I didn't believe it at first when I originally saw the news update pop up on my phone. The Globe Theater in London was moving forward with plans to portray the great Elizabeth I as "non-binary."
It's one thing to impose current cultural fads on modern figures. But to retroactively apply these meaningless, tedious labels to titans of the past is beyond distasteful. As a toddler, Elizabeth watched her father behead her mother, rendering her an illegitimate child and removing her from the monarchial bloodline. Later, after her dad had beheaded her stepmother as well, Parliament would restore her to the line of succession.
In other words, Elizabeth had real problems and challenges to overcome, not ones she invented out of boredom.
Yet while rational minds were reeling from that announcement, the folks at Globe decided to dial it up another notch:
So Elizabeth I is non-binary, and the great Joan of Arc who rose from the peasantry to valiantly defend France in the Hundred Years War is now a they/them gender-neutral entity.
I can't be the only one to see what's happening here, right? I covered this in my Substack Memo I sent to followers this week but it bears repeating here. Western culture patronizingly tells little girls they can be anything they want to be, tells them that they need not play with dolls or play the princess. Girls can do bold and strong things, and can be courageous, daring leaders.
But then when girls do grow into strong women who do those very things – strong women like Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc – that same culture says, "Oh, no, they must not have really been women. Don't call those heroines "her" or "she." They must have been gender neutral."
Once again, notice how a culture in rebellion to God necessarily and unavoidably diminishes the value and erases the identity of women.
One of the most anti-intellectual tropes that persists in our self-obsessed society is how the embrace of Christian doctrine devalues women. But looking around, all evidence is to the contrary. In fact, any honest student of history acknowledges that when Christianity is introduced to a given culture, the lot and lives of women experience marked improvement.
Researcher and author Alvin Schmidt explained,
The extremely low status that the Greek, Roman, and Jewish woman had for centuries was radically affected by the appearance of Jesus Christ. His actions and teachings raised the status of women to new heights, often to the consternation and dismay of his friends and enemies. By word and deed, he went against the ancient, taken-for-granted beliefs and practices that defined woman as socially, intellectually, and spiritually inferior.
The humane and respectful way Jesus treated and responded to the Samaritan woman [at the well] (recorded in John 4) may not appear unusual to readers in today's Western culture. Yet what he did was extremely unusual, even radical. He ignored the Jewish anti-Samaritan prejudices along with prevailing view that saw women as inferior beings.
I'd say that's the prevailing view in Western society these days as well. Strong women are reimagined as "non-binaries," little girls are forced into humiliating locker room encounters with naked men, and young ladies are used as mere incubators, confined to the background, all for the pleasure of men.
Call me crazy, but I think we can and should do better. And that will happen when true Christian theology – the kind that liberates and elevates women – is reintroduced into our civilizational consciousness.
