Neanderthals Aren’t Cool
Kevin Offner on the “Gender Issue”
There’s no question about it: Today, if you hold to the traditional understanding of men and women in the family and the church, you are “uncool.” If you believe that God has assigned to men a unique calling to authoritative leadership, where they alone are ordained in the church and they alone are to be heads of their families, you will be seen as backward, fearful of change, and a misogynist.
And (just between you and me) you probably hold the Neanderthal position you do because you’re an insecure man who is frustrated over his loss of cultural hegemony. Furthermore, either you aren’t married (it figures!) or your wife (for surely you are male) is a shriveled doormat of a human being, who has low self-esteem and wears heavy make-up to hide the welts where you have beaten her.
The Uncool Christian
It really doesn’t matter to the cool people what kind of a traditionalist you are. You might believe women bear the imago Dei and are deeply loved by God, have been given spiritual gifts that they should be encouraged to develop and use in their local churches, and are essential and valuable partners in their families as wives and mothers. You might respect women, work in partnership with women, and learn from women. But if you believe it is God’s (good and gracious) will that men have been given certain unique positions of leadership in church and family—even if you believe this leadership ought to be exercised in a humble, servant-like fashion—the cool people will see you as anti-women.
It also doesn’t matter that your belief regarding the sexes has been the normal position held by the majority of all people, everywhere, over all of time, up until about A.D. 1960. For the current cultural propaganda brushes aside all history before the rise of modern feminism as uniformly oppressive to women. Ordered relationships between the sexes are to be outgrown just like witchdoctors, horse-drawn carriages, and rotary telephones.
So what is an uncool Christian to do?
One wrong response is simply to lay low and never go public with your position on this controversial topic. Just focus on your own private world and hope that the differences in the public world will soon iron themselves out on their own.
Many conservative Christians today, especially men, under the guise of being humble and “peacemakers,” are in reality cowards and people-pleasers. Martin Luther said that the gospel is best heard at those places in the culture where the battle rages hottest, and surely the sex and gender wars would qualify here. We desperately need men and women today who won’t duck their responsibility to bring truth front and center when arguing about how we should think about being men and women in our ever-changing contemporary culture.
The second wrong response is to move into attack mode. It is foolishly thought that the way to regain proper male leadership is by rejecting the challenges outright and simply reasserting the traditional teaching (or your own version of it). Just state the teaching, and assume that those who don’t agree have nothing to say and cannot be changed. But belittling and accusing, rather than listening and winsomely seeking to persuade, burns rather than builds bridges between people.
Neither passivity nor attack will do. But I think there are at least four right responses for those of us who hold the uncool position on male-female relations, a position we are convinced is the orthodox one.
Kevin Offner is on the staff of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He has written for Re:Generation Quarterly, Critique, Student Leadership Journal, and First Things. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife Amy. They are members of the Presbyterian Church in America. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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