Dear news media: please stop mistaking misogyny for liberation

Over the span of one week recently—a single seven-day stretch—the New York Times published two widely read articles on women and family life, and they couldn’t be more different. The first was “How a Polyamorous Mom Had ‘a Big Sexual Adventure’ and Found Herself.” As the tagline explains further, “In her memoir, More, Molly Roden Winter recounts the highs and lows of juggling an open marriage with work and child care.” The second was my favorite American historian’s editorial “Dobbs Didn’t Reduce Abortions. The Anti-Abortion Movement Needs a New Vision.” The tagline reads, “Abortion bans are failing. We can save more unborn lives supporting families.”

Both pieces elicited extensive response in the comments section and on social media, running the full gamut of emotions. Only one, however, resulted in accusations of misogyny for the author—that fate befell the proposal that the best pro-life strategy is to support mothers, children, and families.

That multiple people might consider the support of mothers and families to be misogyny—while describing Roden Winter’s “adventure” as a liberating and praiseworthy quest for finding her best self, is just one more installment in the long series of such stories in mainstream media these days. Indeed, it was another story along these lines from Bloomberg (a piece that argued that women who don’t have kids are richer—and happier) that launched me down the rabbit trail that led to my forthcoming book from IVP Academic, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity.

Disrespect for motherhood as a calling is prevalent in our society and is a symptom of a larger disregard for human life and dignity that comes naturally to a post-Christian worldview–just as it did to a pre-Christian one. In every society in world history, it has been the weak whose lives have been held as less significant, less worthy of protection and of resources. With its glorification of the weak, however, and with its insistence that all human lives are precious because made in God’s image, Christianity has challenged the norms that otherwise lean too comfortably to abuse.

Encouragement of books and profiles along the lines of this latest one on Roden Winter from New York Times is only continuing to normalize abuse and exploitation of women and the derailment of family life, all by dubbing it incongruously as liberation. But this narrative, integral to the dominant strand of secular modern feminism, is a mistake that fails, first and foremost, the women who fall for it, as writers like Erika Bachiochi, Abigail Favale, and Mary Harrington, to name just a few examples, have argued eloquently in their recent books. Indeed, to get an accurate picture of a better feminism, a version that respects women as women—as persons, which includes respecting them as mothers!—I recommend the (clearly necessary!) work of Fairer Disputations, a publication that just celebrated its first birthday.

Instead of heroizing extreme selfishness born of despair, we need more stories of sacrificial love—the kind of love to which traditional marriage (of the not-open kind) and family life calls us so organically yet unnaturally. If there is some sort of quest for self on which we could all be bound, I have not found myself yet, I admit. But God found me. And every morning, usually before I am ready to wake up, so do my children. And that is part of the point.

Christianity calls us to die to self—a phrase that in some circles verges on cliché, and yet is a powerful expression of a deeply extraordinary and countercultural way of life. Living on quest to find oneself is not easy (as Roden Winter apparently argues in her memoir), but it certainly seems easier than the alternative. And yet, it’s the unexpected one of these two paths that can bring authentic, true joy.