IN MAY 2019, Owen Strachan, former president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, wrote an essay titled “Divine Order in a Chaotic Age: On Women Preaching.” He got straight to the point, quoting Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth.” Strachan’s argument followed with confidence: God created a divine order in which husbands rule over their wives, and this order was established at the beginning of creation.
The man is created first in the Old Testament, and possesses what the New Testament will call headship over his wife. Adam is constituted the leader of his home; he is given authority in it, authority that is shaped in a Christlike way as the biblical story unfolds. . . . On the basis of a man’s domestic leadership, men are called to provide spiritual leadership and protection of the church (1 Timothy 2:9–15). Elders preach, teach, and shepherd the flock of God; only men are called to the office of elder, and only men who excel as heads of their wives and children are to be considered as possible candidates for eldership (1 Timothy 3:1–7; Titus 1:5–9).1
Men lead. Women follow. The Bible tells us so.
For a time, I believed this too. It echoed all around during my teenage and young adult years. I heard it attending a Bill Gothard conference, which some people in my small-town Southern Baptist church invited me to. I heard it from my Bible study leaders in college. I heard it from the hosts of Christian radio stations. I heard it from the notes in my study Bible. I heard it at almost every wedding ceremony I attended, spoken loud and clear as each preacher read Ephesians 5. Male headship was a familiar hum in the background of my life: women were called to support their husbands, and men were called to lead their wives. It was unequivocal truth ordained by the inerrant Word of God.
But this was too familiar a story.
Even from my early years training as a historian, Christian arguments about male headship troubled me. You see, Christians were not the only ones to argue that women’s subordination is the divine order. Christians are, historically speaking, pretty late to the patriarchy game. We may claim that the gendered patterns of our lives are different from those assumed in mainstream culture, but history tells a different tale. Let me show you, from the world history sources I have been teaching for more than two decades, how much Christian patriarchy mimics the patriarchy of the non-Christian world.
What Is Patriarchy?
First, let’s talk about patriarchy.
Not long ago, evangelicals were talking a lot about patriarchy. Russell Moore, currently the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, declared patriarchy a better word for the conservative Christian gender hierarchy than complementarianism. He told Mark Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, that, despite his support for complementarianism, he hates the word itself. “I prefer the word ‘patriarchy,’” Moore said.2 Moore made a similar argument in an earlier journal article, warning that evangelical abandonment of the word patriarchy was capitulation to secular peer pressure. For Moore, this wasn’t a good reason to give up the word. As he writes, “We must remember that ‘evangelical’ is also a negative term in many contexts. We must allow the patriarchs and apostles themselves, not the editors of Playboy or Ms. magazine, to define the grammar of our faith.”3 Because the word patriarchy itself is biblical, biblical Christians should be proud to use it.
I first learned of the evangelical conversation about the word patriarchy from a 2012 blog post written by Rachel Held Evans, the well-known author of A Year of Biblical Womanhood.4 She noted that Owen Strachan used the word patriarchy too. Of course I looked up the reference. I remember smiling when I read Strachan’s words. His straightforward approach provided a compromise between evangelicals who prefer the word patriarchy, like Moore, and those who would rather use the word complementarian (like Denny Burk, the current president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood).5 “For millennia,” Strachan explains, “followers of God have practiced what used to be called patriarchy and is now called complementarianism.”6 Complementarianism is patriarchy. Owen Strachan is right (at least about this).
So, what is patriarchy? Historian Judith Bennett explains patriarchy as having three main meanings in English:
It is this third meaning on which, like Bennett, we will focus. As Bennett writes, “When feminists at rallies chant, ‘Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Patriarchy’s Got to Go,’ we are not talking about the ecclesiastical structures of Greek Orthodoxy or about a specific form of fatherly domination within families, but instead about a general system through which women have been and are subordinated to men.”7 This third meaning of patriarchy encompasses the first two. Both the tradition of male church leaders and the authority of male household heads function within cultures that generally promote male authority and female submission.
