Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 06:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Feminine Emotionalism And The Evangelical Conscience
Author: G. Shane Morris

Eikon 6.1 (Spring 2024) p. 64

Feminine Emotionalism And The Evangelical Conscience

G. Shane Morris

G. Shane Morris is a senior writer at the Colson Center and host of the Upstream podcast.

A former colleague of mine recently pointed out on Twitter that pornography use repulses godly women and is a huge impediment to marriageability.1 He was, of course, right about that. But he went on to blame this moral failure among men for the low marriage rate in general, and claimed that he knows “ZERO single women genuinely uninterested in a virtuous, courageous, thoughtful man.” Expanding the discussion beyond the church, he concluded that “the American man’s inability to find a wife is a function of him not living in ways that women respect.”

Is this true? Is the primary obstacle to the formation of godly families in our churches and our nation simply the fact that men are unwilling to live up to the exacting moral

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standards of women? Is the solution to browbeat those men into doing better — often in mixed, public settings — until they make the cut? And can we really expect women to respond naturally to the moral reformation of men with interest and respect?

Many evangelicals seem to think so. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the typical Bible study feels like an exercise in getting men to instinctively behave, think, and pray more like women.2 Evangelical publishers now roll out titles demeaning traditionally masculine traits as toxic, perhaps holdovers of the American west. And we’ve all heard the observation that Mother’s Day sermons tend to be unconditional, velvet-cushioned celebrations of the women in the congregation, while Father’s Day sermons tend to be barbed wire jeremiads about men’s shortcomings and the need for dads to grow a pair and fulfill their responsibilities. Usually, these condemnations of men come from men.

The most famous is probably a sermon by former Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll, who literally screamed at the guys in his congregation over what he saw as their unwillingness to grow up and fulfill the expectations of their “mothers, sisters, girlfriends, and wives.”3 The language he

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used to describe these unnamed men, which he seemed to count among the majority in his flock, was telling: “cowards,” “passive,” “impish,” “worthless,” “little boys,” “making a mess out of everything in their life.” By contrast, the main fault Driscoll found with women in his con...