A visit to your local college or university campus is likely to reveal that a revolution has taken place. On many campuses, young women now outnumber young men, and a gender gap of momentous importance is staring us in the face.

This gender gap has been growing for some time now, as successive generations of young women have entered the world of higher education. Yet, no one seemed to see a gap of this magnitude coming — until it had already happened.

The disparity of enrollment by gender varies by institution, but it is now estimated that almost 60% of all undergraduate students enrolled in American colleges and universities are women. This represents something altogether new in human experience since the rise of the university model as the dominant learning environment for young adults.  For the first time, a generation of young women will be markedly more educated than their male generational cohort.

Is this a bad thing . . . a negative development? Yes — and profoundly so. The problem is not the larger enrollment of young women in colleges and universities. The problem is the phenomenon of missing young men, whose absence spells big trouble for the future.

The numbers point to the problem, but do not explain it. Explanations for the phenomenon of missing young men point to the fact that girls outperform boys at every level in grades K-12, and are thus more ready for the college experience than the boys. Other factors include economic and cultural patterns. Among some ethnic groups, the disparity between men and women entering college is far greater than 60% to 40%. Many young men consider the educational environment to be frustrating, constricting, and overly feminized. Others have lost confidence that an undergraduate education will lead to a job with adequate income and stability. Whatever the reason, their absence makes a big difference on the college campus today — and will make an even bigger difference in the larger society in years ahead.

The New York Times offered an unusually candid portrait of this gender disparity in “The New Math on Campus,” published in its February 5, 2010 edition. Reporter Alex Williams described a radically transformed social scene on some of today’s largest and most historic state universities.

The University of North Carolina, for example:

North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.

Williams described a campus filled with young women who socialize with each other out of necessity — there are just not enough young men on campus. As Williams notes, this makes some college campuses resemble retirement communities, where women also generally outnumber men.

On the secular university campus, the gender imbalance has forced adjustments in the “hooking up” culture of sexual negotiation.  As Williams reports:

“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.

This is a portrait of demographic disaster, and the imbalance is not limited to secular campuses or students. Even as women now outnumber men in baccalaureate programs, they also indicate a desire to marry a man with equal or greater educational attainments. As the numbers now make clear, many of these young women will be disappointed.

Christian parents and all concerned with the coming generation should look closely at this phenomenon and ask the hard question — why is it that so many young men are falling behind in educational attainment? What are we doing that allows or encourages boys to exit formal education at their earliest opportunity? Why do we accept at face value the fact that boys fall behind girls of the same age in maturity and educational level? Why is college now an aspiration for far more young women than young men?

These are hard questions, but the answers will be even harder. We have allowed the development of an elongated boyhood and delayed adulthood. We frustrate them in school and then wonder why they bolt at the first exit from the classroom. We allow boys and young men to forfeit their futures.

All this might be different if the missing young men on our college and university campuses were missing for some good reason — such as military service or similar deployment. But, even as young men are more likely to join the military, the numbers do not explain the differential on campus.

Biblical manhood requires that young men grow up, assume adult responsibilities, and prepare for leadership and service in the home, in the church, and in the larger society.

This much is clear — if this trend is not reversed, the college campus will not be the only place these young men are found missing.

© Dr. Al Mohler

The men ranged in age from about 20 to 40 years old. Not one budged to help with our luggage. Not one offered his seat. They just sat there passively. The thought of taking some masculine initiative to serve us probably didn’t even cross their minds.

How drastically times have changed! If this was a scene out of my father’s generation instead of the new millenium, each one of those men would have jumped up, helped with the luggage, and offered a woman his seat. And if the youngest had hesitated, he would have been chided by the older ones to “be a man” and to treat the women present like ladies.

But alas… these modern men had been innundated with the philosophy that women are equal and should be treated the same as men.  So they had no qualms about letting us manage our own luggage and try to steady ourselves during the pitching movement while they passively sat by and watched us struggle. 

I must admit that I felt a twinge of sadness and nostalgia about the whole scene. Because although I’m totally capable of moving my suitcase and standing on a bus, there’s something in me that enjoys receiving the initiatory strength of men. I don’t want men to treat me the same way they treat the guys. I want them to be men. And I want to be treated like a woman.

This week, Christians around the world will commemorate Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It was at a Maundy Thursday service at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, in 1984, that a four-foot bronze statue of Jesus on the cross was unveiled. But to the shock of the congregation, the image of Christ on the cross was, in fact, an image of Christa. It portrayed Christ as a woman, complete with undraped breasts and rounded hips.