American evangelicalism provides a case in point. A 2017 Barna study, focused on the perception of women and power in American society, drew evidence from three polls to compare attitudes toward women across several demographics—including gender, age, political preference, and religious identity (evangelical, Protestant, Catholic, and practicing Christian). The study found that evangelicals are the “most hesitant” group in supporting women’s work outside the home: only 52 percent “are comfortable with the future possibility of more women than men in the workforce” (a percentage more than 20 points below that of the general American population). Evangelicals also express the most discomfort with a female CEO. The study also found that evangelicals are the least comfortable with women as pastors (39 percent). For evangelicals these attitudes are connected: limiting women’s spiritual authority goes hand in hand with limiting women’s economic power. As the study puts it, these results are “perhaps due to a more traditional interpretation of women’s roles as primary care-givers in the home.”8 Evangelical teachings that subordinate women within the home and inside the walls of the church influence attitudes about women in the workplace.9 Or, considered within Bennett’s framework, male ecclesiastical authority and male household authority exist within broader cultural practices that subordinate women to men. Patriarchy doesn’t stay confined to one sphere.
Let’s consider an even more specific example of how patriarchal attitudes manifest in evangelical culture. Several years ago, when my husband was serving as a youth pastor, our church was looking for a new secretary. He suggested a friend of ours for the position. The friend really needed some additional work and had the advantage of already being a church member. But the friend was a man. And my husband was suggesting him for church secretary. The response from one of the other pastors was telling. Would this man, the pastor asked, really want to answer the phone? It was okay to hire a woman to answer the phone, but the job would be demeaning to a man. So demeaning, in fact, that the pastor preferred not to hire him, despite our friend’s financial need. The job, suitable for a woman to do, was beneath the dignity of a man.
This example of a man being deemed above the work suitable for a woman fits into a larger social pattern in which men’s work is more highly valued than women’s. Women outnumber men in my hometown of Waco, Texas, and women outnumber men at two of the three local institutions for higher education (more women attend Baylor University and McLennan Community College, while more men attend Texas State Technical College). Yet women in Waco average close to $20,000 less in yearly income than men. The largest wage gap between men and women is at the managerial and higher-administration level, where men earn almost $120,000 per year while women earn only $78,000.10 Women’s work, quite literally, is worth less than men’s.
This pattern of devaluing women’s work—whether the type of work or the monetary value of the work—is an example of patriarchy: a general system that values men and their contributions more than it values women and their contributions. Russell Moore maintains that this general system of patriarchy is not the same as the complementarian gender hierarchy. Christian patriarchy isn’t “pagan patriarchy,” as he has called it.11 Moore warns against a “predatory patriarchy” that harms women, but he also continues to support a system that promotes male authority and female submission. He argues that an orderly family structure in which wives submit only “to their own husbands” and fathers serve as a “visible sign of responsibility” makes life better for everyone.12
So is he right? Is Christian patriarchy different?
Christian Patriarchy Is Just Patriarchy
“But you only work part time?”
“So how many hours does that take you away from home during the week?”
“Oh, you breastfeed? I figured you didn’t do that since you worked.”
“Is your husband okay with you making more money than him?”
These are just a sampling of the questions I have been asked over the past twenty years. A pastor’s wife who continued to pursue my own career even while I had children perplexed many in my evangelical community—including some of my college students. One student was particularly vocal. He was theologically conservative and expressed concern about my choice to continue teaching as a wife and mother (especially as a pastor’s wife). He challenged me so often in the classroom that I took to rewriting lecture material, trying to minimize his disruptions. I wasn’t successful. Once the student suggested that I clear my teaching material with my husband before presenting it to my classroom. This both angered and unnerved me. It angered me that he thought it appropriate to suggest that I submit my teaching materials to the authority of my husband. It unnerved me because every semester I worried about how my vocation as a female professor clashed with conservative Christian expectations about female submission.
When I read Russell Moore’s attempt to distinguish “Christian patriarchy” from “pagan patriarchy,” the experience I had with this student came to mind. According to Moore, “pagan patriarchy” encourages women to submit to all men, while “Christian patriarchy” only concerns wives submitting to their husbands.13 Moore has softened his discussion of patriarchy over the years, emphasizing in his 2018 book that, in creation, men and women “are never given dominion over one another.” Yet he still clings to male headship. While he writes that “Scripture demolishes the idea that women, in general, are to be submissive to men, in general,” he explains wifely submission as cultivating “a voluntary attitude of recognition toward godly leadership.”14 Thus his general attitude remains unchanged: women should not submit to men in general (pagan patriarchy), but wives should submit to their husbands (Christian patriarchy).
