Parent’s Day Instead of Mother’s Day?

In some school districts in America Mother’s Day has been targeted by the cancel culture crowd. Some schools have decided to have a gender-neutral Parents’ Day or Family Day instead. We might laugh at this extreme or get angry, but this episode examines how the gender-neutral movement is harming the daughters of our homes, churches, and nation.

Investigative journalist Abigail Shrier cites a startling fact about the troubled condition of teen girls today. “This demographic, teen girls, is in the midst of the worst mental health crisis on record, with the highest rates of anxiety, self-harm, and depression ever recorded” (Irreversible Damage). This observation, by the way was made before Covid, the isolation of which has only made it worse. There are many reasons why teen girls are in such turmoil—but certainly one of them is the flood of social media messages she receives that devalue, the very thing she begins to experience about herself in puberty—that her body is made to be a mother. Every month her body sends her a loud message that the social media around her try to deny. As one scholar suggests, Sexuality permeates one’s individual being to its very depth; it conditions every facet of one’s life as a person. As the self is always aware of itself as an ‘I,’ so this ‘I’ is always aware of itself as himself or herself. Our self-knowledge is indissolubly bound up not simply with our human being but with our sexual being (Man As Male and Female). The ability to be mothers matters profoundly in their understanding of themselves; yet they must suppress this biological reality in today’s social media culture.

But, instead of self-doubt and turmoil about their identity that result from the “gender-neutral” cultural forces seeking to squeeze them into its mold, we want our girls to become godly, self-assured women who understand and celebrate their femininity. We want them to confidently be able to answer the question, “What does it mean that God created them female?” This episode seeks to put a biblical lens over the messages that our wives, daughters, and granddaughters are hearing today about motherhood so that we can better affirm their feminine design, even of those who are not called to motherhood.

HOW MOTHERHOOD IS DEVALUED

In our day, feminists, who sadly are mistaken in their egalitarian approach to marriage, have rightly seen the injustice of closing doors of opportunity to women and sounded the alarm about Christian women allowing themselves to be beaten by their husbands because of their mistaken understanding of the Biblical teaching to be submissive to them. Feminists have also identified the hurtful way that churches almost always link femininity to marriage and the family, unfairly causing single women to feel like second class citizens. Demonizing feminists who have put a spotlight on toxic masculinity would be wrong. Yet, there is a horrible undermining of God’s glorious design of womanhood taking place in our culture, the effects of which Christians must not ignore. Historian Sharon Slater describes radical feminism’s strategy to undermine motherhood:

First convince women that motherhood is meaningless, degrading, and confining, and that childcare is an unfair burden placed on women. Convince them that fulfillment can only be found in competing with men and advancing equality in the workplace. Teach them that postponing or sacrificing professional pursuits for the benefit of their children and family is too much to ask. Better yet, repeal all laws and policies that recognize any differences between men and women. Eliminate special protections or incentives that encourage motherhood, childbearing, or the raising of one’s own child and remove “harmful” symbols that stereotype women, like Mother’s Day (Stand for the Family).

Another widespread cultural movement that undermines motherhood is Black Lives Matter. Although many see the slogan, black lives matter as a noble plea for equal treatment under the law, which they want to support, BLM’s website explains its goal, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” One of BLM’s founders, Patrice Cullors, openly states, “We are trained Marxists.” Their radical Marxist agenda is bent on supplanting the basic building block of society—the family—and replacing it with the state. This organization hijacks the widespread desire to end racism—into supporting a totally wrong solution to the problems in our cities. I’ve had the privilege of working closely with black pastors through the Great Dads Seminar and they will tell you that single moms in poverty don’t need a radical social revolution—they need a husband and father for their children. Fatherlessness is the real villain in our cities, not business owners whose shops are need to be burned down.

A third stream of thought about motherhood comes from the LGBTQ movement. This radical gender ideology shatters sexual personhood into 5 separate parts, ones 1) biological sex, 2) emotional romantic attraction, 3) sexual attraction (orientation), 4) gender identity, 5) gender role, making one’s right to choose each of these categories its highest value. Sadly, advocates of this broken understanding of gender find countless ways of attacking God’s design of gender and gender roles—attacks, which shape our daughters’ thinking. Celebrating and honoring women on Mother’s Day is not being gender neutral enough in their minds.

Christian men today must understand the way these cultural ideologies that devalue motherhood are impacting our daughters and granddaughters. Our ladies end up rejecting much of their womanhood, apologizing for their feminine traits, questioning their own worth and feeling driven to prove they are equal to men. So much inner peace, wholeness, and spiritual health is available to them if we can help them celebrate the glory of their design as mothers and nurturers!

