Feminism's War on Scripture

Not Indifference but Hostility

It is sometimes suggested that feminism is simply a secular movement that happens to disagree with Christianity on certain points—a parallel track that occasionally intersects with the faith. This is profoundly mistaken. From its earliest intellectual architects, feminism has not merely diverged from biblical Christianity; it has targeted the Bible, the God of the Bible, and the biblical vision of manhood and womanhood with deliberate and explicit hostility.

In this lesson, we will let feminism's most influential thinkers speak for themselves. We are not constructing a caricature. We are reading their own words, published in their own books, celebrated by their own movement. When we understand what the architects of feminism actually believed about Scripture and the Christian faith, we can no longer treat feminism as a neutral conversation partner.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and The Woman's Bible

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) is remembered primarily as a suffragist, but her most revealing work was not about voting—it was about Scripture. In 1895, she published The Woman's Bible, a systematic commentary on every passage in the Bible that references women. Her goal was explicit: to demonstrate that the Bible was the single greatest obstacle to women's emancipation and must be stripped of its authority.

Stanton wrote in the introduction to The Woman's Bible that she believed the Bible had been used "to hold women in a divinely ordained sphere" and that as long as women accepted biblical authority, they would never achieve full liberation. She did not argue that the Bible had been misinterpreted; she argued that the Bible itself was the problem.

Stanton openly rejected the divine inspiration of Scripture. She regarded the Bible as a human document reflecting the patriarchal biases of its authors, and she insisted that women must free themselves from its moral claims in order to achieve autonomy. She argued that religious superstition was the primary chain binding women and that the church was woman's worst enemy.

Simone de Beauvoir: Existentialism Against Creation

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) is widely regarded as the founding text of modern feminism. Her famous declaration—"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"—is the philosophical seed from which contemporary gender theory grew.

De Beauvoir was an avowed atheist. Her entire philosophical framework rests on the existentialist conviction that there is no God, no human nature, and no given purpose. Existence precedes essence—meaning human beings are not created with a nature or a telos but must create their own meaning through radical freedom. Applied to womanhood, this means there is no such thing as a woman's "nature" or "calling"—these are constructs imposed by society (and specifically by religion) to limit women's freedom.

De Beauvoir explicitly identified Christianity as one of the primary tools men had used to enforce women's subordination. In The Second Sex, she argued that the Christian teaching that woman was created from man and for man (Genesis 2) provided the ideological justification for millennia of oppression. She framed the Christian concepts of feminine virtue—modesty, submission, self-sacrifice, maternal devotion—as a prison designed to keep women in servitude while convincing them to love their chains.

De Beauvoir's importance cannot be overstated. She provided the philosophical architecture—atheist, existentialist, anti-essentialist—on which all subsequent feminist theory has been built. When contemporary feminists insist that gender is a social construct, they are speaking the language de Beauvoir invented. And that language was forged in explicit rejection of the Creator.

Betty Friedan: Motherhood as the Problem

Betty Friedan (1921–2006) was not primarily a philosopher but a journalist and activist whose The Feminine Mystique (1963) transformed American culture. The book's argument was straightforward and devastating: the American ideal of the happy housewife and devoted mother was a lie—"the problem that has no name"—that left millions of educated women trapped in lives of quiet desperation.

Friedan described the home as a "comfortable concentration camp" and argued that women who devoted themselves primarily to homemaking and child-rearing were wasting their potential and living beneath their dignity. The book explicitly targeted the post-war cultural vision that a woman's highest fulfillment came through marriage and motherhood.

While Friedan was less explicitly anti-religious than some of her successors, her assault was no less devastating to the biblical vision. The Scriptures present motherhood as a calling of profound dignity and eternal significance. Friedan reframed it as a trap. The Scriptures present the home as a sphere of meaningful work and kingdom impact. Friedan reframed it as a prison. The Scriptures call children a blessing and a heritage from the Lord. Friedan treated them as the mechanism by which women's true potential was suppressed.

Mary Daly: Killing the Father-God

Mary Daly (1928–2010) is perhaps the most explicit example of feminism's war on the Christian faith, because she began inside the church and deliberately walked out. Daly was a Catholic theologian who earned doctorates in theology and philosophy and taught at Boston College for over thirty years.

Her intellectual journey traces the logic of feminist theology to its conclusion. In her early work, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), Daly argued for reform within Christianity—updating the church's treatment of women while retaining its basic framework. But by Beyond God the Father (1973), she had concluded that reform was impossible. The problem was not how the church treated women; the problem was God Himself— or rather, the maleness of God.

