History and Culture
Are We All Feminists Now?
When YouTubers Sound More Like the Fathers Than We Do
Did you know that “marriage counseling,” also known as “couples therapy,” was invented a hundred years ago by German eugenicists? It’s true. Racist, feminist eugenicists, pushing birth control. Before the 1920s, nobody thought it a good idea to sit a husband and wife down together, invite them to complain about each other, and then prod one of them, usually the husband, to change his ways to suit her. But that’s what we do today, even us Orthodox.
You’ve heard it said that “Orthodoxy is not a religion, it’s a way of life.” But when it comes to a large part of life—marriage and raising children—the Orthodox way hasn’t really differed much from the world’s way, not in the past and not at present. The problem is that the world’s way of marrying and raising children has undergone a revolution in the past hundred years, and most Orthodox have followed right along.
Many in fact celebrate this revolution. The French Orthodox scholar Jean-Claude Larchet does in his new book Renewing Gender, in which he writes that the way most Westerners now live is the way Orthodox Christians should live because “social structures have evolved” and a “strong egalitarian mentality” has taken hold.
Larchet is wrong about many things in his book, but he is right that a “strong egalitarian mentality” has taken hold of most Westerners, including most Orthodox. Most of us raise our girls very much like our boys. We may dress them a little differently, but we send them to the same schools to learn the same things, push them to compete in the same sports and to aspire to the same careers, and expect them to do all the things that men do in life, while also marrying and raising children.
About the only thing we tell our girls they can’t do is serve in the altar, but we have a hard time explaining why, and the push is on for altar girls and deaconesses. Many priests are already churching girls through the altar, turning an opportunity to teach the difference of male and female into an opportunity to deny the difference.
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