I can't keep silent about this anymore...

The academic ideologies I once believed are proving themselves to be nonsense.

There’s a song I heard a couple of days ago, the lyrics of which have stuck in my head because they encapsulate a movement within the West that I’ve been grieving for quite some time. They were angry words: words built on the ideologies of modern feminism (note the distinction – I still consider myself an old school feminist) and deconstruction that result in people walking away from the faith entirely and hating the God of Heaven and Earth.

They were words rooted in the philosophies I understand all too well because I spent my entire Master’s degree studying them. They were words rooted in the kind of rebellion and pain for which my heart truly breaks. I started writing on this platform because I wanted so deeply to bring hope and healing to those looking to reconcile themselves to the idea that God is still good – even after everything around them has bid them to believe otherwise.

The words were these:

“Crazy how the very first sin was a woman who ate.

She chose her fate.

And she said no to heaven's gate.

She's mother and mother f*king ate.”

There was more, but I don’t care to include the rest. Google it if you care to.

To a Christian, the obvious, initial response to this song is to see it for the blasphemy that it is. And I do. But I also see the pain beneath the anger. The pain that’s fuelling the rebellion. The pain that comes from people who have felt like their entire life has been shaped by legalistic, abusive church systems which encouraged them to not only distrust but to hate their bodies (men are not excluded from this, but there does seem to be a particular war on women’s bodies which was capitalised on in the purity movement).

The problem, of course, is that rebellion against the God who has been shamefully misrepresented by humanity doesn’t lead to freedom from the anger, the bondage, the chaos within the soul.

It feels good for a while, though. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been there.

These lyrics are the product of OG academic ideologies that run deep: the madwoman in the attic; the virgin and the whore; the idea that women are given no choice but to consume or be consumed. I could cite you the names of the academics who authored these literary theories and initiated their journey into mainstream thought in the early 20th century. I know. I studied them. I wrote about them. I even adopted some of them into my own thinking for a time. But the thing is… these ideas don’t actually set women (or anyone) free.

There’s no true liberation in “owning” our sin by trying to redefine it as something other than what it is. There’s no liberation in rewriting the narrative to position ourselves as chronic victims (and to be clear here, I’m not talking about people who have truly been victimised by systemic church abuse – I’m talking about the general ideologies which erupt and are adopted by the masses to perpetuate victimhood as a form of identity).

I say this as a woman who openly talks about the societal inequalities between the sexes. One need only look at the amount of medical funding that has been given to study erectile dysfunction over endometriosis (even though endo impacts a much larger majority of the population) to see that yes, there are concrete areas of inequality between men and women in modern society. But discussing those inequalities no longer forms part of my core identity – and it doesn’t inform my understanding of myself or the nature of God.

The lie in these lyrics runs deep. It tells us that God doesn’t honour women.¹ It tells us that meeting our own basic, bodily needs (like nourishing ourselves with food) is inherently in conflict with a sadistic, heartless Creator.² It tells us that God encourages us to treat ourselves as objects of shame. It tells us that any form of desire is a sin and that we shouldn’t take up space (physically or emotionally) as living, breathing things. It tells us that our choice to say “no” to that same “sadistic” God is the beginning of liberation. It tells us that women have to fight or they’ll be trampled, not just by man but by God Himself. It tells us that there is no rest for the wicked.

But you know what the Holy Spirit dropped into my head as these lyrics ran through my mind, rent-free, on repeat?

Firstly, the very first sin wasn’t a woman who ate (and using our modern ideologies to interpret a sacred text is just bad hermeneutics). The first sin was doubting God’s love for us – choosing to trust our own desires and wisdom over the wisdom of the One who created us. The One who was there before the foundations of the world. The One who, in fact, loves us so deeply that it almost seems recklessly illogical at times.

Secondly, I find it ironic that the tree from which Satan encouraged us to “eat” was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and ever since we “ate” from it, it’s like we’ve been trying to put Pandora BACK in the box. In the academic West, we’ve been trying to act like good and evil DON’T exist. Like “evil” and “sin” are just natural philosophical “products” of an evolved, tribalistic society that has tried to organise itself into some sort of civilised, self-governing structure. Our denial of the truth (that good and evil are objectively real, and one need only look at the image of a child dying of war-induced starvation to acknowledge this truth deep in their gut) is proof that we couldn’t handle the truth in the first place.

Thirdly, God has never denied us what we need. On the contrary, He has offered us abundantly more than what we need: eternal life. This lie that “eating” (i.e. acknowledging the needs of our body) was the first sin? It’s nonsense. Know why? Because God was so concerned about nourishing us with what we needed that He came down and literally offered us Himself.

“This is my body, broken for you. [Eat] this in remembrance of me.”
Luke 22:19

IF the very first sin was a woman who ate, then the remedy to that same sin was a God who gave His own body up to be eaten as the bread of eternal life.

I can no longer stand by and pretend like the intellectualised, academic victim narrative spawned from anger makes more sense than the humble mercy narrative spawned from love.

You want liberation? It’s yours. It hung from a cross and said “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” as we divided up his clothes and cast lots.³

That is the only ideology I can get behind. Because after doing a Master’s degree where I studied all of my other options, I’ve discovered that actually, there is rest for the wicked. It’s the kind of rest that takes the form of an easy yoke.⁴ A light burden. A body broken and offered to me by a craftsman from Nazareth.

Say no to Heaven’s gates if you wish. But I choose rest for my wicked soul.

All my love,

1. I could give you countless Bible passages to show you how much He does. Rahab. The Samaritan woman at the well. Deborah. Mary Magdalene.

2. Again, let me clarify that the ideology pits us against God as the one who denies our needs – I’m not denying that abusive church leaders truly have encouraged congregants to dismiss the needs of their own bodies

3. Luke 23:34

4. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30