Women, Ideology, and the Limits of Belonging

I would rather see a woman help another woman she profoundly disagrees with than watch her scream vitriol at her and call it empowerment. That thought has stayed with me as I have been researching feminism, belonging, political identity, and the increasingly narrow conditions under which people are permitted to remain part of a group. Women have never agreed on everything, nor should we expect them to. We do not share one religion, one political philosophy, one understanding of sexuality, one view of motherhood, one position on abortion, or one interpretation of what equality requires. A society that genuinely respects women has to make room for women to think independently, including when they reach conclusions other women strongly reject.

The question I keep returning to is not whether women should agree with one another. The more revealing question is what happens to our commitment to another womans dignity once she disagrees with us. Do we continue to believe she deserves to speak, participate, work, worship, advocate, raise her children according to her convictions, and move through public life without being treated as morally contaminated? Or does our language about supporting women quietly acquire conditions once a woman becomes politically inconvenient?

A recent confrontation in Driggs, Idaho brought that question into sharper focus for me. A pro life group gathered at Wydaho Roasters while organizing around an abortion related political effort, and the owner ultimately asked the group to leave. There were disagreements surrounding whether the group had previously been told not to use the business for the gathering, and the owner later reported receiving threats after video of the confrontation spread publicly. Those threats are indefensible. A private business owner also has legal interests that deserve to be discussed honestly. Yet neither of those realities removes the deeper cultural question raised by the encounter, particularly when a woman advocating from a pro life position can be treated not merely as someone who is wrong, but as someone whose beliefs make her socially intolerable.

That distinction matters because disagreement and dehumanization are not the same thing. A woman can believe abortion is essential to female equality while another woman can believe abortion violates the dignity of women and unborn human life. Both women can arrive at their positions through moral reasoning rather than stupidity, hatred, or manipulation. If feminism is concerned with female agency, then it must grapple seriously with women who exercise that agency and arrive at conclusions that dominant feminist movements reject. Otherwise, the message becomes strangely contradictory. Women are told to think for themselves, but only certain conclusions are accepted as evidence that they have successfully done so.

This problem is not unique to feminism, and I do not want to write as though progressive women have cornered the market on conditional solidarity. Conservative women can punish women who leave traditional roles, Christian women can isolate women who ask uncomfortable questions, mothers can judge other mothers for parenting decisions, professional women can distance themselves from women whose lives look different from their own, and ideological communities across the political spectrum can become remarkably efficient at deciding who still counts as one of us. The mechanism is human before it is partisan. Feminism simply offers an especially useful place to examine it because so much feminist language explicitly concerns solidarity, voice, equality, agency, protection, and the dignity of women.

Research on social identity helps explain why these fractures can become so intense. Human beings organize themselves into groups because groups provide belonging, coherence, protection, identity, and shared meaning. The benefits can be profound, but group membership also creates boundaries. Once an idea becomes closely attached to identity, disagreement with the idea can begin to feel like rejection of the person, the group, or the moral order that holds the group together. A woman who disagrees from outside the group may be irritating, but a woman who shares the identity of the group while rejecting one of its central beliefs can become especially threatening because she complicates the story the group tells about itself.

This is where my Dissonance Intolerance Response framework becomes useful. Cognitive dissonance is not inherently harmful. We experience it whenever new information, another persons experience, or an unexpected contradiction does not fit comfortably inside what we already believe. Ideally, the discomfort produces curiosity. We investigate our assumptions, consider competing evidence, refine our position, or discover that the issue is more complicated than the categories we began with. Dissonance becomes more dangerous when we cannot tolerate the discomfort long enough to examine it and instead begin trying to eliminate the person who created it.

Imagine a woman who sincerely believes that opposition to abortion is opposition to women. She then encounters another woman who is intelligent, compassionate, familiar with the arguments, and opposed to abortion precisely because she believes she is defending human dignity. The second woman creates a problem for the first womans existing categories. She does not fit easily into the assumption that pro life women simply hate women, lack education, or have surrendered their agency to men. At that moment, the first woman has several choices. She can become curious about how another woman reached such a different moral conclusion, she can maintain her disagreement while recognizing the sincerity of the other womans reasoning, or she can reduce the discomfort by reducing the woman herself.

That reduction is often visible in the labels we use. Once the other woman becomes stupid, dangerous, brainwashed, hateful, extremist, traitorous, or morally contaminated, there is no longer much pressure to understand her. The contradiction has been resolved without the underlying belief ever having to be examined. The woman has become the explanation. This is one of the patterns I mean when I describe Dissonance Intolerance Response, because intolerance of the internal discomfort gradually becomes intolerance of the human being who caused it.

