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Why Feminism Is The Deadliest Cultural Revolution Ever (And Is NOT Christian) · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  envy, contempt, and anger. Those are the three theological vices or theological virtues of feminism, which are completely opposite of Christianity, which is faith, hope, and love. If Christians and Christian women in particular had maintained their faith and not given over the ways in which feminism has manipulated us, I think we'd be in a much better place.
• 0:25
  Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I am excited. Today I'm joined by Dr. Keri Gress. Dr. Gress, thanks for jumping on here today. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, so I loved your book, The End of Women. I thought it was so needed. The subtitle, How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us. Yes, this is a really important conversation we need to have right now because there is almost like this consensus that...
• 0:54
  Patriarchy is just it's the cause of the problem. It's a bad thing. And you're looking at this saying, OK, I think maybe we've misdiagnosed the problem. And now you have a new book out called Something Wicked. When is that being published? It's coming out January 20th.
• 1:09
  Okay, January 20th. All right. So this will probably be released in January. So yeah, I'm really excited to dive into that. I've been diving into an early copy of that. So there's a lot of parallel between The End of Women and Something Wicked. I'd love to maybe talk about the scope of each book. I've got a lot of questions I'd love to drill into. But yeah, tell us a little bit about what you're getting out there. So The End of Woman came about because I realized...
• 1:33
  There's been problems with feminism from the very beginning. I think a lot of people, especially religious-minded people, have thought,
• 1:40
  well, the first wave of feminism was good. Why don't we just go back to that? It was just about women voting and education and whatnot. And, you know, when I started looking into it, I was like, wait a minute, there's some major problems. Because I thought the end of Woman was going to actually just be about the second wave and on, because I had been assured by people that were in the know that the first wave was great. And so I actually had allotted, like, okay, I'll look at it for two days. I'll spend two days researching the first wave. And, you know, here we are. I'm on my...
• 2:09
  what, third or fourth year of researching it now, and still just finding just more and more of the ugliness that really led to the second wave of feminism. But in any event, so what The End of Woman does is basically step through how we got from the very start of feminism, which really starts with Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1890s, I'm sorry, 1790s, to the point now where we've got the trans movement.
• 2:36
  And basically just threads together philosophically, because my PhD is in philosophy, goes through philosophically how we got from that, you know, those two points and all of the pieces in between and why we're in this incredible mess and just all the different philosophical threads that were part of it. And, you know, what was actually really going on. And what's fascinating about it is you see.
• 3:00
  this progression of really the diminishment of what womanhood is, this banishment of motherhood, this idea of our femininity being a bad thing in addition to masculinity. And slowly over time, you see women are taken out of the home, and then their husbands removed, and then their children are moved. And then finally with the trans movement, you get this place where
• 3:26
  actual bodily parts are being removed. So that was a really amazing book to just walk through because I didn't know any other book really like it that goes through that whole history. But what I kept coming up against was, again, this idea that the first wave of feminism was good, but more importantly, the way that Christians were using feminism and trying to tweak it and trying to make it work with Christianity. So that's what the new book is
• 3:56
  you know, why these two things do not fit together. You know, they absolutely are just coming from totally different perspectives and spheres and philosophical roots. And actually, early feminism is really trying to undermine Christianity because the earliest women, like someone like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saw Christianity as a real problem. And it was the
• 4:20
  Christianity was being used by men to enslave women. That was kind of, in a nutshell, what she and other women in the women's movement considered Christianity. And so it was an effort to undermine it and turn it on its head. So that's what the next book is about. It goes into these different ways in which...
• 4:39
  Feminism has has mirrored Christianity. And then it talks explicitly about what's happening among Protestants, what's happening among Catholics. And then, you know, how do we get back to something healthier and ordered and, you know, restorative and healing instead of what we're living with today? Excellent. That's it. Those two in a nutshell.
• 5:00
  Okay. Yeah. So, so needed. I, I've not read anything like the end of women before. I thought, I thought that was absolutely necessary. And I think this word feminism, it, it, it does. I feel like everything sort of starts with the confusion that that word seems to, uh, just engender in our, in our brains. Um, I think Wittgenstein said.
• 5:19
  Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. And there is something so powerful about that word. It just, you know, I've in conversations, people are like, of course, we are feminists. And, and so there's, it's a shorthand for I support women. So is that, is that what it means?
• 5:37
  No, that's what's so amazing about it. And I'm so glad that you brought this point up is the fact that everybody kind of has a different perspective on it. But because we've sort of packaged it in this idea that, oh, if you're a feminist, you want to help women. We've kind of lost sight of what it really is. And so if you start at the very beginning...
• 5:59
  fundamentally it's focused on this idea of women becoming like men, but more importantly, and this is what the idol of feminism has become, is female autonomy. Women becoming, being able to live by themselves, certainly without God, certainly without husbands and children. Those things are nice if you want them, but they're not requirements is kind of what it is. So it's its own faith in the individual person and the autonomy of women really mimicking the
• 6:29
  the masculine. I think that's kind of at the core of it. And there's all kinds of other parts and pieces that get attached to it that have made it kind of a religion such that we don't even really see how much it affects us because we're so used to it on an emotional level, the way that we act, the way that we think. And so that's one of the reasons why I think this book is so important, because it really points out just the ways in which women have been so manipulated. And I think so many of us are...