Betty Friedan, the main force behind modern day feminism, predicted that the question of the eighties would be: “Is God HE?” The Christa sculpture was the liberal church’s response to the question. And although Evangelical Christians have been much slower to consider female gendered God imagery, the recent phenomenon of the multi-million best-seller, “The Shack,” indicates that Evangelicals, too, are succumbing to the feminist pressure to image God in feminine ways. It’s a scenario that I predicted almost 25 years ago.

If you haven’t read it yet, and are amongst the un-Shacked evangelical minority, here’s the story in a nutshell.  Mack’s  youngest daughter Missy is kidnapped and murdered in a remote mountain shack by a serial slime, called the Daisy Bug Killer.  Mack goes through a denial-grief-anger-bitterness cycle until he receives a letter in his mailbox from God who tells him to go back to the shack to confront his point of pain and suffering.  When Mack gets to the shack he blacks out and awakens to find himself in a cabin complete with a manifestation of the Godhead.  But this is no ordinary Godhead.

God the Father, called “Papa,” is a She.  An Aunt Jemima pancake cooking Mother. Think Whoopee Goldberg in an apron. And Sarayu, the Holy Spirit with an Assyrian name, is a wispy ethereal female. Think life-sized Tinkerbell emitting rainbows and sparkles.  Jesus is a human “male” – the one the three members of the Godhead collaboratively spoke into existence as the Son of God (umm…  go figure).  Then, in a bizarre twist that defies the orthodox image of the pre-incarnate Christ, another woman, “Sophia” appears as the divine personification of God’s wisdom.  And in the end, Papa contributes to the gender-bent confusing mess by setting aside his/her female cross dressing persona for a slightly more familiar masculine one- a grey haired man with a hip ponytail.

Forgiveness and healing from pain is a valid biblical motif – one to which I am profoundly committed.  But the way we heal is by running toward the God of the Bible, not by killing off or altering the parts of his character that we find politically incorrect. Not by coming up with an image of a God that is more palatable to our modern-day sensibilities. Not by altering God-revealed truth about the Trinity. Not by thinking we need to “help” God with his image. Over the years, I’ve witnessed thousands of women come to a place of healing and wholeness through the redeeming power of the unvarnished foolishness of the gospel.

The Shack contains terribly wrong concepts about God. Plain and simple. If you think it doesn’t, then you’re well on your way to accepting the image of the Christa on the cross.  In a few years, you might be hanging her up in your church. I don’t think I’m overstating the case. In my book I’ve carefully documented the way it happened in mainline churches. The arguments used to justify their feminist Christa are the same ones the Shack uses to justify its feminized version of God. In essence, there’s no difference between the artistic image of a feminized Jesus (a.k.a. “Sophia”) hanging on a cross and the artistic image of a feminized Aunt Jemima Papa god in a book.  If the latter doesn’t offend you, then the former really shouldn’t.

I’ve had good friends tell me that I’m missing the point of the Shack. Maybe I am. But maybe, just maybe, they are. Maybe they are getting caught up in the emotion of a heart-wrenching story and are failing to notice the horrendous theology that under girds it.  The authors claim that “at its core the book is one long Bible Study.” This isn’t an ordinary story book. It’s a book that seeks to transform people’s ideas about God. The fiction is merely a vehicle for the theology.

How we image God matters. So the image of God the book presents matters. It matters a great deal.  I seem to recall that God wasn’t terribly amused when his people imaged him in the wrong way, as a golden calf. If you’re not convinced that we should refrain from imaging God as female, and are interested in understanding more about the feminist theology rampant in the Shack, check into my book, The Feminist Mistake. If you take the time to understand the impact that feminism has had on society and church, then maybe you’ll understand my distaste for the Shack’s feminine god rendition.

When it comes down to it, my primary interest is not to engage in a debate about the merits of the Shack. It’s OK if you liked the book. There are some good messages in it, and parts that I liked very much.  And it’s apparently helped people in some significant ways. So that’s the good part. But I do want you to think about the false gender-blended image of God this book insidiously presents. And I do want you to base your thinking about God and masculinity and femininity on Scripture, and not on the spirit of this age. The thing that bothers me the most about the Shack is that it wraps destructive ideas up in an appealing package and feeds it to people who have neither the discernment nor the desire to carefully separate truth from error. Most Shackites don’t have a clue about the magnitude of the implications of messing with Trinitarian imagery.