THE GLORY OF MOTHERHOOD 

When I was a young church planter, at one point our congregation had over 75 kids five years old or under. One of my favorite pastimes during these fertile years was watching young dads’ behavior when their wives were pregnant. “Are you okay? Have a seat. Can I get you anything? Does it feel weird having your belly stick out like that?”  The mothers of course were cool. “Actually, my belly sticking out feels like the most natural thing in the world.”  Most dads would mumble, “I’m glad I don’t have to do this”—and that was BEFORE the pain of actual childbirth! Never are a husband and wife’s differences more vividly displayed than when she becomes pregnant. Her body was made to bear children—to give life.

The essence of femininity is to be a giver of life, a nurturer. The man called his wife’s name, Eve, because she was the mother of all living (Gen. 3:20). “Eve” sounds like Hebrew for life-giver and resembles the word for living. Owen Strachen and Gavin Peacock point out:  For their part, women are life-givers. Women give physical life to humanity, a task so great and so significant that it cannot be quantified. God has highly esteemed women by making the survival of the human race hang on their care and nurture. There is immense fulfillment and meaning for women in this truth (The Grand Design).  

This life-giving role extends beyond physically giving birth. God’s design of a woman’s body shows us a great deal about her God-given calling. Since creation matters so much to God, we might expect the woman’s physical body to give clues to femininity. She is designed to receive her husband and surround him with warmth and love. Her breasts are made to nurture, and her life-giving womb nourishes and surrounds her developing child. Creation reveals and Scripture confirms that the call of femininity is to provide life-giving nurture.

The love of a husband calls him to help his wife flourish by providing whatever she needs from the garden. But a woman’s love is giving herself—surrounding loved ones with her personal attention and care. Although Western culture has greatly devalued the feminine calling to motherhood and to a nurturing role, in God’s economy, giving personal care and love to those who surround her life is the highest of callings. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13:13).

There is in the feminine heart a nurturing instinct, but it is one that some in the culture today sneer at. In this cultural moment many young women are being told that child raising is a lower calling than pursuing a career. Moms today, unlike most women in history, are torn between their career, which they have devoted years preparing for, and their call to motherhood. Author, Nancy Pearcey describes her inner tumult when she got pregnant as a graduate student.

I was profoundly ambivalent about this pregnancy. What would having a child mean for my future? How could I have children and still grow professionally? The only way I knew to pursue my deepest interests, to fulfill my calling before the Lord, was in the world of ideas through academic study. But having a child seemed to pose a profound threat to the possibilities of continuing my studies. When men have families, most are able to continue working in their chosen fields (though admittedly, they often do make tradeoffs between family and career advancement.) At times, I confess, it struck me as decidedly unfair that women should experience such intense pressure to choose between the two major tasks of adult life—between pursuing a calling and raising the next generation (Total Truth).

After she had her baby, she, like many career-focused women, was astonished at the intensity of the love bond she formed with her newborn. On the one hand, she did not want to leave him to go back to her career; yet she believed that she had gifts that matched the calling she could only pursue in the world of academia. This workplace vs home choice, faced by modern women, is not a dilemma that has been faced by woman throughout most of history, because the workplace WAS the home. To illustrate this truth, let’s look at family life (in America) before the Industrial Revolution and how the Industrial Revolution changed all that.

A. In the colonial period in America, families lived much as they have lived for a millenia.The vast majority lived on farms or in peasant villages. Productive work to make a living was done by family households, often including members of the extended family, apprentices, servants, and hired hands. Stores, offices, and workshops were located in the front room. Living quarters were either upstairs or in the rear. (Interestingly that design was followed in building the US White House in the 1790s). The integration of home with work had huge implications for family life. Nancy Pearcey points out:

The husband and wife worked side by side on a daily basis, sharing in the same economic enterprise. For a colonial woman….marriage “meant to become coworker beside her husband...learning new skills in butchering, silversmith work, printing, or upholstering—whatever special skills the husband’s work required.” A useful measure of a society’s treatment of women is the status of widows and historical records show that in colonial days it was not uncommon for widows to carry on the family enterprise after their husband died—which means they had learned the requisite skills to keep the business going on their own.

Of course, as in nearly all societies, women were also responsible for a host of household tasks, requiring a wide range of skills: spinning wool and cotton; weaving it into cloth, sewing the family’s clothes, gardening and preserving food; preparing meals, making soap buttons, candles, and often developing a “cottage industry” that produced additional family income through her creative skills. Colonial America was not a panacea. Yet the wife partnering with her husband at home, both in earning a living and raising the children, seems quite similar to the portrait of godly womanhood revealed to us in Proverbs 31. The fact that work and child-rearing took place at home meant that mothers were able to combine economically productive work with raising children. It also meant that fathers were much more involved in raising children than they are today.

