The Problem of Patriarchy

Not long ago, Marxists and feminists called conservativism “patriarchy” as a slander. Now many conservatives embrace the label.

The author of Rules for Retrogrades proposes returning to “familial patriarchy” to save civilization. His wife, in her book Ask Your Husband, defends the thesis that “the husband is the boss of his wife.” “God bless the patriarchy” (“i.e., Christianity”), she says, “the foundation of Western culture for two thousand years.”

How neo-patriarchalists understand “patriarchy” is more complex than a few quotations can capture. But that they describe their project in such terms is already a serious mistake. Reintroducing patriarchy will not revitalize Western civilization or Christianity, but undermine them.

Exalting Masculinity—And Letting Men Off Easy

“Patriarchy” (meaning “rule by fathers”) is a model of family that emphasizes the father as the family’s first principle—that from which the family arises and that which holds it together. Therefore, as Christopher Dawson points out, it “accentuate[s] the masculine element” throughout family life and society. Patriarchal cultures are often disciplined and warlike, such as that of the ancient Greeks portrayed in the Iliad, the ancient Romans and their institution of the paterfamilias, or the ancient Israelites, born of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In times like ours when moral softness abounds, the discipline of patriarchal culture might appeal to many. 

But patriarchy also tends to let men off easy. It praises the chaste woman who gives her body only to her husband, but it often permits or encourages the husband to take several wives and concubines. Patriarchies at times forgive men their infidelities: in the Odyssey, Odysseus gets almost no censure for fornicating for years with other women, even as his wife Penelope is praised for remaining faithful in his long absence. Patriarchy teaches children to obey their father reverently, but its piety can justify a father’s brutality: Roman law let the paterfamilias execute anyone in his household, even his wife and children.

By their strong deference to the will of the man and his sexual preferences, patriarchal societies tend to enable men—especially wealthy and strong “alpha” males—to rule a sprawling brood of wives, concubines, children, and grandchildren. If he is the oldest of several sons, his power grows still greater, especially if he marries his children to those of his brothers (a common occurrence in patriarchies).

Hence the natural political form of patriarchy is kingship, in which the king claims to be—with good reason, if his harem is large enough—the father of his people. Below him are the fathers of clans; subordinated to the clan are its constituent nuclear families (a husband with one of his wives and their common children). What gives meaning to the individual’s life is his place within this highly collective society, ruled by men who control the lives of their subordinates.

Equality in the Spirit

Many neo-patriarchalists shy away from these aspects of patriarchy. The authors mentioned above affirm monogamy and American democracy, not polygamy and monarchy. For instance, the author of Ask Your Husband insists that a woman should obey her husband “not based on blindness but on reason and truth”; she suggests the husband’s judgment is not unquestionable, because all human beings have the same fundamental capacity to know truth. But respect for the universal dignity of the person and his conscience, whether in marriage or political life, cannot last in a patriarchal society, because it runs against patriarchy’s nature. Such respect does, however, flourish in a genuinely Christian culture, which the West has been for much of history. And such a culture, contrary to what neo-patriarchalists say, is not patriarchal.

Christianity sees itself to be in continuity with Judaism, and it accepts that the history of the Jewish people was divinely guided. That history includes the lives of the patriarchs from whom the people of Israel sprang. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Christians acknowledge, had remarkable virtues, above all fidelity to the one true God. But they also practiced vices typical of patriarchy, including polygamy—which the patriarchs undertook not at God’s command, but on their own initiative, and with dubious results. Not surprisingly, Jewish authorities eventually banned polygamy.

Christianity acknowledged only strict monogamy from its start. Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity’s founder, pointed out that, as the Bible taught, God intended marriage to be a two-in-one-flesh union from the beginning; the logic of that calling entailed monogamy and the indissolubility of marriage. It also entailed a fundamental equality between the spouses. Both are bound to keep the marriage intact: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” Jesus’s follower Paul explained that obligation’s logical extension to intimacy within marriage: 

The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does.

Spouses are to “be subject to one another.” They give themselves in different ways according to their sex, but the final value of each person’s gift is measured by a single standard—the purity of the person’s love for God and the other spouse.

God permitted divorce and remarriage after sin entered the world because of men’s “hardness of heart” (just as he tolerated the polygamy of the patriarchs) until the day when, by divine intervention, mankind could once again fulfill its original vocation. As any committed married person knows, marriage’s joys are accompanied by trials that require God’s help. After man was separated from God by sin, he could not abide by the natural law of marriage, since his individual nature was turned away from its internal law. Inevitably, the transcendent law of justice was overridden by the law of physical power: might made right. And since men are, on average, physically more powerful than women, over time the sinful, fallen world became dominated by men, as God warned the first woman, Eve, after she and her husband Adam had sinned.