• 6:56
  When you start seeing it, then you realize this is something from which we have to recover. And, you know, it takes a long time to really undo, really, you know, I know in my own case, decades of indoctrination and get back to something healthier, especially when you don't actually have real models of that. I think that's one of the things that I struggle with and most of us struggle with in the culture is...
• 7:16
  The only models that we see of women who don't want feminism are the red bonnets and the red caps of the handmaid's tail. And of course, that's not what I mean or anybody that I know that's working on this issue means something much healthier and compelling.
• 7:33
  Well, they, so the idea, if somebody said, I'm a feminist, the idea that, that they're, they're promoting is that women, um, so the anthropology, what it means to be a female is to have the ability to be autonomous from men and children. And if we are trying to construct a reality engineer society in which women have that option and is it, is it just an option that we're trying to create or is it a preference if you're calling yourself a feminist? Um, yeah.
• 8:03
  I don't know. That's a really good question. I mean, I think it's by default. That's what they want women to be. Because there's this emulation of the masculine that's part of it as well. So I guess in practice, I think people would say it's an option. It's your choice. You can do whatever you want. But then in reality, of course, the way that women are treated who don't exercise that option are not treated well and are, you know, really condescended to and...
• 8:32
  Or ignore it altogether. So yeah, I think it has become a default. And I feel like if you look at pop culture, if you look at pop music, pop movies and that kind of thing, it's not an option. It's not one of many things a woman can do. It's really the default.
• 8:48
  One of the things that's so interesting is the language for women around the idea of being fiercely independent. We promote that. We're in dialogue right now with a podcast that is basically designed around raising daughters. And I think something like the subtitle is Raising Fiercely Independent Empowered.
• 9:10
  you know, daughters. And I have four daughters and I want my daughters to, to flourish. And everything I'm seeing from society and is like, if you want your daughters to really flourish, then you need to raise them to be maximally independent and empowered. Is that not true?
• 9:26
  Oh, it's 100% true. And that language is exactly right. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. And how would you react to that? In that conversation where someone's like, that is what I'm aiming at. I want to help my daughters to become maximally independent and empowered. Yeah.
• 9:41
  Yeah, well, I mean, that's a secular vision. You don't need God in that. You don't need surrender in that. You don't need anybody else in that. And that, I think, is a hard part, is then what happens when women invariably fail at that because you can never win all the time in that. Life has too many complex realities. What happens when you face suffering, when you face failure? And I think people would say, well,
• 10:09
  you're strong enough and you're empowered, but if you're not empowered with the right things, you're not actually going to flourish. And that, I think that's one of the saddest things that I've been privy to see when I talk to so many women who have bought deeply into feminism is to see what their lives are like 50, 60, 70, where they're like, I had no idea I would be alone.
• 10:28
  I bought deeply into what feminism told me to do. And now I'm alone or I'm just, you know, it's me and my dogs or my cats or, you know, I'm a pet parent. You know, because that desire to mother others is very intense. And that desire for relationships is also very important, particularly to women, to all of us, but particularly to women. So we have feminism has led women down this path where they feel like.
• 10:54
  They have to be strong and independent and not bring anybody else into their lives. And then the result is, you know, past the age of fertility, it really does leave women in this place where they're alone. And you can really see, too, just the way, you know, Satan is going to exacerbate that, where women are going to feel like...
• 11:16
  I'm the one that made these choices. And then there's just this incredible amount of guilt that's associated with it. So what is that going to do? It makes you much, even more alone. You know, like it just keeps getting worse, I think, without the realization that this is, you know, God has a totally different plan for women's lives. And the wealth that women have is in their relationships and the community that they build, the family that they have. And
• 11:41
  You know, the amazing thing, too, is to just look at the way tyrannies work. Every time that people are trying to control other people, the first thing, you know, if you think of Hitler, Stalin, or any kind of indoctrination, the key is to really get people alone, such that they don't have other people around them to bounce ideas off of, to be loved by, to be cared for. And so fundamentally, that's what we have done to women is completely isolate them such that.
• 12:10
  then it becomes very easy for us to be manipulated in so many different ways through this because we don't have this support system that we women used to always have whether you know through their fathers their mothers their brothers their uncles you know that rich tradition of of um being you know nested or embedded deeply into a family um to provide protection and then of course other women to help guide and educate and um you know help women flourish so
• 12:37
  Anyway, so you can see how this women kind of get tunneled through that language of empowerment and fierce independence into a place that they don't realize where they're going, I think. Yeah. Yeah. When I try to understand, like, the root of where these ideas are coming from, this suggestion of – because I –
• 12:56
  I love sort of the thought experiment that you can really reverse engineer people's philosophy by understanding their vision of the good life. And part of what I think seems to have happened in our culture is somehow freedom and has become the highest value instead of a tool that drives us towards greater virtue or greater goods. It itself is the highest good. I think it maybe became the default because it's the one thing in a society.
