Man's Original Sin
Feminism, Effeminacy, and the Fall
As we prepare to launch into the topic of birth control, we felt the need to pause and address the issue of effeminacy, a root cause condition underlying this issue, as well as several others we will be covering in our series on The Seven Deadly Sins of American Christianity.
As with our posts on misrepresenting God’s holiness (parts I and II) and failing to discern between clean and unclean practices (I and II), this eBook on effeminacy, titled The (Ef)feminization of the Church: How American Christianity Lost Its Way by Losing Its Manhood, is intended to provide a broader Biblical framework to our critiques of specific sins now prevalent in the Church. We pray these chapters serve to connect dots and open eyes so that we can see with greater clarity the big picture of the American Church’s decline and how, with God’s help, we can turn it around.
False flag feminism?
For some time now, Christians have been puzzling over the increasing feminization of the American Church. By just about any measure, the Church seems to appeal far more to feminine, rather than masculine, sensibilities. For example, statistics show that in nearly every category of religious involvement, women outperform men in the United States.1 One need only scan the congregants at a local Sunday worship service for first-hand confirmation of this lopsided sex ratio.
The consequences of this imbalance have been manifestly disastrous. Lacking proper masculine influences, the Church has been rendered both impotent and irrelevant. Disorder and dysfunction abound in Christian homes and institutions as our public reputation sinks to perhaps its lowest point in living memory. Each time you think we’ve bottomed out, some new, previously unthinkable gender-bending scandal erupts in the Church, shocking even the most cynical of observers. Perhaps the worst part of it all is that our cowardly Church leaders appear to lack the strength to stand up and actually do something about it.
The million dollar question is, “Why?” What on earth is behind this perverse mass makeover of our Church and its so-called men?
The usual suspects are well known and oft repeated: sentimental worship music, seeker-sensitive church growth methods, emotionalism, and so forth. But perhaps the leading culprit cited for the feminization of the Church is, not surprisingly, feminism, a secular ideology that focuses on “liberating” women from the oppressive shackles of the patriarchy. One can easily envision how this movement, as well as its “Me Too” and “toxic masculinity” offshoots, could neuter our witness and neutralize our fighting men, if left unchecked.
And yet what if feminism and the other aforementioned diagnoses, despite their many inroads into the American Church, are merely symptoms of a larger disease? What if feminization and its trappings are merely a “false flag operation”2 of the enemy intended to distract us from a far more insidious, antecedent problem?
The creation of temptation
To truly wrap one’s head around something, one has to understand its origin story. And when it comes to any and all topics that the Bible addresses—and it addresses pretty much all of them, either directly or indirectly—their foundations are inevitably grounded in the book of Genesis, literally “the book of beginnings.”
Most of us are familiar with the account of the creation and fall found in the early chapters of Genesis. After making the heavens, the earth, and all their inhabitants, God made mankind male and female, in His image, as the crowning act of creation (Genesis 1). Although God placed man3 in the ideal setting of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2), man was soon exiled from paradise for believing the serpent’s lie and disobeying God’s sole prohibition not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3).
What is less familiar is the order in which the fall of man occurred, its relation to the order of man’s creation, and the significance of both for men and women today. If we are to understand the origin of the purported feminization of the American Church, we must first grasp the cause of all gender4 irregularities. Or, to put it another way, to understand the rationale behind God’s creation of man and woman, we must understand the logic behind the serpent’s temptation of man and woman. Lurking in the shadows of God’s creation of mankind was the serpent’s creation of temptation. Yes, God is truly the master craftsman (Genesis 1, 2), but the crafty serpent has honed a craft of his own (Genesis 3:1).
The enemy’s strategy to foil God’s plan for His creation was no accident. The serpent, whom the Bible identifies as “the devil, or Satan” (Revelation 20:2), knew that attacking God directly would fail spectacularly—He is God almighty, after all. So to get at his ultimate target, Satan went after the next best option, mankind, God’s glorious image-bearers (Genesis 1:26, 27; 1 Corinthians 11:7). And to bring down man, Satan aimed his sights at woman, the glory of man (1 Corinthians 11:7). In doing so, he very shrewdly, and quite literally in one sense, staged his ambush on the lowest hanging fruit.
