Evangelicals & the Revolution Against Motherhood
Sometimes your attention is arrested and causes you to stir and write, so today is one such day. I have recently returned from a glorious trip to Sydney, Australia, where I completed my eighth Abbott World Major Marathon. Apparently, I am coming down with a slight (hopefully it stays slight) cold and was listening in bed this morning to the latest development in the Lindsay Clancy trial and was struck by how the Clancy case just epitomizes all that is wrong with Feminism, as is the case when a subject ventures into the classification of an "ism."
As I stated in my last blog, I have begun a grueling pursuit of my PhD at my alma mater, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I know my latest blogs have been voluminous tomes, so I have decided to break this blog into two parts. This will allow me to spend most of my time on my studies while still doing what I love and believe I am called and gifted to do: produce Evangelical-centered blogs and videos that glorify God, make much of His name known, and edify His people.
Motherhood is under direct assault, and we see this playing out in various ways, subtle and not so subtle. Sometimes a culture reveals what it truly believes not through its slogans, but through the assumptions it has gradually learned to accept.
For more than half a century, Radical Feminism has promised women liberation. It promised freedom from restrictive roles, freedom from male authority, freedom from the expectations of marriage and motherhood, and, most significantly, freedom to determine whether the life developing within the womb would be permitted to continue.
Much of what the early feminist revolution demanded has now become so embedded within American culture that its assumptions are rarely identified as ideological at all. Personal autonomy has become sacred. Motherhood has increasingly been treated not as an extraordinary vocation worthy of honor, but as one possibility among many—and often as an obstacle that must be scheduled, postponed, technologically controlled, or terminated when it conflicts with the individual's plans.
Three very different women illuminate different dimensions of this cultural transformation: Gloria Steinem, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Lindsay Clancy.
They should not be morally equated with one another. They occupy radically different circumstances, and it would be irresponsible to suggest that Feminism somehow caused the horrific events surrounding Lindsay Clancy.
But considered carefully, they allow us to ask a much larger question:
What happens to a civilization when motherhood is gradually detached from sacrifice, obligation, biological reality, and the transcendent value of human life?
Gloria Steinem and the Gospel of Autonomy
Few individuals did more to popularize modern American Feminism than Gloria Steinem.
Steinem's importance extends far beyond any particular policy position. She helped popularize a different understanding of female liberation: the conviction that women could not truly be free unless they had ultimate authority over reproduction.
Her own account of abortion illustrates the worldview with remarkable clarity.
Reflecting upon an abortion she obtained as a young woman, Steinem said that it allowed her to “live my own life.” She explained that without it she would have faced responsibility for raising a child and that her life would have been profoundly different.
That statement deserves careful consideration because it captures the philosophical heart of the abortion revolution.
The fundamental question is no longer merely whether abortion should be legally permissible.
The deeper question is this:
Whose life takes precedence when another human life interferes with the life we have imagined for ourselves?
Evangelical Christianity begins from almost the opposite premise.
Evangelical Christianity teaches that human flourishing is often discovered not by escaping obligation but by embracing it.
Christ tells His disciples:
“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”— Matthew 16:24
The Evangelical Christian life therefore cannot be constructed around the absolute sovereignty of the self.
Marriage requires sacrifice.
Fatherhood requires sacrifice.
Motherhood requires sacrifice.
Discipleship itself requires sacrifice.
Yet modern Western culture has increasingly embraced an anthropology in which freedom means the ability to eliminate obligations that interfere with personal self-determination.
Abortion consequently became more than a medical procedure.
It became a sacrament of autonomy.
When Motherhood Becomes an Instrument of Personal Choice
The Feminist Revolution certainly corrected genuine injustices. Women deserved protection from discrimination, access to education, protection from abusive husbands, equal dignity before the law, and recognition of their intellectual and professional abilities.
Evangelical Christians need not deny those accomplishments in order to recognize that another movement was occurring simultaneously.
The liberation of women gradually became confused with liberation from the biological realities of being women.
Pregnancy could be prevented chemically.
Pregnancy could be terminated surgically.
Fertility could be postponed.
Embryos could be created in laboratories.
Eggs could be frozen for future use.
Motherhood could increasingly be fitted around the timetable of personal ambition rather than personal ambition being ordered around marriage, family, and the responsibilities created by human reproduction.
Technology did not create this worldview.
