Digging deeper into the “Christian” origins of feminism and of our nation

The current debate over the Christian origins of feminism is a lot like the one over the Christian origins of America. It is argued that the Founders of America and the “first wave” feminists were mostly good Christian gentlemen and good Christian ladies, that they sought inspiration from the Christian Scriptures, and that, therefore, their ideas were essentially Christian, or at least compatible with it.

In each case, too, Christianity was recovering something that had been lost to it through corruptions of the past. Reason and natural law had returned after a centuries-long banishment under voluntarism and its arbitrary power. Indeed, the founding feminist anticipated Benedict XVI’s call to redeem reason, no less. Equality and freedom, too—both central to Christianity—were making a kind of debut, at least as politically instantiated.¹ If there were blind spots, like slavery or a long-time romantic alliance with an anti-monogamist (as was the case with the first feminist), those were moral failings, which do not necessarily incriminate the substance of the vision (which is, of course, true). If there were subsequent developments, be it the Progressive Era, the “New Deal,” feminism’s second “wave” (abortion), or its third (transgenderism), these were corruptions of a mostly Christian ideal.

In short, a golden (Christian) age at dawn guarantees and justifies an evening celebration (with fireworks).

This account, however, is a bit naïve and misleading. Public association with Christian belief, whether one believes it or not, can—and among many early modern thinkers mostly did—go along with and even justify opposition to Christianity: most significantly, to the metaphysical universe it had assumed and deepened, the one created in the Logos and imbued with it. Indeed, Descartes justified his revolt against that universe on the grounds that its logos-rich concept of nature “usurped” divine power. Most other leading early modern thinkers framed their new theories in Christian terms and biblical proof-texts.

Think, for example, of the mysterious visitors to Bacon’s “New Atlantis” bearing the four Gospels twenty years before they were written, a “miracle” verified by the scientists (!), whose new science was now divinely mandated, as a matter of Christian hope and charity (the “relief of man’s estate”). Think of Locke’s recourse to the fatherless Adam of Genesis to justify his understanding of freedom as ordering ones’ actions, and disposing of one’s possessions and person, as one thinks fit, within the bounds of the law of nature—respecting the rights and property of others, that is—without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

In the case of the American revolutionaries, it is much the same. Gordon Wood, one of the most authoritative historians of the American Revolution, notes that few, if any, of the founders at the time of the Revolution put any stock in Christianity, even if they were publicly affiliated with it. More to the point, the “God” preached in the tents of the Great Awakening had, by the time of the Revolution, become something the “awakened” would not have even recognized (understandably, perhaps, given how “angry” he has been). Jefferson famously quipped: “there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.”²

In his book, Nature’s God, Matthew Stewart—not an entirely impartial observer of history, mind you—provides a detailed historical account of just how far-reaching were the alternate accounts of God (both deistic and pantheistic) at that time in America, and not only in the libraries of the most eminent Founders, but in the tomes of backwoods farmers. Ethan Allen, of Fort Ticonderoga fame, managed to write a 400-page Spinoza-inspired tome.³ Even when the following generation turned (back) to evangelical Christianity, much to the chagrin of the Founders, belief had been so congregationalized that people felt themselves to be “wholly free to examine for themselves what is truth, without being bound to a catechism, creed, confession of faith, discipline or any rule excepting the scriptures,” as one Baptist pamphleteer wrote.

As Wood says, the mantle of a popular (and now metaphorized) Christianity was wrapped around the republican cause, its political instantiation. In short, as Michael Hanby writes: “[G]eneric references [by our wishful-thinking contemporaries] to ‘Christianity’ and the abstract ‘Judeo-Christian heritage’ conceal the historical fact that ‘Christianity’ and ‘God’ were highly contested terms everywhere in the eighteenth century and especially in colonial America.”⁴ They conceal, too, that the “nature” made in “God’s” image had undergone the “early modern revolution in metaphysics and natural philosophy,” cleansed thereby of all logos. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin, who founded the American Philosophical Society, dedicated it to the pursuit of “useful knowledge”—the new science—precisely on these new grounds, emptied of form and finality. And even if you were the odd believer in some form of the God of Christianity (unlike Franklin), you were still standing on the new god-forsaken ground.

