I have titled my presentation Chasing Tinkerbell: rescuing our daughters from Neverland; because I’ll be using the symbolism of the two leading ladies in the Peter Pan story to illustrate two competing philosophies on women and feminism versus the biblical worldview. I aim to show you how Christians have embraced unawares, the feminist philosophies that redirect Christian women, as they have in secular society, to seek their fulfillment in a career and the labour force above marriage, children and homemaking. So although the feminist philosophy might sound attractive, this lie is leading and has led scores of women into a state of Neverland.

In 2020 I published a book titled Lost Boys. The title was drawn from the Peter Pan story. I use this fairytale analogy to explain why so many young men suffer from Peter Pan syndrome, a type of stunted growth in which boys grow up physically into manhood, but they are not developing emotionally and spiritually as they should and therefore they are not committing themselves to relationships, marriage or significant responsibility like starting a family. Jordan Peterson’s explanation of the Peter Pan story and the analogies of the characters was a great illustration for what is occurring with young men today.

Peterson taught about archetypes in fairytales: archetypes are simply patterns of universally shared knowledge. He had some interesting ideas about Peter Pan and The Lost Boys, which you can read about in my book. But in one of his old lecture videos, he explained that the fairy Tinkerbell represented pornography with Tinkerbell luring Peter away from normal responsibilities of life and trapping him as a perpetual lost boy, unable to grow up. And he explained that Wendy represented the traditional real girl virtuous and with a natural desire to grow up, get married and have a family. Her attempts to play-act with Peter, the mother and father role to the lost boys were met with hostility and disgust from Peter. So take a moment to notice the picture on the screen of the three characters  and where each looks at and where each of their eyes are directed and it already gives you a clue to where the story is headed.

Now since most people have only seen Peter Pan movies, but they have never read the book, I need to highlight a few points from the original story before we move on. Firstly, in the original story, Tinkerbell hates Wendy. She’s intensely jealous and even tries to get her killed. And at the end of Wendy and her brother’s time in Neverland, when they return home to a happy reunion with Wendy’s parents; Wendy’s mother tries to talk Peter Pan into staying with them, but he refuses. So you can see the picture on the screen that shows Peter looking in the window after this happening. And in the book the author writes, there could not have been a lovelier sight, but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know, but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must forever be barred. Wendy’s mother agreed to allow Peter to return every school break to whisk Wendy away to Neverland. And the following year Peter returned and Wendy inquired about Tinkerbell, but Peter couldn’t recall her claiming he had had many fairies and he frequently missed his visits to take Wendy back. As the years passed, Wendy matured, married and started a family of her own. However, Peter remained unchanged, unable to grasp that Wendy had grown up. Peterson’s insights regarding the two female characters. Tinkerbell and Wendy intrigued me and motivated me to delve deeper into their symbolism.

So upon closer examination I found the comparisons to be profoundly enlightening. They clearly mirror many aspects of contemporary culture, so I chartered these comparisons to provide a visual representation. On one side, Wendy is more traditional; she is chaste, modestly clothed, has a childlike innocence, kind and compassionate, She is maternal and nurturing and sensible and virtuous, and she looked out for others, especially the weak and she believed the best in people. Then we had Tinkerbell on the other side. She had sort of a progressive view on life. She was called in the book a common fairy and she was sexualized in the Disney versions. She was brazen, she lacked innocence, she was self-consumed, selfish, moody except pan and independent. Tinkerbell was without natural affection and she was also erratic.

Wendy on the other hand had normal aspirations for marriage and motherhood so she didn’t belong in Neverland. Her existence is grounded in her identity as a human girl. She is on her way up. She’s developing into a virtuous woman and she blossoms in motherhood. She was a free girl, she was supported by a family and later by a husband as a mother. But Tinkerbell just wanted to be in Neverland. Her existence depended on people believing in her. She is a fantasy. As you know in the book, it might’ve come out in some of the stories, that when she drank the poison and she was dying, all the children of the world were called to say, I believe in fairies and clap their hands. And that is how she recovered. She is on her way out, going to disappear and be replaced by many other fairies like her and she supported herself. She was a working girl. She was a tinker by trade, hence her name Tinkerbell. So how does this Tinkerbell symbolism translate into our culture today?

It translates through the feminist lie that the single greatest goal for a daughter is to raise her up to be independent and successful in the marketplace, Meaning in the career and workforce she will find her fulfilment and not need to be dependent on anyone. Now at surface level, this statement sounds harmless, even quite positive. However, it’s a direct attack on God’s creation ordinance for a woman to be a helper to a husband, not independent. God’s creation ordinance does not mean that women are to submit to every man or to any man or to all men. But in submission to one man, her husband who is to love her sacrificially as he himself is submitted to God and together they are commanded to go forth, be fruitful, multiply. Now, Adam could not do this independently and nor could Eve. This could only be achieved together. So raising daughters with the primary goal of them working outside the home and becoming financially independent and putting off children, is a reflection of our philosophy on womanhood and motherhood. I believe that we as Christians have abandoned God’s design and ordinance for womanhood and exchanged that beautiful and freeing truth for the feminist lie that our value and life achievements are in the marketplace; not in our children, the next generation. We have abandoned our duty to God and family for the marketplace and we need a reformation in the church.

