Why They Won't Dance
When as an evangelistic tactic one tries to lure modernized people into Christianity by assuring them of how egalitarian it is—a common practice these days—they're bound eventually to see that you're selling them a bill of goods to get them in the door, for if they go through, they will only discover that real Christianity is patriarchal to the core. When the First Article of the Creed or the first line of the Lord's Prayer finally sinks in, they're bound to feel they've been practiced upon, and their last hostility will be worse than the first.
What you've proposed to them is not only dishonest and bound in the long run to be counter-productive in Christian-making, but requires the would-be evangelist to contort into a position where he's constantly adjusting his thought and discourse to conform to something fundamentally anti-Christian, so that over time his own Christianity deteriorates into egalitarianism—the lie he has been serving in his professed attempt to evangelize. It's undeniable that this artful dodging is characteristic of a good many segments of the Church now, having spread from the defining institutions—the schools, the parachurch organizations, theologians, liturgists, hymnal revisers, and preachers—to constituencies anxious to be relieved of the burden of resisting the world on this point.
However the problem is approached—and it is a very great problem because the lie is now well fixed in a culture that automatically associates patriarchy with abuse—the way forward can never be to answer one falsehood with another, that is, to pretend that Christianity, while regarding men and women as equal in substance as the members of the Holy Trinity are, is in any way egalitarian—that there is no hierarchy, no higher and lower, no right expectation of obedience or of following, but only bare functional differences in the relations.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
25.3—May/Jun 2012
Calls for Freedom, Democracy & Secularism End Up with None of the Above by Hunter Baker
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
