Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can't Be Fused with Christianity

by Carrie Gress

The culture wars have raged for decades, but with seemingly little success. Christians are losing the cultural battle for family, life, and faith. But why?

In this riveting look at the underbelly of feminism, Dr. Carrie Gress lays out why pro-life and pro-family efforts have failed to deliver. Feminism has quietly captured the minds and hearts of women by mimicking aspects of Christianity. Through its own “commandments,” “virtues,” “evangelization,” and even “a sacrament,” feminism has become an exceedingly powerful megachurch.

While Christians have targeted the specific products of the feminist ideology, such as abortion and transgenderism, we have missed the bigger picture of how feminism’s shadow church has captured the psyche of Western women.

Feminism is all too often perceived, even among Christians, as something virtuous that affords women true equality and freedom. Dr. Gress overturns this misconception, smashing the idol of feminism and exposing its deeply anti-Christian origins.

Drawing from history, psychology, philosophy, culture, and common sense, Dr. Gress

How early feminists opposed traditional Christianity and espoused occultic practicesSix ways feminism has become its own religion that mimics the Christian faithWhy the feminist idol of women’s autonomy can never lead to happinessHow the prioritization of masculine virtues devalued the vital gifts of womenWhat happens when Christians try to blend their faith with feminismWhy the restless search for identity by many adrift in culture is really a grasping for homeThe vital role that men and the patriarchy play in meeting the needs of all of societyDr. Gress lays out solutions to how womanhood can be viewed afresh, without feminism’s menace, healing the ever-growing rift between the sexes, reconnecting the essential bond of empathy between mother and child, and restoring God to his rightful place in the hearts of all women.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cultural, Theology, Feminism, Christianity, Catholic, Religion

263 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 20, 2026

About the author

Carrie Gress is a Fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based think-tank, Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Scholar at the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University of America.

Carrie Gress has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and was the Rome bureau chief of Zenit's English edition. She is the co-author with George Weigel of City of Saints: A Pilgrimage to John Paul II s Krakow and the author of Nudging Conversions, published by Beacon Publishing in 2015.

A mother of four, she and her family live in Virginia.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book. The main point is that as the subtitle says Feminism is not compatible with Christianity. In fact as the book points out it is working against it from its 1st wave roots to the very current time. The founders for example hated the Christian way and found it to be slavery.

The book traces the waves of feminism and the ever expanding philosophy that want to cancel out all others. This philosophy now encourages the outright competition and cancelation of men while having women try to act or be more like men.

Feminism now has cast women as only being fulfilled when they work and have their own money do not have the shackles of kids or even the need for a man. This has led to many unhappy women and men for that matter who try to fill the vacuum with lesbian lovers or multiple lovers etc. This has led to a much more medicated and suicidal group of women.

Chapter 4 is brilliant, withe the 3 commandments:
1. Thou shalt be promiscuous. This leads to high body counts and a make and break pattern that is hard to undo. It points out that it leads to hating men while becoming like them. Shallow and only wanting to satisfy a bases sexual desire.

2. Thou shalt hate men:
This chapter points out how feminism has, maybe without knowing it ruined men and by disallowing their God given directives of protecting (women), providing, and procreating. see pg 91. During the sexual revolution this gave men great access to sex but without clear direction of who to protect and provide for. This is most obvious in the black community where there are very few real fathers of households.

3. Thou shalt engage in the occult:
I had no idea about the long history of connection of feminism and the occult. It makes sense though as furtherance of destruction of image of God in humans.
I learned of celebrities who are open about their occult involvement: Gisele Bundchen called herself a "witch of love" Actress Emma Watson publicly expressed her gratitude for her coven. Vanessa Hudgens of series Dead Hot about witches and spirits filmed in Salem Massachusetts.

This book is well worth a re-read. It goes far past its subtitle to highlight the impossibility of fusion of Feminism and Christianity to solutions for us as Christians and our response to the pressure of the world to be like them.

