Evangelicals & the Revolution Against Motherhood: Part II
Updated: Sep 9
For those keeping score at home I was diagnosed with COVID-19 for the second time on yesterday, September 7th. I have experienced a very uncomfortable past four days that had me bed-bound for all four days, starting on Friday, September 4th, shortly after returning from an international flight from Sydney, Australia, where I was there to run the 2026 Sydney Marathon, the perfect incubator to be exposed to the COVID virus. Thankfully, I was able to get up and move around yesterday and now just suffer from some lingering discomfort. As promised, today is Part II of my look at the problem that Feminism has foisted, wittingly, for some, or unwittingly, for many, upon our culture.
Now, we all know the outcome of the Lindsay Clancy, and I submit that it demonstrates all actions have consequences, and those who posited Feminism as an unmitigated and unquestioned good never took the inevitable unintended consequences seriously. First-wave Feminism arguably advanced positive good, but all future waves (some say three, some four, and even some posit five waves) are classic examples of what God meant for good Satan has used for his evil intents.
I am ecstatic to report I've used this downtime wisely to work on PhD-related matters. I literally pressed "send" to submit my second reading summary for my Fall Semester course and have developed a thesis topic to submit to my dissertation committee. My proposed topic, still subject to modification, is
Faith, Race, and Political Allegiance: An Examination of Theological-Political Dissonance Among Black Evangelical Christians
Additionally, I have begun the very necessary collaboration with peers who have blazed the trail for me to follow to ensure my best possible academic excellence, all with the expressed desire that it will be part of my human endeavor to hear my Savior greet me with “Ricky, well done” and be a source of edification for His Bride, the Church, and maybe even an Evangelism outreach to those still trapped in spiritual darkness. Regardless of the eventual outcome, I can only wish that To God be the Glory.
I highly recommend you digest Part I before moving on to today's Part II. Part II attempts to establish the Movement's Intellectual Genealogy before returning to Steinem, AOC, Clancy, and the present. I posit this makes my argument substantially stronger because I always seek to critique identifiable philosophies, not merely personalities, as my detractors so want to do to me.
The Revolution Did Not Begin With AOC
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, no matter how popular and how much of a rising star she is today, did not invent the worldview she now represents.
The cultural assumptions that allow a contemporary politician to speak of abortion in the language of liberation were constructed over generations. Long before AOC entered Congress, Feminists were challenging the idea that marriage, motherhood, homemaking, sexual difference, and family obligations should occupy a defining place in a woman's life.
To understand where we are today, we must understand what happened during the Second Wave of Feminism.
The movement contained legitimate grievances. Women faced genuine discrimination in employment, education, finance, politics, and other areas of American life. Evangelical Christians should have no difficulty acknowledging injustice wherever it existed. Scripture provides no justification for treating women as intellectually inferior, denying them equal protection under law, or exploiting them economically.
But movements must ultimately be judged not merely by the injustices they identify, but by the anthropology they construct in response. And that is where the Feminist Revolution became something far larger than a campaign for equal treatment.
It increasingly became a revolution against inherited understandings of womanhood itself.
Betty Friedan and “The Problem That Has No Name”
One of the most important intellectual explosions came in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
Friedan examined the lives of educated middle-class women who had become wives and mothers in postwar America. Many possessed comfortable homes, husbands, children, and material security, yet reported profound dissatisfaction.
Friedan famously described this unhappiness as “the problem that has no name.”
She depicted the suburban housewife making beds, shopping for groceries, caring for children, chauffeuring them to activities, and eventually asking herself a devastating question:
“Is this all?”
That question became culturally revolutionary.
For centuries, motherhood and homemaking had certainly been difficult. Women had buried children, endured poverty, worked alongside husbands, managed households, cared for aging parents, and sacrificed enormously for their families.
Friedan's contribution was different. She helped persuade a generation that the problem might not simply be the hardship of life. The problem might be the role itself.
The National Women's History Museum summarizes Friedan's argument as a critique of the separate sphere of motherhood and homemaking into which women had been placed, while men entered the worlds of work, politics, and public power. Her work helped ignite what became known as Second-Wave Feminism.
