Feminism – “the rejection of gender differences, and the pursuit of role equality in domestic, social, political, economic and spiritual settings”.
Feminism (F) vs. Christianity (C)
F: Self-actualization
“Choice has always been the power of feminism…to create a society where women can live a full, self-determined life.” (Ali P. Crown, choice is the power of feminism)
C: Self-denial
Matt 16:24 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
F: Anti-Family
“the women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps…” (Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique)
C: Pro-family
Titus 2:4 That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, 5 To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.
F: Against submission to husbands
“Feminists agree that male dominance within the families is part of a wider system of male power, is neither natural nor inevitable, and occurs at women’s cost.” (Myra Marx Ferree, Beyond Separate Spheres: Feminism and family research)
C: Submission is God ordained and His order
Eph 5:22 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
F: Identity in Self-fulfillment
“…women are victims of a false belief system that requires them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and children. Such a system causes women to completely lose their identity in that of their family.” (Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique)
C: Identity in Christ
Gal 2:20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
(From //womenandapologetics.blogspot.com/2010/01/is-modern-feminism-compatible-with.html?vm=r&s=1)
One Catholic site stated that there is a Catholic ‘Feminist Double Standard’:
“On one hand, we don’t ordain women; on the other hand, we “worship” Mary.”
Christian Feminism: A movement for women’s equality rooted in Scripture and Christian faith. The seeds of American Christian feminism were planted in Europe centuries ago. Though most Reformation Protestants still barred women from church leadership, radical Puritan groups in seventeenth-century England granted women more freedom. Congregationalist women voted in church; Baptist women publicly confessed their faith; Quaker women preached. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodists, believed lay women could receive an extraordinary call of God to publicly testify and pray. Soon women on both sides of the Atlantic served as Methodist class leaders.
In America, Christian feminism mobilized in the climate of nineteenth-century revivalism where the Spirit’s call, not necessarily ordination or education, qualified one to preach. Evangelist Charles Finney’s “new measures” allowed women to speak in the presence of a gathering of men. Later, women like Phoebe Palmer gained national fame in the mid nineteenth-century Holiness Movement. African-American revivalist Amanda Smith effectively preached abroad and epitomized the courage of African-Americans who overcame the double barriers of race and sex.
Religious freedom and disestablishment in America contributed to new denominations which were able to utilize women however they chose. Free-Will Baptists had female preachers as early as 1797 (Sally Parsons) and 1819 (Clarissa Danforth). Congregationalists, in 1853, became the first U.S. denomination to fully ordain a woman. Methodist Holiness churches often utilized women as preachers. By 1900 Unitarians and Universalists had ordained about seventy-five women.
Temperance, abolition and the churches and women’s suffrage helped spur Christian feminism. Abolitionist Sarah Grimké (Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, 1837) saw links between the misuse of Scripture to endorse slavery and the demand for female submission. The post-Civil War rise of female foreign missionaries meant women now studied Bible and theology in training schools. Even early fundamentalists often endorsed female public ministry. Bible institutes trained women (often barred from seminary) as evangelists, pastors and Bible teachers.
Diversity marks twentieth-century feminism. Early Pentecostals (e.g., Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson) and charismatics (e.g., Kathryn Kuhlman) continued the tradition within Methodist-Holiness churches of advocating women’s public ministry. All of the Protestant mainline denominations now ordain women to the ministry. Evangelical feminists officially organized in 1973 to form the Evangelical Women’s Caucus. Post-Vatican II American Catholics increasingly question female exclusion from the priesthood.
(from Dictionary of Christianity in America, edited by Daniel G. Reid, Robert D. Linder, Bruce L. Shelley and Harry S. Stout; by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA; published by InterVarsity Press)
The following is taken from JeremiahProject.com
The Feminist Movement
Another sign of the end times is the rise of the feminist movement in the 20th Century. Rising from the Progressive Era of the early 1900’s, the feminist movement was largely influenced by the Eugenics movement and is at the forefront of population reduction efforts to exterminate “useless eaters”.
Anarcho-communist organizer Emma Goldman theorized and advocated for an integrated philosophy of women’s liberation, anti-capitalism and anti-authoritarianism. Aside from advocating free choice in sexual relations, she called for access to birth control. She served as a mentor to Margaret Sanger who went to found the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood) and become an extremely visible advocate for access to family planning.
Some would say feminism is about basic human rights and that it’s just a modern social movement. The truth is, the feminist movement is neither modern nor social in its origin. At its roots are ancient, highly religious elements that are rarely, if ever, mentioned.
The spirit of radical feminism is the spirit of witchcraft and rebellion, the spirit manifested in Jezebel. It is the spirit which rejects God’s lawful order and authority and tries to usurp that authority to itself, as did Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Because they build much of their thinking on humanism, leaders in the feminist movement have no place for God. Gloria Steinem says of feminism that “the bottom line is that self-authority is the single most radical idea there is…” The New Age agenda of transforming society is apparent in her thinking, “The point is for people to empower themselves,” she says. She was also quoted as saying, “By the year 2,000, we will, I hope raise children to believe in human potential, not God.”
Feminist leaders easily fit what the apostle Paul warned about … saying false teachers can often be identified by their opposition or indifference to the essential truths of the gospel.