• 13:20
  Democratic Western society, we could all agree is good. We're going to debate about every other value. But part of what it means to be a part of this society is no, we we are pro freedom. Right. And I think that that somehow has become when that gets stuck at the highest place in society.
• 13:36
  How did that not destroy things that I would say are probably higher values, like family, like relationship, like love? So there's a tension, and I think it is at sort of the theological, philosophical level, that is erupting between this relationship.
• 13:51
  the kind of misplacing freedom at this, and it's a definition of freedom often that just means like my individual self-expression or my ability to, to indulge my impulses, my ability to be autonomous and not have to rely or be dependent on any other person. Like these are the kinds of ways that we think about this. So I, has something happened to our society just in terms of a value collision? Cause I, cause this, this feels like we got to wrestle with, uh,
• 14:17
  this foundational question about how important is freedom and how we just accidentally or, or through the decades has it ascended to too high a place? Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. And, and certainly like you're describing it, it's freedom as license, not the freedom to do what I ought. I think that's, that's an important distinction in terms of exactly what you mean by that. And this is one of the amazing things that I have discovered and I'd go into a little bit more in something wicked, but,
• 14:44
  It's in the end of woman to a degree, but I really focus on it. This idea of license, because much of this was actually seeded, you know, it's like actually intentionally planted into the culture. Because if you look at the way the communism has has worked throughout the culture, you know, when it took over. Yeah.
• 15:03
  the Soviet Union was really impressed upon the Soviet Union. It was a very militant way in which the Soviets took it on. And what happened immediately? Well, it was this idea of license, obviously in a limited way because they were so poor. But immediately abortion came in, it was legalized. The divorce happened. You could do it through a postcard. At one point, couples were no longer...
• 15:29
  They no longer had the same day off of the week, so they were intentionally kept from one another. It was really, again, this idea of isolation. And I think communism has always been trying to undermine the West to get the revolution. In 1936, there was a thinker named Wilhelm Reich that wrote this book called The Sexual Revolution.
• 15:50
  And it was basically the blueprint for what happened in the 1960s. He used some of the ideas of Freud. And in this book, he talks about how, you know, one of the ways that we can undo the West is by offering them whatever it is that they want on a physical level, especially in terms of sexual mores. And what we need to do is really vilify anything that looks like restraint, discipline, sacrifice, putting, you know,
• 16:20
  intentionally waiting or protecting something so that the fullness of it can be used later. Something like sexuality, you know, monogamy is one of those examples of that.
• 16:29
  And instead, what we're going to do is we're going to try and make parents look like they're just the repressors and, you know, children are really going to be happy if we just allow them whatever it is that they want. And so it's interesting that, you know, in 1970, there was an Italian thinker named Augusto Del Noce, and he was looking around at the culture at this point and saw what was happening with the sexual revolution in the 60s. And he said, you know, Marxism has a
• 16:57
  expired itself, hasn't exhausted itself. There's still more to come. You know, we've seen the revolutions in Russia, and we've seen them in China, and we've seen what happened under national socialism, under the Nazis. But there's more to come.
• 17:12
  And he's the one that predicted or at least identified that this sexual revolution that, again, had went back to Wilhelm Reich, that that's really what was happening in the West and in the United States. And this is really the undermining of the United States. And so if you look at it now, you know, the biggest way we're being undermined is our birthed earth at this point.
• 17:32
  Very long term game. But, you know, all of these private choices that a woman has been making with her doctor by themselves have had this dramatic effect on the West. This is why we have to have immigration because we don't, Native women aren't having enough children.
• 17:49
  So in any event, you know, that's a long answer to your question, but I think that fundamentally, because we have made license and use this philosophy of Freud and Reich, this has been our undoing because we've prioritized license.
• 18:07
  sensuality and our stomachs and, you know, all the pleasures and trying to, while at the same time, anything that is restraint, sacrifice, discipline has been vilified as, you know, like the worst thing that could happen to you, you know, the defamation of your personality or your character. And as a result, of course, parents have lost their authority when it comes to their children. You know, you can just see it, the manifestations of it.
• 18:34
  really across the board. But specifically with women, though, the big thing has been access to abortion and how much abortion has really certainly destroyed women on all kinds of levels, emotionally, certainly, psychologically, yes, and then a lot of times even physically.
• 18:55
  But this is what makes feminism possible, this idea that we can be autonomous because we have to have jobs. And in order to be able to compete with our careers, we can't, our fertility can't be what it's intended to be. And that gets in the way. And that's why abortion has been.
• 19:12
  obviously so much promoted and women, you know, fight for it now the way that they fought for their children in the past with this kind of fierceness that, you know, seems rational when you're talking about your children, but it's a little bit irrational, more than irrational in the culture today, the way that it's fought for something, you know, the very thing that for all of history, women have fought so fiercely for their children. And now it's just been turned on its head. So you can really see how effective Reich has been in convincing people,
• 19:42
  the West, the importance of our pleasure and our immediate goals. And, you know, even over and above the family, that the career is so much more important.
• 19:53
  Yeah, this birth, dearth, and all of the elements that you just unpacked, when I try to understand these roots, you have this desire for freedom, this also desire for fairness, this like, oh, we have to compare ourselves to men in order to discover how we're oppressed. And so that inevitably makes men the object of freedom.
