Why “trad” values can be toxic for women wounded by feminism

I need to start with a serious disclaimer that I am, more than ever, emphatically in favor of traditional values and I hope I can safely say that most of my readers will know this. It’s kind of my whole thing here.

I believe that the values that were consciously and purposefully challenged and overturned by feminists^[1] throughout the 20^th Century are rooted in the Christian worldview, which alone upholds the true dignity and worth of the human woman, and this is the worldview I firmly, and unto death, hold.

I believe that both feminism and distorted religious extremism violate inherent feminine dignity.

That is why I also write about what I’ve started to call “feminine wellness,” a broad term I’m using to explore the spiritual, mental, and physical health of the Christian woman living in a dystopian, anti-female modern world.

The major reason for this is that after over a decade in the “trad” space on the internet, I’ve observed just how many men and women alike are being drawn within it with good intentions and a massive misconception about what it looks like to actually live “traditionally.”

In a culture broken by the sexual revolution, the allure of “traditional values,” where a masculine, confident husband protects and provides for a soft woman who joyfully submits to his leadership in keeping the home and raising the children, can be positively toxic to women who have ideologically rejected and not healed from feminism.

How do I know?

This was me for years.

As a woman with a strong passion for ideas, intellect, and arguments and a raging sense of pride about my ideology, when I became a Christian and left behind the progressive, feminist values of my youth, I took for granted that intellectual assent to the Christian faith and the sensibility of traditional gender roles was the same thing as “being free” from the impact of being raised in a sexually permissive culture with a broken view of humanity and the family.

I thought that being able to identify the “wrong” of the way I behaved and the beliefs I had as a young adult was the same thing as repenting of my sins and was the same thing of being healed from them.

Far, far from it.

Psychologically speaking (and psychology and the Christian worldview are totally consistent, sidenote for another day), intellectualizing my pain kept me completely trapped within it.

I struggled for years with anxiety, emotional dysregulation, and the constant sensation of hypocrisy and failure at what I believed I was called to do as a Christian woman.

I couldn’t simply shove my feelings down and feel happy when I experienced anything other than complacent, peacefully resolved contentment with my life or perfect “success” as a homemaker, like I (thought I) was “supposed” to do.

I believed, knew, and understood all the right things. Why was I so bad at actually doing them?

Why was it so difficult to just keep my cool and manage my children if I wanted to be a stay-at-home mother and couldn’t imagine not being home with them all day?

Why did homemaking still feel so difficult and overwhelming if I knew it was such important work and that my ancestresses had managed it under far more difficult conditions for millennia before me?

Why was marriage just as confusing and difficult as every other relationship I’d ever had, if I believed the right things about sex and marriage and we were clearly committed to each other for life?

Well, after years of confusion and internal anguish that I know thousands of women out there experience, I answered these questions and experienced tremendous physical relief when I finally surrendered to entering my “healing era” as the kids say, after stumbling across somatic work in the context of feminine healing.

I learned how to simply sit with my feelings and express them without the guilt or resentment I’d adapted to off-set the limiting belief that experiencing feelings was wrong or bad, as I’d believed as a younger Christian.

As I saw conversations and real-life experiences play out in the online niche of which I’m a part, it slowly began to dawn on me that the “trad” values I’d always championed (and continue to do so today, to be clear) could be really, really toxic for women still trapped in a performative mindset.

Here’s what I mean:

When I was a progressive liberal, I had an ingrained sense if idealism about right and wrong. Yes, I absolutely believed in the postmodern concept of moral relativism, as this is not a consistent worldview.

Everyone who professes a belief in relativism also absolutely believes in a kind of right and wrong, just usually a different set of right and wrong than a fundamentalist Christian would.

I went from moralizing about how we shouldn’t assume gender stereotypes to moralizing about how we should.

I went from moralizing about not telling someone else what to believe to moralizing about how others should believe in Jesus.

I went from moralizing about how marriage is just a piece of paper to moralizing about how marriage is a lifelong covenant that should never be broken and that people who got divorced just didn’t try hard enough.

In other words, I was the same person, I just had a different set of beliefs.

The same is true for how I viewed myself and how my wounds and trauma were defining my beliefs and experiences.

I want to be clear that I had genuinely experienced the love of Christ by this time, but I was a brand-new, baby Christian. The contemporary evangelical church doesn’t really have a lot of tools to address what I was struggling with (although I do think this is changing, thankfully).

I went from thinking I was supposed to be hot and unattainable and not commit to or trust any man, to thinking I was supposed to be perpetually sanguine and submissive and never doubt or disagree with my husband or men in general.

As I rejected my old ways of believing and living, I also rejected any language that would have encouraged me to have compassion on the woman I used to be, and the girl who believed she’d failed the world or conservative evangelical culture’s standards for who she was supposed to be.

The love of Christ had so much more work to do in my life than merely to convince me that Christianity was real and that the values of the world I was raised in were immoral.

I was so ideologically opposed to the concept of “self-love,” I was initially resistant to the full depth of His love for me. I subconsciously assumed I didn’t deserve love for the parts of me that failed the ideological ideal.

I would go on to experience the depth of His love for me not only in my sin, but also in my brokenness, my pain, my yearning for love and acceptance. This was through the profound, immutable Word of God, through other Christians and the stories of great saints through history, and through professionals who were able to support me in alignment with my worldview.

I learned that God designed my psyche and that, when those who know Him put the “logos” in “psychology,” we only discover more of His design for us and can far better address the ways that our separation from Him through the Fall can hurt this good, perfect design.

For years, I’ve heard from thousands of traditional Christian women who long to be the woman or the wife they believe God wants them to be, but they’re fighting against their own humanness, stigmatizing their own emotions as “disobedience” or struggling with their husbands who have their own baggage to carry and expect to be healed by a marriage that looks like the robots from The Stepford Wives.

The ideal of traditional values is toxic if you’re expecting it to satisfy what the world didn’t.

If you’ve been hurt by feminism, believing something different about it isn’t going to heal that hurt, so getting married and having a big family and making all your food from scratch in a cute apron with a blue-collar husband certainly isn’t, either.

This is true for all humans, regardless of their past or their beliefs. If you are looking to your own works, your own status, your own lifestyle to provide what you’ve not yet learned to let Christ provide for you, you are going to spin your tires in misery and wonder what’s wrong with you.

Because this is the ultimate act of feminine submission – letting Christ heal the wounds you won’t let anyone else touch. Letting Christ provide the validation and the status that the world hasn’t given you (or that it has, and you find it still wanting).

Traditional values are rooted in the objectively good, true, and beautiful Christian worldview, and I will defend them until my last dying breath.

But I get to experience the fullness of them so much more in the process of letting Christ truly heal me from the inside out.

You can’t heal the culture if you’re not letting him lay His hands on your own wounds, and you certainly won’t heal through relationships with your husband or children if you don’t.

This is my invitation to all the men and women alike out there who yearn for the ideal of marriage and family to accept the ultimate Christian tradition of being made perfect in Christ through the process.

^[1] I’ve been reading about the overt anti-Christian views of the first wave (yes, first wave) feminists in Carrie Gress’ book, Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused With Christianity (affiliate link) which we will be reading together in the book club this summer!