Part II – Traditional Values
I cannot pretend to you that I do not have a bone to pick. In my last post, I wrote about the problem I had with one book on the reception of Helen of Troy. But the book represents a bigger problem with me, namely it was a clear example of how scholars are often complicit in creating a version of the Middle Ages that supports toxic views of progress. These views of progress require inventing a past that never was. Make no mistake, things were very difficult for women in the Middle Ages – and there are trends or bigger statements we can make about their lives beyond the local. But that requires work beyond simple imagination – and it turns out that many people are not interested in that work.
The thing is, over and over again, in modern American discourse, I hear people fighting over the battleground of “traditional” values. If we divide the US into two sides, right and left, I hear both groups discussing, fighting over the place of “traditional” values in the face of “progress.” One example, low-hanging fruit, is the way people discuss the TradWife phenomenon. MSN, for example, reports on these women in an article “The tradwife comeback: Why Gen Z women are turning to traditional lifestyles in a hyper-modern world.”[1] Even the headline’s framing is clear: the “tradwife” phenomenon is a return to “tradition.” The author writes “a recent study highlights how Gen Z women are increasingly drawn to the “tradwife” concept, a movement centered around traditional domestic roles.” He clearly makes my point for me: there is no interrogation of the concept of “tradition” which is “a new take on an old lifestyle.” But when and where are these “trad wives” looking for their tradition? Where does this “tradition” come from? The answer, it seems, is peoples’ imaginations – Tradwives are crafting a tradition to return to based on what they imagined the past was like. This tradition is a fantasy.
To give another example, this time from Reddit, a poster wrote in r/Christianity a post that he knew “will probably offend some people, but it’s something I think the church needs to confront honestly.”[2] The post is titled “The American Church Has Become Gynocentric, And It’s Quietly Destroying Itself” and is largely full of standard Redpill talking points which makes it perfect for my point, here. When Slavo first read it to me, I rolled my eyes it’s so boiler-plate at this point. The user, Firm_Book_4165, appeals to the social roles women and men used to have and how changes to those roles are dangerous: “If the American church continues down this path, it will not fall because the world destroyed it, but because we allowed it to be destroyed from the inside.” Women in leadership in the church and as the majority of church attenders is highly alarming to him, and strikes him as a new thing – he claims that in the Church, “We demonize male traits” so that in the church young men are “raised by being castrated of the natural male characteristics that make them attractive to you in the first place.”
One major issue for him, and there are many, is that men “feel less supported and more targeted.” Why? Because pastors are catering towards women, of course, who value harmony over truth. “Pastors often feel pressure to maintain harmony in their congregations, especially when the majority of active members are women. Over time, sermons become softer, boundaries become less clear, and difficult truths are avoided to keep the peace. At the same time, many sermons disproportionately focus on holding men accountable while rarely addressing the sins or responsibilities of women with the same directness. The message can begin to sound as if men are the primary source of problems in the church, while women are largely exempt from criticism.”
Firm_Book_4165 never mentions tradition, but several times he invokes “historically” what things were like, and how they have changed. Only once does he cite a single historical instance – and the only one he does mention is the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. Beyond that, he does not actually mention when the world was really like what he seems to picture it to have been. Like in the case of the Helen of Troy book, or with the Tradwives, the past he is appealing to for his narrative of decay is in fact an imagined country. His story of decay relies, however, on a past that never was.
To be clear, religious life in America has changed drastically over the last 250 years. Many, many more women hold the title of Senior Pastor than in 1776, that’s for sure. But the religious history of this country is full of women preachers, teachers, evangelists, and missionaries – and women’s involvement in these roles stretches back to the New Testament with Priscilla, Pheobe, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, etc. There are hundreds of women saints in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches who conducted the work of ministry from the earliest days of the Church through today. There have also always been men, like Firm_Book_4165, who have been alarmed by the prominence and power of women in the Church and who have blamed women for decay in their own day. People often point to John Chrysostom and his conflict with Eudoxia as an example of this, but Chrysostom’s relationship with both Eudoxia and women in general was far more complicated (see my upcoming dissertation).[3] But maybe a better example is Narsai, who wrote the single most sexist homily I have ever seen (potentially in response to a conflict with his bishop’s wife). He writes “Eve, the spring from whom flew life to mankind, changed the drink of her sweetness into the venom of death.”[4] Eve ends up committing adultery with the devil, “as a whore she stood in Eden, naked, and as soon as the Evil One saw her, he ran to her semblance and committed adultery with her.”[5] Eve teaches demons to deceive humans, and Narsai warns that any interaction with women will lead to disaster. “Let everybody be afraid of a daughter of Eve and especially the righteous lest she enfeebles their thoughts like David.”[6] Similarly, a pseudonymous sermon attributed to John Chrysostom, Greek Ephrem, and John of Damascus reads “There is no wild beast in the world to match an evil and talkative woman. Among the quadrupeds is there anything fiercer than lion or among the reptiles is there anything more cruel than the serpent? No, except a wicked woman!”[7] But I digress.
