The radical feminism—Christianity pipeline

Radical feminism and Christianity are not obvious bedfellows: one is usually cast as suspicious of tradition, the other as its guardian. And yet, among a certain group of young women, the former increasingly leads to the latter — a trajectory that is less surprising than it first appears.

In its usual form, radical feminism begins from a premise that has become oddly unpopular to state plainly: that biological sex is real, that it matters, and that it has consequences. It treats the differences between men and women as structuring features of human life. From this follow a set of observations: that men are, in almost all cases, physically stronger than women; that sexual violence is overwhelmingly male-on-female; and that the reproductive consequences of sex fall asymmetrically, and heavily, on women.

Where liberal feminism has often sought to minimise or obscure these differences — lest they unsettle its egalitarian commitments — radical feminism insists on them. It refuses to pretend that equality requires interchangeability. Part of its appeal, particularly among young women, lies precisely in that it says these things from within feminism itself, and so carries a legitimacy that more overtly traditionalist arguments no longer possess.

And yet, having reached this point, the argument falters. Radical feminism does not entirely lack positive proposals: lesbian separatism, political lesbianism, and various visions of matriarchal social organisation all represent attempts to answer the question of what should follow from its diagnosis. Thinkers such as Dworkin and MacKinnon pushed harder still, insisting that the asymmetries of sex required not merely withdrawal but wholesale political transformation. 

Although internally coherent, these positions share a common difficulty: they treat the asymmetries of sexed life as problems to be escaped or overcome, rather than as features of a shared reality to be ordered and lived with. The most thoroughgoing versions require, in effect, the abolition of heterosexual life: one is left to wonder how, exactly, the radical feminist project suggests we are to make babies. Nonetheless, if sexual difference is real and structuring, it must place limits on how men and women relate to one another; and limits, if they are to be lived with, require some stable set of norms oriented towards a common good. It is precisely here that radical feminism hesitates. It can identify sexed constraints, but proves markedly less willing to say what they are for — what ends, if any, sexual difference is oriented towards.

And yet something draws them in this direction rather than others

This is the question that drives a small but visible number of women away from radical feminism and towards Christianity — a movement sufficiently common to have generated its own sardonic shorthand in the communities where it occurs. The movement is not always, or even primarily, philosophical in its self-presentation. Many women who make this journey describe it in terms of encounter rather than argument: community found, liturgy experienced, a sense of being received rather than persuaded. That should be noted honestly. And yet something draws them in this direction rather than others — and that something, this essay wants to suggest, has a logic to it.

Christianity takes the same material reality — the givenness of the body and the fact of sexual difference — and treats it as intrinsically meaningful. Not simply because the body belongs to the created order, but because, in the Incarnation, the Creator of the universe takes on a fully human body and affirms it from within. The body is not incidental to the person, but integral to it. From this metaphysical commitment there follows — not automatically, but through a long tradition of moral reflection — a sexual ethics oriented towards ends. Christianity is, of course, not simply a moral framework but a religion — an encounter with the living, triune God — yet it is often through the coherence of its sexual ethics that it first becomes intelligible to women arriving from this direction, before it is believed. 

Those obligations are not abstract: physical strength, reproductive vulnerability, and sexual difference place a particular burden on men to bind sexual desire to marriage, to take responsibility for its consequences, and to order their relations with women towards fidelity, protection, and the care of children. The question is no longer how to escape these asymmetries of sexed embodiment — whether by denying them or retreating from them — but how to live with them without allowing their costs to fall primarily on women. It is not, by any modern standard, an easy settlement — it demands restraint where modern culture prefers carte blanche, and obligation where it prefers autonomy. But it does what radical feminism, for all its clarity, ultimately refuses to do: it answers the questions it raises without treating the body as a problem to be solved.

Seen in this light, the so-called “pipeline” is less mysterious than it first appears. Radical feminism clears the ground by insisting on truths that are often denied; Christianity builds on that ground by giving those truths direction, and by supplying the ends that radical feminism leaves conspicuously undefined. For some women, the movement from one to the other is experienced as the completion of an argument that could not quite bring itself to a conclusion. For others, it is less intellectual than that — a matter of belonging, of beauty, of being surprised by something they had not gone looking for. In either case, what draws them is not, in the end, very hard to understand.