Faith & Spirit Quote by Aaron Allston

Allston’s line lands because it treats “feminism” less as a political program than as a social shibboleth: something people invoke to signal virtue, identity, or membership, even when the terms get slippery the moment you ask for a clean definition. The “sort of like God” comparison is doing double duty. It flatters feminism’s moral seriousness while also poking at the way debates about it can turn theological: competing denominations, doctrinal purity tests, heresies, excommunications, and a lot of heat generated by who gets to interpret the creed.

The intent isn’t to dismiss feminism as meaningless; it’s to expose how the word functions in public life. “Many people profess” is pointed. Profession is performance. It suggests a culture where declaring yourself “for feminism” can be easier than confronting what that commitment demands when it collides with wages, caregiving, sex, religion, race, or power. The second clause - “no one seems to be able to define it to everyone’s satisfaction” - drags the reader from belief to governance. Movements don’t fail because they lack ideals; they fracture because they can’t enforce a single, universally pleasing definition across conflicting interests.

As a novelist, Allston is alert to the narrative problem: big abstract nouns become containers for wildly different stories. The joke’s cynicism targets the audience’s desire for a definition that offends nobody, costs nothing, and resolves every tension. Feminism can’t do that, not because it’s incoherent, but because it’s alive - contested, evolving, and politically inconvenient. The punchline is a warning about language: when a term becomes sacred, disagreement starts looking like apostasy instead of argument.