Nice try, I thought. Tell that to my conservative male student. Because that student considered me to be under the authority of my husband, he was less willing to accept my authority over him in a university classroom. No matter how much Moore wants to separate “pagan patriarchy” from “Christian patriarchy,” he can’t. Both systems place power in the hands of men and take power away from women. Both systems teach men that women rank lower than they do. Both systems teach women that their voices are worth less than the voices of men. Moore may claim that women only owe submission “to their own husbands,” not to men “in general,” but he undermines this claim by excluding women as pastors and elders.15 If men (simply because of their sex) have the potential to preach and exercise spiritual authority over a church congregation but women (simply because of their sex) do not, then that gives men “in general” authority over women “in general.” My conservative male student considered me under the authority of both my husband and my pastor, and he treated me accordingly.
Christian patriarchy does not remain confined within the walls of our homes. It does not stay behind our pulpits. It cannot be peeled off suit coats like a name tag as evangelical men move from denying women’s leadership at church to accepting the authority of women at work or women in the classroom. My church secretary example shows how Christian patriarchy spills over into our everyday attitudes and practices. Even the strictest interpretation of Pauline texts can provide no theological justification for why a man could not serve as a church secretary. Simple, secular patriarchy—which values women’s work less than men’s—provides the answer.
Patriarchy by any other name is still patriarchy. Complementarians may argue that women are equal to men, as does the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1998 amendment to the “Baptist Faith and Message”: “The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God’s image.”16 Yet their insistence that “equal worth” manifests in unequal roles refutes this.
Historian Barry Hankins quotes the “key passage” of the controversial statement approved at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) meeting in June 1998: “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.”17 The claim is certainly that women’s work (from housework to childcare to answering phones) is valuable and worthy, but when that same work is deemed unsuitable for a man to do, it reveals the truth: women’s work is less important than men’s. Moreover, just as men are demeaned for doing women’s jobs (which often come with less authority and, consequently, lower pay), women are restricted from doing men’s jobs (which garner both more authority and higher pay). In this way, Christian patriarchy models the patriarchy of mainstream society. Our pastor valued the work of a woman less than the work of a man, just as the economy of my hometown values the work of women less (almost $20,000 per year less) than the work of men. Russell Moore is right to prefer the term patriarchy because, realistically, it is the right term to use. But he is wrong to think that the Christian model is different.
Indeed, regarding the treatment of women throughout history, the present looks an awful lot like the past. How little the wage gap between women and men has changed over time both frightens and fascinates me as a medieval historian. Judith Bennett describes this startling reality: “Women who work in England today share an experience with female wage earners seven centuries ago: they take home only about three-quarters the wages earned by men. In the 1360s, women earned 71 percent of male wages; today, they earn about 75 percent.”18 This historical continuity—what Bennett calls the “patriarchal equilibrium”—lends superficial support to the idea of biblical womanhood. When examined carefully, however, the historical origins of patriarchy weaken rather than bolster the evangelical notion of biblical womanhood. A gender hierarchy in which women rank under men can be found in almost every era and among every people group. When the church denies women the ability to preach, lead, teach, and sometimes even work outside the home, the church is continuing a long historical tradition of subordinating women.
So let’s go back to the beginning of history—or at least about as close as we can get—and see what my world history students learn about patriarchy.
The Historical Continuity of Christian Patriarchy
In 1839, a young English scholar was distracted on his way to Sri Lanka. His name was Austen Henry Layard, and the sandy mounds that waylaid his journey were located in the heart of ancient Assyria (modern-day Iraq). What he discovered turned out to be the remains of the great Assyrian cities of Nimrud and Nineveh. Remember Jonah? Nineveh is the city that God commanded Jonah to preach repentance to, a command that Jonah resisted because the Assyrians were such terrible people. They skinned enemies alive and fought captured lions, gladiator-style, for entertainment. Yet despite their fish-slapping ways (I can’t resist a VeggieTales reference), they were pretty sophisticated too.
Buried deep inside the once-fierce city walls and now-crumbling ziggurats was an extensive ancient library. It housed the clay fragments of one of the oldest stories in human existence: the story of the warrior-king Gilgamesh. The surviving text dates from the seventh-century library of the last great king of the Assyrian Empire, Ashurbanipal.19 But the story itself was well known much earlier, with versions of it peppering the ancient Near East.20
Gilgamesh is a god, courtesy of his goddess mother, but he is cursed with mortality, courtesy of his earthly father. His father left him the throne of the great Sumerian city of Uruk—which means Gilgamesh is a semi-historical figure. The ancient text tells us that Gilgamesh ruled as the fifth king of the First Dynasty of Uruk around 2750 BC.
