There’s another great post I am compelled to share with you over at the Gospel Coalition. Dr. Mary Kassian, Distinguished Professor of Women’s Studies at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is the author of Girls Gone Wise and The Feminist Mistake (I love that title! In case you missed the in-your-face pun, there was a leading feminist book of bygone days called The Feminine Mystique). Dr. Kassian says we’re in a “Post-Feminist” society. But don’t rejoice yet–unlike Francis Schaeffer’s past declaration that America has moved into the “Post-Christian” era, this does not mean that Feminism has lost its influence. It’s simply moved from a movement to an institution. Says Kassian,

“Virtually everyone is a feminist. Yet virtually no one would identify him/herself as such. Feminism has seeped into people’s systems like intravenous drugs into the veins of an unconscious patient. The majority of people in today’s churches are feminists—and they don’t even know it.”

If this doesn’t ring true to you, you’re not paying attention. Our endemic feminism has taken a toll on American local church ministry and American marriages in the past several decades. In the shameful “glory days” when feminism was a movement, all the ideals of feminism were heralded by activists and educators in a counter-cultural push toward so-called “progress,” and not without resistance from the establishment culture. In other words, back then it had to be taught. Nowadays, we and our children of both sexes are so regularly exposed to feminist ideals that feminism is simply caught. Today, it’s the Biblical ideal of manhood and womanhood that has to be purposefully and energetically cultivated.

But thank the Lord that a new counter-cultural movement has arisen in the American church to do just that, teach the complementarian nature of Biblical manhood and womanhood. Feminism has brought America into an age of what is called “egalitarianism,” where the most obvious distinctions between men and women are no longer assumed. Professor Kassian heralds this positive trend and appears resolved to promote it, but not without a caveat. The last thing we need, according to Kassian, and I agree, is to move from this lifestyle of feminist license, declare liberty from feminism for the sake of the Christian family’s faithfulness to God’s Word, and allow it to degenerate into a legalism in which our focus is removed from the cross and onto an over-emphasis on the Biblical roles of manhood and womanhood that would inevitably facilitate yet another swing of the pendulum back in the direction of the radical anti-Scriptural feminism of the 1960’s and ’70’s.

Christian ladies, and gentlemen, check out the Gospel Coalition’s interview with Professor Kassian and learn that more and more Christian women are breathing the air of liberation from the cultural tyranny of feminism!