Technology merely gave us increasingly powerful mechanisms for exercising it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Feminism's New Generation
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents a generation far removed from the Feminism of the 1960s, yet much of the underlying philosophy remains strikingly familiar.
Her language concerning abortion is especially revealing.
Discussing what she regards as the oppressive effects of patriarchy, Ocasio-Cortez argued that abortion does not merely affect women. She stated that for almost every woman receiving an abortion, there is also a man who has been affected or “liberated by that abortion too.”
Consider the significance of that word. Liberated.
Liberated from what?
Ultimately, from the obligations created by the existence of another human being.
The father is liberated from fatherhood.
The mother is liberated from motherhood.
The couple is liberated from responsibility.
And the unborn child pays the price for everyone else's liberation.
That represents a fundamental inversion of the Evangelical Christian understanding of freedom.
Scripture never defines freedom as freedom from responsibility toward others.
Instead:
“For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.”— Galatians 5:13
Evangelical Christian liberty leads toward service.
Modern expressive individualism frequently defines liberty as escape from obligation.
Those are profoundly different visions of human existence.
The Egg-Freezing Generation
The cultural evolution becomes even more interesting when considering Ocasio-Cortez's recent public discussion of freezing her eggs.
In August 2026, she publicly documented undergoing the process of preserving her fertility. She explained that freezing her eggs was a choice that allowed her to feel “more in control of my life.”
There is nothing inherently immoral about a woman receiving legitimate medical treatment or addressing fertility concerns, and Christians should resist the temptation to manufacture moral condemnation where Scripture provides none.
But the language is culturally revealing.
Again we encounter the central aspiration of modernity: control.
Control fertility.
Control timing.
Control pregnancy.
Control whether pregnancy continues.
Control when motherhood begins.
The irony is enormous.
A movement that spent generations insisting biology should not determine a woman's destiny increasingly relies upon extraordinary technological intervention because biology nevertheless continues imposing realities that ideology cannot repeal.
The biological clock remains stubbornly indifferent to political theory.
Human beings may manipulate nature.
We cannot abolish it.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”— Genesis 1:27
Evangelical Christianity does not regard sexual difference as an oppressive social construction from which humanity requires liberation.
It regards male and female as part of God's created order.
Then We Come to Lindsay Clancy
And here enormous caution is necessary.
Lindsay Clancy should not become a political prop.
She is currently standing trial in Massachusetts over the deaths of her three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan. She does not dispute that she killed them. Her defense argues that she suffered from postpartum psychosis so severe that she was not criminally responsible for her actions, while prosecutors contend that she understood what she was doing and acted deliberately. As of September 4, 2026, jurors remain unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
Christians should therefore resist declaring what was happening inside her mind when even a jury hearing weeks of expert testimony is struggling with precisely that question.
Mental illness is real.
Postpartum psychosis is real.
Human beings suffering profound psychiatric disorders require compassion and competent medical treatment.
Nothing about those truths threatens the Evangelical Christian worldview.
But the cultural conversation surrounding cases such as Clancy's raises another legitimate question.
How does our civilization understand motherhood itself?
The death of three children is first and foremost an almost unimaginable human tragedy.
Yet contemporary discussion can become so focused upon the experience, suffering, intentions, psychological condition, autonomy, and circumstances of the adult that the children themselves almost disappear from the moral frame.
Cora was five.
Dawson was three.
Callan was eight months old.
Whatever conclusion the jury ultimately reaches regarding their mother's criminal responsibility, three children are dead.
Evangelical Christian compassion does not require choosing between concern for a mentally ill mother and concern for her children.
We can possess both.
Indeed, Evangelical Christianity demands both.
Children Are Not Accessories to Adult Fulfillment
One of the most destructive developments in modern Western culture has been the gradual transformation of children from blessings received into lifestyle decisions managed.
Scripture speaks very differently.
“Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.”— Psalm 127:3
Notice the vocabulary.
Heritage.
Fruit.
Reward.
The biblical authors inhabited a moral universe almost incomprehensible to a society that regularly speaks of pregnancy in terms of inconvenience, timing, economics, career disruption, personal readiness, and lifestyle compatibility.
None of those considerations are imaginary.
Children cost money.
Children interrupt sleep.
Children alter careers.
Children restrict mobility.
Children demand enormous amounts of time.
That has always been true.
What changed was not children.
What changed was our definition of the good life.