This was an enormously important philosophical shift. The question was no longer simply:
Should women have opportunities outside the home?
The answer to that question can easily be yes, period, full stop, end of story. The deeper question became:
Can a woman truly be fulfilled if her primary vocation is wife and mother?
That is an entirely different proposition.
When Equality Became Liberation
An important distinction exists between equality of human dignity and liberation from created difference.
Evangelical Christianity, when properly understood, teaches the first. Radical Feminism, tragically, has increasingly pursued the second.
Scripture declares that both men and women bear the image of God:
“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
There is no hierarchy of human worth in that passage. The man does not possess more of God's image than the woman. The woman does not possess less dignity because she can bear children. Yet Scripture simultaneously refuses to erase sexual difference. Male and female are not interchangeable categories accidentally imposed by society. They are part of creation itself.
Second-Wave Feminism increasingly encountered this biological reality as a problem because equality was progressively interpreted to mean that women must possess the same freedom from reproductive consequences historically enjoyed by irresponsible men.
And that objective had enormous implications. If sexual behavior can produce children, then sexual freedom will always be limited by biology. If pregnancy creates moral obligations, then autonomy will always have boundaries. If motherhood begins with conception rather than personal intention, then a woman cannot possess complete sovereignty over reproduction.
Something therefore had to change.
And increasingly, it was not sexual behavior that was expected to conform to responsibility.
Reproduction had to conform to autonomy.
The Formation of NOW
In 1966, Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women and served as its first president.
NOW's original statement of purpose called for women to enter “full participation in the mainstream of American society” and enjoy equal opportunity alongside men. Those aims included employment opportunity and other legitimate equality concerns.
But the organization's agenda rapidly extended into reproductive politics.
By 1967, NOW had formally adopted the repeal of abortion laws as one of its goals, alongside the Equal Rights Amendment and publicly funded child care. NOW's own historical account identifies it as the first national organization to endorse legalization of abortion.
That development was not incidental. It followed logically from the emerging philosophy of liberation. For women to participate in society on precisely the same terms as men, pregnancy had to become manageable. Motherhood had to become voluntary. Fertility had to become controllable. And unwanted children had to cease being an unavoidable consequence of sexual behavior.
This is why abortion became so central to Modern Feminism. It was not merely one policy among many. It solved an ideological problem. Biology had created an inequality that legislation alone could not eliminate. Men could engage in sexual behavior and walk away from pregnancy. Women could not.
The Feminist answer was not primarily to demand greater sexual responsibility from men and women alike. Increasingly, the answer became technological and legal control over reproduction. Birth control could prevent pregnancy. Abortion could terminate pregnancy. Eventually, reproductive technology could postpone pregnancy.
The female body itself would increasingly be subjected to technology so that the individual could exercise greater control over the timing and consequences of reproduction.
The Transformation of Motherhood
This transformation did not require Feminists to say that motherhood was evil.
Most did not. The more important cultural move was subtler. Motherhood shifted from a vocation to a choice. That change may initially sound harmless.
But culturally it represented an enormous philosophical transition. A vocation implies obligation. A calling asks something of us. A responsibility may arrive without consulting our preferences. A choice, however, exists because the chooser wishes it to exist.
Once motherhood becomes an expression of personal choice primarily, the child occupies a radically different moral position. The child is welcomed ONLY when wanted. Delayed when inconvenient. Prevented when untimely. And, within abortion ideology, eliminated when unwanted. The center of gravity moves from the dependent child toward the autonomous adult. That is perhaps the most consequential legacy of the feminist revolution.
The Christian Answer Was Never Female Confinement
Evangelicals must be careful here. We should not romanticize every aspect of the past merely because Modern Feminism rejected it. Some women had their intelligence dismissed.
There were wives trapped economically with abusive husbands. There were women denied educational opportunities for reasons having nothing to do with biblical theology.
Men invoked “traditional values” while neglecting the biblical obligations imposed on husbands and fathers. That deserves criticism. But correcting those injustices never required declaring traditional womanhood itself oppressive.
Evangelical Christianity does not say that every woman must marry. Paul explicitly honored singleness. Christ-followers do not say women are incapable of business or productive labor. Proverbs 31 describes a woman who purchases property, engages in commerce, supervises a household, produces goods, serves the poor, and speaks with wisdom.