2 Tim 3:1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. 5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. 6 For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, 7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
The false teachers of feminism teach a false lifestyle of unrighteousness. They prey on weak-willed women – unstable women – who are guilt ridden because of their sins, torn by lust, and victims of various false teachers. A large number of feminists are victims of childhood abuse and are bitter toward men. Their ‘guilt’ is associated somehow with the false belief that they are responsible for their abuse. Rather than receiving the forgiving grace of Jesus, most of these women have bought into the lie perpetrated by false teachers that they are ’emancipated’ and as a result are unable to function in a healthy relationship with a man. Is it any surprise the majority of women in NOW are lesbians?
Who are [Feminists] really? Goddesses who have been forced into amnesia by primitive white men trying to keep them from their true potential. Feminism is in fact a spiritual movement based partly on reawakening of “goddess consciousness,” and its real goal is matriarchy, not equality.
Gloria Steinman famously stated: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
The ultimate symbol of the patriarchy is a male God – the Father. In response, feminists at the National Council of Churches pushed through a unisex version of the Bible in which God is “our father and mother in heaven.” and Jesus Christ is not the “Son of God,” but the “child of God.” The St. Hilda Community (an offshoot of the Church of England’s Movement for the Ordination of Women) are replacing [their church’s creed] with stuff such as, “We believe in the presence of God in the world. She is our mother, source of deep wisdom … she is our lover and is allowed to touch our pain … she is our friend who stands alongside us.”
[In March, 2002, the New Testament of the “gender inclusive” TNIV officially hit the streets in the U.S.A..
LBI Institute, has released a new Bible entitled: “Judith Christ of Nazareth, The Gospels of the Bible…”
This new Bible includes: The Parable of the Prodigal Daughter, The Lady’s Prayer, and other revised favorite passages, such as: John 19:17 And She bearing her cross went forth. 18 There they crucified Judith.]
In her book Changing of the Gods, Naomi Goldenberg predicted that the continued feminist presence in religion would force a redefinition – one that would alter the very essence of Judeo-Christian belief. Goldenberg writes:
The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Yahweh. Yet very few of the women and men now working for sexual equality within Christianity and Judaism realize the extent of their heresy.
Contemporary Goddess spirituality draws inspiration from all the variations of earth-based religions, including Native American Spiritism, which isn’t matriarchal at all. It also embraces European nature religions (especially witchcraft), Westernized Hinduism, Chinese Taoism, Japanese Shintoism, and Buddhism whose quest for self-realization and aversion for logic fits right in. Many differences and contradictions are simply ignored. All these influences are merging and multiplying in today’s self-seeking, power-hungry, post-Christian Western culture.
The feminist’s internal God would be totally antithetical to the traditional Judeo-Christian God of the Bible. [The feminists do not believe in ‘God’, but rather, in ‘Goddess’… in the person of Sophia.]
New Age feminist and conference speaker Charlene Spretnak in her book, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, teaches that, according to one reviewer, “Goddess worship, paganism, Wicca, and witchcraft are all names for a form of natural religion that is centered around the mystery, sexuality, and psychic mysteries of the female. The book is a clarion call to women to regain their natural power and to overthrow the global rule of men. The author’s starting point for the re-establishment of female dominance is in bringing an end to Judeo-Christian religion.”
Modern feminists are rediscovering the great goddess. Certainly nothing can seem to lift a woman’s self-esteem more than becoming a goddess. That indeed appears to be one solution to “problems of self-worth and identity.” To them it vindicates the feminine in a universe where too much male principle seems to be operative. If the goal is judicial equality in society, then the same alternative must be applied to the cosmos. Followers of the goddess say that a male deity must be counterbalanced with a female counterpart. It only makes sense in an era of judicial egalitarianism.
Starhawk, priestess of the Old Religion of the Goddess, is one of witchcraft’s leading ambassadors. An instructor at Matthew Fox’s Institute for Culture and Creation, she and others who share her pagan persuasions have been teaching wiccan rituals and the “positive” side of witchcraft in church groups and seminaries across the country. “Witchcraft is … perhaps the oldest religion existent in the West,” writes Starhawk in The Spiritual Dance, a manual on witchcraft which is also used in Women’s Studies in colleges, universities and even in some seminaries.
Increasingly, we see the followers of Wicca – a pagan religion which worships nature, the Earth goddess and so forth – gaining respect in society. Wicca followers are changing the public’s perception of them. They claim thay are not Satanists because they don’t even believe in Satan. Despite the fact that Wicca, another name for witchcraft, is indeed occultism, the pagan religion is gaining respect in society because of its respect for the planet and environmental concerns.
As zealous protectors of the environment, witches view the earth as the physical manifestation of the Goddess. To them, the earth is the sacred body of the goddess, whose life-force flows through everything. The model of the Goddess…fosters respect for the sacredness of all living things. Witchcraft can be seen as a religion of ecology. Its goal is harmony with nature, so that life may not just survive, but thrive.
It would appear that the feminist movement has bought the oldest lie. Like Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit at the invitation of the serpent with the promise that she would become as a god and never die, it is again women as part of the
feminist movement, who has again been deceived by Satan, and is trying to pass on the forbidden fruit.