Gabriel Hughes (you may know him from WWUTT) wrote on X, “Fatherlessness is an even greater scourge on this nation than feminism. If more men were principled and faithful, less women would be promiscuous and feminists.” To some, that sounded sober and wise. To anyone paying attention, it sounded typical for an evangelical minister. One might think that if women are in control of anything in the age of empowered womanhood, it would be their own bodies (so they say). But no, apparently they’re not in control of their own sexuality, no matter how many bras have been burned to send that message. Men are to blamed for the feminine lack of virtue.
What Hughes said is not the boldness of a prophet, no matter how he scolds men with all the certainty you would expect from one. No, that was the recycled talking point of a pulpit that has learned the safest way to look courageous is to scold men. The rule of modern evangelicalism is simple: blame men first, blame men last, and never hold women accountable at all.
Every young man in the pew has seen the double standard. On Mother’s Day, the sermon is a Hallmark card stretched to forty minutes. Mothers are praised as saints, as selfless heroes, as the moral backbone of home and church. The congregation is urged to stand, clap, and honor the women who make life possible. Father’s Day is a different story. Instead of honor, men receive indictment. The father who has worked sixty hours to keep food on the table is told he is lazy. The young man struggling to establish himself is told he is ruining the next generation. The sermon is not gratitude but guilt. “Do better. Step up. Quit failing.” What the mother receives in roses, the father receives in rebuke.
THE DOUBLE STANDARD IN THE PULPIT
Why this pattern? Because pastors know men will take it and women will not. Rebuke men and they bow their heads. Rebuke women and the knives come out. The gossip spreads. The offering plate gets lighter. The pastor’s job suddenly feels less secure. So pastors scold men with a clear conscience, knowing there will be no serious pushback. They flatter women because they fear them. This is not strength. This is cowardice. It is feminism dressed in clerical robes.
Even the vocabulary has been captured. The plague of single motherhood is never called what it is. It is called “fatherlessness.” A woman decides to bear children out of wedlock, or she drives her husband out of the home through divorce (78% of divorces are filed by women, unless they’re college educated, and then it’s 90%), and the church blames the man who is not there. A culture in which women deliberately raise children without fathers is presented as a crisis of absent men, rather than the rebellion of women. Her sin is recast as his failure. This is not biblical clarity. It is linguistic submission to feminism.
But the historical record can’t be ignored. The sexual revolution did not erupt because men suddenly forgot how to lead. It erupted because women demanded the removal of the restraints God had placed on their sexuality. In 1960, the Pill was licensed. Ten years later, no-fault divorce was law in California and soon spread across the nation. In 1973, Roe v. Wade sanctified abortion as a constitutional right. Every milestone of the revolution was driven by feminist demands and celebrated as female liberation. And at every stop along the way, men largely voted against these evolutions and “advancements” (and they were shouted down by screeching women).
The numbers tell the story. In 1960, fewer than five percent of children in America were born to unmarried women. By 1980, it was nearly twenty percent. By 2000, it was over thirty percent. Today, it has surpassed forty percent. These are not numbers generated by “fatherlessness.” They are the direct consequence of feminism. They are the fruit of a philosophy that told women covenant was chains, marriage was oppression, and promiscuity was empowerment. Men did not author this revolution; women did.
THE LAZY THEOLOGY OF ADAM AND EVE
And yet, when pastors want to sound theological, they retreat to a single text. They point out that sin entered the world through Adam. They say that is why we call it the Fall of Man, not the Fall of Woman. They repeat this point endlessly, as if it solves every problem of human history. But this is lazy theology. It is half a truth wielded like the whole.
This is how evangelical feminism operates. Pastors claim to be “biblical,” but they carefully choose which parts of the Bible they will use to maintain their equilibrium. They thunder about Adam’s responsibility while whispering past Eve’s deception. They speak boldly when blaming men but suddenly lose their voice when it comes to correcting women. And when men like Hughes insist that fatherlessness is a greater scourge than feminism, they are not defending biblical truth. They are repeating the catechism of the age.
Beginning about ten years ago, pastors started telling the story of David and Bathsheba differently. I still remember the first time I heard the tale with Bathsheba as the victim. I really don’t have the bandwidth tonight to explain how incredibly dumb that is, but it’s wear-a-helmet, short-bus dumb. But low and behold, just a few years after Me-Too, and Bathsheba as a victim is the way you’ll probably hear that tale told today in the pulpit, a complete 180-spin difference from the last 2500 years of preachers before us. Never mind the Bible clearly painting her as a hussy, God explicitly punishing her for her sin, or the fact that sex with David comforted her after the loss of her child. David was a sexual predator, Bathsheba the poor victim, and that’s all there is to it.