Once personal autonomy becomes our highest value, motherhood inevitably becomes problematic because motherhood represents one of the most dramatic limitations upon personal autonomy imaginable.
A newborn does not care about your schedule.
A toddler does not respect your career objectives.
A sick child does not consult your five-year plan.
Parenthood requires the individual to subordinate enormous portions of his or her life to someone completely dependent upon them.
And Evangelical Christianity says something astonishing:
That sacrifice is not necessarily oppression.
It can be love.
Radical Feminism Misdiagnosed the Problem
The great error of radical feminism was not recognizing that women sometimes suffered injustice.
They did.
The error was locating the ultimate enemy in hierarchy, biological difference, traditional family structures, and obligations arising from motherhood.
Evangelical Christianity identifies a much deeper enemy: Sin.
Men abuse authority because they are sinners.
Women misuse freedom because they are sinners.
Husbands can become tyrants.
Wives can become selfish.
Fathers can abandon children.
Mothers can reject their responsibilities.
No rearrangement of social power eliminates the depravity of the human heart.
The Evangelical Christian answer, therefore, was never male domination.
Nor is the answer female domination.
The answer is redeemed men and women submitting themselves to Jesus Christ.
“Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.”— Ephesians 5:21
The biblical vision of family does not tell men that women exist for their gratification.
It commands husbands:
“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.”— Ephesians 5:25
That is not permission for male tyranny.
It is a command for male sacrifice.
The husband is commanded to model the crucified Christ.
The wife is not property.
The husband is not sovereign.
Only Christ is.
Feminism's Greatest Paradox
Perhaps the greatest irony of modern feminism is that a movement claiming to elevate women increasingly seems uncomfortable with the biological capacities that distinguish women most dramatically from men.
Pregnancy becomes something requiring liberation from.
Motherhood becomes something to postpone.
Fertility becomes something to technologically manage.
Sex differences become increasingly controversial.
Even the definition of the word woman has become politically contested.
Yet none of this appears to have produced a civilization particularly comfortable with womanhood.
The Christian worldview offers something radically different.
A woman's dignity does not depend upon becoming more like a man.
Her dignity existed before feminism.
It existed before the American republic.
It existed before modern political movements.
It originates with her Creator.
“Male and female created he them; and blessed them.”— Genesis 5:2
Women do not require ideological liberation from womanhood.
They require redemption from sin—the same redemption required by men.
The Question Evangelicals Must Ask
The question confronting Evangelicals is larger than whether we approve of Gloria Steinem or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
It is whether we have unconsciously accepted their fundamental anthropology.
Have we begun believing that personal fulfillment is the highest good?
Have we accepted that children should arrive only when they complement our plans?
Have we begun treating marriage primarily as an arrangement for individual happiness rather than a covenant?
Have we confused freedom with the absence of obligation?
Have we allowed the language of autonomy to replace the language of sacrifice?
Because if we have, then the feminist revolution has influenced the Church far more profoundly than we realize.
The Church does not answer Radical Feminism by despising women, but we do not shrink back from calling Balls & Strikes as best we understand them, all with fear & trembling.
We answer Radical Feminism by recovering a biblical theology of womanhood, manhood, marriage, children, sacrifice, responsibility, and human dignity.
We must teach our daughters that motherhood is not beneath them.
We must teach our sons that fatherhood is not optional once they create children.
We must teach both that sexuality creates obligations extending beyond personal pleasure.
We must teach husbands to sacrifice.
We must teach wives to honor God's design.
We must defend mothers experiencing genuine mental illness without erasing the humanity of their children.
And above everything else, we must reject the ancient lie that freedom is discovered by placing the sovereign self at the center of existence.
The Evangelical Christian message is far more demanding.
And ultimately far more beautiful.
“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.”— Luke 9:24
Radical Feminism promised liberation by freeing women from the expectations that once constrained them.
Jesus Christ offers something different.
He calls men and women alike to die to themselves.
In the economy of the Kingdom, greatness is found in service, freedom in obedience, love in sacrifice, and life itself through surrender to Christ.
That is the revolution our culture actually needs. I need to break here and get some needed tasks scheduled for today done. Suffice it to say, much of America wakes up for the Clancy verdict to be announced. I caution believers that, as Dr. Albert Mohler is fond of saying, the best we can hope for in this age is approximate justice. Final and perfect justice awaits the eschaton.
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