Clearly, the thought of being labelled a “sexist” for adopting this technique was the least of Satan’s concerns. He was out for the kill. He was not above launching his offensive against man’s “soft side,” Adam’s other half (Genesis 2:21, 22), if that would give him the strategic advantage. The predatory serpent had patiently studied his prey’s behavior, their habits, weaknesses, and tendencies, enabling him to home in on their most vulnerable point of attack. Adam and Eve were in deep trouble before they even knew what hit them.
Discerning Christians should not shy away from pointing out the pragmatism of the serpent’s attack on Adam vis-à-vis Eve. How else can we wise up and fend off similar assaults on ourselves? Remember Jesus’ admonition to His disciples (Matthew 10:16): “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Indeed, the Bible often exhorts believers to sharpen up spiritually (e.g., Matthew 26:41, Luke 16:8, 1 Corinthians 14:20), “in order that Satan might not outwit us. For we are not unaware of his schemes” (2 Corinthians 2:11). And if one wants to understand Satan’s age-old game plan to tempt and deceive, then one need look no further than his approach in the garden.
Rather than presenting woman as identical to, or less than, man, the Bible teaches that women are uniquely different from and complimentary to men (Genesis 2:18–25). Because of this, women are tailored to different duties and roles than men, affording them special care and honor in keeping with their natural distinctions (1 Peter 3:7; cf. 1 Corinthians 12:18–26, Ephesians 5:22–33):
“Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.”
Women are constitutionally more delicate than men, a fact that should be honored and accounted for by the male leaders who have been given charge over them. This is not merely the Apostle Peter’s opinion, but rather an unavoidable, self-evident feature of God’s “very good” design for woman. As such, it should not only be acknowledged, but highly esteemed, and even celebrated.
The Apostle Paul takes this knowledge further and spells out the analogy between the order5 of God’s creation and the order of Satan’s temptation, drawing out their implications for the proper functioning of the Church (1 Timothy 2:12–14; cf. Genesis 2:18):
“I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”
Paul tells us that the order of man’s creation mirrors the order of his fall: Adam was made first, then Eve; Eve sinned first, then Adam. He then extrapolates from these facts normative principles for Christian conduct that apply to all men and women in the Church. Let’s unpack this briefly.
Though it is neither good nor possible for man to exist independently of woman (Genesis 2:18a; 1 Corinthians 11:11, 12), woman was nevertheless made from and for man as his suitable companion, and not vice versa (Genesis 2:18b, 21–23; 1 Corinthians 11:3–10). Furthermore, Eve’s agreeableness, a quintessentially female tendency,6 was leveraged by the serpent to great effect, playing right into the hands of his diabolical ruse. Since these observations speak to abiding aspects of maleness and femaleness in general, rather than mere individual quirks of Adam and Eve in particular, they serve to ground man’s right and proper authority over women in the orderly worship of God’s Church (1 Corinthians 14:26–40).
Some may at this point object to the Apostle’s line of reasoning, labeling it “behind the times,” and in a sense we would heartily agree. However, it is precisely because Paul’s timeless logic goes back to the very beginning of time that it is, and always will be, ahead of its time. Indeed, Paul provides us with profound insights for understanding the very gender dysphoria that is presently plaguing our people.
The testing of Adam
To realize the full benefit of these insights, we have to tease out a central irony in Paul’s teaching on the fall. Given what we have just noted, it may come as a surprise that this same Apostle consistently pins the blame for humanity’s descent into sin and corruption on Adam, rather than Eve. According to Paul, it is “in Adam” that “all die” (1 Corinthians 15:22a, emphasis mine), and “sin entered the world through one man, and […] death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who did not sin in the way that Adam transgressed” (Romans 5:12a, 14, emphasis mine).
What accounts for this apparent inconsistency? After all, as noted above, Genesis clearly records that it was the woman, and not the man, who was the first victim of the serpent’s cunning. And yet, when studied closely, it is that very passage of scripture that yields the key to unlocking Paul’s conundrum (Genesis 3:1–7):
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made.
He said to the woman, ‘Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?’ And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”
Do you notice how surprisingly passive our AWOL Adam is in this whole affair? He is only mentioned, as something of an afterthought, at the tail end of the temptation and appears to go along with it with little to no resistance. God’s question after the fall is fitting even at this juncture (Genesis 3:9): Adam, “Where are you?” On the sidelines, it would seem.