Simone de Beauvoir was one of the mothers of modern feminism, and in a conversation with Betty Fried, she said, no woman should be authorised to stay at home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice because if there was such a choice, too many women would make that one. This unmarried woman opted for a highly promiscuous lifestyle, yet remained childless and unhappy. Only a person with a hardened heart could advocate for such a callous act as separating infants and children, the most defenceless and vulnerable members of our society, from their mothers. Of course, de Beauvoir was right about too many mothers choosing to stay at home with their children, if they had that choice. Mothering is a full-time job and there’s a deep psychological connection between mother and child.

But sadly, due to the feminist movement and the mass exodus of women out of the home into the workforce in the seventies and eighties, it changed the economic system so that before when most families could survive comfortably and purchase a home on one income, today the dream of owning a home is becoming a near impossibility for a single income family, let alone a double income family. Therefore, many mothers have two full-time jobs, one at home and one outside the home, and as a result, they are opting for less children or none at all. But perhaps that was the intent all along.

To illustrate this phenomenon, parents are prioritising their daughter’s education towards a career in the workforce; I draw your attention to this Pew study that was released last year. Eighty-eight percent of parents say that they prioritise financial stability and job satisfaction for their children. Only twenty-one percent prioritise getting married and  twenty percent having children. As of 2020 women now surpass men in the labour force in the US and Australia is following close behind. The feminist movement has assured women that their fulfilment and independence lies solely in the workforce. However, any socialist could have cautioned them that there is no one more dependent than a wage earner. The glaring disparity in parents’ primary concerns serves as undeniable evidence of our misplaced priorities over the past several decades. This survey epitomises a cultural philosophy that prioritises work and career over family, faith and relationships. What happened in the church, that we too switched gears to change our priorities away from marriage and motherhood. What do we do in the church to encourage and prepare our daughters for their most important and fulfilling calling and duty? Surely a reformation is needed before it is too late. Rather than helping Christian women incorporate work and family into their lives over the long haul in a way that works for their marriage, their children and themselves. We have followed the lead of the masses, and mothers have left their homes and babies and returned to the workforce. Parents in the church have coached our daughters to put education and career first and just worry about love and marriage later, maybe when they are 30.

Brett Weinstein, a secular evolutionary biologist, said this in an interview. ‘The job of a parent is to mirror the environment that the child will mature into so that when they get there they’ll have the software that is an appropriate match for it. A lot of mental health issues come down to a mismatch between the software that our developmental environment and the environment you actually live in’. Going back to our Peter Pan symbolism, if we compare the software from a Wendy type childhood environment compared with a Tinkerbell type upbringing, it’s clear to see that a Wendy type will be the ones who have strong marriages, strong families, and strong homes. Rebecca Hendricks in her article titled Baby Bust, wrote about the feminist lie or fantasy that is kept alive only by us believing in it. This cultural dogma is so pervasive and so uncontested that it induces young women not quite on board with the programme to cauterise their hearts and pursue a life unnatural to them, leaving them frustrated, anxious and bitter. What if Wendy was pushed or coached to become a Tinkerbell? We need to contest this cultural dogma for that is what it is. To illustrate Brett Weinstein’s point about the mismatch causing mental health issues; Pew also asked the question of parents about what they are most worried about happening to any of their children. Top of the list was that they would struggle with anxiety and depression. A Cambridge study conducted eight years ago showed overwhelmingly that women are almost twice as likely to suffer from anxiety as men and that people living in Europe and North America or the West are disproportionately affected. The article goes on to try and work out why women are most affected with anxiety; perhaps hormones, perhaps brain chemistry, or that women tend to ruminate more on problems. It is not ever considered that it could be that women are forced into a life unnatural for them where they need their hearts to fit.

A year ago I was in a meeting of Christian women leaders, both young and old, and I presented them with this question to ponder. What if the minister or pastor stood up one Sunday and said something to the effect that according to God’s word, a woman’s most sacred calling and duty is motherhood and mothers should make it a priority to be at home raising their children. The room was silent except for some odd gasps and awkward laughs. And finally they told me that this could never happen. It would offend too many people, especially the women, even though they all reluctantly agreed that this was in fact a biblical principle. So my question was, if this is a biblical ordinance, then why could it not be taught openly in the church? Has the world’s culture, its ideas and philosophies so permeated the church that what has become distasteful to the world is now distasteful to us Christian?  Is the church no different from the world and what it values and what it does not have? We have lost our distinctiveness to offer an alternative to the world’s narrative. I believe it was Matthew Henry who said that the church most influences a world when the church is least like the world.

