Teen Column: Idol Woman

Art by Cathy Martin

By Jessica Greer

The modern woman has become a hodgepodge of fashionable politics and TikTok pop-psychology who is tormented by a cognitive dissonance between body positivity and plastic image culture.

Rather than each individual woman reflecting what is True, Good, and Real, women have become worshipers of idols and ideologies conceived by man.

As she disconnects from objective truth and falls out of harmony with her created purpose, she reflects instead the subjective cultural experience.

This is gladly bestowed on her by the pretentious social media celebrity, the Christian mommy influencer, the radical feminist, the empowered woman of color, the pseudo-psychologist life coach, and, of course, the transgender woman.

This is the post-modern female of the twenty-first century. She is both victim and hero.

Her fragility is celebrated as humility. Her promiscuity is promoted as empowerment. The extermination of her offspring is praised as egalitarian freedom.

She has been reduced to a political construct, thus blurring her as an individual. Her shapeless, formless identity can no longer be defined. Even the highest judges in the land are at a loss. When asked to define the term woman, Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson replied, “I can’t; I’m not a biologist.”

Such is the vacuous abyss of ideological nothingness that has swallowed the female identity.

The Victim

In one of the most masterful conspiracies of our time, second-wave feminism has created a framework for women’s rights that permits women a license to commit nearly any transgression without accountability.

In a 1990 article in The Atlantic titled “Feminism and Abortion,” Professor Martha Bayles described various contradictions within the evolving feminist movement. She stated that the failure to undermine gender differences resulted in a new scheme, and noted that feminists claimed: “the persistence of such [gender] differences is proof that female oppression is the most deeply ingrained injustice in history.”

Fast-forward thirty years and we find the feminist movement is a monolithic bloc of victimhood which has assigned themselves status as mothers of the marginalized.

The variations on the women’s empowerment movement defy politics and religion. From self-care to pro-choice, these ideologies amass to form the myth that victimization is quite literally everything.

The most insidious of these ideologies, however, is the one that embodies the spirit of Molech.

Jeremiah 32:35 says, “They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into My mind, that they should do this abomination.”

From the earliest of days of Israel in Leviticus and throughout the Old Testament, God consistently warned the His people against the worship of Molech. This unique practice was one of child sacrifice in exchange for favor.

The rabbinical tradition of Maimonides explained the sin of Molech worship as compared to classical idolatry: “Many other practices are prohibited, and assume forces outside of God, or assume that there are sub-deities. He [worshiper of Molech] demonstrates that the Sinaic, absolute proof of God's existence is not within his "radar." He does not operate with the basic tools of reason. This is the unique crime of Molech.”

Another translation says, “Molech worship contains this additional feature: Absence of the most fundamental reasoning. Such a person has reached a qualitatively new level of philosophical corruption, more than one who prostrates himself to a stone god.”

Molech worship says, "My mind is useless in the most apparent of truths."

After Roe v Wade became law in 1973, what had once been considered a taboo last resort quickly rose to a compulsory practice for family planning. Terminating the unborn in exchange for women’s social, economic, and political security became acceptable overnight.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 after nearly fifty years sent shock waves throughout the United States.

The Brookings Institute decried the overturned law, contending that “access to family planning, whether it be contraception or abortion, has positive effects on women’s long-term outcomes by allowing them to determine whether, when, and under what circumstances to start or grow their families.”

According to Pew Research in June 2022, 61% of Americans said abortion should remain legal.

The worship of Molech – voluntary destruction of your child as a peace offering for your own preservation – has become a normalized alternate reality to God’s natural laws that He programmed into the universe.

In today’s victim culture, women have attained to a superior power in nearly every relationship within the spaces they share with men. Victimhood empowers women to leave unhappy marriages, to end friendships, and to leave communities that fail to “yasss queen” their self-interest. They are free to circumvent accountability for their actions and inherit positions of power for which they are not qualified.

Women are so powerful that the historically “oppressive white male” is changing his gender to become one! But the greatest reflection of the uneven power dynamic is that of the godlike capacity to decide between life and death.

The voiceless woman, hooded in her supposed oppression, is the most elaborate deception used to support feminist ideologies and justify the worst idolatry of all: the worship of Molech.

The Vain

Many cultures of the past carved images of earthly creatures to embody multiple gods, but the technological age has given humans a tool for fashioning gods of their personal image.