Firm_Book_4165 is afraid that “gynocentricity” of the church is causing the decline he seems – and this narrative of decline relies on imagining a less gynocentric American church which he has failed to prove ever existed outside of his imagination. Once again, like our Helen of Troy book, my issue is that this post highlights a major problem I see in the discourse. “Traditional” values are the battleground of modern American politics today. Fox warns “Traditional values disappearing from American culture: Young people are taught ‘America is a bad country’”[8] and AI generated images warn “beware of the progressive communist Democrat attack on American core values.”[9]
I reject the framing.
People are creating, dreaming, a past in which to anchor what they think tradition should be.
I will give a last example before signing out.
Two friends are getting married this summer. They love music, and the setting they want to do for their wedding would be in the older prayer book – the 1923 (rather than the 1986 we use now). They were wary to use it – they assumed it would be more sexist, because the “conservative” branch of our church who split off over women’s ordination has a more sexist wedding service that strongly emphasizes gender. However, when they looked at the 1923, they were surprised to find none of the sexism they had feared. The service was basically the same as it is now in the 1986. The “conservative” “recovery” of “tradition” was actually a neo-conservative rewriting of tradition to match the sexism of modern America. The actual past, in this particular case, was egalitarian in a way that shocked my friends. The wedding service we use, in the “progressive” church is more closely tied to the textual and nuptial traditions of a past that actually was. The neo-conservative schismatics are fighting to erase the story of an egalitarianism that was already there.
[1] Jonathan Riniti, “The Tradwife Comeback: Why Gen Z Women Are Turning to Traditional Lifestyles in a Hyper-Modern World,” MSN, April 19, 2026. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-tradwife-comeback-why-gen-z-women-are-turning-to-traditional-lifestyles-in-a-hyper-modern-world/ar-AA21gVNi.
[2] Firm_Book_4165, “The American Church Has Become Gynocentric, And It’s Quietly Destroying Itself : R/Christianity,” Reddit, March 5, 2026.
[3] In the meantime, Wendy Mayer, “John Chrysostom and Women Revisited,” in Men and Women in the Early Christian Centuries, ed. Ian J. Elmer (Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls, 2014), 211–25; Lamprini Papadimitriou, “‘A Gender Transcendence’ The Woman in John Chrysostom’s Epistles to Women,” in Interdisciplinarity of Religious Studies: Interaction of Culture, History, Religion, ed. Tarik Ziyad Gulcu (Warsaw: IRF Press, 2017), 29–41.
[4] Narsai, The Reproof of Eve’s Daughters, 1 trans. Corrie Molenberg, “Narsai’s Memra on the Reproof of Eve’s Daughters and the Tricks and Devices’ They Perform,” Le Muséon (Leuven) 106, nos. 1–2 (1993): 75.
[5] Narsai, The Reproof of Eve’s Daughters, 11 trans. Molenberg 76.
[6] Narsai, The Reproof of Eve’s Daughters, 102 trans. Molenberg 81.
[7] This is Greek Ephrem, Against Immoderate Women, 198
[8] Fox News Staff, “Traditional Values Disappearing from American Culture: Young People Are Taught ‘America Is a Bad Country,’” Fox News, March 27, 2023. https://www.foxnews.com/media/traditional-values-disappearing-american-culture-young-people-taught-america-bad-country
[9] Why Progressive Democrats Are Losing Touch With Traditional Values – One Citizen Speaking, accessed April 26, 2026. https://onecitizenspeaking.com/why-progressive-democrats-are-losing-touch-with-traditional-values/
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