Feminism Is “Wicked”—and Worse, It’s Rooted in a Christian Heresy

In her new book, Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity, Carrie Gress brilliantly exposes many dark errors hidden within feminist ideology and plainly shows why feminism and Christianity can never be joined together. She correctly declares that feminism isn’t merely misguided: it’s actually a rival “shadow religion.” As a convert and former feminist, I completely agree with Gress. I wish to add only one essential fact to her powerful book: this rival religion actually has a name.  

Pretending to make the world better for women but actually making it worse, feminism is deeply rooted in Gnosticism, a poisonous Christian heresy thousands of years old that re-erupted full blast in America in the 1960s and is rapidly destroying what remains of our post-Christendom culture.  

The word heresy, meaning an evil doctrinal error that destroys the whole truth of the Christian Faith, was commonly used up until the mid-19th century, but it has long gone out of fashion largely because it sounds hostile and doesn’t promote unity among Christians of all denominations. Unfortunately, one tragic result of losing this very useful word is that in the elite media, on the Internet, and even in our churches, people’s minds are literally being barraged and deceived by a daily onslaught of Gnostic fantasies. 

Gnosticism: The Religion of Our Age

To make matters worse, Gnosticism is notoriously hard to define. Lurking under a smoke screen of cunningly devised partial truth, it frequently appears to embrace Catholic social teaching but leaves Jesus Christ out of the picture. Basically, Gnostics believe the world is created evil (not good) but that they, in their narcissistic, self-sufficient “independence” possess a gnosis or “secret knowledge” (in this case, feminist dogma) that will fix it all up. Underlying Gnostic pride is the sin Eve and Adam committed in the Garden of Eden: humans have the capacity to grasp all knowledge, and we can be gods without God.  

As Msgr. James Shea and his colleagues at the University of Mary observe in their book The Religion of the Day, this pseudo-Christian religion tends “to be assumed and held by ourselves and the majority of the people around us…including many within the Church.” Many religious leaders—including Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, Lutheran pastor Peter Burfeind, and Canadian Presbyterian minister Philip Lee (author of Against the Protestant Gnostics)—have repeatedly warned us against the reappearance of this ancient heresy in modern thinking. Gnosticism is said to be “the primal heresy to which all subsequent heresies return” and is perhaps the most dangerous enemy to the Christian Faith in the third millennium. 

Gnosticism entered modern thought through many doors, including the Enlightenment, Nazism, Jungian psychology, the Theosophical Society, feminism, Freemasonry, and the New Age movement. This diabolic heresy is a bit like the Whack-a-Mole arcade game: when you whack it down at one place, it pops up somewhere else.

The Catholic/Feminist Controversy

If feminism is rooted in a heresy, why do so many brilliant Catholic academics, like Erika Bachiochi, proclaim feminism to be a Christian cause and even urge female Catholics to reclaim our “lost vision”? Didn’t St. Pope John Paul II himself call on Catholic women to create a “new feminism”? It’s a complicated question, and far be it from me to attempt to answer it completely.       

But for whatever it’s worth, here’s one possible way to resolve these two seemingly conflicting viewpoints. The history of first-wave feminism, starting in the 18th century, is the history Bachiochi views positively as a search for women’s dignity and Gress views negatively as a wicked movement filled with witchcraft and other diabolical influences. Since all human beings are both created good in God’s image and also tempted by evil, both views probably have merit. The feminist movement certainly gave women many rights—including the right to vote, go to college, and apply for credit in one’s own name—but as Gress clearly points out, it also gave us millions of dead babies through abortion and its destruction of the family.  

Whatever good first-wave feminism may or may not have done during its first 150 years, we have to recognize that second-wave feminism was quite different. Feminism radically changed in the mid-20th century after an Egyptian farmer dug up 12 ancient, leather-bound papyrus manuscripts, most of them Gnostic “gospels,” buried in a sealed jar.   

We need to be crystal clear about this: these gnostic writings rediscovered in 1945 were totally bogus and anti-Christian. They had been soundly defeated by the early Church Fathers in the second to fourth centuries. In an introduction to a translation of St. Irenaeus’ book Against Heresies, we’re told that when St. Paul “night and day with tears” warned the churches of “the grievous wolves” who were to make havoc in the Church, he was referring to the malice of heretics like the Gnostics. 