I find The Epic of Gilgamesh riveting. The characters are deeply flawed: a bored king who makes war to enhance his reputation; a loyal sidekick who eggs on the bad behavior of his best friend; a scorned woman who tries to release a plague of zombies on earth because she is so angry. Given its dramatic twists and turns, I am surprised the story hasn’t yet been made into a Hollywood blockbuster. It is action packed and filled with high drama—including lots of sex and supernatural monsters.
It isn’t the supernatural monsters that draw me to the story, though. It is the continuity of human experience that makes it so compelling. Even four thousand years ago, people acted much the same as they do today. One of my favorite parts is the aftermath of Gilgamesh losing his best friend, Enkidu, to a wasting disease. In a startlingly modern cry, Gilgamesh demands that the world echo his grief:
Weep. Let the roads we walked together flood themselves with tears. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let the river which soothed our feet overflow its banks
as tears do that swell and rush across my dusty cheeks.
Let the clouds and stars race swiftly with you into death.21
We can see him, crumpled over the body of his friend. We can feel his grief, as it echoes our own. We still love and grieve in the same ways that people did more than four thousand years ago. We still cry out in pain.
The rawness of human grief runs throughout The Epic of Gilgamesh.
So does the reality of patriarchy.
From the prostitute who civilizes the wild-man Enkidu to the wise tavern keeper to the virgins Gilgamesh takes to his bed, women play significant roles throughout the Gilgamesh stories, even moving the plot forward at key moments. For example, when Gilgamesh is most out of control, the prostitute Shamhat seduces Enkidu, enticing him to enter Uruk and challenge the tyrannical king. Shamhat does not do this of her own accord. She is ordered by the hunter, who is tired of the wild Enkidu disrupting his traps and protecting the animals, to go to Enkidu and “let him see what charm and force a woman has.”22 Shamhat does, showing Enkidu her body (I once accidentally assigned a too-accurate translation of this encounter and had an embarrassing moment in class) and staying with him for seven nights—teaching him not only about sex but also about civilization.
This episode between Shamhat and Enkidu shifts the entire story. It is through Shamhat that Gilgamesh meets Enkidu. After a violent battle, Gilgamesh realizes he cannot defeat Enkidu and accepts him as his equal. The two become inseparable. From this point forward, instead of relieving his boredom by forcing the young men of his kingdom into endless wars and the young women (even the married ones) into his bed, Gilgamesh sets off on a series of adventures that culminate in Enkidu’s death and launch Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality. Shamhat, in other words, is the catalyst for the entire plot.
Women like Shamhat play critical roles throughout the story. Yet women never take the lead—as religion scholar Rivkah Harris has emphasized.23 Even Shamhat is only doing what a male authority figure (the hunter) tells her to do. Women in the Gilgamesh narrative function primarily as helpers. The collected stories of the epic, written by men for men and about men, portray women as “supporting and subsidiary.”24 Women work and speak and move throughout the narrative, but their main role is to meet the physical needs of men and to give them advice and comfort. Siduri, the tavern keeper, perhaps provides the best example of this. Not only does she offer alcohol and comfort to Gilgamesh when he is tired from his quest and overwhelmed by grief from Enkidu’s death, but she also gives him some telling advice: “What is best for us to do is now to sing and dance. Relish warm food and cool drinks. Cherish children to whom your love gives life. Bathe easily in sweet, refreshing waters. Play joyfully with your chosen wife.”25 Women were keepers of the hearth. Even in the chaotic and dangerous world of ancient Sumeria, women provided the comforts of food, sex, and happy family life.
In one sense, The Epic of Gilgamesh supports Albert Mohler’s claim that history is on the side of complementarianism. Mohler, current president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, writes that it is an “undeniable historical reality that men have predominated in positions of leadership and that the roles of women have been largely defined around home, children, and family.” Biblical evidence, Mohler continues, drives home this historical continuity: “The pattern of history affirms what the Bible unquestionably reveals—that God has made human beings in His image as male and female. . . . We understand the Bible to present a beautiful portrait of complementarity between the sexes, with both men and women charged to reflect God’s glory in a distinct way.”26 Just as women were the keepers of home and family, the domestic supporters of men, more than four thousand years ago, they would probably continue to be so today if not for the disruptive (and “unbiblical”) influence of feminism. Such a grand sweep of historical continuity convinces Mohler that complementarianism must be God’s design.
