God's created order won't be violated forever. Traditions come and go, but, if patriarchy is woven through creation as Scripture indicates, the pendulum will one day turn. And when it does, it will destroy every feminist altar in its path, revealing father-rule to be every bit the law of creation that gravity is.
The question isn't whether the pendulum will turn, the real question is what the world will look like when it does. And that is a frightening thing to consider....
In a recent column, New York Times columnist David Brooks reflects the prevailing wisdom of Western society on manhood:
Forty years ago, men and women adhered to certain ideologies, what it meant to be a man or a woman. Young women today... are more like clean slates, having abandoned both feminist and prefeminist preconceptions. Men still adhere to the masculinity rules, which limits their vision and their movement.
Everywhere, the story is the same: men are losers in the modern interconnected world; men no longer wear the pants in the family economy; hookup culture is female empowerment; women don't need men like men need women; fatherhood is overrated, children really only need mothers....
Yet even as it's accepted that masculinity is a waning force in the West, our organs of influence and power are being forced to adapt to the resurgent patriarchy of fundamentalist Islam.
So, this weirdly admiring article in the New York Times celebrating Muslim women in France who defy French law by wearing the burqa in public...
And here, the Voice of America presenting Egypt's newly-veiled female newscasters as proof that the repressive Mubarak era is truly over.
And finally, here, a New York Times article on a Muslim Brotherhood premarital counseling course in Cairo teaching loving male headship and female submission. The most startling thing about the course, in the view of the author, is the sight of young Egyptian women nodding in agreement:
At the group’s headquarters, in the densely populated Cairo neighborhood of Nasr City, Mr. Abou Salama...lectured on qualities to seek in a partner, getting acquainted under parental supervision, dealing with in-laws and consummating marriage. In his social paradigm, understanding that the woman was created to be an obedient wife and mother and that the man was created to fend for his family holds the secret to a happy marriage.
“I want you to be the flower that attracts a bee to make honey, not the trash that attracts flies and dirt,” Mr. Abou Salama said as the women listened intently.
Western civic religion, which bows before every idol, honors in Islamic culture what it disdains in its own, masculine headship and feminine deference.
Which brings me to my point; the West is marching into the future with a scorched-earth policy toward the past. There can be no return to the days of Ozzy and Harriet or even of Billy and Ruth, the path is destroyed, the map has been burned. The gentle patriarchy that once defined American culture--a product of hundreds of years of Protestant teaching--is now just fuel for the furnaces of modern culture. We're shredding our Christian past with the vengeance of hatred.
When the West reembarks on the good ship Patriarchy, it will do so not under the benevolent authority of Jesus Christ, but under the repressive rule of Christless authority.
Because we will not have the patriarchal authority instituted and governed by God--and this is true in America today precisely because Christian men and Christian women have refused to serve as salt and light by embracing feminism and rejecting God's Word--patriarchy will return not as blessing but as scourge.
The pendulum will swing, and the power of its arc will be the anger and resentment of Western men reclaiming not the benign authority of submission to God's Word, but the evil capacity to destroy that is an inherently male consequence of the Fall.
The one great secular truth about the sexes that feminism dances around but never fully comes to grips with is this: women are nowhere near so good at destroying as men. Women nurture. Men, well, they play football... and rugby... and mixed martial arts, and they don't go onto the field or into the cage with women because, of course, it wouldn't be manly. It would be unfair to the girls.
In a word, men excel at destruction. Despite placing women in our fighter cockpits and behind the controls of our drones, and despite women marching in our infantry, when the order of the day is violence, men will be men.
When Western men finally throw off the skirts of feminism, the day may well be ushered in by a spasm of cultural violence and destruction. Why? Because, though women can fly drones and pilot jets, when it comes to cold-hearted, in-your-face violence, women can't compete. It's a simple fact.
Don't believe that Westerners still possess the capacity for such violence? Consider for a moment that, unlike the West, most Arab countries outlaw abortion, and that despite North America's declining ratio of medical abortions (a result of the increase in chemical abortions) the incidence of surgical abortions in North America is nearly double the rate of Muslim western Asia. Western men excel at killing. The less patriarchal the culture, the more coldly proficient the killing.
I don't suggest that the violence that ends feminism will necessarily be man against woman. After all, feminism has always been as much a male conceit as female. But it is distinctly possible, perhaps even probable, that the event that will mark the pendulum's turn against feminism will be a baptism of violence which makes manifest once again the truth of God's created order.
And if this is the Divine decree against the rebellion of man at the heart of feminism, Christians will bear a major portion of the blame. Every caviling "complementarian" along with every egalitarian "Evangelical" will bear responsibility for the reign of terror to come.
If we will not heed God in peace and prosperity, God will send destruction. Read Ezekiel 21 if you doubt this.
Scripture warns that because the daughters of Zion are haughty the day is coming when,
seven women
will take hold of one man
and say, “We will eat our own food
and provide our own clothes;
only let us be called by your name.
Take away our disgrace!”
Feminism will never hold. God forbid that we should experience its demise as Divine judgment on our sin. Far better to repent.
