I once heard a passionate preacher decrying egalitarianism in modern Christianity declare at a conference in trumpet tones: “Feminism began in the church!”
He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Of all of the major cultural institutions, the one that has held out the longest against ideological feminism has been the church. Only over the last 30 years or so has sexual egalitarianism achieved a firm foothold in significant sectors of the church, though not in Eastern Orthodoxy and very little in Roman Catholicism. Women occupying prime church leadership roles or expounding the word during public worship have been the rarest of exceptions historically until recent decades. This is precisely why cultural progressives fling invectives at the church as the supreme retrograde institution barring the way to unmitigated sexual equality. And they are right: until relatively recently the church has been the prime institutional barrier to the mad social egalitarian rush.
Feminism has roots in the historic Genesis 3 Fall, but its proximate genesis is often located in the ideological progressivism of the 1960s. Like all ideologies, it began in Leftist university faculties and subsequently filtered down to the wider culture via college students and the entertainment industry and publications like Playboy and Playgirl.
But its historic roots are deeper. Egalitarianism as a social vision began in earnest during the French Revolution with its aversion to social hierarchies — though of course, the hierarchy of the revolutionaries over everybody else was granted a notable exception. No political school has carried forward the French Revolutionary vision more widely and effectively than Marxism, and the Marxists have been happy to ally with feminism to meet their hierarchy-crushing objectives. The most foundational of social hierarchies is the family, so the family itself must be reengineered and, if necessary, pulverized. This is what the most consistent application of feminism does to the family. The wife must not be subject to the husband, and the husband must not be bound to the wife.
To say the culture embraced sexual egalitarianism because the church started it is to have things precisely backwards. Most of the failures and vices of the church are due to its accommodation to the surrounding culture.
Sexual egalitarianism is the fruit of radical cultural secularization launched full scale during the French Revolution and transmitted to Western culture everywhere. Asia and Africa have been less affected until recent years, with their gradual capitulation to Western influence.
In short: sexual egalitarianism is first and fundamentally a cultural phenomenon.
The Ecclesiocentric Error
This historically verifiable explanation doesn’t sit well with ecclesioentrists, defined as Christians (usually church and seminary leaders) who see the church in its institutional and liturgical dimensions as the chief conduit and conveyor of God‘s work in the world. By institutional dimension, I mean the church in its concrete existence and operation under the authority of its leaders. By liturgical dimension, I mean the church as it meets on the Lord’s Day and its sequence of public worship.
Ecclesiocentrists tend to blame the church for all cultural evils because it’s the basic cultural institution. They’re convinced that just as she is ultimately responsible for all cultural virtues, the church is also responsible for all its evils. Since the church is the center of everything, if there is evil, the church must be responsible.
This is to assign too much credit and blame to the church. The church is vital. Christ died for the church, when it is defined as his redeemed people. But the institutional and liturgical dimensions of the church are simply aspects, albeit vital, of God‘s work in the world among several. The church is not the kingdom of God. The kingdom is wider than the church.
This means likely most evil in the world is not due to the failure of the church, though certainly some of it is. To say (for example) that the culture embraced sexual egalitarianism because the church started it is to have things precisely backwards. Most of the failures and vices of the church are due to its accommodation to the surrounding culture.
This began with the old covenant church, Israel. Again and again God warned the Jews when they entered Canaan not to adopt the practices and ideas of the nations surrounding them. They later apostatized precisely because they disobeyed this command. God eventually sold his covenant people into exile because of her unrepentant worldliness. Surrounding Canaanite cultures did not become evil because Israel did. Vice versa.
As ecclesiocentric view of the relation between church and culture can reinforce the church’s irresponsibility because it tends to assume that if the church only gets its act together, the culture will eventually get its act together. This is well-intentioned but self-flattering deception. If the church (when defined as the people of God) refuses to extend the kingdom in the world, the church will constantly be fighting worldliness at its front doors. The church will always be playing defense if the kingdom is not its priority. Yes, it is possible for the Church to remain substantially pure for a time as the surrounding culture grows in increasingly evil. In the end, of course, the worldly culture will win if the church persists in its insular irresponsibility.
Conclusion
The only way for the church to maintain long-term purity is to also and equally and simultaneously exercise long-term kingdom responsibility, which means working to bring every area of life and thought and culture under the authority of King Jesus. Church purity and liturgical renewal will not suffice — and historically they have never sufficed.
To borrow from and slightly revise the neopagan Billy Joel, the church didn’t start the fire. But the church can help extinguish the apostate fire by claiming all of culture for Christ the King.✞
More great stuff
The Center for Cultural Leadership site is here.
My Amazon author page (print and digital) is here.
My I-Tunes sermons, lectures and podcasts are here.
You can find my sermons and lectures at my YouTube channel.
Sign up to get my blog updates here.
Here’s my Twitter feed.
If you want to get the free exclusive hard copy publication Christian Culture, please send me a Facebook private message.
The CCL phone number is 831-420-7230.
The mailing address is:
Center for Cultural Leadership
P. O. Box 100
Coulterville, CA 95311