Patriarchy exists in The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story about men and women at the beginning of history, because patriarchy was designed by God—or so goes the Christian patriarchal narrative. Women should proudly claim their roles as supporting actors because this is God’s divine plan. Women past were just as women present are and should continue to be: subordinate. No wonder so many complementarians are upset by recent pop culture narratives like the Marvel movies and the new Star Wars trilogy that cast women in leading roles. As Denny Burk has said, “I’ve noticed that in Star Wars (and in action films more generally) there is a move away from male hero/protagonists. Warrior women protagonists who save the men are the order of the day (Rey, [Jyn Erso], Wonder Woman, Eleven, etc.).”27 To him and others, warrior women reflect a feminist agenda that subverts the order of God.
But the very continuity of patriarchy should give us pause.
Patriarchy looks right because it is the historical practice of the world. In ancient Mesopotamia, women were treated as property. They had less opportunity for education; they were mostly defined by their relationships to men; they were legally disempowered as wives; they were subject to legally sponsored physical violence; and they rarely got to speak for themselves in the historical narrative. As Marten Stol concludes in his 2016 comprehensive study titled Women in the Ancient Near East, “In ancient society women fared much worse than men. . . . As we come to a close we expect none of our readers to shut this book without uttering a sigh of sadness.”28
My modern students balk at how Babylonian law allowed husbands to drown their wives for alleged adultery, but my students are also living in the state of Texas in which women make up 94 percent of the victims in domestic partner murder-suicides—not to mention the United States in which almost 25 percent of women have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner.29 This evidence shows not only the continuity of patriarchy from ancient Mesopotamia to modern America but also the continuity of its dark underbelly. Instead of being a point of pride for Christians, shouldn’t the historical continuity of a practice that has caused women to fare much worse than men for thousands of years cause concern? Shouldn’t Christians, who are called to be different from the world, treat women differently?
What if patriarchy isn’t divinely ordained but is a result of human sin? What if instead of being divinely created, patriarchy slithered into creation only after the fall? What if the reason that the fruit of patriarchy is so corrupt, even within the Christian church, is because patriarchy has always been a corrupted system?
Instead of assuming that patriarchy is instituted by God, we must ask whether patriarchy is a product of sinful human hands.
I remember the first time it occurred to me to flip the Christian narrative about patriarchy.
I had just wrapped up my evening women’s studies seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I was on my way to the Chili’s in Durham, where my husband was working a double shift. We were both full-time graduate students, me in the history doctoral program at Chapel Hill and he an MDiv student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. I had a stipend at Chapel Hill (about $11,000 per year), while he worked as a part-time youth minister at a local Baptist church (earning about $100 per week). Waiting tables meant we could pay the bills. It also meant he could purchase half-price meals for us. On nights like tonight, when he worked a double shift, I would sit in a booth and enjoy the only restaurant food we could afford (not to mention free refills on my half-price Diet Cokes). We were so young, so poor, and so busy. Those cheap meals were a godsend.
But that night, I wasn’t thinking about dinner. I was thinking about the conversation in my women’s studies seminar. We had spent the semester reading and discussing the status of women. From the ancient world through the modern world, history told a continuous story of patriarchy—of women suppressed, oppressed, devalued, and silenced.
That night the story hit home for me. The conversation turned to Southern Baptists and Paige Patterson, then president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. For the same reason Patterson became a hero in the Southern Baptist world, he became repugnant in my seminar that night: his views on gender roles.
Patterson preached that men were divinely created to lead and wield authority, women to follow and submit. The influence of men like Patterson (and, ironically, his wife) led the SBC to rewrite its faith statement, first creating the 1984 resolution that emphasizes women’s secondary creation, followed by the 1998 statement about wives submitting to their husbands. The submission statement swiftly became an amendment, culminating in the final (and by that time uncontroversial) addition to the “Baptist Faith and Message 2000” that only men can serve as head pastors.30
Bewildered outrage bubbled in my seminar—not only about Patterson’s views but also about the thousands of women who supported him. We didn’t miss that it was Patterson’s wife, Dorothy, who fought so resolutely on the floor of the 1998 convention to hold the line on women’s submission. She argued against the phrase “both husband and wife are to submit graciously to each other” because it implied similarity, equality even, between husbands and wives. She insisted that a divine hierarchy existed in the marriage relationship and that only women were called to submit “graciously” to the leadership of their husbands.31 Isn’t it ironic how a woman led the charge to ban women from leadership?