The Biblical Woman is hardly passive. Nor does Evangelical Christianity reduce female identity exclusively to motherhood. True mature Evangelical Christianity does insist without apology, and not meekly, however, that motherhood has intrinsic dignity because children have intrinsic value. That is exactly where the Evangelical Christian Worldview and Radical Individualism collide.
The woman of Proverbs 31 is productive beyond the household, yet the household is not an embarrassment from which she must escape. Her strength does not require rejection of femininity. Her economic activity does not require contempt for motherhood. Her accomplishments do not compete with family. The modern dichotomy between meaningful achievement and domestic responsibility would have been foreign to the biblical text.
Gloria Steinem Takes the Revolution National
If Friedan helped articulate the dissatisfaction, Gloria Steinem became one of the movement's most effective public evangelists. Steinem helped carry Feminism from books and organizational meetings into journalism, politics, television, popular culture, and eventually the American mainstream.
She became one of the defining public faces of Second-Wave Feminism, co-founded Ms. magazine, worked within the women's political movement, and made reproductive freedom central to her activism.
Her importance was therefore not simply that she held Feminist beliefs. She helped normalize them. Ideas once considered radical became conversational. Ideas once considered controversial became policy goals. Ideas once presented as liberation eventually became assumptions that later generations inherited without remembering where they came from.
That is how revolutions usually succeed. Not when everyone begins calling themselves revolutionaries. But when the revolution's conclusions become so normal that nobody remembers they were once revolutionary.
From Friedan to Steinem to AOC
This is why the progression matters. Betty Friedan asked whether domestic motherhood was sufficient. Gloria Steinem helped transform female autonomy into a national political cause.
Organizations such as NOW translated those ideas into institutional demands, including legalized abortion. Decades later, AOC inherited a culture in which those premises no longer require lengthy justification. She does not have to argue from first principles that a woman should possess sovereignty over reproduction.
That proposition has already been culturally established. She merely carries the logic forward. And that should force Evangelicals to recognize something important. We are not confronting isolated political disagreements. We are confronting competing visions of the human person.
One worldview says:
My body, my life, my identity, my choice, my timing.
The Evangelical Christian worldview begins somewhere altogether different:
“What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?”— 1 Corinthians 6:19
Ye are not your own.
Few sentences could stand in greater opposition to the spirit of modern expressive individualism. Evangelical Christianity does not tell women they belong to men.
It tells men and women alike that they belong to God. Our bodies belong to God. Our sexuality belongs under God's authority. Our marriages belong under God's authority. Our ambitions belong under God's authority. And our children do not receive their worth from whether we wanted them, planned them, timed them correctly, or believe they fit conveniently into our lives. Their worth comes from the God whose image they bear.
That is the fundamental collision between Radical Feminism and Evangelical Christianity. The disagreement is not ultimately about whether women should have careers.
It is about who possesses final authority over human life.
The Revolution We Actually Need
Radical Feminism promised women freedom by loosening the bonds of tradition, biology, marriage, motherhood, and ultimately moral obligation. Yet the Evangelical Christian worldview offers a radically different definition of freedom. We are not liberated by becoming sovereign over ourselves; we are liberated when God rightly orders our lives under His authority.
The answer to the excesses of Radical Feminism is not hostility toward women, nor a nostalgic return to every social convention of the past. It is a recovery of biblical womanhood, biblical manhood, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood, sacrifice, and the sacredness of human life.
Our culture does not need another Revolution against God's Created Order. A vain attempt that will fail and fail miserably because its architect is already a defeated foe. He knows it, and those who bend the knee to God's Holy Writ know it too and flee while the going is still good.
Our culture, most especially the professing Visible Church, needs repentance and a return to Jesus Christ.
“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”— Romans 12:2
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Weighed and Found Wanting
Until next time, continue Thinking Critically from an Evangelical Worldview, testing everything against the truth of Scripture and refusing to allow the culture to do your thinking for you.
With fear & trembling,
Ricky V. Kyles Sr., DEd.Min.Thinking Critically from an Evangelical Worldview
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