If any young woman in the church today would dare to say she wouldd like to be a full-time mother, well there must be something wrong with her. That young woman needs to be pulled aside for mature instruction as she cannot waste her talents on motherhood because anyone can be a mother. It is just a biological function of childbirth and training and discipline. Children, they are easy, they’ are just little and it comes naturally. As does a flourishing marriage, I recognise that we are in a day and age where many women now often have no choice but to work outside the home. I know many beloved sisters in this situation who feel enslaved as the choice has been taken from them. My own mother had to work and one of the hardest things for us kids was coming home to an empty house without a mother to greet us. My mother, who is 84 still says that when she worked, she yearned with an aching heart for her children every single day. My admonition for the church is to provide practical help for young mothers who want to stay at home and raise their children. Can the local church community lift the burden so that a family can cut down the number of days the mother needs to work away from their precious children? The next generation of Christians will be thankful to the church and perhaps we will not have so many of our young people walking away from the faith despising the institution that preaches one message but lives another.

The narrative that informs our daughters, pursue your career, make lots of money, become successful, party, find yourself, have as much fun as you can, date as many guys as you can, and then at 30 you can settle down and find a husband and have children. Following that path has left many women without a husband and childless. This phenomenon has been coined unplanned barrenness or involuntary childlessness and time does not permit  us to delve into this further, but there has been a lot written on it lately. Involuntary childlessness is growing exponentially to concerning levels even in the church. Carrie Grass wrote in her article that Feminism’s fairy tales have erased women. The power of the new feminist fairytale is highly compelling, but it comes at a cost. The millions of women who have followed it blindly find themselves trapped in a world they did not expect. Barren and broken with hearts aching for more, it often manifests as rage and fear. Feminists have failed to offer a future to build in their quest to purge the warts of the past. Yes, surrogates can be found; pet parents and fur babies, but the structure of mothering is built deeply into our bodies and souls despite our scarce acknowledgement of it. 

The late Alice von Hildebrand, a professor of philosophy said:

A woman by her very nature is maternal. For every woman, whether married or unmarried, is called upon to be a biological, psychological, or spiritual mother. She knows intuitively that to give is to nurture, to care for others, to suffer with and for them. For maternity implies suffering, and is infinitely more valuable in God’s sight than to conquer nations and fly to the moon.

Why has the feminist ideology sought to destroy the maternal in women by undermining a woman’s unique qualities and distinction between men and women? When that becomes blurred, what happens is that we end up asking the question, what is a woman? I purport that what we are seeing in the trans movement and drag queen phenomena are certainly only copies or caricatures, not of the original creation, but of the feminist recreation of women, the sexualized and liberated that the world forces us to give assent to. Hannah Moore wrote the following quote in 1777 about art, but the principle is still the same across the ages. ‘Those who copy from others will undoubtedly be less excellent than those who copy from nature. Imitating imitators leads one further away from the great original herself. When males seek to imitate biological women, it is an impossibility for them to emulate the most distinctive attribute of women. And that is the innate maternal qualities that drives a woman in sacrificial, selflessness and duty not just for her children, but also the weak, the vulnerable and the suffering because God made women that way. Drawing inspiration from Sir Roger Scruttons insights on the amplification of modern art through Marxist ideology. Similarly, feminist ideology with its Marxist roots has amplified womanhood, reducing it to be all about me. Womanhood is about sacrifice for others. Even bearing children is a sacrifice to give life to another, and this now is despised and avoided. When womanhood is reduced to a self-centered me, it is amplified and loses its grace and beauty. It is tainted by selfishness. Perhaps this idea of selflessness and sacrifice would be a novel one on this international women’s day. 

Jesus told a parable about a wealthy vineyard owner who went out in the morning to the marketplace to hire workers for his vineyard and he found men standing around and hired them. And then he went out to the marketplace three hours later and he saw some more standing around. And you know the story. He goes out numerous times throughout the day to the marketplace and hires men to work in his vineyard. And at the end of the day, they are all paid the same. But I saw this parable in a very different light recently when I read it. The vineyard owner obviously represents God and so too does wisdom in Proverbs represent God?

Matthew Henry in his commentary wrote, the gospel call is given to those that stand in the marketplace. It is the place where wisdom cries out. Proverbs one 20 to 21. It’s a place of sport for there, the children are playing and the gospel calls us from vanity to seriousness. It’s a place of business, of noise and hurry from which we are called to come from the marketplace. We are to work in God’s vineyard. And when we work for God, we work for our souls and the souls of our family, our own personal vineyard. God’s vineyard is His church where we should be; where we are to be planting, watering, fencing, pruning, dressing, weeding, not slothful loiterers. Wisdom is crying out in the bustling marketplace of this world for us to return to our own vineyards.

A woman’s vineyard is a home and family, and yet the world has been grooming our girls from their childhood for the marketplace just like their mothers were groomed. The world insists that our value lies in Neverland. Let us stop chasing the Tinkerbell fantasy that is deceiving our daughters and leading them by the score into Neverland’s captivity.

May God have mercy on us and open our eyes to see. And finally, if you resonated with this message, you’ll be interested in my new book coming out early April titled The Nature of Truth and Beauty; timeless Instructions on femininity and the education of daughters. And it is a must, I believe, for every woman, from teens to grandmothers and it will be a very valuable resource.

Thank you and God bless.