If you do some stalking on social media (now referred to in the culture as research), going back to about 2014 in the Instagram accounts of various influencers and celebrities, you can see how branding began to evolve.

Within less than ten years, social media’s virtual reality has spilled into our actualized world of the real. Online health journals are regularly publishing articles like “What to Know About Social Media and Mental Health” and “Study: Social Media Use Linked to Decline in Mental Health.”

Cosmetic procedures have become so commonplace, the middle-class woman is starting to look like she hosts a Fox News roundtable. This is not to shame a woman’s right to beauty maintenance or deny her a refusal to allow society to expire her.

However, an aesthetic, an image, and a brand are now requirements to participate in our multilayered cultural reality, and the vanity that social media has introduced is unprecedented. According to Statista, 84% of the influencers are women. Much of the social media landscape is dominated by beauty and fashion. This correlates with an article from 2018 published in Psychology in Popular Media which suggests that social media makes young people vulnerable to grandiose narcissism.

Cultural narcissism is displayed within the constant fashioning and re-fashioning of our own online images, as well as the incessant demand that everyone within our sphere of influence stroke our online egos with unwavering comments of support.

We are basically bowing down to one another’s idols of self-image and subjective narratives.

As she promotes her indulgence and vanity on social media, the idol woman demands allies over friends. From TikTok to Instagram, the vain woman compares herself to false images, misinforms herself with fabricated ideologies, and becomes obsessed with fashioning herself into a lifeless idol for self-worship.

She no longer reflects the image of her Creator or has the wisdom to seek His Truth.

Psalm 115:4-8 says, “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.”

The Vapid

The New Yorker recently published an article titled, “The Rise of Therapy Speak,” which describes how the language of academic psychology made its way into the mainstream vernacular.

Suddenly, therapy culture has become a kind of reconciliation and salvation for a generation of unbelievers wanting to confess their sins without repentance. Priests, in the form of life coaches and counselors, practice anecdotal science to soothsay their clientele.

Moreover, the blitz of around-the-clock TikToks, YouTube shorts, and Instagram stories hit our algorithms with “truth bombs” – not to mention the online quote culture feeding us the non-stop uplifting empowerment of random feel-good statements.

The same follows with the radical polarization of politics. The slogans, buzz words, and phraseology released throughout the web simplify every thought into a blurb.

Women sit front and center at the altar of these singular ideologies.

Christian mommy influencers write entire books with vapid observations about how hard adult life is and dole out online inspirations to help women feel light in a heavy world. You can now get your dinner recipe and your spiritual inspiration all in one influencer account.

I’m reminded of Isaiah’s ironic description of idolatry in Isaiah 44:14-17: “He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak. He let it grow among the trees of the forest or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow. It is used as fuel for burning; some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread. But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it. Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal; he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms himself and says, ‘Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.’ From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, ‘Save me! You are my god!’”

Idol  Woman

See, the thing about idolatry is that it reduces humans to mere matter, born with no purpose in life but to reflect a decaying material world rather than an eternal perfect God. It’s no wonder, then, that radical ideologies conceived by the limited minds of sinful man result in patterns of dehumanization and destruction.

A Gallup poll from 2021 reported that one in five Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQIA+. The claim that Gen Z’s soaring queer identity reflects the qualities of a more open and empathetic society is as junky a “scientific” conclusion as the claim that an incredibly complex natural world came about by a big bang in the cosmos.

Gen Z is the first generation of digital natives. From their very birth, they have been handed the most effective tool to date that makes them ready to fashion themselves into ideologies that mimic the most debased nothingness.

Repost culture. Collective identity. Group-think. Replica after replica to repeat and regurgitate the ungodly party line rather than produce new ideas based on God’s eternal Truth.

Let’s draw a simple comparison between the Bolshevik Revolution and the American Revolution. The first was a bloodthirsty rebellion driven by the madness and dogma of one man. The American experiment was based on numerous enlightenment philosophies in search of truth and was built on the fundamental principles of the Judeo-Christian God.

The origin of ideas and beliefs matters. Is it fashioned by man to reflect the material world or is it revealed Truth reflecting an eternal form?

The premise must stand on the wisdom of the fear of God. The Lord our God is One. God is Love. God is Truth. God is Beauty. God is Justice. How can women turn instead to flesh and blood, soul and spirit? Look up! Look out!

The idol woman is a patchwork of cultural identities, but the individual woman is fearfully and wonderfully made. Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Women can walk in His glory, and so reflect to a dark world the Light of Eternal Truth.