The section on new neurological look at left and right human brain theory is fascinating. How we all need both left and right brain harmony to be complete humans in God's image. This is take it seems from the book by McGilchrist "The Master and His Emissary"

I am not sure what to do with chapter 8 on Pope John Paul II and the broader topic of what to do with Catholicism. I took away 2 things: 1. I am not Catholic, this I knew but ... 2. Not everything Catholic is bad and we can learn much from the Catholics who love our Savior.

Contents:
Introduction

Part I The New Woman
1. Dismantling Christianity (1790-1900)
2. Building the New Woman (1900-1960)

Part II The Shadow Church
3. A New Idol: Autonomy
4. Three Commandments
5. The Sacred Rite: Work
6. The Gospel of Discontent and the Sacrament of Abortion

Part III Christian Feminism
7. Christian Feminist Fusion
8. Pope John Paul II's New Feminism

Part IV Restoration
9. Ideological Exit
10. Restoring What has been Lost

[Kathryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only got about halfway through. I can't disagree with any of her facts or analysis, but there is something off-putting about her writing that doesn't sit well. Her views may not technically be inaccurate, but seem very narrow and missing an even larger picture about the cause of our current cultural crisis.

[Abby Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book as soon as I heard it had been published... then waited weeks and weeks for it to ship because it was backlogged for a while. This is going to be a short review. I would like to write a longer review, but I'm not sure I'm going to have time to do that. It may have to wait for a re-read down the line.
The main thoughts I have are a comparison between this and The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us. This was actually an easier read, but I didn't devour it and immediately re-read it like I did *The End of Woman*. I would recommend it if you want to start studying how feminism has hurt women and where it has taken us and why. I would recommend *The End of Woman* more.
I appreciated Gress attempting to stick to the basic tenants of Christianity so this book could be read by both Protestants and Roman Catholics. Overall, she did a great job, but due to the nature of this book, her Catholicism is part of the point, and so there were places of vast theological differences. If you aren't relatively familiar with these theological differences, I would hesitate to recommend this book and simply point you back to *The End of Woman*.
I enjoy reading this so close to The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. They quote from a lot of the same authors, and it helped me understand the context of Wicked.
I loved the chapter on work. It was very balanced and beautiful.
This book had a lot to chew on. It produced a lot of discouragement with the women of our world and a lot of encouragement for the woman attempting to divest herself of the feminist mentality. After reading *The End of Woman*, I began to loath much modern storytelling because all I could see was the feminist message. This happened again. I could only see the ugly rage in all the women in all the modern shows. Our nurturing and compassion are almost never on display. More things ruined. :-)
I think my biggest takeaway was having my growing frustration that all my favorite decorating and fashion things are currently associated with witchcraft fed. I, as a woman, a Christian, and a homemaker, have to be careful having things like feathers, bells, shiny rocks, cool sticks, bones, candles, and herbs in my home. I'm not a witch. I don't want to be associated with something that is the occult. I do love long black dresses, boots, skulls, the phases of the moon, and stars. I get irritated thinking these beautiful parts of creation are assumed to only belong to the witchy-feminists. This book made me feel that vexation even more.

[Emma Wright · Rating 2 out of 5]

Full disclosure that I had already read quite a few (negative) reviews of this book before getting around to reading it, and was previously somewhat biased against Dr Gress from a previous read of her “Anti-Mary Exposed”. It seems there is quite a lot I agree with Dr Gress on in the grand scheme of things, and I am not in any way particularly married to the necessity of the term feminist, so my objections here are certainly not due to wildly different worldviews or priorities.

My objection is primarily that her thesis is poorly structured and supported, and smells frequently of cherry picking, confirmation bias, and common neo-conservative intellectual cop outs.