The same process can move in the opposite political direction. A conservative Christian woman may encounter a progressive woman whose experience of sexism, abuse, religious harm, or discrimination is real and well documented. If acknowledging that experience threatens assumptions she has made about her own community, she may dismiss the woman as bitter, worldly, feminist, deceived, or attention seeking rather than allowing the testimony to complicate her beliefs. A pro life woman can speak about protecting women while showing very little compassion toward the frightened woman facing an unexpected pregnancy. A traditionalist can defend motherhood while treating mothers who need public assistance as morally suspect. The vocabulary changes, but the underlying mechanism remains remarkably similar.

This is one reason I keep returning to a principle that has become central to my writing: what we believe is how we behave, but how we behave may also reveal what we actually believe. It is relatively easy to claim values such as dignity, justice, compassion, equality, truth, life, freedom, and solidarity. The more difficult test begins when honoring those values costs us something socially or requires us to extend them to someone our own group dislikes. If I defend the dignity of women only when women agree with me, then agreement may hold a higher position in my value system than dignity. If I condemn misinformation until a false story damages someone I consider politically dangerous, my behavior may reveal that winning has become more important to me than truth.

The question becomes even more uncomfortable when we examine what we are willing to tolerate from our own side. Many people recognize cruelty immediately when it comes from an ideological opponent while becoming remarkably sophisticated at explaining it away when it comes from someone who shares their politics. Humiliation becomes accountability, contempt becomes righteous anger, exclusion becomes safety, and dehumanizing language becomes acceptable because the target has already been placed outside the circle of people deserving ordinary compassion. This is how moral language can become a shield that prevents moral examination rather than a tool that encourages it.

My Emotional Idolatry Pattern offers another way of understanding this process. Emotion is not the enemy of sound judgment. Anger can alert us to injustice, fear can draw attention to danger, grief can reveal what we value, and empathy can move us toward another persons suffering. The problem begins when emotion moves from messenger to master. Once a feeling becomes authoritative, we begin arranging truth and morality around what preserves the emotion rather than allowing truth to evaluate the emotion.

A person who feels threatened may therefore conclude that another person must objectively be dangerous. A person who feels disgust may begin treating that reaction as evidence that another human being is morally contaminated. A person who feels righteous while humiliating someone may interpret the feeling of righteousness as proof that humiliation itself is justified. None of this requires conscious dishonesty. Emotional idolatry is powerful precisely because the person may sincerely believe the feeling confirms the moral conclusion, even when the feeling has actually begun governing it.

For Christians, this should concern us deeply because Scripture does not permit us to place political identity, feminism, conservatism, autonomy, belonging, anger, or even our own sense of moral certainty above God. An emotion may contain information, but it does not become Lord. A political movement may identify genuine injustice, but it does not become Scripture. A community may provide profound belonging, but it does not become the final authority over what is true or what another human being is worth.

James confronts this contradiction directly when he describes people using the same tongue to bless God and curse human beings made in the likeness of God, concluding that this should not be so. The theological significance is difficult to avoid. Scripture does not say that people retain the image of God only while they are reasonable, likable, politically correct, theologically accurate, or socially acceptable. The woman standing across from me does not stop bearing Gods image because she votes differently, understands sex differently, disagrees with me about abortion, rejects my faith, practices another faith, or believes something I consider morally destructive.

Recognizing the image of God in another woman also does not require moral relativism. Christianity includes correction, repentance, moral boundaries, judgment, and truth claims that cannot simply be dissolved into politeness. Jesus did not teach that love requires pretending every belief is equally true. What Christianity refuses to grant us is the right to turn moral conviction into permission for contempt. We are still accountable for how we treat the person whose beliefs we oppose.

Paul gives a striking warning in Galatians when he tells believers that if they bite and devour one another, they should take care that they are not consumed by one another. The imagery feels painfully relevant to modern political and social life. We have developed entire digital ecosystems around biting and devouring, and social media can reward the person who humiliates an opponent more readily than the person who understands one. Outrage travels quickly because outrage is emotionally stimulating. Contempt builds group cohesion because identifying a common enemy gives people something around which to organize. Yet a culture built on mutual consumption should not surprise us when everyone eventually feels consumed.

Jesus offers an even more demanding standard in His command to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. That command becomes almost meaningless if enemy simply refers to someone mildly annoying. Christian love becomes visible precisely when affection, agreement, and reciprocity are absent. If I am only capable of treating women well when they affirm me, vote like me, share my theology, or validate my identity, then my behavior may have very little to do with Christian love and quite a lot to do with social exchange.

