Gen Z Women Are Not Commodities — and Christianity Should Be Able to Say That Better Than the Culture Can

On May 5, Christianity Today published a piece under the headline “Gen Z Women Are Not Commodities,” engaging Freya India’s book Girls® and the wider way consumer culture packages young women as products to be marketed, optimized, and consumed. The article’s framing is important because it identifies something many people feel but struggle to name: modern womanhood is constantly being narrated through commerce. (Christianity Today)

That pressure is everywhere.

Young women are told to build themselves like brands, style themselves for visibility, optimize themselves for desirability, and narrate themselves in ways that stay algorithmically useful. Even empowerment language is often swallowed by the marketplace and sold back in monetized form. Authenticity becomes a product. Confidence becomes a product. “Healing” becomes a product. Identity itself becomes something curated for display.

The result is exhausting.

And Christianity should be able to speak into that with unusual clarity.

At its best, the Christian vision of personhood resists commodification at the root. Human beings are not merchandise. They are not raw material for self-optimization. They are not primarily bodies to market, identities to package, or lifestyles to sell. They are image-bearers — created, known, and loved by God before they ever become useful, attractive, or legible to the culture.

That is not a small theological point. It is a direct challenge to the logic of consumer modernity.

The reason this topic matters for modern Christianity is that Christians are not immune to the same distortions. Churches also absorb cultural scripts. Sometimes they repackage them in more respectable language. Young women can still feel watched, evaluated, flattened, and functionally commodified inside Christian spaces — whether through purity culture, performative femininity, or the pressure to embody a polished “godly woman” ideal that still treats them more as symbols than as full persons.

So the real challenge is not just for the culture out there. It is for Christian communities too.

Can the church become a place where women are not reduced — not to image, not to role, not to marketable identity, not even to “issues”? Can it recover a thicker, holier, more humane way of seeing women that resists both secular commodification and religious flattening?

That is harder than posting the right statement. It requires re-formation.

It requires teaching people to see dignity as prior to utility. To see vocation as deeper than presentation. To see embodiment as sacred without turning it into spectacle. To see women as persons, not platforms.

This is one reason younger women often feel suspicious of institutional language, whether secular or religious. They have heard too many scripts before. Too many messages telling them what they are worth, what they should be, how they should appear, what kind of power they should perform. It is not enough to say the Christian answer is different. Christians have to demonstrate that difference in how they listen, teach, lead, and honor women in real communities.

The church should be unusually good at this. Not because it is trendy to say so, but because its theology gives it better resources than the market does.

A world of commodities can only imagine value in terms of exchange. The gospel imagines value in terms of creation, redemption, and love.

That changes everything.