The “Christianity” of the early feminists is much the same. The historian of feminism, Débora Luciano, author of the recently published Autópsia do Feminismo, writes concerning the foremother of feminism:

[Mary Wollstonecraft] belongs, fully and consciously, to the intellectual horizon that Benedict XVI identifies as the site of the gradual erosion of the Logos. Her understanding of nature, her theology, her anthropology, and her political proposals unfold within the conceptual architecture forged by Protestant reform, Whig constitutionalism, and the transformation of lex naturalis into natural rights.

It could hardly have been otherwise, for Wollstonecraft belonged to an enlightened intellectual circle frequented by the free-thinkers of the day, at the center of which was the publisher Joseph Johnson, her mentor Richard Price, and Joseph Priestly—all unitarian, rationalist, and Pelagian in orientation. American Founders Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin were frequent guests at their table.

One thing all these had in common was their enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft herself wrote two treatises defending it (though not its violence). The French Revolution relieved the French from the “dark traditions,” “superstition,” “barbarism,” “blind persuasion,” and “ignorance” of the Roman Church. Moreover, freedom from the “strongholds of priestcraft” was the condition for the “fresh spring to [man’s] reasoning powers,” the pursuit of moral excellence, and equality. Indeed, the appeal to being “in God’s image” justified freedom from those “strongholds” and established a reason free from their “fables,” beginning with original sin.

A cursory glance at the first few chapters of Genesis would show any reader that “god-likeness” can go in two directions. One can be “like God” as a son and daughter, with God (and the Son who mediates him to the world through his Bride), or as a fatherless orphan, without him. The rejection of the incarnate, sacramental presence of Christ in the Church, if not the rejection of the Incarnation itself—the birth of the Son of God to the Virgin Mary—was a consistent theme in early feminism, as it was generally in the radical intellectual and theological milieu of the time. The result, naturally enough, was a Woman’s Bible which was, like the Church and miracle-free Jefferson Bible, purged of all supposed “corruptions,” including, now, its teaching about the “inferiority of women.”

The newer (disincarnate, if not also anti-Trinitarian) conceptions of God that were in the air could not but have had an effect on the conception of everything else. Thus, even if cloaked in the language of Christianity and the classical tradition Christianity had taken up, concepts such as “nature,” “rights,” “reason,” “freedom,” “equality,” “image of God,” “man,” “man and woman,” and the “virtues” that make men and women become more so, had all become shadows of their former selves, as Alisdair MacIntyre told us.⁶ They were old wine skins containing new wine (and not, to be clear, the wine of Christ). It would have been a miracle had it been otherwise. And there were no miracles at the time.

Most relevant is the entirely new concept of “nature” on which the concepts of “natural law,” freedom, and equality depended (if not everything else). As Pierre Manent puts it, “nature” had been downgraded to a logos-less “unit of life,” defined by separation.⁷ This means that the human “units” were free precisely because they had no inherent binding characteristics to the other “units,” and equal because they were identical (and interchangeable). This did not mean that “units” could not unite. They could, and they would. But they would do so only on the new contractual and egalitarian grounds. As Jay Fliegelman notes in his book on the American Revolution, Prodigals and Pilgrims, early Americans were adamant about marriage precisely because it was a purely voluntary (contractual) union. In short, the new “units” were free and equal because they were by nature—metaphysically—indifferent to each other.

Indeed, so much did “equality” mean separation that Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence stated: “all men are created free and independent.” Three decades later, when Tocqueville observed the central place of equality in the New World, he noted the tendency towards pantheism (both religious and otherwise), where things were separate in a different sense, in that there were no relations between distinct things, all differences having been levelled, between God and the creature as between creatures themselves.⁸

When it comes to early feminism, one does not have to think that its projects were totally depraved simply because its representatives were living in the New Atlantis, drinking its new wine at table with its strongest proponents. There can be no quarrel with attempts to advance the education of upper-middle-class women, who had been abandoned to the frivolousness and coquettishness typical of the cramped confines of English society of the time. Wollstonecraft and her less radical, evangelical contemporary, Hannah More, did much in this regard. (Though, to be clear, they did not invent the education of women.) But given the metaphysical and ecclesial confines of the time, it was virtually impossible to think out the relation between men and women in any other terms than “pantheistic,” un-sexed ones, since difference signaled superiority and inferiority. Living for centuries without Our Lady (of Walsingham) and the whole Marian dimension of the Church in England, the “sign of the woman”—and her blessed womb as the condition sine qua non for bearing God into the world—accentuated a one-sidedly “masculine” family and Church, contributing much to this state of the mind, as Walter Ong⁹ and Christopher Dawson¹⁰ explained.

