Christian feminism is a gospel issue

2025, my gosh. 

I don’t mean to freak anyone out but we are a quarter of our way through the 21st century. Isn’t that just wild? I’m having to stop myself spending too long wondering what life will look like in another 25 years.

Will writers like me have been totally replaced by AI? Will they still be releasing one Avatar film per decade? Will I have mastered the parallel park? 

It really is all to play for. 

Anyway, let me claw my way out of this almighty rabbit hole and mention another reason why this month feels a little bit special. It being January 2025 also means that you and I have been chatting about Christian feminism for one year. 

A whole year. 

A year of highs and lows

What a year it has been: we’ve tackled men raging at pink confetti, the ‘flirting fallacy’, the ‘believe me’ gap and the (ever-growing) ‘4B movement’. We’ve talked marathons and period blood, Andrew Tate and music festivals, female urinals and individualism. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve spent too much time mentioning Taylor Swift. And we’ve done all of that through the lens of Jesus. It really has been a pleasure doing (Christian) feminism with you.

Outside of this sweet column, it’s also been an incredibly interesting year to be a woman, hasn’t it? I think it may be one for the history books – for all the right and all the wrong reasons.  

This is the year the UK got its first female chancellor; it’s also the year that – for the very first time – the Olympics had as many women competing as men. It’s the year Saoirse Ronan had an accidental feminist mic-drop moment on The Graham Norton Show, the year that the ‘pop princesses’ returned with a bang, the year John Lewis put women at the centre of their iconic Christmas advert.

So, there’s been all of that going on. 

But then it’s also been the year that Donald Trump was elected to be president again despite multiple allegations of sexual misconduct (you can totally disagree with me, and I truly hope that I’m proved wrong, but I don’t see that as a win for women). It’s been the year of the Andrew Tate effect, the year we learned that the former Harrods owner – Mohamad Al-Fayed – had been sexually abusing his female staff for decades. And – perhaps most staggeringly – it’s been the year that violence against women and girls in the UK has reached ‘epidemic’ levels, officially rendering it a ‘national emergency’. 

This national emergency has been outlined in a 70-page long National Policing Statement, but I’ll just sum up the key statistic that has led to this: it is estimated that one in every twelve women and girls will experience violence at the hands of men, and that such violence is taking place (at least in part) precisely because they are a woman or a girl. If you’re a bit of a news junkie, this won’t sound surprising – it feels as though the news has been bursting at the seams with stories of this happening, with women being harmed by the men in their lives. 

And so, you see what I mean. It’s been a history-making twelve months we’ve spent together. We’ve had pop sensations calling for a ‘Femininomenon’ (as in – a feminine phenomenon) while the government have announced a national emergency. 

It’s a lot.

A gospel issue

I’ve been reminded this week why this column exists. And I’ve come to the realisation that I am even more of a Christian feminist now than I was a year ago. 

That disconnect, that inequality, that friction between the sexes – that’s a symptom of our brokenness, and our ‘breaking-things-ness’. It’s proof that we’re living outside of God’s original blueprint. You can take a peek at Genesis 3, and it says it there. The fact that women are so often harmed by men is a complete distortion of the way that God intended things to be. It’s a bad thing. I truly believe that God’s heart breaks over the multilayered, multifaceted disharmony of it all.  

And that’s why Christian feminism – fighting for the social, political, economic and spiritual equality of the sexes – isn’t just for feminism’s sake. 

It’s a justice issue, sure. But it’s also a gospel issue.

Because it won’t always be this way. Because of Jesus, there’ll be perfect harmony one day – no harm, no danger, no fear. And that can start, albeit imperfectly, now. We can fight for this restored relationship between men and women right here and now, even in this middle ground we’re living in, even while we’re surrounded by this ‘now-and-not-yet-ness’. We can, and should, work toward the safety, equality and wellbeing of women. 

Why? 

Because, in doing so, we’re fighting injustice, which is a mandate on us all, and bringing pieces of heaven to earth.

Are women cursed? Belle joined Tola-Doll Fisher on the Woman Alive podcast to talk about why we seem to bear the brunt of ‘The Fall’.