B. The Industrial Revolution built a chasm between the workplace and the home. During this era of history (1770-1870), the development of steel, expansion of the railroads for transporting goods, and use of steam as a power source to replace human labor, led to the building of factories and mass production. Whereas men used to work at home with their wives and families, they had little choice but to follow their work out of their households and fields, and into factories and offices. These are some of the results of this transformation of society:

• The physical presence of fathers at home dropped sharply. The most striking feature of child-rearing manuals of the mid-nineteenth century (the height of the Industrial Revolution) is the disappearance of references to fathers. Because in America, the home had always been the place where children are taught moral character and religion, women began to be looked up to as those who were custodians of religion and moral character.
• This was a stunning reversal. In colonial days, husbands and fathers had been admonished to function as the moral and spiritual leaders of the household. But now men are being told that they are naturally crude, appetite-driven animals who need to learn virtue from their wives.
• The impact of this work/home divide may have been worse for women. The home ceased being a locus of economic productivity. Instead of enjoying a sense of economic indispensability, women became dependent—having to live off the wages of their husbands.
• Because household industries were replaced by factory products, women at home with their children were no longer able to utilize the full array of their gifts but only those relating to motherhood and household tasks.
• Not surprisingly, this cultural expectation that women should be at home, and not at work spawned the feminist movement, which was rooted in the rights of women to have their own career outside the home.
• Wives who used to be economically productive and care for the family with their husbands are now alone in their work; this natural partnership is gone. It could be argued that the woman’s role as a mother became overvalued. She is criticized if she doesn’t find, essentially all of her fulfillment by being home with the kids—when that is not the picture of the Proverbs 31 woman.

C.  Contemporary feminism began as a revolt against the traditional female role. To a large extent it was inspired by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), which began as a survey of Friedan's former classmates at Smith and grew into a polemic about the psychological frustrations experienced by women who exchanged the relatively egalitarian world of the college campus for the "comfortable concentration camps" of middle-class suburbia. Restless and sometimes envious of their husbands' careers, Friedan's "trapped housewives" wanted to pursue the goal of freedom and autonomy on an equal basis with men. Friedan’s message continues to shape the current generation of daughters who are told the Bible oppresses women by teaching traditional family roles—that Dad goes off to an exciting career while Mom is stuck caring for the kids. To the contrary, Scripture teaches that both Adam and Eve are gifted and given the task in Genesis 1 of building culture. The Proverbs 31 woman’s contribution to the economic welfare of the family is immeasurable. Adam’s calling to provide for his family, materially, is clear in Genesis 2:15; but that calling is joined with the calling to ensure that his wife utilizes all of her gifts. However, it is a denial of God’s creation design to deny that she is created to nurture. She is called to help Adam build culture; but her physical body and Scripture tell us her primary calling is to nurture her family and build a home for them.

D. In the 1970s, second-wave feminism, made the right to an abortion a woman’s right. Sadly, feminists’ legitimate concern for women’s rights became politicized by the abortion industry. The unwillingness of pro-choice advocates to even discuss how the rights of unborn children need to weigh into tough abortion decisions, reflects a tragic devaluing of children, which goes hand in hand with devaluing motherhood.

BEING A NURTURER WHEN NOT A MOM

Although starting about age 12 a young woman’s body sends her a monthly reminder that God designed her for motherhood, some women never marry, though they would love to, and some women are childless. The church needs to loudly proclaim that utilizing her physical capability to conceive children is not what makes her feminine. Rather, her body just points to her real womanhood—being designed to nurture, to give her personal care to others. Even if she is unmarried, childless, or postmenopausal, she has a vital instinct built into her as a woman with (30 trillion XX genes) to nurture others, to give herself, her personal care to those surrounding her.  Being a nurturer is not all there is to womanhood; but it is at the core of God’s design.

I want to close by pointing us to perhaps the most famous mother in the world—though she herself never bore children. Her name was Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu. In 1950, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a group of 4500 Roman Catholic women who nurtured the needy around them in 133 countries. Though she herself died in 1997, these unmarried nuns still manage homes for people who are dying of HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis. They also run soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, children's and family counselling programs, as well as orphanages and schools. They know that for suffering people there is nothing like a woman’s tender care.  How fitting that she who never bore her own child is known as Mother Teresa.

For Further Prayerful Thought

1. Why does the gender-neutral movement and devaluing of motherhood harm a teen girl today?
2. In the struggle of women to balance their call to use their gifts vocationally and use their gifts to nurture their children, how would you explain the role of the Industrial Revolution? How can this knowledge prevent us from the legalism that a woman should not work outside the home, or the false idea that she must have a career outside the home to be fulfilled?
3. In your circles, how can you support women who are wrestling with both the calling to be at home with their kids and good stewards by using their gifts outside the home?
4. How might honoring mothers but also women who are not—for their incredibly precious nurturing hearts warm the hearts of single and childless women?