• 20:18
  what we're all trying to move at. And this obviously then is a move away from being feminine. So what is the proper thing to look at to try to capture the right? And there was an interesting conversation that happened on a podcast a couple of weeks ago between Doug Wilson and Sam Harris. And one of the things that Doug Wilson claimed in that conversation was that a lot of the Bible is misunderstood.
• 20:41
  Because the Bible sort of assumes that the smallest unit that we're really focused on in society is the family. And there's something about our culture that focuses on the individual, which invariably breaks down the genders into masculine, feminine, and you begin to compare with each other. Instead of see, oh, they actually are designed for each other.
• 21:00
  And I'm curious how you think about that. I don't know how to get past this without bringing in theology. There does seem like I've always seen gender, for example. If you look at that from an individual frame, it's sort of like you're inevitably going to do this comparison, and this comparison is going to really drive both men and women towards sort of the same individual goal. Whereas if you start from the perspective that,
• 21:26
  that gender is actually a family construct and the idea of why a woman has female characteristics and why a man has male characteristics is because of the family. Then you inevitably start to think about things from a family perspective. And yeah, I'm curious what your thoughts are. How, how, how do we get past this? Is, is, is there basically a collision between thinking about things sort of theologically, philosophically as individuals versus the family? Yeah.
• 21:53
  Yeah, no, I think the key really is, as you described it, going back to the idea of fertility. What does that mean? I mean, I think when you think in terms of fertility, everything sort of is clarified, and I don't think you need a theological argument for that. And that's one of the real damages, I think, of the pill, is that it was the first time when suddenly that's cut off. And actually, there was a professor at Notre Dame Law, maybe 20,
• 22:18
  30, 40 years ago, and he used to tell his students all the time, the pill is what is going to lead to same-sex marriage. And all of his students thought he was nuts. Like, what are you talking about? How could this possibly happen? And of course, here we are today. And what happens is you suddenly, your body is useless.
• 22:37
  under with with feminism generally other than for pleasure or functioning, but it's not useful for fertility and a woman's body is shot through with elements that are appropriate and needed and necessary for her fertility.
• 22:53
  So it's really interesting to hear women talk today. It feels like women are always in this battle with their own body on one level or not. You hear about the women who are constantly afraid of getting pregnant, and then when they try to get pregnant, they can't get pregnant. And then they're trying to not be—it's just the control of it, those aspects of it, I think have really plagued women. And I've heard women speak of their uterus as a curse and all of that. So I think that that happens.
• 23:23
  All of the needs they had and the purpose that men had are completely washed out. Procreation, protection, and providing. And as a woman who's had five children, I can tell you that there are very few times when you are more vulnerable than when you're very pregnant or shortly after you've had a baby, which I'm sure you know well also. Absolutely.
• 23:46
  So I think that's what it comes down to is that our children and our future together is really what knits the family and knits male and female back together. And all of this even predates, of course, the Christian story. It goes back to the Old Testament, goes back before Moses.
• 24:04
  the beauty of marriage and the importance of it. So I think that's really where the rupture happened, is when you take out procreation as an important element, then suddenly people can't figure out what their purpose is. And they have the sense of
• 24:20
  I have to reinvent myself. I have to be something great and fantastic as in isolation. And that's, you know, they're really the big lie is that the greatness comes when you work in combination with someone else, especially a wife or a husband. Absolutely. You have this incredible superpower. You can replicate yourself. All the scientists working together could never accomplish what one woman can do with her womb. And yet we look at that and say, oh, that's that's so I need to compete with a man.
• 24:49
  And that is really the key of it, I think, is we haven't said anything good about motherhood in 50 years. You know, like I remember before I had children, friends of mine were talking about this, you know, that the wife can actually give birth to a whole other child. Like there was kind of this wonder in it. Like I'd never really thought about it in that extreme because, again, we we take it so for granted or something that needs to be like.
• 25:14
  done away with or you know controlled um but just that idea of just how remarkable that is that it's you know i remember having my own when i had my own children in fact just that that amazing moment of like who is that you know just this that miracle that it is um and that's what we've really lost the sense of too is just the the incredible gift that children are and
• 25:38
  You know, each year it feels like it gets worse because of the fact that nobody really knows what it looks like to raise children well. You know, we've been told they're a burden. And so what we're seeing is all this mental illness. You know, one thing leads to the other because children aren't properly attached to their mothers and fathers. And, you know, just this incredible brokenness that we're seeing on all, you know, three generations, four generations later because of it.
• 26:04
  Yeah, man. Hey, it's Jeremy. If you love your family, but feel like you're drifting, always busy, rarely aligned, we made something to help. It's a free course called Five Days to Transform Your Family into a Team. It's five short emails that walk you through how to bring shared vision, rhythms, and purpose back into your home. It's simple, biblical, and practical. You can join us for free at familyteams.com slash transform.
• 26:33
  I wanted you to speak a little bit. Being a Catholic, we have a lot of Protestants who listen to this. And one of the things that I appreciate so much about the Catholic Church is that you saw this. The Catholic Church saw this. You quote Pope John Paul II and some of the things he wrote about Christianity.
