A Christian is made by submitting oneself to Christ and the Church. One wonders if those original first-wave feminists could have possibly imagined just how many external authorities—including basic biology—their idol of autonomy would call upon its adherents to reject.

At the end of Kate Chopin’s nineteenth-century novel, The Awakening, protagonist Edna Pontillier steps into the Gulf waters in a desperate bid to escape the human ties that impose upon her soul. She has spent the entire novel disassembling every structure and relationship: abandoning her marriage vows for a series of purposefully fleeting sexual encounters, breaking the socio-economic norms of her Cajun society, offloading her children, moving out of the family home, and picking up an artistic occupation in order to manifest her autonomy.

At one point in the novel, she explains her guiding principle: “I don’t want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others …” By the novel’s end, she has managed to get her own way entirely. Yet still Edna feels the burden of human connection, spurring her despairing swim from humanity in a last, fatal attempt to find pure individuality.

As I read Dr. Carrie Gress’s new book, Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t be Fused with Christianity, I could not stop thinking of Edna swimming to her death in the vain pursuit of total autonomy at any human cost. Gress charts feminism’s rise and development from Mary Wollstonecraft to the present day. She highlights a movement that presents women with an idol of autonomy, and commands them to trample upon the lives of all who might compromise its worship. Something Wicked strips the mask off of feminism to reveal a violent and bitter rival to Christianity itself — one promising a newer “truth” that it claims will set us free.

The first part of Gress’s book is a beautifully researched exposé of feminism’s hostility to Christianity, and especially to Catholicism, from its earliest writings to the present day. Feminism’s deep antipathy to Christianity was closely tied to the progressive Unitarianism of many of its most important first-wave voices. Unitarianism rejects the fundamental Christian beliefs in the divinity of Jesus and the reality of human fallenness. Instead of acknowledging the need for a divine savior, Unitarianism focuses on human reason and progress as virtue. Inspired by this heterodoxy, Wollstonecraft crafts the feminist idol of autonomy: the enlightened individual’s exercise of her own private reason, unencumbered by any exterior authority.

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