What Did Feminism Leave Behind? A Christian Argument About Limits, Power and Human Nature

When Gloria Steinem died on 2 September 2026 at the age of 92, the tributes focused on what she helped win for women: a public voice, political access and the end of many arbitrary barriers. In a recent essay for The Daily Declaration, Australian writer Dr Tim Orr used the moment to ask a harder question. Beyond the doors feminism opened, which ideas about human nature came in with it?

Limits Made by People, Limits Built Into Creation

Orr does not defend every pre-feminist custom. Refusing a qualified woman a job or an education because of her sex is a human-made restriction, and it can be fixed. His concern is with what happened next: the growing habit of treating every limit, including the givens of a body, a sex, a family and a mortal life, as an imposition to be overcome.

On his reading, once freedom is defined mainly as self-definition, anything we did not choose starts to feel like oppression. Liberation then has no natural stopping point.

Difference Under Suspicion

Orr argues that equal dignity does not require identical life patterns. He points to a large meta-analysis of about half a million participants by Su, Rounds and Armstrong, which found that on average men lean toward working with things and women toward working with people. The distributions overlap heavily and say nothing about any individual’s calling. But the findings do challenge the assumption that every occupational gap is proof of injustice. In his view, disparity is a reason to start investigating, not a verdict.

A One-Sided Doctrine of Sin

The heart of the essay is theological. Feminist critique, Orr says, was often right to name how aggression, authority and competition can turn ugly. But traits coded as feminine, such as empathy, care and conflict-avoidance, were often treated as morally pure by default. Scripture offers no such asymmetry. Men and women are both image-bearers and both fallen.

Every strength can serve love or sin. Empathy can slide into sentimentality, and peace-keeping can become cowardice. Orr draws on Gad Saad’s phrase “suicidal empathy” to describe compassion that loses its grip on truth.

The Long Shadow

Orr traces a line from second-wave feminism through intersectionality and fourth-wave activism to today’s identity politics. He also examines abortion, which he sees as placing the feminist commitment to autonomy in tension with the givenness of the female body. He notes that separating sex from gender opened the door to later gender-identity theory, even though many feminists reject that outcome. He draws on Kara Jesella’s 2026 book Feminist Antisemitism to argue that power-based moral frameworks struggled to make room for Jewish and Israeli suffering after 7 October. He also finds the same categories shaping how some evangelical institutions now understand themselves.

Orr’s Answer

He is clear that the answer is not nostalgia for the 1950s. Christians should oppose real discrimination while recovering the ability to tell injustice from limitation. Creation comes before our preferences. Bodies, sex, motherhood and fatherhood matter, and men and women can share equal dignity without being interchangeable.

Worth Weighing

This is a contested argument, and critics will push back. Many historians and Christian feminists say the vote, property rights and access to education were justice, not ideology, and that the movement’s later strands are too varied to trace as one line. Intersectionality, they note, began as a legal critique of how courts overlooked Black women’s claims. And plenty of feminists reject gender-identity theory on precisely the grounds Orr raises. Readers should test his claims against those objections.

Source: Dr Tim Orr, “The Feminist Revolt Against Givenness,” The Daily Declaration, 29 September 2026. This article is an independent summary and commentary. Read the original for the full argument and sources.