Christianity does not locate freedom in radical autonomy. It does not tell either men or women that happiness consists in escaping obligations arising from relationships we did not entirely choose.
For nearly two decades, I taught university courses on the history of Western civilization. Somewhere between the Enlightenment, industrialization, and the political transformations of the modern era, I included a section on the expanding rights of women. I kept it brief, for survey courses do not allow for deep dives, and simply covered the familiar story of how, beginning in the nineteenth century, women gradually acquired political, legal, and social rights they had not previously possessed. At the time, I did not see any reason to explore much more.
But looking back, I think I missed an opportunity. The history of women’s rights is a normal part of any curriculum, but it usually presumes that it and the ideas of feminism are one and the same. They overlap, certainly, but they are not identical. Feminism was never simply a program for extending particular rights to women. Among some of its most influential advocates, it offered a much broader interpretation of Western society itself—one that understood relations between men and women through the categories of oppression and liberation and called into question traditional understandings of sex, family, religion, and freedom.
I wish I had explored that distinction more carefully with my students. We discussed the reforms but spent comparatively little time examining the ideas that accompanied them and, in some cases, supplied their intellectual and spiritual foundations. Two recent books have brought that omission back to my mind: Rachel Wilson’s Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation and Janice Fiamengo’s The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself. Neither disputes the simple fact that women acquired rights they had not previously possessed. Both, however, ask us to look beyond that familiar account and consider the ideology that developed alongside those changes.
Wilson concentrates on the often-overlooked relationship between feminist pioneers and various forms of occult religion. Fiamengo examines feminism as an ideology and argues that its antagonism toward men and inherited social structures is not merely a feature of its later waves but can be found much nearer its beginnings.
Wilson’s Occult Feminism makes a more unique argument. Her subject is not primarily suffrage legislation or employment law, but the spiritual world inhabited by a surprising number of people associated with women’s liberation. She leads the reader through spiritualism, theosophy, occultism, and related religious movements that flourished during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her contention is that these connections were not always incidental. For some participants, emancipation from traditional Christianity and emancipation from traditional understandings of womanhood belonged to the same project. As Wilson observes, “the only thing holding back women’s liberation,” in the mind of early feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “was traditional Christianity” (pg. 55).
This is the most valuable part of Wilson’s book. Modern readers can easily forget how religious nineteenth-century radicalism could be. The weakening of orthodox Christian belief did not necessarily produce secular rationalists; it also produced a variety of alternative religious movements. Wilson makes a good case that their relationship to early feminism deserves more attention than it usually receives.
Nevertheless, there is a weakness in Wilson’s approach. Establishing that important feminists were involved in occult or heterodox religious movements does not establish that feminism itself originated in occultism. Historical association is not the same thing as causation. Wilson’s book is strongest when it restores neglected people and ideas to the history of feminism. It is less convincing when those connections are made to carry too much explanatory weight.
I think it is important to keep this in mind, particularly if you (like me) are already skeptical of the movement because a Christian critique of feminism does not depend upon its association with occultism. Ideas can be judged on their own terms and on what they say about God, creation, human nature, and freedom. Even if Wilson’s occult connections were set aside, the question of feminism’s compatibility with Christianity would remain.
Janice Fiamengo’s The Goddess That Failed addresses that question more directly. Her argument is less concerned with religious genealogy than with feminism’s stated ideas. Fiamengo rejects the familiar division between an admirable early feminism concerned with equality and a later feminism that became radical. She argues instead for substantial continuity, particularly in the tendency to understand relations between men and women through the categories of female victimhood and male power.
Central to Fiamengo’s argument is the claim that feminism is not synonymous with believing that women possess equal human dignity. Christianity already provides the theological basis for that affirmation in the biblical teaching that male and female are both created in the image of God. Nor does feminism simply mean believing that women should be treated justly under the law. According to Fiamengo, a more fundamental feminist concern has been liberation from forms of dependence and obligation regarded as limiting female autonomy. She argues that feminism threatens “women’s capacity to love, reason, and exercise self-restraint” (pg. 11). [1] Her concern, in other words, is not simply that feminism challenges traditional arrangements between men and women, but that it undermines the virtues necessary for human relationships to flourish. This makes the tension with Christianity clearer.
Christianity does not locate freedom in radical autonomy. It does not tell either men or women that happiness consists in escaping obligations arising from relationships we did not entirely choose. Above all, Christianity understands us as creatures rather than creators of ourselves. “You are not your own,” Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 6:19. That claim stands at a considerable distance from the expressive individualism, to use Charles Taylor’s description, that characterizes much of modern Western culture.
Our deepest bondage is not to embodiment nor the obligations created by human relationships. It is bondage to sin and death.
Here Wilson and Fiamengo converge. Wilson draws attention to religious currents within the history of feminism; Fiamengo concentrates on its understanding of men, women, and society. Both eventually lead to the question of freedom. From what do human beings need to be liberated, and what is freedom for?
The Christian answer differs substantially from one centered on autonomy. Our deepest bondage is not to embodiment nor the obligations created by human relationships. It is bondage to sin and death. Nor does Christian freedom mean becoming autonomous selves answerable to no one. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” declares Paul in Galatians 5:1, yet the freedom of the Christian expresses itself in love and service to the neighbor.
None of this requires romanticizing the past. Men have sinned against women, and traditional societies were hardly immune from injustice. But recognizing those failures does not require accepting a feminist interpretation of the relations between men and women. Particular reforms can be judged on their merits without adopting the larger philosophy that may accompany them. Correcting an injustice is one thing; treating the institutions in which injustice occurs as inherently oppressive is another.
Both books have weaknesses. Wilson occasionally gives the occult connections she uncovers more explanatory weight than they can bear. Fiamengo can treat a large and internally diverse movement as more unified than it has always been. Neither book should be mistaken for a comprehensive history of feminism.
The Christian alternative is not resentment toward women nor nostalgia for an earlier social order.
Their value, rather, is in directing attention toward assumptions that can disappear from view when feminism is treated simply as another chapter in the expansion of civil rights. We speak readily of liberation, equality, and autonomy, but those words carry assumptions about human nature and the good life that deserve examination.
The Christian alternative is not resentment toward women nor nostalgia for an earlier social order. Christianity offers a different account of the human person. Men and women are neither competitors nor interchangeable units. They are creatures made by God, equal in dignity yet embodied as male and female, bound together in relationships of mutual obligation, and redeemed by the same Christ.
Perhaps that is what my old Western civilization lectures were missing. The expansion of women’s rights certainly belongs within the political and social history of the modern West. But alongside that history, was an intellectual and spiritual history that I gave considerably less attention. Wilson and Fiamengo approach that history from different directions, but together, they suggest why the history of feminism deserves to be studied as something more than the history of women acquiring rights.
Paul’s warning to the Colossians seems relevant here. “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit” (Col. 2:8). The point is not to reject philosophy as such, but to recognize that ideas about freedom, equality, and human flourishing are never religiously neutral. Christians ought to examine them in light of Christ rather than simply absorbing the assumptions of the surrounding culture.
The Gospel offers a fundamentally different account of human freedom. It does not understand liberation as emancipation from our created nature or the obligations that arise from life with others, but as freedom from sin, guilt, and death through Christ. Christian freedom, therefore, rests not in autonomy or self-determination, but in reconciliation with God and a life directed toward the good of the neighbor.
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