In the end, what is at stake in this question is what women today want to find in the golden age of feminism to justify their feminism. After all, women face no legal barriers to anything (the voting booth, graduate school, military academies, etc.). Essentially, the current Christian feminism comes down to a new way of talking about and approaching the remaining natural “barriers” to the equality of women. Not abortion, of course, but the distinct demands the baby places on the (pro-life) mother, especially after it is born.

Young Christian women would now be pushed along the (still) one correct path toward goals (still) incompatible with those demands, with the help of the newly baptized anti-sex discrimination regime that exists to guarantee women’s “success.” It means accepting the newly invented “care” ̶ “work” binary, which imagines a past in which women did not work, and men did not care, but now both do (or should). And that means, that instead of doing different things for each other at the same time, together, as an expression of what makes them necessary to each other in the first place, men and women will (or should), ideally, divvy up what are now generic care-giving functions, taking turns doing the same things, in the way any two adults—any two equal units, defined by separation—could and should.

It means thinking of motherhood and fatherhood in stacked terms, where being a mother or a father is “one aspect of life,” below the “aspect” of being human, as opposed to a distinct manner of living the whole of their humanity together. It means, worst of all, a failure to grasp the equality of dignity in difference, grounded in the God of creation himself. And that is because it fails to extract itself from a movement at the center of which, beneath all of its many “waves,” is, as Débora Luciano put it recently, a “metaphysics of revolt … [a refusal of] incarnation, and ultimately of creation itself.”¹¹

This 250th year of U.S. independence is an excellent occasion for Christians, especially Catholics, to consider the values central to the American identity, especially freedom and equality. We should be sober about the daylight between the Christian account of these and the latter-day, all-American ones. We should plumb the roots of these ideas—the ones that go deeper than those in the minds of the Founders, or of the “first wave” feminists. In doing so, we will find a freedom that is a being “from,” rather than a “with,” and “for.”

We will also find an equality that is richer than uniform indifference. Rooted in the Christian God and his mediation to man through the Incarnate Son and his Church—extended in time through the priesthood and the laity—Christians will re-discover an equality of distinct modes of being and acting in the world, which relate the two to each other. As Hans Urs Balthasar wrote:

The Catholic Church is perhaps humanity’s last bulwark of genuine appreciation of the difference between the sexes. In the dogma of the Trinity, the Persons must be equal in dignity in order to safeguard the distinction that makes the triune God subsistent love; in a similar way the Church stresses the equal dignity of man and woman, so that the extreme oppositeness of their functions may guarantee the spiritual and physical fruitfulness of human nature. Every encroachment of one sex into the role of the other narrows the range and dynamics of humanly possible love even when this range transcends the sphere of sexuality, birth and death and achieves the level of the virginal relationship between Christ and his Church.¹²

Edith Stein, one of the most profound thinkers on women, is an example of just this deep thinking, when she distanced the “Catholic Women’s Movement,” to which she belonged, from the “middle-class feminist movement” of her time. Said Stein:

It should not be forgotten that the latter [middle class movement] developed on a foundation foreign to us…. The Catholic Women’s Movement must rest on its own foundation, the foundation of faith and a Catholic world view which is well thought out in all its consequences.

By resting on their own foundation, Catholic Christians, far from standing aloof from their country, or time, will be more in it, because they have something not of it.

(Note: This essay was posted originally on the “What We Need Now” site and is published here with kind permission.)

Endnotes

¹ See Robert Reilly, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020), 248.

² In his 1822 letter to Benjamin Waterhouse (Writings, 1458-9), Jefferson wrote: “I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.”