Christian conservatives are wildly overcorrecting with their opposition to feminism. Here’s why

By Kaeley Harms, Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Feminism has long gotten a bad rap among socially conservative Christians like me, and I completely understand why, given its deep ties to abortion. But today, an overcorrection that is ignorant of important history is at hand. 

Rightful disgust, which I share, with what’s known as third-wave feminism (which not only supports abortion but also degrading scourges like trans ideology and “sex work”) is fueling a larger sentiment among increasing numbers of Christian voices that all of feminism — even some of the good accomplishments of the early voices who were responding to real problems — was cancerous and must thus be ripped out — root and branch. And it’s there where many are making a disastrous error in judgment. 

While I’ll refrain from detailing all the intricacies of the various waves of feminism in the past several decades, many conservative and Christian women today do not realize the noble gains that were made for women, many of which are compatible with eminently Christian convictions.

Second-wave feminism (roughly early 1960s through the late 1970s) did accomplish some things that were genuinely good. Despite their flaws, voices like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon made intelligent critiques of male sexual exploitation that were necessary and overdue. Meaningful overlap exists here with Christian values, as these women were unflinching in their opposition to pornography and prostitution, naming the ways the sexual revolution often benefited men at women’s expense. You’ll often hear conservative Christians nowadays anchor their thinking about the breakdown of the family and society as being rooted in the sexual revolution, which exploded in the late 1960s. And let’s be real here, the sexual revolution, as a cultural force, has indeed unleashed catastrophic damage to society since then, and it continues to destroy marriages and families.

But valorizing hedonism and extramarital sex wasn’t invented in 1968. It was happening constantly; people were just better at hiding it, and women were expected to endure it quietly. 

A Florida researcher named Alan Petigny underscored this reality with his own research, utilizing government data rather than self-reporting. His research used U.S. Census Bureau statistics on premarital pregnancy and found a sizeable increase in premarital intercourse during the 1940s and '50s, pointing to the unexpected conclusion that there was far more sexual activity during those decades than Americans were willing to admit. Petigny specifically identified WWII as a key catalyst, with 15 million young men thrust into the military and five million young women forced into factories, creating unprecedented social mixing that drove measurable rises in premarital pregnancy among both white and black Americans. Petigny convincingly argued that the sexual revolution actually began during World War II, not the 1960s, but too many people are just blissfully willing to pretend it was feminism that was to blame.

There’s a reason the song “Stand by Your Man” was a chart topper, and it wasn’t because the situation it described was a great one for the women living it. The revolution didn’t create male infidelity and selfishness. It just stopped requiring anyone to pretend like it wasn’t already rampant.

What the birth control pill and the cultural shift actually did was remove the remaining incentives for men to behave responsibly and then market that removal as liberation. The insistence that freedom meant severing sex from relational commitment, much less any semblance of responsibility, wasn’t a neutral development. What followed was not some utopian landscape of liberated women, but a steady erosion of the family unit. Fatherlessness skyrocketed, divorce became normalized, and children bore the brunt of adult self-actualization projects. Women and children were quietly expected to absorb the fallout (emotionally, physically, and economically), all while being told this was social progress.

To be fair, the pill wasn’t the only accelerant. Deindustrialization was quietly gutting the kind of stable working-class jobs that had made early marriage and single-income households viable, and hardly anyone was talking about that. It’s easier to blame the birth control than to reckon with the economy. Those who call for a return to “Leave it to Beaver” systems completely fail to contend with the reality of surviving in today’s economy. The demands they’re making (especially on mothers) are not feasible in many situations.

The cruelest irony is that the men most enthusiastic about sexual liberation were rarely the ones absorbing the consequences. Unintended pregnancies, single parenthood, the emotional labor of fractured families — those costs were distributed very unevenly, and not in men’s direction, which made continued feminist action almost imperative as a result.

Economic and workplace justice for mothers is another area where the second wave got it right. Maternity leave, fair wages, and childcare support are not radical demands; they are entirely compatible with, and arguably required by, a Christian ethic that actually values motherhood and family stability rather than treating both as inconveniences.

Then again, at the same time, it is understandable why some reject second-wave feminism outright because of its ties to abortion. Many of these second-wave women bought the lie that to achieve equality in a man’s world, they had to wage war on the one power unique to the female body: the capacity to bear life.