• 26:50
  about the importance of fertility. And this has been a kind of a battle, I know, inside the Catholic Church. But officially, there's been, you know, the Catholic Church has done a really good job holding the line and say, there is something sacred about this, about, and I think there's a phrase that you use in like being open to life.
• 27:08
  Um, and in that process of, of the, this, we, we, and I, everyone I knew kind of in the Protestant world just completely accepted, um, birth control, the ubiquitous birth control as a good thing. There was almost no understanding of the trade-off that we were making. It's just like, okay, this is good. We now have more power, more freedom.
• 27:27
  So more freedom is always good and always better. So what would you say to somebody? And obviously, you know, Catholics in practice also struggle a lot with this, but there's been a pretty strong official stance on this that has that I find really interesting and encouraging. But when you're talking to women, whether you're Protestant or Catholic women who see birth control being so ubiquitous as being always just a net positive for society. This is wonderful. It's given us more freedom. How do you respond to that?
• 27:57
  Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. One of the things that's really fascinating is to go back and read Paul VI's document on birth control, where he points out the things that are going to happen if a culture pursues birth control on a wide scale. And, you know, I don't have all the points at my fingertips, but some of them are really mind-blowing. One of them is being...
• 28:19
  That women will start being used as sexual objects instead of being really appreciated for their fertility and in their wholeness. You know, all of those, all the elements of what it means to be female. Another one is that governments will use birth control to control their own populations, which, of course, we've seen on a massive scale in places like China.
• 28:40
  It's been abused in Africa as well. So there were just a lot of really incredible insights that the Pope had then and that are ring true now. And I think it's always kind of mind-blowing when you're like, how did this man who never was married, he was Pope, he didn't have a wife, didn't have children, how did he see all of this? And just so incredibly presciently. And this is one of the things that,
• 29:08
  I think Catholics don't realize what a gift we have and a wealth we have to be able to explain this and sort of see not only the damage, but also the fruit of it in terms of really bonding a couple together. You know, how strong it makes a marriage. This is one of the statistics that I don't know the exact number, but the couples that are not contraceptive, the divorce rate is almost nothing. Like it's tiny compared to the national average.
• 29:38
  Um, and that's really compelling. And part of it has to do with the fact that you're communicating a lot more, you know, there's, you have to be a lot less, um, selfish and you also, you know, there's the demands of the children in your life, um, that you're raising as well. Um, so anyway, I think that there's, there's such a richness to it. And I've actually saw in my own family, um, there's a woman named Janet Smith who did, um,
• 30:03
  It was back in the day when we had cassette tapes. But she had this lecture called Contraception, Why Not? And it was mind-blowing. And I watched immediate members of my own family in Oregon back in the day. I'd given them the tape. And it changed their life entirely, completely changed their marriages. It's just this incredible thing to watch. So I think it's one of those things, if you dig into it, you can start seeing really...
• 30:33
  That there's something that the culture has missed and that, you know, going back to this issue of birth control is so much of it because the fact that it really allows this kind of individualism that you've alluded to on so many levels and this kind of license that isn't really meant to be part of God's plan in our lives for sure.
• 30:53
  Yeah, you definitely have to ask, like, did we discover something by making this ubiquitous from the 1960s on? Had things gotten better? Like, you started the whole book with a page where you have Jesus, you know, his quote, you know, like, look at the fruit. You'll know a tree by its fruit. And it's like we refuse to do that. We don't ask that question. We say, did it give more freedom? If the answer is yes, then the fruit doesn't matter. And it's so weird. It's such a strange, like, cognitive problem. So, yeah. Yeah.
• 31:23
  I would build on that. And Humanae Vitae, by the way, is the name of the encyclical that Paula Six wrote. But I would add to that as well is that this is why we have abortion is because birth control fails and people think, well, I didn't mean to get pregnant. So I...
• 31:38
  Because I didn't mean to, and I am pregnant, we have to deal with this. So this is part of the problem, is abortion is a direct fruit of the failure of contraception. So I think that's another important thing. If we're going to recognize how awful abortion is, we have to realize where it started. And the other piece of it, too, is that there are plenty of abortifacients, unfortunately.
• 32:01
  In certain kinds of contraception, an IUD prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman's uterus. The pill has an abortifacient aspect because it thins out the lining of a woman's uterus so that the fertilized egg cannot be implanted there either.
• 32:19
  There are those abortions that are happening very, very early and people don't know about them, but that's still a life to which we're going to be called to responsibly someday whenever our life ends. So we have to be aware of those realities because these aren't clean in terms of abortion and the fruit that's happening in our lives as Christians.
• 32:42
  If you don't put abortion into the ledger of, okay, you gain some measure of what you call freedom, then you kind of will just hide this other variable over here. And it makes sense why it's difficult for people to understand why isn't this just...
• 33:01
  An obvious good. And one of the things you do in Something Wicked that I found interesting was you really are framing feminism like a kind of religion and abortion, like a sacrament of that religion. And that's an interesting move. In the whole anti-racist world, I definitely saw this realization that people were coming to that that.