Indeed, some commentators believe that the phrase “her husband who was with her” (Genesis 3:6, emphasis mine) suggests that Adam, as in the painting above by Frans Wouters, was physically at Eve’s side for at least part of the serpent’s temptation. If this is true, then how much more culpable is our first father for failing to step in and thwart the serpent’s ploy! In fact, the degree of passivity that this interpretation requires on Adam’s part leads many commentators to reject it, concluding that the phrase means only that Adam was “with her” in the sense that he was her God-given companion in the garden. However, even if Adam was merely MIA during Eve’s hour of need, this too may reflect poorly on his care for her as a somewhat absentee husband and protector.
As inexcusable as it may be, Adam’s dereliction of duty helps solve the paradox of Paul’s description of humanity as fallen “in Adam.” Recall Paul’s twin observations covered above: 1) “For Adam was formed first, then Eve”; and 2) “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1 Timothy 2:13, 14). According to scripture, the order in which God created Adam and Eve reveals God’s order and design for all men and women, including their respective roles and responsibilities in the Church (1 Corinthians 11:3, 7–10):
“But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. […] For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.”
Obviously, there are a lot of interesting lessons to be drawn from this passage concerning head coverings in church.7 For the present discussion, we need only note the general principle undergirding this practice: the headship of the husband over the wife, which is grounded in the purpose for which they were created.
Here’s how this principle impacts who gets blamed for the fall: Because Adam was Eve’s husband, and thus her head, authority, and “covering,” even though Eve was the first to eat of the forbidden fruit, the responsibility for humanity’s fall is ultimately laid at Adam’s feet. Worse, whereas Eve was deceived, Adam knew full well what he was doing when he took that fateful first bite (1 Timothy 2:14). This sheds a whole new light on the account of the fall. What at first glance appeared to be merely the temptation of Eve becomes, upon further analysis, the testing of Adam.
The implications of these truths for understanding the feminization of the Church can now be seen in sharp focus.
Although Eve may have been the world’s first “feminist,” Adam was the first “effeminist.” Behind every feminist is an effeminate enabler. Moreover, although feminism and effeminacy are both sins, effeminacy is clearly the deeper of the two. Without effeminacy, feminism is evil, but restrained; coupled together, they spoil the entire cosmos.
Imagine, for instance, if Adam had prevented his wife’s sin, or at least refused to join in it, standing in the gap for her before God as a powerful mediator, rather than as a powerless accuser (Genesis 3:12). We don’t know exactly what would have happened in this scenario, but based on what would later occur when a sinless husband interceded for His sinful bride (Ephesians 5:25–27), we know the outcome could very well have been glorious.
Ironically, Paul’s teaching on the fall shows us that a big part of the solution to the problem of the feminization of the Church is realizing that feminization is not the Church’s primary problem.
One can immediately see the strategic value in this reframing of the Church’s present gender predicaments. Before waging war on feminism “out there,” as well as its inroads “in here,” male Church leaders should first and foremost repent of their own effeminate sins that paved the way for all the others.8 This is not to let the women off the hook, but rather to realize that it is compromise in the Church’s male leadership that makes a way for feminism, and a host of related sins, to take root in the first place.
Here’s what we’re getting at with all of this: Until Christian men admit the sinful abdication of their duties as heads of home and guardians of the household of God, we can fuss over feminism all we want, but it will not solve our problems in the long run. If, however, we rid ourselves of the upstream effeminate pollutants, then the downstream feminist pollution will inevitably be eliminated (cf. Matthew 23:26, Luke 11:39–41).
Nuclear fallout
It should come as no surprise that we are still struggling to avoid the same gender pitfalls into which our first parents fell. According to scripture, Adam’s headship extended not only to his wife, but to all his children, including us (Romans 5:12–21). We are all “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.”9 As Chesterton famously noted, original sin10 is unique among Christian doctrines in that it is empirically provable: we can see it on display in the streets and in the daily headlines.11 The Adam bomb did indeed explode, and we are the nuclear family living in the contaminated rubble of its worldwide fallout.
The account of man’s fall demonstrates that the most fundamental problem behind all our disorders is that most dreaded of three-letter words: Sin. This fact will never change. Sin always involves a perverse inversion of the created order that is the sine qua non of violating God’s will (Genesis 3:8–13):
“And they [i.e., Adam and Eve] heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’ He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ The man said, ‘The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.’ Then the LORD God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.’”
What a sorry mess sin makes of us. How else can you account for a reptile giving orders to a naïve woman who prevails upon her pushover husband who ultimately throws God under the bus?