My main objections:

- she cherry picks who she counts as feminist and who she doesn’t, and only uses as examples women who support her theory of feminism as inherently tied to Unitarianism, the occult, failed relationships, and socialism. There certainly are are plenty of these women, and plenty of threads of feminism that bear the impact of that, but it’s a narrow and clearly self serving definition that she takes

- she makes HUGE and frankly absurd logical leaps (“Pope Leo 13th was a virulent anti feminist! I mean he never said that and didn’t even know what feminism was but he spoke out against socialism so basically the same thing”) and in a lot of places will drop something crucial and then dip without ever supporting it, as if she assumes (or hopes?) we are just automatically on board

- she attributes a lot of rightly named ills (aggressive individualism, breakdown of gender relations, loss of thick community, abortion/divorce/birth control/etc etc) to feminism as inherent to feminism, when they are imo more rightly attributed to other movements of modernity (the Industrial Revolution, enlightenment philosophy, dualism, etc) and are not necessarily inherent to feminism at all

- she consistently sets up Catholicism as a patriarchy and uses patriarchy as an ideal, but does not ever define what she means by a patriarchy, what that looks like politically, what rights women can or should have in it, and how it may or may not differ from other religions’/cultures’ patriarchy. This actually is one of my biggest objections because my personal hot take is that a lot of what modern Catholic trads look at lovingly as a patriarchy is a very modern, very Protestant understanding that flies in the face of Catholic patriarchy

- there is zero acknowledgement of the ugliness of the historical sexism that gave rise to feminism and zero acknowledgement of ANY good coming out of feminism, despite her own PHD and the litany of review quotes from female doctors, lawyers, and professors….. need I say more?

This book was not a waste of time to read, but it’s recklessly confident enough that I’d be quite cautious recommending it to anyone who didn’t have a firm grasp of the subject matter ahead of time.

[Lindsay Mangini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a good book. I don’t think the audio version did the book justice. I think reading the physical book would have been much better. But I still enjoyed the content and would recommend to others.

[Nicholas Pokorny · Rating 2 out of 5]

So many assumptions made. Very few redeeming qualities.

[Auguste Meyrat · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, to my surprise, this book doesn't actually talk about the musical Wicked (the title and the rainbow on the cover threw me off), though it does mention The Wizard of Oz in a couple of places. This is fine. Actually, Gress goes to work examining the ideological roots of feminism, which turn out to to be Enlightenment Rationalism and Marxism. This puts the movement at odds with Christianity since both sources are distinctively anti-Christian and often anti-woman.

Gress is a talented and clear writer who approaches her subject with a wealth of knowledge. Still, I wish she handled more of the common objections that stress the victories of the feminist movements (like voting and access to the professions) instead of going into the weeds of the phenomenological philosophies of St. Edith Stein and St. John Paul II. Maybe the hope was to rise above these disputes and go deeper? I guess this is fine for the most part, this is fine, but it can feel a little academic and dry sometimes.

All that said, it's still a great read and highly informative for anyone interested in this important issue.

[Toni Payne · Rating 4 out of 5]

How many modern women think they have arrived at their view of a woman through their own clever, independent self-discovery? Wrong. Women have been duped into thinking this way about themselves by centuries of lies and manipulation. Gress explores the history of feminism, helping the reader make connections and recognize the ideas that have "passed like a kind of contagion from one person to the next," ultimately leading to the destruction of true femininity and, by extension, the family. Today, you are a heretic if you go against feminism. Faithful biblical thinking about womanhood (and even personhood) demands it anyway. Want to know why feminism can't be fused with Christianity? Let Gress tell you why.

[cellomerl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty special book. We’ve all been well trained to believe that feminism is a force for good, and in fact Gress shows that it’s exactly the opposite. “Feminism” is by definition a divisive Marxist philosophy and is responsible for many decades of unhappiness among some of the richest people in the world. Despite its “caring face” it is hypocritical and completely incompatible with Christianity.
(Note that anything called an “ism” doesn’t have much going for it, usually it is some garbage based on unchallenged assumptions and only causes a lot of human misery.)

[Jennifer Beck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great premise

This book has a great premise. It's just slow on delivery. If you have a degree in philosophy it will be a great read for you. Its a struggle to stay engaged in a book that speaks so far above your head that Google becomes an interpreter of sorts.

I loved the premise and I loved Gress's points. I wished that she had spoken so succinctly throughout her book as she did in the beginning and the end.

[Scott Sirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and important work by Dr Carrie Gress stresses the importance of men and women to complementary not in conflict.

[Noelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good but her Anti- Mary Exposed was better for my taste.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth the read in a culture trying to destroy Christian women and real values. Gives an interesting history of the roots of tearing women away from Jesus and the church.