Does the Bible degrade women
Responding to Dan McClellan’s “Does the Bible Degrade Women?”, the Feminist Critique of Gender Roles in the Bible, and Critical Theory
Below is my response to a video by scholar and YouTube creator Dan McClellan titled “Does the Bible Degrade Women?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZneuopio_M
In it, he plays a clip from another creator (Daily Disciple) where he attempts to respond to critiques of Christian doctrine regarding men and women. He ultimately appeals to the idea that Ephesians 5 does not devalue women but rather that they have different roles within a marriage. Dan begins his deconstruction of the video by pointing out that this parsing of the equality of role and value does not address the central concern that inequality of role brings.
Due to the limited scope of the video, that would be an accurate representation. However, I believe that a fuller explanation of the biblical perspective would be something like - equality of value among humans is a fundamental reality in that they (male and female) are created in the image of God (Gen 1:27), whereas equality of role within a marriage is not possible and therefore must be prescriptively addressed to prevent abuse of this dichotomy.
Dan, as far as I can tell, ascribes to a school of thought known as Critical Theory, which is an aspect of Neo-Marxism. The problem for Dan is that it is impossible for him to accept or even understand that role and value can be separated in such a way. This is because Critical Theory says that everything in society is best understood by critically examining power structures and nothing else. There are no other concerns or facts that must be integrated into our position except the real and imagined plight of the less powerful.
Dan is saying that to believe in the equality of male and female one has to turn to an external philosophy (as he has) in order to make sense of the text. In so doing some passages are diminished and others are brought up, or what he, in almost all of his videos describes as “negotiating with the text.” Fundamental to that notion is that the text cannot be understood as consistent, which is based on two things. Firstly, textual criticism of the Bible - which views the Bible as a merely human document to be examined exclusively in light of available data. Secondly, deconstructionism, which is the idea that there is no such thing as intrinsic meaning or authority - these things are only assigned by individuals and societies as a way to structure power. Therefore, it’s okay to use the Bible to develop your own personal views (since truth is relative) but you cannot use it to “adjudicate meaning”.
An aside - Ironically, the adjudication of meaning and making authoritative decisions to a subservient group of people is exactly what those with a role of authority do (whether in the family, Church, state, etc.). So if adjudication of meaning is a misuse of the text, it’s confusing as to what exactly is being advocated when he says that women should share leadership roles.
We could go on to why the Bible says that roles should be assigned to one gender over the other, but as far as the subject of this video, that’s really all there is to it. Daily Disciple holds a worldview which allows value and role to be separate, Dan’s worldview equates role and value because it views everything in terms of power. When you’re a hammer, every problem is a nail. Neo-marxists view authority as something like a sociological phenomenon based on the inherent injustice and inequality of structured systems, therefore power structures must be dismantled and authority meted out equally in order to bring about equity. Christians understand authority to be an undeniable physical and metaphysical reality which flows from God in a hierarchy determined by Him. So that’s that. Neo-Marxism assumes there is no God, or if there is, His characteristics cannot be determined by careful exegesis of the Bible. On the contrary, Christians start with the belief that God exists and sovereignly provided the Bible. So, that’s that.
Now, I said that equality of role was impossible. So, let me show why that’s self-evident. A marriage is a partnership of authority figures (over creation as we learned from Genesis 1, and obviously over their children). Supposing that equality of role was ideal, and supposing that a problem required a decision to be made, as problems often do, and supposing also that the man and woman disagree after attempting to convince one another, who gets to decide? Now, you could try to find the most egalitarian way to settle that dispute - such as flipping a coin. That might suffice for small things, but for larger things this will result in self-defeating aimlessness and further disputes about infinitely branching consequences. There would be no accountability for decisions made, because that is a feature of authority. Because of these complexities, there will always be a dichotomy of dominance and subjection. Now, you can argue from a humanistic, Marxist, atheistic perspective as to how that should play out, but I already explained that for the Bible believer, that authority flows from God. It is a fundamental reality that is not subject to the whims and musings of man. For the humanist, they would also have to contend with the biological realities that tend to manifest these hierarchies naturally.
Alternatively, in light of Ephesians 5, the man gets the final decision. Dan has suggested that the man’s value will unavoidably be amplified and the woman’s degraded. This assumes that authority structures cannot act in the best interest of those subject to them, so the only way to ensure equality (or equity) is to force equality of role and outcome. However, bias can be mitigated, which is exactly what Eph. 5 says the husband must do. If a man follows Eph. 5 and loves his wife as Christ loves the church, and as he loves himself, he will at the very least heavily consider her desires if not override his own (ie, lay down his life for her). Which was the exact solution from the text that Dan smugly shrugged off at the beginning of the video. In a Christ-centric home, the man has the willingness, ability, and authority to make decisions that are to the benefit of all within the home.
There are several tertiary arguments that he addresses, which I will skip over as they are more specific to the video he is responding to. However, I do want to respond to his use of Galatians 3:28. He makes the case that the Bible is not univocal (speaking with one coherent, consistent voice) but rather contains conflicting statements that we must choose to diminish or prioritize. This is the extreme opposite of the fundamentalist evangelical view of the Bible, but it is essentially the same argument that anyone would bring against the idea of male headship - that there are verses which contradict the plain reading of Ephesians 5:22-23.
“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28
You have to keep in mind that to Dan, the Bible is not saying that men and women are equal. He fully believes that some passages degrade women. He’s using this to say that there are conflicting passages that we have to decide to emphasize or deemphasize. What’s odd about his application of this verse in this context is that it includes slaves and free. Slaves and freemen are equal in value as members of the body, but they do not have the same roles - yes, outside the body - but the point is that regardless of role, their value is the same. Again, this is his proof text against male headship. A Christian slave and a Christian king are of equal value as humans and children of God. They do not have the same role within the structure of the state. A husband and wife are much closer in terms of role, but one is necessarily above the other – within the structure of the family, despite being equal in value as children of God.
This is, again, a metaphysical reality under which sociological and biological realities exist as microcosms.
Dan believes that he is acting on behalf of women, but the fact is that this is only the opinion of a specific subset of women influenced by a modern, western conception, and a potentially infinitesimal subset of women from a historical perspective. The fact is that there is no evidence that women in general throughout history have believed that their role of bearing and rearing the next generation, supporting their family, and acting in a Proverbs 31 manner made them lesser in value than their male counterpart merely because they lacked the final say in decisions. By saying that they did, he has anachronistically forced a modern, Neo-Marxist conceptualization onto them (which was created predominantly by males). Ironically, Critical Theory itself has devalued the vast majority of all women that have ever existed by suggesting that they have not chosen to not value the correct thing (power). By spouting this rhetoric, he indicates that anyone who has self-assigned a less authoritative role has made themselves less valuable.You can’t have it both ways. Either they are literally less valuable because they have a different role, in which case he will need to explain why that is not a patriarchal view, or they are literally the same in value and have a different role, in which case, welcome to the biblical view. Of course he would reject that notion, but I merely say it to expose the rhetorical sleight of hand being used here.
Value is not the issue, as he said. Value is, to the Critical Theorist and deconstructionist, a subjective term with a subjective meaning. Any answer to the very title of the video “Does the Bible Degrade Women?” is a non-sequitur for the deconstructionist. It is impossible to even define what that means. Rather, to them, power (as they perceive) is all that matters. All other realities are invisible to them. Divine inspiration, biology, tradition, love, naturally occurring hierarchy, spiritual significance, ability, etc. are meaningless or impossible to consider and maintain this phenomenally simplistic view of society. This is the same on all fronts in which Neo-Marxism rears its head, both in the traditional sense and in an ouroboric sense.