• 33:24
  People are like treating anti-racism like a religion and it has rituals and you really are driving into feminism saying that this also is being treated like a religion with its own sacraments. Why? Like talk to me about that categorization. Yeah. Yeah.
• 33:40
  No, I think this is a really interesting thing. First of all, there's a sacrament is that which makes holy or it can be a rite of initiation. There's a lot of aspects to it, but I think it's something that is holy. And if you look at the way in which it's treated, like I was mentioning before, just it's become, you know, it's a way women vote. It's a one single issue.
• 34:02
  that women will vote on is whether or not someone's for or against abortion. The way it's become put on such a pedestal in terms of the importance of women's lives, I think, shows that it is something sacred. And you even hear, there was a, I have in the book, a man who was a retired abortionist. And he was, in his letter, as he's closing his clinic, he's talking about what a sacred responsibility it has been for him to be able to provide abortions to women for 40 years.
• 34:31
  So there's something about it that is much more important than just kind of your average medical procedure that a woman has. But what's amazing about it is there's a philosopher named Peter Kreeft who has made the comparison before I did, and I use it here. But it's that idea of, you know, when Christ is offering himself the Last Supper, he's saying, this is my body given up for you.
• 34:57
  But what abortion does is this says, you know, it turns that on its head and it says, this is your body given up to me, given up for me. So it completely inverts that order. And Kreeft has another book where he talks about, actually, it's Thomas Howard, I think, is the one who wrote the book, Hallowed Be This Home or Hallowed Be This House.
• 35:17
  where he talks about the role of parent is we make sacrifices for the life of our children. And, you know, that's this is the way it should always flow. This this this sacrifice and this gift that we give to those who are younger, more vulnerable, who are our children.
• 35:33
  And this is, again, where you see it go the opposite direction, where it says, well, your life is inconvenient for me. Your life is going to be a problem that make my life more difficult. So you need it needs to be sacrificed. So I think it's, you know, when you start seeing it in those terms, you know,
• 35:53
  just the real reality and the importance of life and what it's always meant to be in the way that people, you know, obviously there are people who have not done this well in the past. We're not trying to sugarcoat it because we know that we live in a broken world. But there is this vital understanding and there's something really fundamental about that relationship between mother and child. And so, you know, this has been one of the themes I've talked about a lot in my books is how do we get to this place where a woman is,
• 36:20
  These aren't strangers killing their children, aborting their children. They're parents, fathers, mothers, grandparents involved in it. And that's really the amazing thing. So if you look at just a wide-scale manslaughter, it's usually strangers. Maybe in the Civil War you had people that were fellow countrymen,
• 36:40
  that exists, but it's not parents killing their own children. And this is a real tragedy is that we can't see that. First of all, we also don't realize that because of abortion, feminism really has become the greatest issue.
• 36:56
  The most number of people killed by any tyrannical ideology is feminism because the abortion numbers completely dwarf the numbers of those killed in the Holocaust, those killed in Mao's China, those killed in the gulags, even in a couple of years because we're now somewhere between 40 and 70 million abortions worldwide annually. It doesn't take long to catch up with feminism.
• 37:24
  all of those mass extermination events. So yeah, it's really sobering when you start looking at the numbers and the reality of it. And I think it stays hidden because we don't have, we don't have, this baby hasn't been personalized yet. We don't have eye color. We don't have hair color. We don't have, we don't know anything about it. And that's what makes it so difficult to really fight this is because it feels like such an abstraction and someone we don't know.
• 37:52
  And that's the real challenge I think we have to helping people understand what it is that they're really doing and why it's so diabolical, truly.
• 38:01
  Yeah, the thing that has confused me the most about abortion in the political realm is when women almost celebrate it. I could understand the left saying, hey, we want to make an extremely rare, we know there are these edge cases, let's only protect those. That's not the rhetoric, especially this last political cycle. There was people that were celebrating more abortion, more abortion. And I kept on getting so confused by this.
• 38:29
  And then I began to realize that if you're a woman who has had an abortion, what you have done is so potentially morally horrific. As a mother killing her own child, that if you start to imagine living in society where you're a woman who has done that, and then society's morals begin to shift.
• 38:48
  And they overturn Roe versus Wade. They're like all kinds of laws are passed against abortion. And society as a whole begins to wake up from this horror show and says, that's wrong. Imagine the guilt that would fall over you. And so I can't imagine this. Suddenly this sort of thought experiment like made sense to me about why women are so bad.
• 39:10
  Adamant about protecting and celebrating abortion. And it does begin to function at that point, like a sacrament or an initiation ceremony into a religion. Because as soon as you, it's like, it's like a baptism. It's like, you can't go back from that moment. From that moment, the narrative of your life has essentially shifted.
• 39:30
  And to, for the rest of your life, talk about care and love and wanting to be this mother who is, you know, instead of being a political animal, like something shifts in your fundamental identity, it seems like. And this is, you want to create more people like you. And so you have to protect the right of abortion for future generations. It seems like that's kind of what started to piece together for me as this potentially is a sacrament.