Here’s the thing.  In the Old Testament, God instructed his people to reject female goddess images and images of God as a bi-sexual or a dual-sexual Baal/Ashtoreth-type collaboration. God hated this imagery so much that he had his people destroy it and all those who promoted it. The New Testament Church also fought hard against teachings that sought to incorporate female images of God alongside the male images – the Gnostic heresy, in particular. And now, it seems that the same ideas are knocking once again…. and many are throwing the Church doors wide open and welcoming them in.

What’s the big deal? Why can’t we image God as female? The main reason is that God defines who God is and how we are to image him and relate to him. God has chosen to reveal himself with male imagery.  Father is HE. Son is HE. Holy Spirit is HE. That’s not to say that God is male.  He encompasses everything that is good about masculinity and femininity. But that doesn’t mean that we have the liberty to think or refer to him as female. That’s crossing a line we have no right to cross.

The gender imagery that God has given us is highly important. It reflects critical truths about the nature of the Trinity. Calling him “she” violates his character and important imagery about the nature of our relationship to him. As C.S. Lewis observes,

Common sense, disregarding the discomfort, or even the horror, which the idea of turning all our theological language into the feminine gender arouses in most Christians, will ask “Why not? Since God is in fact not a biological being and has no sex, what can it matter whether we say He or She, Father or Mother, Son or Daughter?”

But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument …  against Christianity. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery. Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. And as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life… [But] one of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and semitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures… [God images himself as masculine because]…we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him.

…The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.

(Quotes from C.S. Lewis Essays Notes on the Way and That Hideous Strength.)

There’s a whole lot more to be said about the importance of accurate gender imagery and the importance of honoring and preserving masculine imagery for God. But I’ll leave it at that for now. Hopefully this post has alerted you to some popular false ways of thinking that are both insidious and dangerous.  The nearly universal frothing of the Christian community over the Shack shows me how very much the philosophy of feminism has influenced even the Evangelical church.

For those of you who are interested, here’s a more detailed critique of the Shack by renowned Christian reviewer, Tim Challies

copyright 2009, Mary Kassian

A survey of 1,280 teens and young adults – conducted by TRU, a global leader in research on teens and 20-somethings – reports that one in five teen girls (22%)-and 11% of teen girls ages 13-16 years old-say they have electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude images of themselves. These racy images are also getting passed around: One-third (33%) of teen boys and one-quarter (25%) of teen girls say they have had nude/semi-nude images-originally meant to be private-shared with them.

The statistics among the young adult population of 20 to 26 year olds is even more staggering. More than one third (36%) of young adult women have sent or posted nude or seminude images of themselves.

Other findings from the Sex and Tech Survey include:

• Sending sexually suggestive messages is even more prevalent than sending nude/semi-nude images. Nearly half of young people (49% total, 39% of teens, 59% of young adults) have sent sexually suggestive text messages or email messages to someone.
• Even more have received sexually suggestive messages: 48% of teens and 64% of young adults (56% total). Fully one-third of young teen girls (ages 13-16) have received sexually suggestive messages.
• Even though nearly three-quarters of young people (73% total, 75% of teens, 71% of young adults) say that sending sexually suggestive content “can have serious negative consequences,” nearly one-quarter (22% total, 19% of teens and 26% of young adults) say sending sexually suggestive content is “no big deal.”
• What teens and young adults are doing electronically seems to have an effect on what they do in real life: Nearly one-quarter of teens (22%) admit that technology makes them personally more forward and aggressive. More than one-third of teens (38%) say exchanging sexy content makes dating or hooking up with others more likely and nearly one-third of teens (29%) believe those exchanging sexy content are “expected” to date or hook up.

Law enforcement agencies are struggling with how to manage the sexting phenomenon. In several cases across the nation, prosecutors have threatened child pornography charges against teens who received or sent the text messages.  In Pennsylvania, a prosecutor threatened to charge three teenage girls with trafficking in child pornography after photos of themselves topless or in their skivvies ended up being sent to classmates’ phones. A kiddie porn conviction could mean jail time or even registration as sex offender. The district attorney offered that in order to avoid the charges, the girls participate in a five-week re-education program, in which they would discuss “what they did wrong” and “what it means to be a girl.”  But their parents and the American Civil Liberties Union intervened. They argued that these young women had every right to send the explicit photos.