Daly argued that the Christian concept of God as Father was not merely metaphorical but was the foundational justification for patriarchy. Her famous formulation was unapologetic: "If God is male, then the male is God." She insisted that as long as the deity was conceived as Father, King, and Lord, male authority would be treated as sacred and women would be subordinate. The solution was not better theology but the abolition of the Father-God entirely.

In her later works, Daly abandoned Christianity altogether, describing herself as a "post-Christian feminist" and developing a neo-pagan spirituality centered on goddess worship and what she called the "metapatriarchal journey" of women freeing themselves from all male religious constructs. She called for women to move beyond the "Christolatry" of the church and to recognize that the entire Christian tradition was irredeemably patriarchal.

Shulamith Firestone: Abolishing the Family

Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012) was a radical feminist whose The Dialectic of Sex (1970) stands as one of the most extreme—and most logically consistent—works in feminist thought. Firestone adapted Marx's class analysis to gender, arguing that the most fundamental class division in human history was not between bourgeoisie and proletariat but between male and female, and that this division was rooted in biology itself.

For Firestone, the biological capacity for pregnancy and nursing was not a gift but a curse—the ultimate source of women's oppression. Her proposed solution was breathtaking in its radicalism: the complete abolition of the biological family. She envisioned a future in which reproduction would be accomplished through artificial means, children would be raised collectively rather than by parents, and the very categories of "mother" and "father" would disappear.

Firestone also called for the elimination of the incest taboo and the abolition of childhood as a distinct category, arguing that age-based distinctions were another form of oppression. The family, in her vision, was not merely flawed but was the fundamental unit of oppression that had to be dismantled entirely.

What God calls His first blessing on humanity—fruitfulness, family, the bond between parents and children—Firestone calls the root of all oppression. The contrast could not be more absolute.

Gloria Steinem: Human Potential Over God

Gloria Steinem (b. 1934) is arguably the most culturally influential American feminist, co-founder of Ms. magazine and a tireless activist for over half a century. While less philosophically systematic than de Beauvoir or Daly, Steinem's cultural impact has been enormous, and her views on religion are revealing.

Steinem has spoken openly about her hope that future generations would be raised to believe in human potential rather than in God. She has consistently framed organized religion—and Christianity in particular— as inherently patriarchal and therefore inherently oppressive to women. For Steinem, the liberation of women requires not merely the reform of religion but the replacement of theistic belief with a humanist faith in human capability.

Steinem also championed abortion rights as the cornerstone of women's freedom, arguing that without complete reproductive autonomy, no other rights mattered. She framed opposition to abortion as fundamentally about controlling women's bodies rather than about protecting unborn life—a framing that has become standard in feminist discourse.

Judith Butler: Erasing Creation

Judith Butler (b. 1956) is the most influential living feminist philosopher, and their work represents the culmination of the trajectory we have traced. In Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler argued that not only gender but biological sex itself is a social construct—that the categories of "male" and "female" are not natural facts but products of cultural discourse.

Butler's theory of gender performativity holds that gender is not something you are but something you do—a series of repeated performances that create the illusion of a stable identity. There is no "true self" behind the performance, no created nature that defines what a man or woman is. Identity is radically fluid, self-constructed, and liberated from any biological or theological constraint.

This is the direct antithesis of Genesis 1:27: "Male and female He created them." Butler's project is, at its philosophical core, the denial that human beings have a created nature. If there is no Creator, there is no creation order. If there is no creation order, there is no given nature. If there is no given nature, then sex, gender, family, and every other category are human inventions that can be reinvented at will.

The Pattern Revealed

When we step back and view these thinkers together, a clear pattern emerges. Feminism's intellectual leaders have not stumbled into conflict with Christianity by accident. They have identified the Bible, the God of the Bible, the family as God designed it, and the created distinction between male and female as the specific targets that must be dismantled for their vision of liberation to succeed.

Stanton attacked the authority of Scripture. De Beauvoir denied the existence of the Creator. Friedan redefined motherhood as bondage. Daly demanded the death of the Father-God. Firestone called for the abolition of the family. Steinem championed human potential over divine authority. Butler erased the categories of creation itself.

This is not a coincidence. It is the logical outworking of a single foundational commitment: the autonomous self, answerable to no authority beyond its own will, is the measure of all things. When that commitment encounters a God who says "I made you, I define you, I have a purpose for you"—it must either submit or rebel. Feminism's intellectual tradition has chosen rebellion, consciously and articulately.

The cry of feminism's intellectual architects—"Let us burst their bonds apart"—is not new. It is the oldest human impulse: the desire to be free from the authority of the One who made us. Understanding this helps us engage feminism not merely as a political movement but as a spiritual reality—and to respond with the only thing that can truly liberate: the truth.