country, it's very difficult to push back on the things that they want to achieve politically. So I'm very skeptical of anybody who, yeah, tries to convince me that my great, great grandfather was actually evil. He may have been a devout Christian, his peers may have built the United States of America, but secretly he was evil and he was mean to my great, great grandma. Like, I just don't believe that.
Jenna Ellis: Yeah. And, you know, it's, it's so important to go back and look at History, not through the lens of how, those who are perpetuating all of these different, false worldviews would paint it. I mean, it's the same thing as you were talking. It reminds me of, you know, where the black community is with, like, the 1619 Project and, BLM and all of these things, like trying to go back and paint a version of American history. And that is just totally false. And, you know. Yes. Did we have slavery for a while and is that wrong? Yes. But does that mean that, you know, even at the founders, even at the Constitutional Convention, I mean, the only reason for the, three fifths compromise was because they couldn't yet agree on slavery. It wasn't that all of the men there were saying, you know, yeah, we're 100% on board with this. And so to suggest that the entirety of the power in America was centralized, and still is is systemically racist. it's kind of the same thing where if you buy into the premise of the way that they are, these, these leftists and, you know, the propagators of these myths are framing the history, then inevitably their demand requires you to then concede to what they advocate for now. And that's a really excellent point, Jon. And we have to make sure that wherever we're at in society and our moment is now, that we always push for the biblical worldview and the framework, regardless of what has come before and regardless of what, people are pushing for in a secular framework now, we always need to have the Bible as our standard, not allowing them to either reinvent history or say that, you know, we need to perpetually apologize for the past, that, you know, white people are always the oppressors, men are always the oppressors, you know, all of those things. And so we can't possibly speak up for the biblical worldview of these issues because we still need to apologize for centuries past. we need to reject those lies.
John Doyle: Politics is downstream from culture; it has to start with culture
So, last question for you here, and I appreciate, this, this deeper dive here into this, you know, where. Where do you see the, the most impact that we could make as Christians into some of these things? Because I know there are so many different organizations, I mean, AFA Action included, that, you know, we try to push for a better policy. But as Breitbart, of course, famously said, politics is downstream from culture. I think it's more of a cultural rot problem than it is just pushing for policy. We should push for good policy, but it has to start with the culture.
John Doyle: Yeah, I think that's absolutely correct. I guess I would say, insofar as policy is concerned, the only reason that these people are able to, and by these people I just mean people who are, you know, working for the father of lies. The only way that they're able to make the country so back backwards is because they have at their disposal the greatest tool for disseminating propaganda in the history of the world, which is the smartphone. I mean, we are all now getting our information from short form video content on our smartphones. And so if you control that flow of information and everybody's tuned into it at all times all day, you can get people to start to believe things that are completely backwards. And so I don't know exactly. Obviously we have free speech. So I don't know how this would work out in terms of policy. But the ability for evil people to spread evil to everybody should probably be curtailed. And I know the founding fathers would agree with that, even though the intellectuals from which they derive their view of government believe that atheists shouldn't even be considered parts of, polite society, basically. So I think that's a big problem. So I think there's optimism on the basis of that. Like, insofar as we see everybody's crazy and believes crazy things, it's not because they've gone crazy by themselves, it's because they're tuned into the devices that are making them crazy. Other than that, I think the parents need to be very vigilant about what their kids are doing. Because, you know, if you raise your children properly and really try to instill these values into them, even if they go to college and they start to read about crazy stuff, I mean, that's gonna, it's gonna slide off them like water on a raincoat if they have, you know, a proper upbringing. But unfortunately, all too often I see parents think that they can just kind of coast and then for the first time in their kids lives, someone tries to connect with them and then they put bad ideas in their head and all of a sudden, you know, little Johnny comes back for Thanksgiving dinner and he's a Marxist and so we definitely want to avoid that.
Jenna Ellis: Yeah, well, really well said. Well, Jon Doyle, really appreciate your commentary and weighing in on these issues that are so critical to, America. You can follow him on X and also at the Blaze. Thanks so much.
John Doyle: Thank you.
The biblical worldview offers something that neither sexism nor secular feminism can provide
Jenna Ellis: All right, so ultimately this is where the biblical worldview offers something that neither sexism nor secular feminism can provide, which is the truth. Christianity does not begin with the question how much power should a woman have, or, how can men and women coexist? It begins with a much more foundational and fundamental question. Who is a woman and where does her value come from? Scripture answers that on the very first page of the Bible. Male and female, he created them different but equal. Both are made in the image of God, equal in dignity, equal in moral agency, equal in our need for salvation, and equal heirs of the grace of life. And also very different. So that also means that Christians should never defend the mistreatment, marginalization, or artificial limitation of women under the guise of traditional values. But neither should we accept the secular feminist premise that a woman becomes free only when she is liberated from these institutions of marriage, motherhood, biological reality, sexual morality, or especially all of this comes under the authority of God. So the great mistake of modern feminism was not recognizing that women deserve dignity and opportunity. It is the framework that it was built upon that is completely incongruent with the biblical worldview. And it was attempting to ground that dignity in autonomy rather than in the image of God. And autonomy eventually becomes its own kind of bondage. Because if freedom means answering to no authority outside ourselves, then there is no objective standard left to tell us what human flourishing actually is. I mean, this is the same thing that some are arguing, with man in general, that we need to be free and liberated from God in society. The whole premise, God is dead, and, and we're better off without him. We need to create our own reality in our image. that's essentially what women are trying to do by excising God and men out of their lives. And what men do all the time by subjugating women or excising God out of their lives and having no authority. The biblical vision is better and it is truthful. So a woman doesn't need to imitate a man to be equal to him. She doesn't need to reject motherhood or marriage to be accomplished. And she definitely doesn't need sexual liberation to be free. She doesn't need the destruction and killing of, her unborn child in order to participate equally in society. Dignity has never been bestowed by feminism, government, culture, or men. It's always been bestowed by God. And that's why the Christian response to feminism shouldn't be to simply turn the clock backward or have these conversations on a secular humanist playing field. Because otherwise, we've lost the debate before we've even began. We need to point toward something higher, a society in which women are exercising the gifts that God has given them while recognizing that genuine freedom is, is not freedom. From God's design, it's freedom to flourish within it. And that is the Christian life. For a man or a woman, that is the Christian life. So, as always, we cover some, some pretty heavy topics on this podcast. And I hope that this has encouraged you to think more biblically. And we always ask for suggestions on topics or guests. If you'd like to reach me and my team at Jenna at the. @afr.net and I will see you next week here on demand.
Join Jenna Ellis and guest John Doyle as they discuss Steinem's influence on American culture, the evolution of feminism, and the implications of her views on women's roles in society. They explore the intersection of feminism and biblical values, questioning how the pursuit of equality has sometimes strayed from God's design.
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