How Feminism Became the Biggest Pagan Megachurch in the World
I’ve been writing about the failure of feminism now for nearly ten years. Recently, my work was attacked in the Boston Globe by a Harvard student. Her complaint? I’m too reasonable.
In her op-ed, Zoe Yu writes:
The genius of Gress’s rhetoric is that it is not an appeal to regressive submission but to reason, to reverence — women are cherished, mothers are honored, families are sacred. Many people, progressives and conservatives, men and women alike, would agree broadly with these claims.
But here is her caveat: “And yet these statements can lead, step by insidious step, to a politics that removes women from public life altogether.” My reasonableness, the young Yu warns with the caution of a sage, will only end in “gender fatalism,” which we are to assume means that women will never leave home again. But ask the 50, 60, 70, or 80-year-old women who bought deeply into feminism about gender fatalism, and they will give you a much different definition, as they raise their dog or cats, alone.
This may partially explain why feminism is losing its long-held grasp on the Western psyche. Its hold isn’t just political, but a suffocating religious grip that has captured us for decades. In my forthcoming book, Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity (due out Jan. 20, 2026), I explain how feminism has made itself a shadow church, mimicking the major elements of Christianity. It has an object of worship, which is female autonomy, its own commandments, theological virtues, a sacrament, and even its own form of evangelization.
This ersatz religious structure — which provides meaning, directives, and focus — has made it difficult for women to see its problems and to break free from it as an ideology. Feminism, with no shortage of apostles, disciples, evangelists, celebrity spokesmen, and corporate sponsors, grew in strength as Christianity has waned. As a result, feminism has become the biggest megachurch in the world.
The underlying premise of feminism is that women are better off mimicking the behavior of men — and not good men who are devoted to their wives and family — but the selfish and promiscuous man committed to his career and his autonomy. Work and career ought to be women’s priority. Fifty years of this rhetoric has given us enough time to see the wreckage and the foolishness of the megachurch’s dogma that motherhood is nothing but slavery and drudgery.
And like all ideologies, feminism vilifies those who disagree with it as not just wrong, but a dangerous threat that needs to be silenced. When I started writing about the evils of feminism nearly a decade ago, there was little engagement with the topic and only women dared to speak about it. Today, articles and conversations abound. Now, even men are talking freely without fear of scorn or banishment. Among conservative women younger than the Boomer and Gen X generations, fewer and fewer identify with feminism. As the girlboss wanes, more feminine versions of conservative women are taking her place.
Some conservatives, however, don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Decades ago, there was some kind of conservative consensus that the only way to beat the feminists was to join them. The problem is that the conservative bet on feminism isn’t working out as promised. The culture has shifted radically for abortion, the women’s vote seems intransigent, the family is in a shambles, and the birth dearth is now more than just fearmongering — it’s an encroaching reality. Today, liberal and conservative feminists are almost indistinguishable except that generally liberal feminists fearmonger about abortion, while conservatives fret about the vote. There’s feminism and feminism-lite.
The Feminist Mystique
The usually wise and insightful Henry Olsen recently took the old conservative script and opened fire in The Atlantic on Scott Yenor, a family-policy scholar at The Heritage Foundation. Olsen, who appears not to have written on feminism before, still seems to believe that conservatives need feminism’s mystique to win elections. He suggests that The Heritage Foundation, and conservatives more generally, must be protected from discussion piqued by those like Yenor who have noticed that women are different from men.
Olsen’s critique, like Yu’s criticism of me, suggests that Yenor’s real threat isn’t in what he has said, but what he might be trying to say. “[H]is most extreme views on gender are so radical that he tends to articulate them only elliptically,” Olsen explains. Yenor thinks “the two sexes are formed by nature to be fully complementary. Women bear children, are more tender and attached to their offspring, and prefer to focus on the home. Men father children, are more attached to achievement and competition, and prefer to focus on matters outside the home.” The notion that marriage corresponds with the static aspects of human nature, ubiquitous throughout all Western civilization for millennia, is just too radical for conservatives to engage.
Olsen voices general concern about how a conversation challenging the regnant feminist narrative will damage the GOP’s big tent. But ignoring important discussions about the nature of men and women, as we have for decades, hasn’t been a winning political position either.
Few GOP victories have been carried by women, especially single women highly susceptible to feminism’s fancies, including in the latest round of off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia. In both, women carried the vote for Democrat victories of radical leftists. Avoiding the women’s issue has, politically and culturally, only continued to strengthen feminism’s stranglehold on the female vote with its “abortion is everything” shibboleth (which also happens to be the name of a new children’s book). Young men, in contrast, are now refusing to bow down to feminism’s dictates. The GOP could work to boost male turnout, given that women consistently outvote men.
What has been politically effective for Republicans is the immigration issue. As of yet, however, there has been no major public effort connecting the dots between abortion, which is feminism’s sacrament, and immigration to understand why Western cultures are so dependent upon importing people. The simple truth is that the private “choices” of women and their doctors have had a dramatic public effect. Exposing how these elements are intertwined could go a long way toward building the necessary foundation on which to strengthen and rebuild the family and to protect the country. And for big-tent GOPers, I’ll just note that no one is bigger-tent than Elon Musk, and even he is sounding the alarm on the birth dearth where he can.
Those of us encouraging a closer look at women apart from feminist dogma certainly don’t agree on everything, but there is agreement that feminism has failed women, men, and children. The best thing we can do to hasten feminism’s demise is to recover an ordered and beautiful sense of womanhood and motherhood, largely missing because of the prohibition against an alternate feminist POV. The truth is that almost all women work and all women are called to a kind of motherhood, whether biological, spiritual, or psychological.
We also need an honest discussion about men — their purpose, strengths, gifts, as well as their complementarity to women and vice versa. And then, of course, discussion needs to include the important role played by fertility and children that brings men and women together. Discussing, discerning, and prioritizing family over autonomy is the place for conservatives to start if we are truly intent upon conserving anything.
https://thefederalist.com/2025/12/12/how-feminism-became-the-biggest-pagan-megachurch-in-the-world