Here’s a question social media has muddied: What is a woman’s greatest calling?
It’s an appropriate question as Women’s History Month was held in March and Mother’s Day approaches in May.
Social media hands young women two competing visions of womanhood. On one end sits the coastal-city influencer: career-driven, sexually liberated, self-worshiping. On the other sits the “tradwife.” Figures like Ballerina Farm, Nara Smith, and Estee Williams have been labeled with this title after building profitable media businesses around idealized homemaking — sourdough baking, made-from-scratch meals, and wearing pristine dresses and flawless hair.
What these two visions share is more significant than what divides them: both are aesthetics. Both are performed, packaged, and monetized.
But one is particularly deceptive to Christian women: the tradwife. They’ve packaged God’s design for family and marriage into an aesthetic.
The Oxford Dictionary defines aesthetic as “concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty”— ornamental, decorative, skin-deep.
Social media algorithms reward the performance, not the reality — and young women in our congregations are drawing life conclusions from it.
A recurring phrase among tradwife influencers is some variation of “I live to serve him, my husband.” The husband becomes the organizing center of a woman’s identity.
This is not the biblical vision of marriage.
Paul’s instructions in Ephesians 5 are often excerpted to emphasize wifely submission, but the passage opens with a mutual command: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21). The husband’s role is defined not as lordship but as sacrifice: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25).
Paul’s broader vision in Galatians 3:28 establishes the foundation: “There is neither Jew nor Greek … no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Spiritual equality before God is not a concession — it is the bedrock.
Alongside “I live to serve him” runs a second message from these influencers: a woman’s greatest calling is motherhood. They romanticize motherhood on the highest pedestal.
When a woman’s identity shifts from imago Dei to wife and mother alone, something has gone theologically wrong. A woman who never marries or cannot have children is not living a diminished calling. She stands before the same God, summoned to the same discipleship.
Consider Lottie Moon. She never married and had no children. She spent nearly 40 years as a missionary in China and pioneered the women’s missions movement that still shapes Southern Baptist missions today.
What if, as a young woman today, a tradwife account had convinced her that her greatest calling was homemaking, that she should forego missions to bake sourdough and document it aesthetically online?
Paul affirms in 1 Corinthians 7 that an unmarried woman may be “anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit” (7:34). Singleness is not deficiency. Given to God, it enables pure devotion and service.
The Church does not need to choose between rejecting homemaking and elevating it as the highest calling. Homemaking is honorable, difficult, and worthy of deep respect as we see in Proverbs 31.
The point is that it is one expression of faithful Christian womanhood among many.
What the Church must help this generation do is resist reducing a woman’s calling to a role or an aesthetic — whether the coastal-city influencer, the tradwife, or any other stereotyping category that contradicts biblical womanhood.
The calling of a Christian woman is first and foremost to love God with all her heart, soul, mind, and strength. Everything else flows from that primary allegiance.
The algorithm should not tell our daughters who they are. God’s Word should. And the message is this: Your greatest calling is not an aesthetic. It is a Person. B&R