And yet, in spite of the various players involved in this incident, in God’s created order of human rulers and animal subjects (Genesis 1:28), the buck stops with man, and not woman. As the old ditty from the New England Primer put it, “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.”12 Not in Eve’s fall, nor in Satan’s. It wasn’t the devil who made us do it and it certainly wasn’t God—may it never be!13 No, at the end of the day, the blame falls on the shoulders of men. We have to own this. It will do us no good to hide behind bushes or fig leaves (Genesis 3:16–19):
To the woman He [i.e., God] said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.’
And to Adam He said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’”
Aside from the agony of intense physical pain, toil, and death, note the relational antagonism that God says will result from our rejection, among other things, of His prescribed gender roles (Genesis 3:16): “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” The “battle of the sexes” is as old as sin itself.
We get a strong contextual clue as to the meaning of this curse from the very next chapter of Genesis, where God uses an almost identical phrase when addressing a crestfallen Cain (Genesis 4:7, emphasis mine):
“If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.”
Now that is telling.
Because of Eve’s sin, wives will be ever chafing under their husbands’ headship, lying in wait to subvert their authority like the heel biting snakes they are at enmity with (Genesis 3:15). Husbands in turn will be caught in a perpetual tug of war between subduing and being subdued, playing the man (2 Samuel 10:12), or being played.14
When fallen men and women clasp hands in marriage, the temptation to usurp on the one hand locks fingers with the temptation to either domineer or tuck tail and run on the other hand. This is the cause of all marital and inter-sex strife, both inside and outside of the the Church, and it is far cry from God’s original intent for gender harmony in His peaceable kingdom.
To revitalize our wilting, womanly churches, we must identify sin as the main enemy and effeminate men as principally responsible for its damage. If we fail to do this, then we’ll be starting off on the wrong foot from the get-go—if we begin by doing this, then we’ll have already won half the battle.
We’ll be able to detect the radiation from the infamous A-bomb and treat its poisonous effects. We can convert our exposed churches into bomb shelters and prepare for future engagements. We can even advance God’s kingdom on earth and cultivate paradise once again in our scorched and barren land.
Effeminism and its discontents
We’ve identified the ultimate origins of effeminism, but what are its proximate causes? In the next post in this series we will dive into the topic of effeminacy from a Biblical perspective. We will define and describe it using examples from scripture, as well as examine its typical presentation in the men it afflicts. If you desire to better understand this condition and why the American Church is so rife with it, you won’t want to miss our next installment.
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See the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study “Gender composition” polling statistics.
See “False-Flag Operations” by Peter R. Mansoor, writing for the Hoover Institution.
Here the word “man” is used inclusively for both sexes, man and woman, as in the word “mankind.”
Here, the term “gender” is used synonymously for the two sexes, male and female, not as an arbitrary “identity” that one subjectively adopts, regardless of one’s biological sex.
Not merely the “chronological order,” but the “intent” or “purpose.”
This does not mean, of course, that agreeableness—that is, the proclivity to sympathize with another’s point of view, to think the best of their intentions, and to cooperate with their suggestions in good faith—is an exclusively female tendency. Indeed, men also exhibit this trait, with some even doing so to a greater extent than at least some women. Nevertheless, on average, women are the more agreeable of the two sexes. See Yanna J. Weisberg, Colin G. DeYoung, and Jacob B. Hirsh, “Gender Differences in Personality across the Ten Aspects of the Big Five.” Frontiers in Psychology. 2011; 2(178).
For more information, see the resources offered by The Head Covering Movement.
As for the female Church leaders that Paul forbids (1 Timothy 2:12), they must step down at once and submit to the god-ordained male leaders in their lives (Titus 2:4, 5).
This phrase is of course taken from The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.
This refers not to Adam and Eve’s initial (i.e., “original”) sin of eating the forbidden fruit, but rather to the inherited sin nature which they passed on to all their descendants as a result of this sin.
Orthodoxy, “The Maniac.”
See “Alphabet Poem.”
As the Apostle James says (James 1:13–15):
“Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”
These inversions are also echoed in Satan’s rebellion. By rejecting his God-ordained role as a worshiper and servant of God (Hebrews 1:7, 14; see also “Was Satan in charge of music in heaven?” from Got Questions Ministries), Satan declared his desire to be worshipped in God’s stead (Matthew 4:8–10).