The following is an edited excerpt from Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity, set for publication on Jan. 20.

The idea that marriage is simply a kind of equal partnership between a man and woman is a model that Western culture purchased a long time ago and at a high price. Poet and author Wendell Berry lays out the contemporary vision, written in the 1980s:

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

Such a pattern, as Berry suggests, isn’t a model for integrating a family together into an organic unit but is a road map for divorce with divisions from the start. Separate responsibilities, career goals, and bank accounts make it a challenge to truly weave a couple together, which requires placing the common goal of the family over the individual.

This elimination of difference between male and female is exacerbated by the many ways in which a woman limits her own female nature to mimic that of the male. Catholic psychiatrist Karl Stern noticed in the 1950s that what “is frequently........

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