We’ve been lied to.

For decades, women have been told that it’s up to them to create their identities, that they can be whomever they want to be. It doesn’t matter what your body tells you. It’s your mind that is the real you, and you ought to change your body to match your mind if you really want to live a happy and fulfilled life on this earth.

But this is completely untrue. Our bodies and our minds should not be at war with each other. They are both equal parts of who we are as women, and they both are equally valuable in informing who we are and what we are like. We can’t just be whoever we want to be and do whatever we want to do, even if this means going against the identity that we’ve constructed in our heads. Our culture has made so many of these kinds of promises to women, but they have all fallen short and come up empty.

We are made for more. We need the truth. And as Jen Oshman writes in her new book, we ought to cast aside these cultural counterfeits and lies the world has offered us.

What exactly are these cultural counterfeits? Jen explains,

“The counterfeits of our age are a deviation from what our good God intends, a marring of the good gifts he offers us…We have bowed down at the altars of outward beauty and ability, cheap sex, abortion, gender and sexuality, and even marriage and motherhood. We’ve sought our value, identity, and real joy in cheap fakes rather than the real thing.”^[1]

Counterfeits are exactly what they sound like—fakes. They’re essentially idols, promising power and freedom they cannot provide. God has given us many good things, but our culture (mostly due to the sexual revolution) has twisted and turned them in such a way that make us look inward rather than upward.

What are we to do? How do we fix this massive issue in our culture and reject the counterfeits and lies they try to sell us? According to Jen, we simply have to seek out what is true and rehearse the good news of the gospel—

“Knowing, cherishing, and rehearsing this good news now will prepare us to confront the counterfeits of our age…”^[2]

In Cultural Counterfeits, Jen discusses the many counterfeits that are presented to women in their search for identity: physical beauty, hookup culture, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, marriage, and motherhood. She explains how each of these things came to be so prevalent or important in our society and why none of them will truly satisfy us and give our lives meaning. Throughout the book, she compares herself and all other women to the story of the prodigal son. Some are like the younger brother, living wildly out in the world and discovering their identity in their sex life or outward appearance. Some are like the older brother, doing all the “right” things and finding their identity in their roles of wife and mother. But all of us are called to leave these counterfeit idols behind and come home to the Father. Why? Because He is our only true hope—

“Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. No one can be saved, and no one can thrive, apart from him…We in the West have largely accepted and embraced the counterfeits of our day. And though they’ve promised life, they’ve delivered death. The truth about who God is, who we are, and how he designed us to live is our only hope.”^[3]

Jen Oshman’s Cultural Counterfeits is an excellent book, and it’s one that I enjoyed reading very much. She repeatedly reiterates that “human well-being requires harmony with reality,” and this is a message that I believe everyone, believers and unbelievers alike, desperately need today. Jen’s book is well-researched and full of scriptural truth, and despite what the world or society may argue, she makes it clear that it is good to be a girl.

If you’ve struggled with finding your identity as a twenty-first century woman or if you’ve simply been on the hunt for your next good read, you should pick up a copy of Cultural Counterfeits and surrender yourself to your Savior‑

“No more trusting in the empty promises of our age. No more giving ourselves over to fake identities or self-reliant living. We wave our white flags and surrender to the good God who made us and died to save us.”^[4]

**I wanted to make a brief note on two points of disagreements with the book. These disagreements may seem minor, but they are things that I am passionate about. 1) On page 124 in her chapter on abortion, Jen writes, “What if we pursued life and the well-being of others with such tenacity that abortion became unnecessary, unthinkable even?” However, doctors and former abortionists have attested that abortion, the intentional killing of a preborn human being, is never medically necessary. Perhaps Jen meant here that an individual or the culture at large might one day view abortion as unnecessary, but I think it’s important to be clear that abortion is never necessary and that it is sin. 2) In her chapter on LGBTQIA+, Jen discusses the story of Ellen Page, an actress who transitioned in 2020 and changed her name to Elliot Page. Throughout this illustration, Jen refers to Page with he/him pronouns, seemingly confirming that she is now a man. However, biological women cannot become men and vice versa, and I believe it is important, especially for Christians, to speak what is true and live not by lies, which means referring to people by the pronouns of the biological sex/gender that God created them to be.

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^[1] Jen Oshman, Cultural Counterfeits: Confronting 5 Empty Promises of Our Age and How We Were Made for So Much More (Wheaton: Crossway, 2022), 18 & 64.

^[2] Ibid., 61.

^[3] Ibid., 17 & 66.

^[4] Ibid., 188.