Evangelizing a friend requires us to find the best in her. Where is God already speaking to her, even if she doesn’t recognize that voice as the Holy Spirit’s? How can I collaborate with where God is already drawing her to himself? Christians know, or should know, that the game is always rigged in our favor by providence. But in Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity, Dr. Carrie Gress makes her opponents smaller and wickeder than they are. It leaves her readers poorly formed to reach out boldly in love.
Gress aims to reveal the secret history of the many overlapping feminist movements, and argues they all are rooted in three principles: an embrace of promiscuity, a hatred of men, and attachment to the occult. Solid second-wave feminists like my nonreligious mother, who subscribe to none of these principles, are dismissed as peripheral or lying. The book felt familiar to me; I read plenty of tracts like this in high school, which dismissed opponents as even dumber and more malicious than you expected. But those were written by New Atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. These handbooks of anti-witness left me unprepared to engage the good-faith, smart Christians I met in college, who eventually converted me. I worry Gress’s jeremiad will leave her readers just as exposed and unprepared.
Harris and Dawkins were always looking for the worst examples of religion to use to discredit all strains of Christianity. The New Atheists would point toward Levitical laws to cast all Christians as hypocrites, as though Paul had never talked through these questions in Acts. Dawkins dwelt on some Christians’ rejection of evolution, without a care for the work of religious brother Gregor Mendel in figuring out the rules of genetic inheritance. Even when our enemies are wrong, they are more diverse (intellectually and morally) than any broad-brush condemnation can reflect.
Reading Harris and Dawkins left me less prepared to debate the Christians I met in college, because I so often tried to debunk the beliefs I thought they had, not their actual claims. They made the same mistake in reverse sometimes too. My college boyfriend told me that I could try prayer, even though I was an atheist, because I could just “tell God why you’re angry at him, it’s okay!” If I had mistaken him for a sola scriptura proof-texter, he had mixed me up with a fallen-away Christian whose trust had been broken. But I was no angrier with God than with martians—I’d never believed in either. We trusted each other enough to work through these mix-ups to see each other clearly. Only then could we argue with each other as individuals, not as metonymies for movements.
As evangelists, we have to be ready to encounter our friends as individuals, not intellectual types.
Like the New Atheists, Gress is deliberately not engaging with the strongest arguments of her opponents. Her evidence that early feminist and advocate for women’s education Mary Wollstonecraft hated men is a single quote in which Wollstonecraft objects to men holding doors for women. She goes further, saying that Wollstonecraft should be judged not just by her writing but by the “bad fruit” her work bore in her disreputable daughter, Mary Godwin Shelley, who ran away with a married man. Gress neglects to mention that Wollstonecraft died less than two weeks after her daughter’s birth from complications of pregnancy. The book tempts readers to believe they can skip past deep examination of Wollstonecraft’s work, since Gress’s just-so story of “bad mother, bad daughter” gives permission to move on. In fact, they are exposed as evangelists without the armor of scholarship or charity. Are readers really expected to offer the witness that Wollstonecraft was at fault for dying in childbirth?
I recognize these traps, because I fell into them as a New Atheist. These curt dismissals cut off curiosity, and without a real interest in your opponent, it is impossible to win her trust. Gress’s work, like that of the New Atheists, does not form readers for fruitful dialogue: It gives them excuses to disengage. When I read caricatures of Christians, then attempted to talk to real people, the jarring discrepancy pulled me up short. Had the New Atheists misrepresented what they claimed to specialize in? Or were my interlocutors lying? It would be easy for a reader of Something Wicked to walk away from the possibility of conversation (and conversion) the moment her feminist friend says, “But I don’t practice the occult! What are you talking about?” If she places deep faith in Gress, she will conclude her friend is operating in bad faith, making dialogue impossible.
I don’t want to see that happen, especially because Gress and I are in agreement that the mainstream feminist movement makes a serious mistake in making an idol of autonomy. No one, not the child in the womb, the pregnant woman whose body inclines toward her baby’s need, or the elderly woman in hospice, is autonomous. We all are shaped by our need for each other; the only variation is how intense our need is and how intimate the bond it creates. Gress and I disagree on whether the term “feminism” is redeemable, but we’re in strong agreement that any movement seeking justice for women has to be able to tell the truth about babies.
Her book is at its most effective when Gress unfolds what she believes, rather than describing and dismissing the beliefs of others. I underlined this passage:
Arguing against abortion today is very challenging for the simple reason that the child is small, hidden, and unknown. It is hard to paint a picture of the life that is sacrificed in every abortion. This is how the “clump of cells” lie has spread so effectively; it is hard to dispute because most people don’t realize how well formed a baby is in the early stages of pregnancy.
This is exactly the error I fell into in my former life as an atheist, pro-choice feminist. I did encounter people who tried to tell me the truth (the mom of my college boyfriend carried fetal models in her purse), but I didn’t believe them. I had heard falsehoods from pro-lifers before (like when Senate candidate Todd Akin said “legitimate rape” could not result in pregnancy), which made it easy to not want to investigate dangerous truths. I only really believed when I saw those fetal models again, on my phone, from a neutral pregnancy app (The Bump) as it unfolded the story of my baby.
The more hidden the truth, the greater the trust we need from our friends. As evangelists, we have to be ready to encounter our friends as individuals, not intellectual types. Even when we disagree about terms, we need to be looking underneath the language that divides us for the beat of the restless heart that keeps our friend yearning for a better, fuller truth. We have to look for the part of our opponent that is seeking justice, even in a partial or distorted way. An effective evangelistic tract doesn’t leave us misinformed and contemptuous. It prepares us to see the best in our opponent and help them on to better.