CHRISTIANITY is said to be a great force for social justice. But one of the most important ways in which Christianity has promoted justice is rarely acknowledged. Christianity historically protected men from various forms of exploitation. It is in some senses the ultimate men’s movement.

By this, I do not mean modern-day pseudo-Christianity with its worship of the feminine divine or its aggressive denial of Christian events and revelation. I do not mean those who “honoreth with the lips” while their hearts remain stone-cold. I refer to the Christian creed, scriptures and traditions. The good man, or the man trying to be good, has always been ripe for oppression, even more so than the good woman. It is for him, not the brute or the thug or the despot or the libertine, that Christianity once secured important protections.

This is an important subject and there’s a great deal to say about it.  At the risk of useless simplification, here is a very brief look at the ways in which Christian civilization historically protected men.

Fatherhood 

It is not possible to conceive of God as sexless. In truth, he is sexless, but it is not possible to conceive of him as such. There are limits to human understanding. God is a person and therefore he must have a sex in the human mind. It is not accidental that the Old Testament God is masculine. This was not due to cultural conditioning, as feminine gods had existed throughout human history. God possesses both masculine and feminine attributes. He is not a man. But femininity is too merged with life to express God’s authority and his detachment from creation. By conceiving of a loving and authoritative God, a single supreme monarch who loves and judges his people, the Hebrew Covenant protected and nurtured fatherhood. Other cultures institutionalized patriarchy, but none so strongly imbued it with these twin aspects of authority and love. By doing so, it protected the most humble man in his role of monarch.

Christ was not a father. He was the loving Son of the supreme father. His love and submission were in themselves a resounding affirmation of fatherhood. Christ could not have had anything but a perfectly just and perfectly good father. Human fathers fulfill themselves in submission, not to human beings, but to God.

Christ redeemed the lowliest aspects of paternity and maternity, and gave both greater significance.

Monogamy

Contrary to folk wisdom, polygamy is more anti-man than anti-woman. While it does benefit a minority of powerful men, it consigns a significant percentage of low-status men to reproductive oblivion, without mates and helpmeets. Take the case of a Morman profiled in National Geographic last year. He more than 15 wives. That means fourteen men probably went without wives. Polygamy is covetous and hurts the least powerful. Very few women go without mates in a polygamous culture. Polygamy does have distinct disadvantages for some women too of course, but it does not so thoroughly deprive a minority of women of happiness in the same way it does of men.

Christ insisted on monogamy. Christianity has enabled more men to marry and become fathers. In contrast, modern serial polygamy, in which powerful men marry two or even several wives one after the other, is similar to traditional polygamy in that it harms lower-status men and less desirable women.

Chastity

By insisting on chastity before marriage, Christianity protected paternal rights.

Wealth

By despising riches, Christ protected men from the burdens of excessive materialism. Men have always carried the main responsibilities for financial support. Excessive materialism hurts women too, but they often receive a respite from non-stop material acquisition in the years of motherhood and child care. A man is open to a life of continual, back-breaking labor to keep up with the demands of ever escalating material standards.

 By insisting on the primacy of masculinity – and there is no question that the Bible from its opening pages is an extended argument for the primacy of masculinity – Christianity also historically protected men from competition from women in the labor market, further easing their financial burdens.

Government

Authority is masculine. None of the apostles or the authors of the gospels were women. This is not accidental. God could have chosen to become a woman or a hermaphrodite. It is not accidental that he came as a man. Feminists dishonestly say that this means Christianity is misogynist. You can talk to them until you are blue in the face and they will never understand that God is not a man and man is not God. Nor will they ever acknowledge the degree to which the Incarnation emancipated womankind.

In any event, the fact that all of the apostles were men is a significant defense of male leadership, which is the only means of ensuring the ongoing paternal rights and authority of men in a democracy.

                                                                                            — Comments —

Clark Coleman writes:

Great column, except for one thing. I vehemently oppose the use of the term social justice. The word justice needs no modifier. Either a particular person does an injustice to another person, or not. There is no systemic, impersonal injustice. Leftism has coined more modifiers for the word justice than I can count (social justice, gender justice, redistributive justice, economic justice, etc.), and they all reduce to variations on the idea that equality of outcomes must be guaranteed, and inequality of outcomes implies that discrimination occurred. You might not be able to point to any particular injustice, but if women are not half of Fortune 500 CEOs, there must be discrimination or injustice somewhere.

On the contrary, I assert that there is no injustice without particular acts that are wrong, in which case those acts can be simply called unjust with no modifier needed.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

“Social justice” is not a term I normally use. In fact, it repels me; I agree with your explanation of its dishonesty. But in this case, I consciously used it in an effort to speak to the left in its own language. There is a good case for never doing that.

Jenny writes:

This is excellent. I have never thought about Christianity in this way.

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