This does not mean women should become quiet for the sake of harmony. Women have too often been told to be pleasant when they needed to confront abuse, remain agreeable when something was wrong, or preserve peace when the peace being preserved depended upon their silence. I am not arguing for niceness as a substitute for truth. A woman can protest, confront, challenge, vote against another woman, expose wrongdoing, defend boundaries, reject an argument, and tell another woman that she believes her position causes serious harm. None of those actions inherently require dehumanization.

What I am arguing for is something more demanding than niceness and more durable than ideological solidarity. I am arguing that women should remain capable of recognizing one another as human beings even when agreement becomes impossible. I want to see women able to sit across from one another and say, I believe you are profoundly wrong, without needing to make the next sentence, therefore you deserve humiliation. I want women who disagree about abortion to remain capable of helping one another through pregnancy, grief, poverty, illness, motherhood, abuse, disability, and ordinary human hardship. I want the conservative woman to defend the progressive woman from a lie and the progressive woman to defend the conservative woman from a lie because truth should not change value according to whose reputation is being damaged.

This kind of solidarity would require a different understanding of strength. We often imagine strength as the willingness to fight, speak louder, refuse compromise, and stand our ground. Sometimes strength certainly requires those things. At other times, strength is the capacity to remain regulated enough to hear a person whose beliefs create intense dissonance without immediately needing to destroy her credibility. Strength can mean correcting someone without humiliating her, defending someone we dislike when she is being treated unjustly, or admitting that our own group behaved badly even when doing so creates social consequences for us.

1. The first practical solution, then, is increasing our tolerance for dissonance. Before deciding what another womans disagreement means about her character, we can learn to remain with the discomfort long enough to ask better questions. What does she actually believe? How did she arrive there? What experiences shaped the conclusion? What evidence does she consider persuasive? Is my understanding of her position based on what she has said or on what people who oppose her have told me she believes? These questions do not require agreement. They require intellectual discipline.
2. The second solution is learning to distinguish emotional information from moral authority. When another womans beliefs produce anger, fear, disgust, or defensiveness, the feeling may be worth examining, but it does not automatically tell us what the other woman deserves. Through the lens of Emotional Idolatry Pattern, we can ask whether the emotion is helping us perceive reality or whether we have begun reshaping reality to protect the emotion. Christians can take that examination further by asking whether the response reflects the fruit of the Spirit or whether political passion has begun receiving obedience that belongs somewhere else.
3. The third solution is behavioral consistency. Instead of beginning with what our group says it values, we can examine what our behavior demonstrates when the values become difficult. If I say women deserve safety, do I care when a woman I strongly oppose receives threats? If I say women deserve voices, do I still believe that when the woman is pro life? If I say truth matters, will I correct false information that benefits my political side? If I say unborn life matters, am I equally concerned with whether a mother has food, housing, medical care, social support, and a realistic path forward? Consistency does not solve every moral disagreement, but it makes hypocrisy harder to hide behind slogans.
4. The fourth solution may be the simplest and the hardest. Help the woman in front of you. Before she becomes a voter, activist, feminist, conservative, Christian, atheist, mother, professional, advocate, or opponent, she is a person. There will always be occasions when policy debates are necessary, arguments matter, and moral lines need to be drawn. Yet women also encounter one another in parking lots, hospitals, schools, grocery stores, churches, workplaces, support groups, waiting rooms, and moments of private crisis where ideology does not need to be the first thing through the door.

I would rather see a pro choice woman bring dinner to a pro life mother whose family is falling apart than watch either of them score another point online. I would rather see a conservative woman sit beside a lesbian woman whose mother has died than watch her use grief as an opportunity to make a theological statement. I would rather see a Christian woman protect an atheist woman from a false accusation than remain silent because correcting the lie might benefit the wrong side. None of these women have to abandon their convictions to behave this way. They only have to decide that another womans humanity has not been revoked by disagreement.

Perhaps that is where meaningful solidarity has to begin. Not with pretending women are naturally unified, and not with demanding that every woman pledge allegiance to the same political philosophy, but with refusing to make human dignity contingent upon ideological obedience. Women will continue to disagree about some of the most difficult questions in public life, and those disagreements will sometimes be profound. The challenge is whether we can disagree without becoming the kind of people whose behavior contradicts the very values we claim to defend.

What we believe is how we behave, but how we behave may also reveal what we actually believe. If our solidarity survives only as long as another woman agrees with us, then perhaps solidarity was never the highest value. Perhaps belonging was conditional all along. The better alternative is not less conviction. It is conviction strong enough to coexist with truth, humility, self control, and a willingness to recognize the image of God in the woman standing on the other side.