When Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal.
- 2 Kings 11:1
“To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumelious to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, and of all equity and justice.”
To modern ears could a more offensive sentence be found in all of literature? Not having read all of literature, this author does not pretend to be able to answer that question definitively. Yet with that said, it is hard to imagine an idea more repugnant to 21st century readers than this quote from John Knox’s essay “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women” (hereafter, TMR).
We have, all of us living in the West in the early 21st century, been steeped in feminist theory from our youth up to the point where, for most of us, Knox’s words are little more than noise from a bygone era with no relevance for us today, except perhaps as a cautionary tale to warn us about how bad the bad old days really were.
Liberal Democrats, were they to read Knox, would quickly be triggered, alternating between outrage, ridicule and calls to have his ideas removed from social media. Conservative Republicans, on the other hand, would attempt explain away what Knox wrote by saying that he was a product of his age, that what he was really writing against was 16th century liberal women and that if he were alive today he would gladly support a female presidential candidate so long as she was pro-life, pro-Second Amendment and promised to fight against the Green New Deal.
Contemporary Protestants, even supposed Bible believing ones, would be embarrassed by Knox’s words. Most likely, they would hope that no one would notice what he wrote. Were someone to bring up TMR with them, they would find some way to explain it away and quickly change the subject. Some Protestants can’t seem to gush enough about the prospects of a woman president. In 2012, Republican Michelle Bachmann was considered something of a favorite among Evangelicals. According to one article, Evangelical pastors could not gush enough about her candidacy, with one Presbyterian minister saying of her that, “She was speaking the language of the heart of the people in this room.”
Commenting on Bachmann’s presidential run in the Washington Post, D. Michael Lindsay observed that many outsiders were surprised to see Bachmann, who posited herself as a Christian conservative, both running as a presidential candidate and receiving widespread support from Evangelicals. Lindsay went on to write, “The reality is that evangelicals today have crafted a notion of what feminist scholar Marie Griffith calls ‘practical Christian womanhood,’ whereby adherents hold seemingly contradictory notions regarding authority and gender ideals.”
But contrary to Marie Griffith, there is nothing “seemingly contradictory” about Evangelicals, on the one hand, supporting what Lindsay called “traditional gender roles at home” and, on the other hand, supporting a woman for president. This is an actual contradiction, one of many compromises that Protestants have made with the world. Is it possible that the weakness and ineffectiveness of the Protestant church in the 21st century is somehow related to its refusal to think, speak and act logically in accord with the teaching of the Scriptures?
The idea that Knox was serious about what he wrote and may actually have been right, that is simply unacceptable to modern men and they will not hear it. And this includes a great number of 21st century conservative Christians.
But Knox was right.
There, I said it. And I’ll say it again.
Knox was right.
It has long been this author’s view that feminism is not only one of the most ungodly ideas ever advanced in philosophy, but also one of the most destructive in practice. Ideas Have Consequences is the title of a well-known work of philosophy by American Richard Weaver. He understood that it was ideas that were primary, actions followed from them. This was also the position of Gordon Clark and John Robbins. As Robbins noted in one of his lectures on philosophy, our practice – the actions we take in life - is always based upon some prior theory.
Feminism is based upon the idea that man and women are in all respects equal and, therefore, the feminists logically conclude that there is nothing at all inappropriate about promoting “a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation or city.” Further, not only is doing so not inappropriate, but it is a positive good, for it liberates women from the oppression of the patriarchy.
Another implication of this idea, that men and women are in all respect equal, is that anyone who opposes promoting a woman to a position of political authority is not merely wrong, but a very bad person with questionable motives.
In a 1980 presidential debate with then president Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan famously asked the viewers, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Many think this was one of the decisive moments of the 1980 presidential election that saw Reagan unseat Carter.
With all the turmoil we’ve seen in 2020, with our civilization apparently collapsing about us on a daily basis, perhaps it’s worth asking a similar question today. Is society better off today that it was before feminism? Does our government function better now that feminist philosophy and practice dominates both parties and all branches of government? How about our schools and universities? How are they doing? Are they better off now that Women’s Studies has become standard fare on campuses everywhere? Or let’s look at families. Are they better off now that women have won the right to sit in a cubicle eight or more hours a day working for some corporation that couldn’t care less about them rather than being keepers at home, working for their husband and children who love them? What about churches? Do feminist churches preach the Gospel more faithfully in the 21st century then they did in the non-feminist 18th century?
The answer to all these questions is not merely no, but a hard no. But it’s worse than that. Not only are the institutions of civil government, the church and the family not better off now than before feminism, they all are markedly worse off. Within fifteen years of women winning the right to vote, America and other Western nations found themselves with a bloated, unbiblical and socially destructive welfare state. Schools and universities today are little more than Marxist indoctrination centers that teach students not only to hate and despise their parents and their entire civilization, but also leave their students saddled with unpayable debt for the privilege of learning anti-Christian nonsense. The practical effects of our ungodly educational system – a system in which feminism plays a major philosophical role – was on full display last summer in the Black Lives Matter/Antifa riots. Many of the “peaceful protestors” didn’t even know whether they were male of female. And families, they’re a mess too. Marriage rates for Westerners are plummeting as are birth rates. This should come as no surprise. Feminist philosophy makes it impossible for men and women to relate to one another in the way God intended. If the home becomes a battlefield where a husband and wife have to fight for dominance every day over everything, isn’t it just easier and more sensible to avoid marriage and children altogether?