The truth is clearer. Feminism destroyed the family. Feminism glorified promiscuity. Feminism institutionalized rebellion. Yet evangelicals blame men, because men are safer to rebuke. They flatter women, because women will not stand for correction. That is not prophetic preaching. It is pandering.
Young men know this instinctively. They may not have the theological categories, but they see the imbalance. They hear sermons that paint them as the culprits for a revolution that erupted before they were born. They are told that if they were simply more principled, women would stop being feminists. That is a lie, and it insults the intelligence of anyone paying attention.
Men are not leaving the church because they despise accountability. They are leaving because the church refuses to give accountability where it belongs. The pulpit does not name sin honestly. It does not confront women with the truth. It heaps guilt on men who are already carrying the load, while absolving women who have set the culture on fire. Hughes’ tweet is not courage. It is feminism pretending to be wisdom.
Modern evangelical preachers like to sound bold by telling men that everything wrong in the home and the church is their fault. They imagine themselves standing in Adam’s line, scolding his sons for repeating his mistakes. But this posture is not biblical. It is not even faithful to the story of the fall. And when you actually read Scripture with your eyes open, you find not a book that lays all the guilt at men’s feet, but a book that again and again warns of the sins of women.
THE FALL, CONCISELY
Yes, Adam bore covenant headship. His guilt was imputed to humanity. But Paul goes out of his way in 1 Timothy 2:14 to underline a different fact: “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” Eve sinned first, and she sinned by believing the serpent’s lie. Adam followed her into rebellion with his eyes open. The Bible does not hide Eve’s role. Pastors do. They inflate Adam’s failure into the whole story because they know it is safer to rebuke men than to confront women.
But the canon does not stop at Genesis 3. Over and over, God’s Word exposes the destructive power of sinful women. Evangelicals refuse to touch those passages. The Spirit inspired them for a reason.
The prophets were blunt. Amos called the women of Samaria the “cows of Bashan” (Amos 4:1), pampered and greedy, demanding luxury from their husbands even at the expense of the poor. Their indulgence drove oppression. Isaiah thundered against the “daughters of Zion” who minced along with haughty eyes and jingling ornaments, seducing with their bodies and parading their pride (Isaiah 3:16). God promised to strip them bare, exposing their vanity to judgment. Jeremiah portrayed Israel as an adulterous wife, prostituting herself with many lovers (Jeremiah 3:1). Ezekiel was even more graphic, likening Samaria and Jerusalem to Oholah and Oholibah, sisters who whored after idols and foreign men (Ezekiel 23). These are not throwaway verses. They are central indictments. God Himself said women can corrupt nations.
History confirms it. Solomon’s wives dragged him into idolatry (1 Kings 11). Jezebel turned Israel to Baal and orchestrated Naboth’s murder (1 Kings 21). Athaliah murdered her own grandchildren to steal the throne (2 Kings 11). Delilah seduced Samson, prying out the secret of his strength and delivering him to his enemies (Judges 16). Herodias manipulated her daughter to dance for Herod and demanded John the Baptist’s head (Mark 6). These women were not side characters. They were pivotal in leading Israel into apostasy and bloodshed.
The New Testament does not soften the picture. Revelation names “that woman Jezebel” in Thyatira, who called herself a prophetess but seduced Christ’s servants into sexual immorality and idolatry (Revelation 2:20). The warning could not be clearer: seductive, power-hungry women have always been among God’s people, and the church is not immune.
THE WISDOM OF PROVERBS
Proverbs is blunt about women. A wise woman builds her house, but “a foolish woman tears it down with her own hands” (Proverbs 14:1). A quarrelsome wife is compared to “a continual dripping on a rainy day” (Proverbs 27:15). More than once, Proverbs warns that it is better to dwell in a desert or on a rooftop than to share a house with such a woman (Proverbs 21:9, 19).
Even more striking are the warnings about the adulteress. Proverbs 5 portrays her lips as honey but her end as bitter wormwood. Proverbs 7 depicts her hunting for the young man, dressed like a prostitute, seizing him with bold face, seducing him into destruction. “With much seductive speech she persuades him; with her smooth talk she compels him. All at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter” (Proverbs 7:21–22). The entire chapter is a warning that female sexuality, unrestrained, is lethal.
Pastors today dare not preach this. They might quote the positive passages about the virtuous wife in Proverbs 31, but they bury the equal warnings about destructive women. Yet the Bible gives us both: the wife who blesses her household and the wife who tears it down. To preach only half is to mutilate God’s Word.
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