A Journal for Men & Women
Raise the question of “women’s roles” among conservative Christians and you will send almost all the men scurrying for cover. So dominant are certain feminist assertions—that, left on their own, men will mistreat women and that the Christian tradition as we have it is the work of men left on their own—that men who are not guilty of a single chauvinist thought will grovel as much as they must to prove their innocence and enlightenment.
Even those who hold to the New Testament teaching on the headship of men tend to grant the feminist claims in every other way. Many will not use man and he generically, and we even see, once in a while, the hitherto unimaginable sight of very conservative men avoiding he when speaking of the Father and the Son and especially the allegedly genderless Holy Spirit. When they have to say they oppose women being put into positions of headship, they almost always add some qualifying phrase like “but I certainly don’t mean to say that women are inferior,” as if holding the biblical view were in itself evidence of misogyny.
A few weeks ago one of our readers, an old friend with some status in the wider world, wrote me to complain that Touchstone ran only male writers and “operates [on] a male-only basis.” In our articles “all references to Christians are always ‘he,’ never ‘she,’” and even my essay on “Imaginative Orthodoxy” “addresse[d] a male-only readership” because I called my readers “modern men.” For these reasons—the relative lack of women writers and the use of generic language—women don’t “rate in your pages.” In Touchstone, “Male is normative, female is exceptional.”
As a magazine opposed to the egalitarian project, of which feminism is the most popular expression, we would be prudent to scurry for cover with almost everyone else. We would not offend old and influential friends, for one thing, and we would please conservatives who either hold to the milder form of feminism, usually marked by belief (often quite aggressive) in the headship of women in the Church, or who do not hold to any form of feminism but dislike open opposition to it. We could begin publishing more women because they were women and impose on our writers a judicious use of “inclusive” language, in order to win some, as St. Paul said.
Two Reasons
It would be prudent to scurry for cover, but we have decided to stay in the open. One reason is that the editors share a sense of honor, alas probably now very old-fashioned, in which a gentleman does not dignify assaults on his character by changing his behavior to gratify his critics. But mainly, we act so contrary to popular opinion and political prudence for two reasons, one having to do with the nature of our work and the realities of human nature, which realities we are not inclined to reform, the other having to do with the need to preserve the traditional linguistic expression of the order God gave us, lest belief in it be yet further lost.
First, the sort of work we have been called to do limits the number of women who will be likely to write for us. More men than women write for Touchstone because the sort of polemical and analytical theology we favor is primarily a masculine enterprise, or at least a primarily male enterprise, and indeed has been since the New Testament (a collection written entirely by men, which suggests something).
For better or worse, for every Dorothy Sayers there is a Lewis and a Chesterton and a Knox and a Belloc and a Blamires and a Kreeft and many others. (The catalogues of evangelical publishers like Eerdmans or Baker and the pages of magazines like First Things and Christianity Today reveal this as well.) If another Sayers were to appear and offer to write for us if we dropped one of the senior editors into the middle of Lake Michigan in January, we would gladly draw straws—not because she was a woman, but because she was a genius who would write what needs to be written.
Such theology may be primarily masculine because, as some feminists argue, women are more “relational” than men and tend to “make connections” while men find distinctions and differences. If they are right, because Touchstone’s mission requires the drawing of distinctions and the pointing out of differences, it will, in a world marked by confused attempts to combine what cannot be combined, tend to be a primarily masculine work.
We are happy to make connections, but only when the differences of the things to be connected have been identified and evaluated. There are differences whose combination is ordained and fruitful, like that of man and wife, and differences whose combination is not, like that of two men who want to ignore the incompatibility of their sexual organs by referring to the false unity of “love and commitment.” The false claim of the second must be destroyed for the first to flourish, and this sort of critical analysis is a major part of our calling as a magazine.
Even on a less directly theological subject like Intelligent Design, the leaders in the field are all men. (This is true on the Darwinian side too, which suggests something). Publishing the major writers on the subject means publishing men. There is no way around this fact, except by bypassing the leaders in the field and publishing lesser figures because they are women.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
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
37.5—Sept/Oct 2024
Why Law Schools Can't Teach Law
A sidebar to How Law Lost Its Way by Adam MacLeod
33.1—January/February 2020
on a Saint's Charism That Cures Toxic Perfectionism by Colleen Carroll Campbell
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