Sometimes one will hear conservatives and Christians defend feminism by saying that it was a needed corrective back in the day but it just went too far. We can’t reject feminism in toto as the reactionary Knox did. No, we must be reasonable and hold fast what is good in feminism while avoiding the extremes. This sounds reasonable, but it is foolishness.
Feminism was always an ungodly idea. From the very beginning it was rebellion against God and his Word. As proof of this, take the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments that came out of the famous Seneca Falls Conference held that year. That conference, considered by historians as marking the start of First Wave Feminism, issued the Declaration which contained sixteen resolutions. Time does not permit a discussion of all of them, but let’s take two as representative.
He [man] allows her in church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.
He [man] has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.
Both these propositions are easily refuted from the Scriptures. “Let the women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak…Let a woman learn in silence with all submission, And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence…A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife….” These are not suggestions, neither are they culturally conditioned, neither is the language obscure. It takes willful ignorance to construe these statements in any other way than to say that they forbid women from holding church office and serving as ministers.
The same principle applies to civil government, which is the focus of Knox’s TMR. In TMR, Knox argues from the lessor to the greater when he writes,
The Apostle takes power from all women to speak in the assembly [church]. Ergo, he permits no woman to rule above man. The former part is evident, whereupon does the conclusion of necessity follow. For he that takes from woman the least part of authority, dominion, or rule will not permit unto her that which is greatest. But greater it is to reign above realms and nations, to publish and make laws, and to command men of all estates, and finally to appoint judges and ministers, than to speak in the congregation….
If anyone objects to Knox’s logic here, let him ask himself who created church and civil government? According to Scripture, the civil magistrate is as much a minister of God as is the preacher, for both derive their authority from him. See Romans 13, for example, where Paul calls the civil magistrate God’s minister. If civil and church government are both created by God, then we can infer the principles that apply to one also apply to the other. Going back to the quote above from the Washington Post, for Protestants to, one the one hand, hold to what the author called “traditional gender roles at home” [they are not traditional, they are God ordained] and, on the other hand, to promote a woman for president so long as she’s a conservative woman, is not “seemingly contradictory” but rather actually contradictory.
The second resolution represents a direct attack of Scripture, for it says that men have usurped “the prerogative of Jehovah himself in claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.” This is wildly off the mark. For it is not man who assigned a particular sphere to woman, but Jehovah himself: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church”…“[let the] older women…admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands”…”as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord.”
None of this is difficult theology. The language of the Scriptures is clear and unambiguous. Indeed, it would be hard to see how it could be clearer. The problem is not the clarity of the Bible. The problem is that sinful men have willfully rejected God’s counsel. The feminist wind sown in the 19th century has become a whirlwind in the 21st, one that threatens to blow away what remains of Western Civilization.
It was noted above that it takes willful ignorance to not see what the Scriptures plainly teach about men, women and their roles in the government of the family, the church and the state. Certainly, those who claim to be teachers of Israel bear the greater sin, for they fail to teach their congregations what the Word of God so clearly states. And if the preachers fail to preach the truth, it should come as no surprise that ordinary Christians fail to understand and believe it. They perish for lack of knowledge. And not Christians only, but their civilization as well.
Closing Thoughts
America has been building its Monstrous Regiment now for over 150 years. If we use the 1848 Seneca Falls Conference as a starting point, it's been at work on this project for a full 172 years. In truth, the ideas expressed at the Seneca Falls Conference originated much earlier.
It remains to be seen whether we will get our first woman president in the person of Kamala Harris. Technically, she's Joe Biden's running mate and is slated to take office as Vice-President should Biden win. Practically, many people think she will be more in charge than Biden will be, even if he remains in office for a time.
It likely was not a slip of the tongue when last week when Harris made reference to the "Harris Administration" and the next day Biden talked about "the Harris/Biden administration." Some thought this was a gaffe. A more likely explanation was that it was an attempt to signal to the feminist base that a vote for Biden would result in the first woman president.
But even if Donald Trump retakes the White House in 2020, the issue of a female president will not go away. It will merely be delayed. Trump himself has promoted the idea of a woman president and seems to be preparing his daughter Ivanka for this role.
In the opinion of this author, barring a new Reformation or the near-term return of Christ, America will succeed in completing it Monstrous Regiment in an upcoming election cycle, perhaps as early as 2024. The guiding feminist philosophy of the schools and churches of America requires it as does the political spirit of the age.
As Christians, this is an opportunity for us to speak out. Let us take it.