We’re also told that “the task of Irenaeus was…to make it impossible for such a monstrous system to survive, or ever to rise again.” And yet here we are, some 2,000 years later, confronting the same “monstrous system” disguised as feminism, spiritualism, individualism, secularism, and many other “isms” that borrow bits and pieces from Christianity and attempt to reduce the whole truth taught by Jesus Christ to a multitude of half-truths, limited truths, and truths out of context (i.e., propaganda) fabricated by flawed human beings.   

In the third century, Epiphanius of Salamis (honored as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Presbyterian churches) declared that Gnostics “forge nonsensical books” and “interweave falsehood and truth” in such a sly way that they deceive even unwary believers. For many years, as a secular journalist, I myself was a Gnostic and didn’t know it. Even after I converted to Catholicism, I wrote a book titled Sex and the Catholic Feminist because I believed the “f-word”—feminism—could be proclaimed in the public square as a Christian concept, defending the dignity of women. But, due largely to Gress’ research, I now believe the f-word is so polluted with Gnosticism that it can’t be redeemed. 

Gnosticism and The Second Sex

Referring to one wicked Gnostic work diabolically titled “the Gospel of Eve,” Epiphanius observed “all the perfection of death is contained in such a devil’s sowing.” And yet, in 1949, four years after 12 volumes of these long-buried Gnostic writings were unearthed by the Egyptian farmer, French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (an ex-Catholic) published The Second Sex. Known as “the feminist bible,” The Second Sex drew upon these false Gnostic gospels to attack men, motherhood, and the family, and to promote abortion and preach de Beauvoir’s feminist misinterpretation of Christianity.   

In the Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas,” which The Second Sex refers to but never fully quotes, St. Peter speaks to God about the Virgin Mary and supposedly says: “Mary should leave us, for women are not worthy of the Life,” to which God is allegedly said to reply: “This is how I will guide her so that she becomes Man. She, too, will become a living breath like you Man. Any woman who makes herself a Man will enter into the Kingdom of God.”  

This totally fictitious Gnostic dialogue reveals where de Beauvoir may have gotten her nonsensical notion that the Catholic Church considers women “inferior” to men. This passage may also be the source of her most famous line: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”—the poisonous mustard seed that led to the feminist theory that male and female are simply “social constructs,” not biological gifts from God. When we read the actual words in the Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas,” ridiculous as it sounds, we might even conclude that de Beauvoir wanted to be a man because she thought that was the pathway to Heaven!

The Second Sex was laced with Gnostic error, and the Catholic Church’s Vatican-based leadership banned the book when it first appeared. But the ban was lifted when the Vatican’s policy of prohibiting dangerous books was abolished in 1966, right at that moment in history when Americans were being blindsided by feminist ideology and the sexual revolution (which also grew out of a Gnostic mindset). 

De Beauvoir’s feminist Gnosticism entered the United States in full force in 1970 when Kate Millett (another ex-Catholic and de Beauvoir’s disciple) published her best-selling book Sexual Politics. Featuring Millett on its cover, Time magazine ordained her “The Mao Tse-Tung of Women’s Liberation” and feminism’s new “high priestess.” In her anti-family, anti-motherhood, anti-fatherhood cries to overturn all sex roles, Millett bitterly wrote, “Patriarchy has God on its side.”

Condemning the founders of the many Gnostic sects that flourished in the third century, Bishop Epiphanius wrote that the “despicable, erring founders of these sects come at us and assault us like a swarm of insects, infecting us with diseases, smelly eruptions, and sores through their error.” Gress rightly calls feminism “the gospel of discontent.” Authentic Christianity is a Gospel of faith, hope, and love. Gnostic feminist sects replace these beautiful Christian virtues with bitterness, envy, and rage.  

Pseudo-Christian feminist religion falsely promises to make the world better for women. But, as the Church has always taught, the only way to make the world a better place—not merely for women but for all of mankind—is to come back to a proper relationship of love with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Msgr. Shea and his colleagues at the University of Mary give us our marching orders when they declare that “the only way to make the world a better place is to come back to a proper relation with God and creation, to regain our true voices, so we can once more enter the heavenly harmonies.”