But for those who received salvation from sin through Jesus, physical power once again became subordinated to justice and charity. The spirit once again ruled over the flesh and its desires, and the original law of marriage was restored. The focus of kinship became the nuclear family, not the clan, and polygamy was ruled out entirely. Christianity made it difficult for clans to develop, forbidding intermarriage between close relatives.

No longer could the haze of sin let men rationalize dominating women because of their greater physical strength. Now it was clear that the spirit was the highest principle in humanity, and that women were just as capable of spiritual excellence as men—as witnessed by the holiness of Mary, the Mother of God; of Catherine of Siena, who brought powerful men to heel; or of Teresa of Avila, who founded a spiritual movement that transformed much of Christianity. The measure of a person’s merit became not his power but his love of God and neighbor; the equal standing of men and women as persons was indisputable.

In part to seal these social transformations, Christianity made a new institution to complement marriage: celibacy, the lifelong renunciation of marriage to give one’s heart, mind, and body wholly to God. The very existence of celibate men and women showed visibly that the spirit was superior to the flesh—that even the desire for conjugal love could be satisfied by spiritual love for God, if God gave one such a calling. The same God who alone could make marriage possible was the one thing necessary for the human heart.

Rolling Back the Progress of Grace

When Christianity entered the world, it did not affirm patriarchy; rather, it tried to help us grow out of it. Christianity taught humanity to love God above all things and to judge reality from his eternal, spiritual perspective. Man’s body is God’s creation, but it is less like God than man’s soul is. Christians who affirm patriarchy today, like all patriarchalists, judge men and women by their bodies more than their spirits. They thus risk rolling back the progress that grace has made in transforming the West: they point us not to a more Christian future but back to ancient paganism.

One can understand why conservatives might be tempted this way, after the twentieth century’s experience with radical feminism. Radical feminists absurdly denied that women’s bodies gave them what Edith Stein called a “natural vocation” “to be wife and mother.” They did so in part because they lacked the strong sense of humanity’s spiritual life—which Christian feminists like Stein had—that relativized the physical without denying it. Often being Marxists, or materialists of other kinds, radical feminists believed the only way women could be equal with men was by gaining material power. Christian feminists could recognize that women who embraced motherly roles in the family—which appeared materially inferior—could be more excellent human beings than men.

On the other hand, one can understand why radical feminists might have been drawn to their opinions. For one thing, the growth of prosperity under the market economy has made us less tolerant of any material differences. But more importantly, as Dawson points out, although the market economy is not patriarchal by nature, it was linked with patriarchy, as Dawson says, “by a curious freak of historical development”: the economic changes that created modern prosperity arose from early modern English culture, which happened to be quite patriarchal. 

In the seventeenth century, the English royalist Robert Filmer, an Anglican Christian, defended absolute monarchy and patriarchal society in his Patriarcha (which provoked John Locke’s famous reply). His Puritan compatriots rarely spoke of patriarchy: according to David Hackett Fischer, they “sometimes actually condemned” it. Nevertheless, English Puritans “rejected the ideal of celibacy,” just as Anglicans did. Both groups also severely reduced or eliminated devotion to Mary, the Mother of God. Thus, these dominant elements of English society tended toward patriarchy, whether in principle or in fact: they regressed toward more material and masculine views of family and religion, and therefore away from original Christian spirituality. And as English culture was transplanted to America, then spread through the industrial revolution, its materialistic notions of family spread as well, calling forth the opposition of feminists.

Sounder Spirituality, Not Sexual Materialism

Hence our current confused and paradoxical impasse. Both radical feminists and neo-patriarchalists emphasize the physical in humanity to the detriment of the spiritual; but the former camp hates physical differences between the sexes, while the latter embraces them excessively. Both radical feminists and neo-patriarchalists rightly identify a patriarchal element in Western history; but they are both wrong for blaming—or crediting—Christianity for patriarchy’s rise. Christianity caused modern patriarchy more by declining than by growing. Attacking Christianity will only make patriarchy worse, and defending patriarchy will undermine the spread of Christian culture; either way, the world may end up with bizarre new forms of polygamy.

Instead we should promote an authentic humanism, like that of Edith Stein, by which we can recognize the complementary physical differences between men and women in light of their common spiritual vocation. This approach offers a sounder anthropology, and it directs our attention toward union with God. He alone can give knowledge of the mystery of the human person he created, and so help us navigate between the twin errors of sexism and false egalitarianism.

Christians especially should not adopt patriarchal ideas that have little to do with the Gospel; they should attend to their own conversion so they can see human sexuality from God’s perspective. They might also think of how to foster celibate vocations in their church, starting with their own children, as a way to counter our age’s sexual materialism. If Christians are young enough, they should ask God whether he is calling them to give themselves entirely, body and spirit, to him: to bear living witness to the power of the One who created human beings “male and female” in His image, destining them for a new creation in which they will be as though “neither male nor female,” “like angels.”

Image by Yeti Studio and licensed via Adobe Stock.