For people who purport to love the family, some Christians sure aren’t making it easy to start them.
Samuel James put it this way:
If the sexes are set against each other in the wider culture, they are at open war in some segments of the church. James singles out two online personalities to represent the male and female factions.
James focuses on Michael Foster, a pastor who has built his online brand writing about masculinity and Sheila Gregoire a writer who, ostensibly, dispenses marriage and sex advice for women, but who has, in recent years, become ever more strident in her condemnation of “complementarianism”, which for our purposes can be understood loosely as the idea that men and women, though equal in value, have complementary roles in family life.
James goes on:
James is right to say the tensions between men and women in our culture pop up in the church and online Christian spaces through these particular personalities.
But, more than that is going on.
Foster and Gregoire and others aligned with their camps do not merely symbolize the palpable tension and alienation between men and women, they amplify it. They disseminate it. They normalize it. They perpetuate it.
Untold numbers of people are suffering now as relationships between the sexes follow the path of our ever degenerating culture. Influencers who build brands around telling their followers they are victims of the other side fan the flames of that hurt.
Foster and Gregoire do not create the pain that’s out there so much as they encourage their readers to adopt their pain as a lens through which to read all of reality, thereby increasing the isolation men and women experience from one another.
Foster and his lesser known protege, Eric Conn, often repeat the claim that leaders in the church are unwilling to condemn sins committed by women. Foster goes to great lengths to warn men of evil women coming into the church eager to lead otherwise virtuous young men astray. James links to this tweet, where Foster writes about women in the Church who betray their marriages with impunity.
Gregoire is worse. Where once she doled out very reasonable and balanced views on sex and marriage, Gregoire has adopted more and more the positions of liberal feminism just as those ideas are being replaced in the wider culture by other approaches like the reactionary feminism advocated by Mary Herrington. Gregoire’s Twitter and Facebook feeds, her blog and podcast are ever more devoted to mocking critiques of people she doesn’t like. Honestly, it’s embarassing to watch.
Though they appear to be divided by an unbridgeable gap, Foster and Gregoire are similar in one important way. Both are ideologues. Both believe listening to the other side is a betrayal of their own. What “listening” does happen is done without openness, and with an ear for any weakness in the opposing point of view that can be exploited in front of an online audience to score points, gain followers and increase influence.
To be fair, Foster has recently shown greater willingness to moderate his positions and to criticize the excesses of his own camp. I have seen no such willingness from Gregoire unless we count the apology she offered after the online chastening she received when she attempted a public take down of Nancy Pearcey, a much more nuanced and powerful thinker.
The tragedy of the situation is that while a lack of openness plays well online, any path out of our current impasse demands we cultivate precisely this neglected virtue.
My plea for openness at the expense of online applause is no mere call for beyondism or an insistence that the truth lies between the poles Foster and Gregoire inhabit. Rather, it is an assertion that in order to move relations between the sexes forward, we must transcend the combative positions these personalities advocate and the online world embraces. We need not go beyond as much as we must rise above to a vantage point where we can see the truths each side experiences.
Foster, for example, is right when he says patriarchy is inevitable, that men’s leadership and dominance in society are rooted in deep biological and psychological realities that we are not likely to alter. Gregoire is right when she says women are routinely abused in terrible ways wherever they are, including in the church. She is right when she says men, generally, are unmoved by their suffering and blame women for their own abuse in myriad subtle ways.
Christians who want to heal the divide between the sexes (or at least to make it hurt a little less) must begin listening to the truths each side is calling the other to hear. We must reckon with complicated questions almost no one is asking like “If patriarchy is a fixed reality, then why should we view the guilt of women’s sins as exclusively theirs rather than as shared by their patriarchal leader?” and “What special guilt does the widespread abuse of women lay upon men given men’s more powerful role in the patriarchy?”
It is in wrestling with these questions and finding the way to integrated, even if imperfectly balanced, answers that we will find a livable path. In short, Christians concerned about helping the sexes form mutually satisfying and enjoyable relationships must reject the team sports mentality that currently infects the discourse. We must advocate not for one side over the other, but for peace and love to triumph over both.
Foster’s claim that patriarchy is inevitable offers us a final lesson along these lines: it all depends on the men. If the tensions between the sexes are going to slacken, if trust is going to be rebuilt and the proper groundwork for healthy families relaid, men must start the process. Because of their higher levels of vulnerability and need to defend themselves, women cannot be expected to be the first to lay down their arms.
Men must seek peace preemptively. We are, after all, the leaders. Men in the patriachailist movement must show their strength by walking unarmed onto the battlefield and asking for an opportunity to negotiate.
What’s the worst that can happen?
The only things at risk of death are their egos and audiences, a small price to pay when the promise of a ceasefire portends so much a greater life for all. To bring an end to the current hostilities, men must embrace the paradox of patriarchy which means we must go first in all things including surrender.
The thing that seems missing from this article is, by what standard? It seems to me that before we can judge the teaching of any Christian teacher, we have to first make up our minds what scripture actually says on the issue. It doesn’t matter what our feelings are, and it doesn’t even really matter how the culture is, if we don’t first determine what scripture says.
Calling Michael Foster an "ideologue" is comical. Patriarchy comes from scripture not some man-made idea. This is a bad take altogether IMO. Foster is very willing to engage with others, but like a real man, doesn't get bogged down in endless controversy. No one in the patriarchy camp disregards the reality that men have a great temptation to be tyrants over women and children, so I really don't understand why there is a claim that the patriarchy side "isn't listening to the plights of women". When the plights are made up out of thin ear, then there is no need to listen. Douglas Wilson and Foster have frequently taught that men have responsibility over the sins of their family even though it may not be their fault. Lots of straw men here.