It was never just the women

Sometimes the conservative refrain, “there’s a war on men,” functions less as a diagnosis and more as a gatekeeper, one that prevents even the most measured, necessary criticism from entering the conversation at all. Any attempt to examine male failure, cultural rot, or institutional responsibility is waved away as feminist hysteria or cultural Marxism before it can even clear its throat.

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon a Christian Post article titled “Is It Always the Women?” It immediately set off my internal alarms. In the article, the author argues that the recent decline of women in church attendance is largely tied to cultural forces and values that lead women away from traditional Christianity, portraying women (especially politically liberal ones ) as the most visible agents of societal unrest and moral collapse.

“Here we go,” I muttered to myself. “The woman whom thou gavest me did give me the fruit, and I did eat,” verse forty-three million and seventy-four.

I’ve long argued that both sides of the political and cultural divide are engaged in the same dishonest game. The Left insists that white conservative men are the singular source of all human misery. The Right, meanwhile, behaves as though America went to Hell the moment women were allowed to vote. You may think I’m overstating my case, and you may be right. I’m exaggerating for effect, perhaps. But you have to at least acknowledge the outright hostility to anything feminism adjacent, even the good stuff.

I flagged the article as potential blog fodder, but when I finally sat down to write, I realized I had less than zero energy to spend on what felt like another futile skirmish in the endless gender wars. Eden’s curse of enmity between the sexes, playing out on repeat, with me foolishly stepping in to make the noise louder.

Advocating for the dignity of women is a tricky business. Do it too forcefully, and you’re accused of hating men. Fail to do it at all, and you tacitly endorse a system that eats its own daughters alive. The world works best when men and women operate in tandem, neither with a boot on the other’s neck, nor pretending dominance or retaliation is the same thing as human flourishing.

And honestly, when I actually read the article, I didn’t entirely disagree with the author.

It is women (particularly white liberal women) who most frequently appear in media reports of cultural unrest: blowing whistles in people’s ears at protests, doxxing officers, vandalizing property, and enforcing ideological conformity with a kind of moral zeal that would make Orwell blush. They have become the hall monitors of the progressive state, animated by a misplaced empathy that metastasizes into catastrophic policy and open sympathy for the worst actors imaginable.

The examples are not hard to find: Women medicalizing preschoolers and locking them into lifelong pharmaceutical dependence. Women romanticizing cold-blooded killers like Luigi Mangione. Women screaming “Nazi” as ICE arrests actual wife beaters and pimps. Women denouncing the so-called male gaze while insisting that prostitution is empowering. Women hauling their children to drag queen story hour and calling it empathy.

The data is also sobering. Women, especially Gen Z women, are leaving the Church in droves. Post-pandemic attendance numbers show men outpacing women. Christianity has historically elevated women. Christ was revolutionary in His regard for them. And yes, Romans 1 does describe what happens when a people suppresses truth long enough.

None of that is wrong.

But it is radically incomplete.

If we want anything resembling a productive conversation, we have to stop pretending this happened in a vacuum.

You cannot talk honestly about why women are leaving churches without talking about church culture itself. You cannot ignore decades of institutional indifference to abuse, abuse that was often minimized, covered up, or spiritualized away in the name of protecting “the witness.” You cannot gloss over the routine silencing of women, the rigid enforcement of suffocating gender cages, or the way theological language has been weaponized to keep women compliant rather than holy.

And you absolutely cannot ignore the men.

Porn has hollowed out massive numbers of the very men women are told to submit to, trust, and build families with. Entire generations of men have been catechized not by Scripture, but by algorithm-fed degeneracy, trained to see women as consumable, disposable, or contemptible. Who wants to procreate with a man whose imagination has been colonized by porn? Who wants to tether their future to someone who has never learned self-governance?

This did not happen in isolation.

Andrew Tate did not materialize out of thin air. Nick Fuentes is not an anomaly. They are grotesque, but they are logical end products of male failure that went unchallenged for far too long. They are part of the story. They communicate — loudly — that women’s pain is negotiable, their voices optional, and their presence conditional. There is no shortage of supply of these stories.

To balance this out, let’s not forget: Men platforming misogynists like Doug Wilson while dismissing credible allegations as “gossip.” Men excusing marital rape under the banner of “biblical submission.” Men building online empires around “red pill” rhetoric that reduces women to status symbols or breeding stock. Men derailing discussions of abuse with cries of “false accusations” while ignoring the epidemic of unchecked harassment in their own ranks. Men preaching complementarianism as a divine mandate but practicing it as unchecked authoritarianism, leaving women spiritually starved and emotionally battered.

When misogyny goes unchecked on the right and within Christian institutions, it should not shock us when women sprint toward ideologies that promise, at minimum, to hear them. That does not make those ideologies true. But it does make the migration understandable.

I know that men are hurting, too. They’ve personally told me so. They’re tired of being told their protective instincts are toxic. They’re tired of being told their voices are unwelcome. Both sexes have legitimate grievances. We will get nowhere by dumping all responsibility onto one sex. I don’t claim to have any clue how to facilitate these discussions in a way that leads to anything resembling fruitfulness or growth. I just know that what we are presently doing doesn’t seem to be working very well.

I’m genuinely glad to see young men returning to the Church. I believe, without hesitation, that Jesus is the answer. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned about the version of Christianity many of them are being handed. Too often, it seems less about surrender to the lordship of Christ and more about power, dominance, and reclaimed status.

I hope I’m wrong. I’m more than willing to be wrong. But what I’m mostly seeing is a rallying cry that sounds like, “Men, rise up. Beat your chests. Take back your rightful place as leaders.” And while the call to responsibility and courage isn’t inherently wrong, it becomes deeply distorted when it’s paired with the idea that leadership requires domination, especially over women.

A healthy society is not built by men ruling women, nor by women retaliating against men. It is built when both accept moral responsibility, tell the whole truth, and reject the childish fantasy that everything would be fixed if the other side would just shut up and comply. There was no subjugation of women in Eden, and there will be no subjugation of women in Heaven.

In the end, the only path forward is through the narrow gate of humility and repentance, where men and women alike lay down their weapons and idols at the foot of the cross. Only there can we rebuild a Church and a culture that honors God by truly honoring one another as image-bearers, co-heirs in Christ.

Originally published at Honest to Goodness.