My mother homeschooled six kids all the way through high school during the 1990s and 2000s. A significant challenge then was assembling a coherent curriculum for each of us. Homeschooling’s primary benefit, flexibility, is also its biggest challenge. Back then, few paths were proven and assembling the materials involved everything from the local middle school to regional homeschool conventions and subscribing to upstart periodicals. And she did it all. Springing up to fill the demands of religious homeschoolers were mail order catalogs, small publishers, and the like. Mixed in with the educationally-minded were some people with truly strange beliefs. When you’re on the fringe of the fringe, the flat-earthers and John Birchers aren’t far away. That’s how we heard about Doug Wilson.
He surfed into our lives on the trends of the religious homeschool movement in the late 1990s. In vogue was classical education, a close reading of the reformers, John Calvin especially, and concomitant ahistorical Christian reconstructionism. Homeschoolers elevated the dissenting Puritans who founded America from historical forebears to superhuman archetypes. The education of John Quincy Adams went from historical oddity to practical guide. The risk of close readings of ancient texts or even recent history is a viewing of all contexts as good and worth returning to. Wilson’s books, blogs, and publishing work brought these themes together with a fascination of power. There were many threads of the ‘everything leads to power’ ethos of the time. I’d put Mike Farris’s “Joshua Generation” at a slightly less extreme end of a spectrum, but Doug Phillips and Doug Wilson comprised a more extreme side. They went to great lengths to deny recent progress, from the ending of slavery to rights for women. Unsurprisingly, Phillips ended his prominence with a sex scandal, as did many other conservative Christian homeschool leaders. Wilson is still doing what he’s been doing all along: saying provocative and offensive things and then (slightly) walking them back when challenged.
For the true believer, an entire life can be lived in Wilson’s orbit. You could move to his city in Idaho, you could graduate from his college, you could raise your kids with his curriculum, you could submit to his church, and, in the evenings, you could enjoy his podcasts and books. For those of us on the outside, it has the hallmarks of a cult. A few months ago, I linked to a short profile about one of Wilson’s denomination’s churches in the DC area. The folks at Politico highlighted its adjacency to power. My point at the time was that a posture of curiousness portends a better outcome than a posture of judgment. Maybe, though, a bit of judgment is warranted.
This brings us to today’s links, the tales from two Helens. Both write about contemporary misogyny and both are by a person called Helen, but from there, the tales diverge: Helen Lewis has a sobering picture of men, like Wilson, who hate women while Helen Andrews is, best I can tell, a woman who hates women. In thinking about this essay, I called them good Helen and bad Helen, respectively.
First, good Helen. Her piece sobered me by reminding me of the 1990s and 2000s religious right and homeschooled. These are people who earnestly wonder whether women should speak at all in church, much less be ordained, and think that the right to vote is a contestable argument. Upon reflection, it’s not at all surprising that the other Doug’s time as a figure in this world ended in a sex scandal. Would a man earnestly seeking the social and political subjugation of women have anything other than a sordid sexual history? I read the piece wondering whether it’s worth focusing any attention on the Doug who’s lasted longer. Isn’t attention for Wilson nut-picking?
For one thing, before becoming an online goober, he was an offline goober. In the offline times, it was his positive mentions of slavery, common among reconstructionists, that got him into trouble. He weaseled out of those, somehow, only to land in perpetual hot water with his dim view of women. When good Helen tries to pin him down, he squirms and walks back his worse comments. Wilson did the same thing to Ross Douthat (answering that, sure, America will be Christianized, but not for a few hundred years, so don’t worry about the sabbath laws we want to promulgate). Someone who says really offensive and shocking things on the internet or to his followers and immediately softens or walks back isn’t a serious thinker. Wilson is on the fringe of the fringe and delights in all attention, negative and otherwise, like a misbehaved little child. He says things like slavery wasn’t all bad or Calvin’s Geneva is worth emulating and then, when pressed, always backs off. Who does that? An attention-seeker. He’s big on Twitter.
Do we need such an attention-seeker to help us decide whether women ought to be able to vote? I’m not sure that there are two serious points of view here and I am sure we don’t need Wilson in this sort of debate.
So why talk to him? In the piece, good Helen has the anecdotes about powerful people to be found in some of his few dozen churches and points to the millions of views his antics can rack up. But he’s a reactionary. Both religion and politics have moved, for a couple of centuries at least, further and further away from the ideas his antics animate. The ascendent populist right isn’t conservative, isn’t religious, and isn’t reactionary; the few in the political right who are religious aren’t nationalists, and almost none are aspiring theocrats. The few we can find mostly exist in the algorithm—when one finds and engages with their “content,” more appear. Like anything in the algorithm, if we never engage with them, we won’t see them. In doing so, I doubt we’d miss anything.
Good Helen has found a villain, one who illustrates that the reactionaries have a women problem, but there’s not a serious argument to be had. The serious argument is made by bad Helen.
Helen Andrews, as a reactionary, is much closer to the center of the ascendent populist right. She’s not questioning divorce or voting laws (that we know of), but she’s certain that women bring nothing good to culture nor to institutions, and she appears to want women, generally, to go away. The thinking here is both serious and pernicious.
It’s serious thinking because there has been a change. A few generations ago, corporate employees, lawyers, academicians—America’s rich and powerful—were almost completely male. While none of those categories yet are majority female, they are recently and meaningfully mixed. At least in the US, women now comprise a majority of our completers of undergraduate and graduate degrees. In a few decades, our upper echelons might be more female than male. It’s an open question about what this change will produce. In a time of change, the reactionary’s answer is uniquely pernicious.
Bad Helen makes the reactionary’s primary assumptions. First, that all good things have resulted from all aspects of the past. Second, that any changes will cause those good things to disappear. It’s an especially flawed argument in that bad Helen cannot find anything wrong with the old patriarchy and cannot imagine anything good happening from its demise. It’s hard to imagine that a male-dominated, male-created status quo needs no correction. Harder still to imagine that all these men didn’t help but structure things in a way that benefited themselves at the expense of women. To take a simple case: large employers generally have had abysmal parental leave allowances. But the counter-factual isn’t a women versus men argument: if women had been around at the creation of these benefits, and if they had gotten some more generous leave allowances, then wouldn’t all families have been better off? This is precisely what’s happening now. Despite the reactionary’s concern, productivity hasn’t come crashing down. The modern corporation, male-dominated as it was, has been an incredible wealth engine. Bringing women into its ranks hasn’t diminished it, but related changes have made it a more positive contributor to all of society.
Unlike bad Helen, it’s hard to imagine an institution or a role that wouldn’t benefit from the presence, or even preponderance, of women. Another counter-factual history illustrates the point. After decades of enabling and covering up abuse, today’s church is perpetually splintering over the ordination of women. What if the pastoral staff reflected the other half of the people? Would women have spotted abusers more quickly? Once alerted, would women priests have stopped the cover up? While some may not have, given institutional incentives, some might have, and that would’ve been to everyone’s benefit, not the least the church itself.
It works both ways, as we see from the compelling argument that more men as elementary educators would make primary schools stronger. This is why thinking about advancements for women in society isn’t zero-sum (women advance; men recede): society is all of us together. If women make stronger corporations or churches, or men make stronger schools, when society as a whole becomes better. Put another way: Chesterton’s fence is sometimes useless; sometimes, it blocks the way towards something better.
Reading
The Great Feminization
In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym “J. Stone,” argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire “woke” era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.
The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet
Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”