• 39:53
  Right. No, I think that's very well said, that idea of you can't go back because you either have to double down and shout your abortion. You have to do that. Otherwise, you will be crushed emotionally. And I think that's obviously something to communicate, too, is that we know God's mercy and forgiveness are immense and that he wants nothing more than to forgive us of this. So that tenderness and God's love needs to be communicated to women who have had abortions.
• 40:22
  But at the same time, understanding the mindset of those who keep perpetuating it is really, really key. There was a book that it's just come out or it's just being released. It's on the Shout Your Abortion website. And the book is for children. And it's called Abortion is Everything. I mean, it's really amazing that, you know, that's the name of the book. Abortion is Everything.
• 40:45
  For children. For children. Yeah, it's directed at children. So it's just incredible. You're exactly right. You know, we went from Bill Clinton talking about safe and rare. Yeah. Now it is absolutely celebrated and seen as, you know, really a rite of passage. In one of my books, they talk about there was a couple who they were pregnant and they were doing a gender reveal.
• 41:13
  And they ended up serving jelly donuts because they aborted the baby. I mean, it's just a thing. And it's not hard to find stories like that anymore. Just, you know, how egregious and vile the way in which we speak about the unborn. You know, it's just off the charts and just really, really dark and sad and ugly.
• 41:35
  So that's what's at stake. So there's very dark, but something we have to face. All right. I would like to do something a little bit on the constructive side as we pull out of this. So I was reading something wicked. I found myself asking myself this question for you, Dr. Gress. And that was if you could go back in time and guide the women's movement onto a different path from day one at the beginning of
• 42:00
  You know, the first wave of feminism, knowing what you know now about where this ultimately leads, what would you recommend? What would you what could we have done? What's the counterfactual?
• 42:10
  Well, this is fascinating. I think that one of the things that I've discovered is this woman named Hannah Moore, whom you've probably heard about before. She was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft's, and her work is amazing because she knew Wollstonecraft's work. She knew this precursor to feminism, and she refused to read her. She said, why would I want to be an imitation of a man when I can be a woman?
• 42:34
  And I think, you know, one of the reasons why feminism took such hold was because with the Industrial Revolution, you have the home is really denigrated in a way that it had never been before. Because, you know, prior to that, everything happens at the home. It's, you know, the family's there, the meals are there, education, entertainment, all of that is there. And the woman is a huge role in this. I mean.
• 42:56
  I mean, it's almost laughable hearing people talk about whether women should work or not. Like women always worked in different contexts and in different ways. And even children under that model were an asset to the family. They weren't, you know, the pride and joy of a woman. And then suddenly everything gets moved outside the home. And I think that's really where, you know, it's glacial. It happens very, very slowly. But this is where you can see women realizing that.
• 43:22
  you know, this growing sense of discontentedness. What am I supposed to do with myself? Work outside the home or, you know, this, that, that pattern is established. And so I think truly what needed to be recognized was what was happening with the home and just this realization that the importance of motherhood, because we also kind of thought, oh, well,
• 43:44
  Children can just take care of themselves. They don't really need a mother. You know, this is some of the rhetoric, certainly in the 70s. But going back further, I think, you know, fundamentally, we needed to look at, we need to be more like Hannah Moore.
• 43:58
  and recognize the importance of womanhood and really understand what is lost when you lose ordered good women who love their families. And I think this is some of the reasons why we have so much loneliness today too, because women were usually the ones that brought people together that would host dinner parties or events or things after church, all of that. And people don't have that kind of community anymore. Even if it's someone that you just know in your neighborhood,
• 44:27
  You know, women were the ones that were sort of keeping an eye out for people because they were home and they could do that. So anyway, yeah, I think fundamentally we needed to go back and really understand the role and the value of home. And that doesn't mean that we have to reject wholeheartedly the Industrial Revolution. You know, like anything, there was positives and negatives, but...
• 44:48
  But we do have to recognize the importance of the home. And there were certain elements of this throughout history where people tried to grasp at it. But I think feminism was very strong, it was very compelling. And then, of course, it latched on with communism. And so it had so many different political and I think a lot of monetary force behind it. So it's really interesting to see that.
• 45:13
  Like where it went wrong and how we could correct that. But yeah, fundamentally, this idea that a woman needs to be valued for who she is instead of denigrated because she can just raise children. You know, that kind of idea. Yeah, it seems like one of the difficulties in kind of going back and imagining maybe where we got off is that most people's imagination for going backwards is they end up in the 1950s. And that's not going back far enough. And so you say, you know...
• 45:41
  We got to go back farther than that. There was a time where there was a household-based economy. Husbands and wives worked together. There was a lot going on in the home. Children were an asset. And there might have been ways to leverage some of the strengths of the Industrial Revolution and actually preserve society.
• 45:58
  the household in that way, if we had a vision for it. The problem was we didn't. Like we didn't really, we had a vision for freedom. Like we said, we went, we took the trajectory towards individual freedom instead of let's build a certain kind of household. And it seems like that's why the only thing that really gives me hope
• 46:14
  is going back to scripture and really understanding this idea of the biblical household, and that if we attempt to build anything else, we're going to be caught in this trap where we're going to be broken down and atomized into individuals. The family is going to disintegrate, and our essential femaleness and maleness will become confusing to us, and ultimately something will try to transcend. I don't know what else. Those are the only two paths I can imagine.