They weren’t wrong about the problem. Men were, in many cases, treating women like breeders and using children as a means of keeping them economically and socially trapped. That was real and needed to be confronted. But the proposed solution, decoupling sex from consequence and framing motherhood itself as a liability, lost much of the Evangelical Christian world, and not without reason. Abortion is evil, and that shift cannot and should not be defended. 

But the “all feminism is cancer” talking point and overcorrection that is increasingly prevalent online ignores the real injustices women have faced, and the legitimate corrections that were needed. If we’re serious about truth, we should distinguish carefully instead of torching the entire category just because the current iteration is indefensible.

For example, Joe Rogan recently hosted influencer Rachel Wilson on his podcast to discuss her condemnation of feminism. Her entire schtick is that feminism, at its core, has always been rooted in occultism and is, therefore, a rebellion against God. Neither she nor her husband thinks that women have any business voting, and the contempt for womankind is not even remotely subtle, and this is exactly where the wheels come off.

Early feminism didn’t spring out of some shadowy esoteric movement, but in response to very real, material injustices under which women were living. Women couldn’t vote, and in many cases, couldn’t own property. Under coverture, a married woman had no independent legal identity; her wages, her assets, even her children were legally controlled by her husband, and there was little to no legal recourse for abuse. Educational opportunities were limited, and professional pathways were largely closed off. If a woman found herself in a bad marriage, her options were often to endure it or face social and economic ruin.

Those are not minor inconveniences, and true commitment to biblical living does not wink at this kind of oppression.

Who, overwhelmingly, began to challenge these injustices? Devout Christians. Quakers, Methodists, and Evangelicals who believed, on explicitly biblical grounds, that women were moral agents made in the image of God and therefore deserving of legal recognition and protection.

Figures like Sojourner Truth and Frances Willard were not occultists; they were Christian reformers. The early suffrage movement was deeply intertwined with abolitionism and temperance, movements also driven largely by Christian conviction.

While it is true that some suffragists dabbled in Spiritualism or Theosophy, so did plenty of people across every reform movement in the Victorian era. That was a cultural quirk of the time, not the theological foundation of the cause. Guilt by association is not a serious argument. By that logic, you could just as easily claim abolitionism itself was an occult enterprise.

And interestingly, no one making the argument that feminism equals the occult and must be rejected in total wants to apply it consistently. Consider how Thomas Jefferson literally created his own edited version of the Bible, cutting out anything supernatural with a razor blade. Should we conclude that the entire American experiment was, at its core, a demonic project? That none of the principles he helped articulate are worth preserving? Of course not.

Among some conservative types, particularly given the cultural insanity of our time, a persistent fantasy exists in their imagination that if we could just rewind the clock to some mid-century “golden age,” everything would fall neatly back into place, and the family would magically be restored.

But the truth is far less romantic. The conditions that gave rise to first-wave feminism (and later helped fuel the sexual revolution) did not emerge from nowhere. They were, in many cases, the predictable result of a system where women had little agency, limited protection under the law, and were often entirely dependent on the goodwill of men to survive. When that goodwill failed, and it frequently did, women and children paid the price.

It is impossible to repair the damage of the sexual revolution by recreating the very conditions that made it the force that it was in the first place.

If you tell women that their safety depends entirely on male virtue, while stripping away their legal protections and social recourse, you are not restoring order. You are rebuilding the pressure cooker. History has already shown us what happens when that pressure builds long enough. It doesn’t produce holiness; it produces backlash.

The sexual revolution was, in many ways, a deeply flawed and destructive response to actual injustices. But that doesn’t mean the injustices themselves weren’t real, or that the answer is to pretend they never existed.

If we actually care about strengthening families, we need something better than nostalgia. We need a framework that upholds responsibility, honors motherhood, protects children, and refuses to treat women as either disposable or dependent. We need solutions that factor in the reality of this present cultural moment, including an economy where most families cannot physically survive off a single income and many good mothers have no choice but to participate in the workforce outside the home.

We cannot correct an error by embracing a different one. If we care about truth, about women, and about the integrity of the family, then we need to be precise. That means rejecting what is indeed wrong about feminism without rewriting history, scapegoating the female sex, or sanitizing and diminishing the abuse and mistreatment of women to get there.