Key Takeaways

The Story: A National Platform for a Difficult but Necessary Argument

On August 29, 2026, J.P. De Gance published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America section that addresses one of the most controversial cultural moments of the year — and draws from it a conclusion that every pastor and church leader needs to sit with carefully.

The Lindsay Clancy case, in which a Massachusetts mother was tried for the murders of her three children, has produced a cultural response that De Gance argues is more revealing than the trial itself. More than 31,000 people donated over $1 million to support Clancy. Viral social media posts showed women writing “Same, Lindsay” in apparent identification with a woman who killed her children. That response, De Gance argues, is not simply misplaced sympathy for an insanity defense. It is the expression of something deeper — a worldview that has been cultivated in the culture for decades, one that teaches women to view motherhood not as a vocation but as a burden, and that has produced measurable consequences in the unhappiness of the women who have most fully embraced it.

The op-ed is a direct and serious piece of cultural analysis. For pastors, the most important question it raises is not about the trial. It is about what the Church has to offer the women in its congregation who are navigating a culture that is giving them a profoundly distorted picture of what their lives are for.

The Core Finding: The Data on Motherhood and Happiness Consistently Points in One Direction

The cultural narrative that feminism has promoted — that marriage and motherhood constrain women and compete with their flourishing — is contradicted by the happiness data with unusual consistency.

According to the 2024 American Family Survey, conservative women are three times as likely as liberal women to report being completely satisfied with life. Research from the Institute for Family Studies, cited in De Gance’s op-ed, finds that married women with children are twice as likely to report being very happy compared to their single, childless peers.

These are not marginal differences. They are among the largest wellbeing gaps documented in social science research on women. And they point to a conclusion that the culture is actively suppressing: the vision of marriage, motherhood, and sacrificial love that Christianity has always taught is not a constraint on women’s flourishing. According to the data, it is one of its most reliable pathways.

De Gance is careful in the op-ed to acknowledge the genuine suffering that family life involves. His own wife has struggled with postpartum depression. He and his family have walked alongside friends through the same. The Christian vision of family life has never promised the absence of suffering. What it offers is something different — a framework in which suffering is not the end of the story, in which sacrificial love produces goods that cannot be measured on a balance sheet, and in which the daily demands of marriage and parenthood form character in ways that self-focused living simply cannot replicate.

The happiness data keeps confirming what that framework has always taught.

The Counterintuitive Angle: The Culture Is Not Offering Women Freedom. It Is Offering Them a Different Kind of Bondage.

Here is the reframe at the heart of De Gance’s op-ed — and the one with the most direct pastoral implications.

The feminist worldview has presented itself as liberation: freedom from the constraints of marriage, motherhood, and biological design. The promise has been that a woman who invests in her career, maintains her independence, and keeps family formation optional will end up happier, freer, and more fulfilled than a woman who embraces the traditional path.

The data keeps falsifying that promise. Liberal women — who have most fully absorbed the feminist framework — are measurably less happy than conservative women. Single, childless women are measurably less happy than married mothers. The culture that promises liberation is producing, by its own metrics, less flourishing.

De Gance connects this directly to the social media response to Lindsay Clancy. When thousands of women write “Same, Lindsay” — when they identify with a mother who killed her children as an expression of release from what they experience as an unbearable burden — they are not expressing a psychotic break. They are expressing the logical endpoint of a worldview that has taught them to experience motherhood as an imposition on the self rather than a gift to the world.

This is the cultural crisis the op-ed names. It is not primarily a political problem. It is a formation problem — and formation is exactly what the Church is designed to provide.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, De Gance’s Washington Examiner op-ed points to something we see in the communities and congregations we work with: women who are hungry for the vision of marriage and motherhood that the Church has always offered, but who are navigating a culture that tells them that vision is regressive, constraining, and beneath their dignity.

The Church’s response to this moment is not to engage the political debate about feminism. It is to embody the alternative — to become the kind of community where marriages are genuinely strong, where mothers are genuinely supported, where the sacrificial love that family life requires is surrounded by the community care that makes it sustainable, and where the data-backed truth about what produces human flourishing is held out clearly and with compassion.

Think about the women in your congregation. The young mothers navigating the exhaustion and isolation of early parenthood without the village that previous generations had. The women who have absorbed, often without fully realizing it, a cultural message that their identity should be built around career and independence rather than covenant and family. The married women whose marriages are quietly under strain, who are not being asked how they are doing, and who feel alone in a community that assumes everything is fine.

These women do not need a political argument. They need a community that actually supports them in the vision of life they have chosen — or are still trying to choose. A church that invests in marriage, surrounds young mothers with genuine care, builds the relational infrastructure that makes the sacrificial love of family life feel sustainable rather than crushing, is doing the most direct and meaningful work available in response to the cultural crisis De Gance names.

The culture is failing women. The Church has the answer. Communio helps churches build the community and the ministry strategy to deliver it.

Take the Next Step

Communio partners with churches to build marriage and family ministry that supports women, strengthens marriages, and builds the community of care that makes the vision of flourishing family life real and sustainable.

► Read J.P. De Gance’s full Washington Examiner op-ed → washingtonexaminer.com

► Explore Communio’s resources for churches → communio.org

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the core argument J.P. De Gance makes in the Washington Examiner op-ed? De Gance argues that the widespread public sympathy for Lindsay Clancy — including viral social media posts by women identifying with her — reveals a worldview that has taught women to experience motherhood as a burden rather than a vocation. He connects this to a broader cultural framework that is contradicted by the happiness data: women who embrace marriage and motherhood are measurably happier than those who follow the path the culture prescribes.

What does the data show about women, marriage, and happiness? According to the 2024 American Family Survey, conservative women are three times as likely as liberal women to report being completely satisfied with life. Research from the Institute for Family Studies finds that married mothers are twice as likely to report being very happy compared to their single, childless peers. The wellbeing gap between women who embrace family life and those who don’t is among the largest documented in social science research.

What is the Christian vision of motherhood and family life that De Gance points to? De Gance argues that healthy Christianity offers a rightly ordered vision of family life — one that acknowledges the genuine suffering that marriage and parenthood involve, while pointing to the rewards that flow from sacrificial love lived for others. This vision has always held that family life forms character, produces goods that cannot be measured on a balance sheet, and provides the deepest form of human flourishing available on this side of eternity. The happiness data consistently vindicates that vision.

How should the Church respond to the cultural crisis the op-ed describes? De Gance’s argument implies that the Church’s primary response is not political but pastoral and formational. The Church is called to embody the alternative — to become communities where marriages are genuinely strong, mothers are genuinely supported, and the sacrificial love of family life is surrounded by the community care that makes it sustainable. That is the response Communio helps churches build.

How does Communio help churches support women and families? Communio partners with churches to build marriage and family ministry that reaches women and families at every stage — from engaged couples to young mothers to long-married couples navigating the demands of family life. By helping churches build the relational infrastructure and community of care that makes the vision of flourishing family life real, Communio helps churches become what the culture desperately needs: a place where marriage is honored, motherhood is supported, and women are genuinely known and cared for.

Credit: This post draws on J.P. De Gance’s op-ed “Feminism Should Also Be on Trial in the Lindsay Clancy Case,” published in the Washington Examiner on August 29, 2026. Read the full op-ed here.