• 46:39
  Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. And I can't stress enough how much Christianity has been denigrated because of feminism. Because one of the things that feminism is traveling on the same path as socialism and communism. It starts out, Wollstonecraft is contemporaries with...
• 46:57
  all these radical revolutionary men. They were Englishmen, but they all were huge supporters of the French Revolution. And how do we get rid of faith? You know, we want this faithless egalitarianism. That was pretty much the vision, you know, built on rationality. And so this is why...
• 47:14
  Thomas Paine is actually considered the start of what we know as the left. There was another man named Dr. Richard Price, who's actually considered the first leftist thinker, and he was Wollstonecraft's mentor. So she's right in the midst of all these leftist thinkers. And if you look at feminism, it just travels completely along with all these leftist organizations. And one of the things that I think is really important is understanding the role of
• 47:42
  of emotions and the way feminism has really manipulated those because of the fact that the socialists in the 1890s realized, you know, if we make women angry,
• 47:54
  they're going to be much more politically active for us than if they're happy. So they very intentionally, they started what we know now is called consciousness raising, which was getting women together to just talk about their problems and not to bring healing or closure or to help them. It was just literally to make them angry and then not just angry about their own problems, but about their neighbor's problems because they would hear all the things that the other women in their community were upset about. And this is what was, you know, ended up being part of the motivation.
• 48:24
  So in any event, I think it's really interesting to start looking at, you know, what's happening to certainly men in light of this, because that's really what the start of the vilification of men is this idea that women have been enslaved and are victims and whatnot. All of that starts simultaneously. But then what's the engine behind it? It's this anger of woman, which is, you know, 100 percent used really up to today.
• 48:54
  These are not placid events. This is really built on envy, contempt, and anger. Those are the three theological vices or theological virtues of feminism, which are completely opposite of Christianity, which is faith, hope, and love.
• 49:12
  So anyway, I think that's one of the things, like you mentioned, is if Christians had, and Christian women in particular, had maintained their faith and not given over to the ways in which feminism has manipulated us, I think we'd be in a much better direction.
• 49:30
  place as well. I think that that's obviously a core piece of it is, you know, restoring or at least maintaining our understanding of Christianity instead of vilifying it and saying that's, you know, women are going to be free and liberated without it. Yeah.
• 49:45
  Well, that's a great place to kind of conclude. Christianity is really important. Like we need to have a belief system that we really believe in. And as Jesus said, you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. We need to preserve our faith in light of these kinds of ideologies. And that's really the hope. So, Dr. Gress, I'd love for you to share with everyone a couple of things as we conclude here.
• 50:10
  how they can get your book. And then the work you're doing at Theology of Home, I find that really interesting. I think that dovetails really well with what we do at Family Team, so I'd love you to share about that.
• 50:19
  So my book will be available, you know, Amazon. It's published by Sophia Institute Press. So Sophia Institute dot com. Or you can get a copy if you want a signed copy of my website called Theology of Home dot com. So Theology of Home is really this idea that dovetails with my other books because I realized women were destroyed, particularly in the 60s and 70s and up to today, through things like magazines and, you know, all the things that that.
• 50:47
  women really enjoy thumbing through or watching daytime TV, that kind of thing. And it occurs to me, why can't we start taking our own Christian values and putting them in something just as beautiful and compelling? But I also recognize, you know, Theology of Home, the idea behind it is that for women, you know, for all of us really who love God,
• 51:06
  of Jesus is we all want to just be in heaven with him. That's the goal. We want to get home and be at home with all those whom we love. And so that's what I realized, you know, our home is really meant to be a foretaste of that, a foreshadowing of that. You know, it's a place where we are comforted, we're safe, we're nurtured, you know, there's hospitality, all of these great elements.
• 51:32
  that certainly are reflected in heaven. So that's really what I built out was kind of this understanding of God through the home. But these books have been, also, there's a lot of photographs in them. So they're really fun to look through and
• 51:47
  and thumb through. So anyway, and then in the meantime, I've also started a blog because I feel like we're not spending enough money, time and attention to really help women understand what it means to be a woman, the role of motherhood, which isn't just about biological motherhood. It's also about spiritual motherhood, mentoring, helping people have life. That's what mothering is. And we just haven't done a great job of that in the culture. So anyway, those are my...
• 52:16
  my efforts to really start giving women a model of what it means to be a beautiful, compelling feminine woman. Certainly in contrast to what it is that we're seeing in the culture today. So good. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Grass. I love, I love the fact that you you've raised five children. You have all this responsibility as a mother and you are these books and the theology of home, especially, I think that that vision is so compelling. I agree a hundred percent. That's so needed. So appreciate you jumping on here today and thank you for all the work that you're doing.
• 52:44
  My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks so much for all the work you're doing and just providing a model for people. I think that's really key is, you know, erasing what the left is implanted and really start giving people something beautiful and compelling that they want more of. Absolutely.
• 53:01
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