There’s so much that could be said about all this, but what’s so interesting to me, is the district attorney’s insistence that the girls needed to be “re-educated” about “what it means to be a girl.” The irony of the situation is that the actions of these girls are totally in line with our culture’s definition of womanhood. The reason they’re sexting is because they HAVE been re-educated about what it means to be a girl! They’re the first fruits of a truly feminist culture. They’ve been taught – and they truly believe – that women have the right and the power to do and be whatever they want. Women define themselves! So in their minds, they haven’t done anything wrong. Sexting is just another expression of Girl-Power. It’s nothing but a practical application of Betty Friedan’s mantra that “We (women) need and can trust no other authority than our own personal truth!”

The authors of the Sex and Tech survey conclude that teens need to think before pressing “send” and that parents need to talk to their kids about sex and technology. This is undoubtedly true. But until we present our young women with a new and beautiful vision of womanhood – a biblical vision . . . a high and noble vision that speaks to their true identity and purpose – they will continue to pursue the modern sexualized ideal, and slither further down the slippery slope. Women, it’s time to reject the feminist notion that women can define what womanhood is all about.  It’s time to look to our Creator for a true definition of womanhood. It’s time to stand up for the minds and hearts of the next generation of women. It’s time for a holy counter-revolution.

copyright 2009, Mary A. Kassian

Details about the new Shi’ite Personal Status Law are few. The text has not yet been published in the official gazette. Karzai and members of his office have yet to comment. But the UN and opposition politicians say that the bill contains numerous provisions restricting the rights of women, such as giving their husbands priority in court; requiring the husband’s permission to leave the house, obtain education or employment, or to see a doctor; and reserving the custody of children to male relatives. Its most controversial provision, though, is Article 132, which requires wives to submit to their husbands’ sexual demands. It reportedly says that a husband can expect sex with his wife once in every four days except in the event of illness. The United Nations argues that this is equivalent to spousal rape.

It never ceases to amaze me that the assault on the biblical pattern for marriage comes from both sides. As Shia law demonstrates, it comes on the right, from those who would abuse authority and submission -who regard women as inferior and demean, degrade, and assault them.  But it also comes on the left, from those who would throw off all distinction between male and female, deride authority and submission, and seek an egalitarian gender-neutral-type of existence.

Do I believe that the law should treat men and women as equals? Absolutely. We ought to speak out against this Shia law and against any other law that legalizes the misuse of authority and acts of oppression. Then do I believe in authority and submission in marriage? Absolutely. I believe in the biblical model that displays the glory of Christ’s relationship to his Bride:  Men are to reflect the strength, love and self-sacrifice of Christ. Women are to reflect the character, grace and beauty of the Bride he redeemed. In the biblical model, authority and submission are lived out voluntarily, with humbleness, gentleness and the indwelling power and guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Laws that promote the equal treatment of all persons serve a protective function. They are necessary.  I like the thinking of C. S. Lewis on this matter. He maintains that equality is in the same position as clothes: “It is a result of the Fall and the remedy for it.” But, he argues, it is the naked body, still there beneath the clothes of each one of us, which really lives. It is the hierarchical world, still alive and (very properly) hidden behind a facade of equality, which is our real concern:

Artificial equality is necessary in the life of the State, but …in the Church we strip off this disguise, we recover our real inequalities, and are thereby refreshed and quickened…

I believe in political equality… Fallen men are so wicked that not one of the can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows… The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin), but because fathers and husbands are bad….

But the function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food. By treating human persona as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But it is not on this that we were made to live… Authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live… in the Body of Christ, we step outside that world which says ‘I am as good as you.’ It is like turning from a march to a dance. We become, as Chesterton said, taller when we bow; we become lowlier when we instruct.

A given man may make a very bad husband; you cannot mend matters by trying to reverse the roles. He may make a bad male partner in a dance. The cure for that is that men should more diligently attend dancing classes; not that the ballroom should henceforward ignore distinctions of sex and treat all dancers as neuter. That would, of course, be eminently sensible, civilized, and enlightened, but, once more, “not near so much like a Ball.”

C. S. Lewis(Excerpts from Essays on “Membership” and “Priestesses in the Church”)

Gender dominance and gender neutrality both threaten the integrity and beauty of the “dance” the Lord instituted for male and female. In this, and every other battle, we would do well to heed Proverbs 4:27: “Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil.”

(Copyright Mary Kassian, 2009)