The Loss of Feminine Virtue: Lindsay Clancy

We are living through the complete collapse of virtue. Not a dip. Not a cultural mood swing. A collapse. The old words—duty, chastity, honor, motherhood, helper, self-denial—have become either punchlines or hate speech. We have catechized a generation to believe the highest good is the unencumbered self. And now the fruit is hanging in the open for anyone with eyes to see.

Last week a Massachusetts jury deadlocked in the trial of Lindsay Clancy. She strangled her three children—Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months—in the basement of their Duxbury home in January 2023, then jumped from a window in an attempt to follow them. She does not deny the acts. The question before the jury was whether she should be held criminally responsible or declared not guilty by reason of insanity because of postpartum psychosis, bipolar disorder, and a cocktail of psychiatric medications.

Eleven jurors were ready to acquit. One man would not. The foreperson later told the cameras she had already begun filling out the verdict forms. He had even admitted reasonable doubt. Then he said the sentence that stopped the machinery: “But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.” The judge declared a mistrial.

Praise God for that lone juror.

He did not acquiesce. He looked at three small bodies and refused to pretend that a mother’s hands around their throats was merely a medical event. While the room pressed him—nurses on the jury explaining charts, personalities growing loud, notes sent to the judge complaining he would not follow the instructions on reasonable doubt—he stayed put. The culture calls that arrogance. Scripture calls it the remnant. One man who still believed that some acts are wicked even when the perpetrator is sad, medicated, and female.

The government, by contrast, failed. A mistrial is not justice. It is a shrug. Three children are in the ground and the state could not bring itself to say the word “guilty.” That failure does not stay in Plymouth County. It travels. Every future mother who is exhausted, over-medicated, or drowning in the lie that her children are obstacles to her authentic self now has a new data point: you can do this and a jury of your peers may weep for you. Blood is on their hands for the copycats who will come. Soft justice for the slaying of infants is not compassion. It is the final surrender of a people who no longer know what a mother is for.

What God Actually Said About Woman

The deeper tragedy is not one courtroom. It is the catechism that made the courtroom possible.

God did not create woman as a sovereign individual whose primary project is self-discovery. He created her as ezer kenegdo—a helper corresponding to the man (Genesis 2:18). Not an afterthought. Not a decoration. Not the main event. A necessary counterpart whose glory is found in relation, not isolation. The helper is not the house. She is not the table. She is the one who makes the house a home and the table a place of life. She is the accent that causes the room to come alive. Remove her and the structure still stands, but it is no longer living. That is not diminution. That is design.

Paul does not apologize for this. “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church” (Ephesians 5:22–23). Titus tells older women to train the younger “to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored” (Titus 2:4–5). Peter points to Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him lord, and says this is the hidden person of the heart that is precious in God’s sight (1 Peter 3:4–6).

A woman’s identity is therefore a subset of God’s call. She does not generate it from within. She receives it. Daughter of the King. Wife. Mother. Helper. Member of a body. These are not accessories she adds after she has first become “herself.” They are herself under Christ. The modern gospel of individuality inverts the order. It tells her she must first find herself, then maybe give what is left to others. Scripture says the opposite: “Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Faithful motherhood is one long, daily losing of the self. There is no other kind.

We have spent fifty years telling women the opposite and then acting shocked when some of them treat their children as expendable extensions of a self that must be protected at all costs. Postpartum suffering is real. Sleep deprivation is real. Bad medicine is real. None of that erases the creational office. A helper who murders the ones she was given to help has not merely had a mental health crisis. She has abandoned her post. The church that cannot say this out loud has already surrendered the field.

What We Have Lost

Sisters, feel the weight of this.

The world sold you a counterfeit. It told you that the highest feminine virtue is self-expression, that submission is violence, that children are optional lifestyle accessories, and that a woman who loses herself in a family has somehow failed. The result is not liberation. It is exhaustion, anxiety, pharmaceutical dependence, and a quiet despair that no amount of “you go girl” can touch. You were not made to be the centerpiece. You were made to be the glory of another—first of God, then of the man He gave you, then of the children who bear His image.

Look at the beauty we discarded. A mother who rises in the night, who folds laundry as an act of worship, who teaches a toddler the Apostles’ Creed while wiping a nose, who submits to her husband not because he is perfect but because Christ is. That woman is not small. She is participating in the same self-giving love that took Christ to the cross. She is the living contradiction of a culture that worships the unencumbered self and then wonders why no one wants to get married or have babies.

The three Clancy children did not die because one woman had a bad day. They died downstream of a civilization that taught their mother—and millions like her—that her truest self existed somewhere apart from them. When the pressure came, the self she had been trained to protect won. That is what happens when virtue is replaced by therapy-speak and identity is located in feelings rather than in the call of God.

I write this as a husband and father of three. I have watched my own wife lose herself daily for Abigail, Elisabeth, and Asher—and in losing herself she has become more herself than the world ever promised. That is the secret the age refuses to believe.

Reclaim What Was Stolen

Therefore, sisters and mothers of Christ the King and beyond: reclaim feminine virtue.

Stop praising your individuality as if it were a sacrament. You were never meant to find your identity in yourself. You were meant to find it in the God who named you, the husband who covers you, the children who need you, and the church that disciples you. Lose yourself. That is not self-erasure. That is faithfulness.

Be the helper. Not the rival. Not the co-CEO of a dual-career brand. The helper. Make the house a home. Be the accent that brings the room to life. Teach your daughters that their glory is not in out-earning or out-leading every man in the room, but in becoming the kind of woman whose presence turns a house into a sanctuary. Teach your sons that a godly woman is not a threat to their strength but the very thing that makes their strength worth having.

Older women, Titus 2 is not a suggestion. Train the younger women. Do not outsource this to Instagram influencers or the pediatrician’s office. The church must recover its nerve. We have spent too many years softening the edges of Ephesians 5 so that no one would call us harsh. The result is a generation of women who do not know they are allowed to want what God designed them to want.

This will cost you. The world will call it oppression. Some in the church will call it outdated. Let them. The lone juror did not wait for consensus. Neither should you. Virtue that waits for cultural permission is already dead.

Christ lost Himself for His bride. He did not cling to His own identity; He emptied Himself (Philippians 2:5–8). Women who belong to Him are invited into the same pattern. Lose yourself in the call. Become the helper. Make the home. Bear the children. Die daily. That is not the end of you. It is the only way you will ever be found.

The complete loss of virtue is not inevitable. It is a choice we keep making. Choose otherwise. The children are watching. The Lord is watching. And one stubborn juror has already shown us that a single person who will not acquiesce can still hold the line.

Soli Deo Gloria.