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- Feminism is not opposed to Christianity: It is its descendant.
The Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald uses the image of a necklace in describing the nature of moral systems. The system may contain discrete ideas—that feminism is a good thing, say, or that slavery is wrong—but all of these beads are threaded together on a string. “You can’t pick up the individual bead,” he posits, “without lifting the whole necklace.” You do not, I’m afraid, get to pick and choose.
When we accept the Christian emphasis on weakness as a crucial prior, many other moral conclusions follow. Slavery becomes unacceptable, as does the rape of low-status women. To point out the vulnerability of women, children, the poor, the enslaved, and the disabled is to argue in favor of their protection, not their persecution. Dress it up in secular language if you like, talk of “human rights” or of “humanism,” but this system of morality is far from universal.