But why women like Dorothy Patterson so prominently supported women’s submission wasn’t the question that bothered me. I knew why many women supported it: because we believed male headship was divinely ordained. I was taught that God ordained women to follow the spiritual leadership of their husbands in the home and of male pastors in the church. Because Christianity was supposed to look different from the world, it made sense that a women’s studies graduate seminar at a public secular research university would object to a Christian understanding of gender roles. While the world promoted feminism and blurred the boundaries between male and female roles (or so I had been led to believe), Christianity promoted a divinely ordained gender hierarchy that brought clarity and order to everyday life. I understood Dorothy Patterson’s argument because I was part of Dorothy Patterson’s world.
But I had concerns even then. Christians were called to be radically different in how we uphold the dignity of all people, including women. That semester I had come to realize how historically unremarkable Christian gender ideals were. Instead of looking different in how we treated women, Christians looked just like everyone else.
Kate Narveson hadn’t yet written her book on early modern piety, so I hadn’t yet read her beautiful description of people incorporating Scripture into their everyday lives: “Scripture phrase,” she called it.32 That night I thought in Scripture phrase. A cradle Baptist, I learned to read and study the Bible at a young age, and Scripture has always flowed through my life. It flowed through my head that night, as my heart cried out to God for answers. I remembered the words of Genesis 3:16, part of the curse of the fall, almost as if they were etched in the night sky: “In pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” God spoke these words to Eve in the garden of Eden after she had sinned and taken the fruit from the forbidden tree. As the Latin Vulgate (which was becoming one of the primary Bibles I used as a medievalist) phrases it, “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee.”33
And there it was—the biblical explanation for the birth of patriarchy.
The first human sin built the first human power hierarchy.
Alice Mathews, theologian and former academic dean at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, explains the biblical perspective of the birth of patriarchy so well in her book Gender Roles and the People of God. Listen to what she says:
It is in Genesis 3:16 (God speaking to the woman) where we first see hierarchy in human relationships. . . . Hierarchy was not God’s will for the first pair, but it was imposed when they chose to disregard his command and eat the forbidden fruit. . . . Adam would now be subject to his source (the ground), even as Eve was now subject to her source (Adam). This was the moment of the birth of patriarchy. As a result of their sin, the man was now the master over the woman, and the ground was now master over the man, contrary to God’s original intention in creation.34
Patriarchy wasn’t what God wanted; patriarchy was a result of human sin.
What was new to me that night was rather old, theologically speaking. Everyone already knew that patriarchy was a result of the fall. Stanley Gundry, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society, states this matter-of-factly in a 2010 essay. The patriarchy that continues to appear in biblical text is a “mere accommodation to the reality of the times and culture; it is not a reflection of the divine ideal for humanity.”35 Patriarchy is created by people, not ordained by God.
Katharine Bushnell, a female missionary to China at the turn of the twentieth century, held a similar view. She cautioned about the danger of patriarchy for women. Instead of “desire,” she preferred to translate the word in Genesis 3:16 as “turning.” As she translated the verse, “Thou art turning away to thy husband, and he will rule over thee.”36 Before the fall, both Adam and Eve submitted to God’s authority. After the fall, because of sin, women would now turn first to their husbands, and their husbands, in the place of God, would rule over them.
I love how historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez describes Bushnell’s interpretation as a “theological coup” that “upended Victorian understandings of womanhood.” As Du Mez explains, “For Bushnell, male authority over women contradicted God’s will and perpetuated man’s original rebellion against God.” Women thus “continued to commit the sin of Eve when they submitted to men, rather than to God.” Patriarchy, for Bushnell, was not just a result of the curse; it was embedded in the fall itself. Adam’s rebellion was claiming God’s authority for himself, and Eve’s rebellion was submitting to Adam in place of God.37
I didn’t know about Alice Mathews as a teenager. I certainly didn’t know about Katherine Bushnell. I joined my church youth group in the late ’80s—at the height of evangelical authors and influencers like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tim and Beverly LaHaye (founder of Concerned Women for America), Elisabeth Elliot, and the Pattersons. Collectively the devotionals, Bible studies, marriage books, and parenting advice that had been influenced by their teachings saturated the Christian publishing world.38 The message for women was eerily uniform: Christian women submit to the authority of their husbands, taking care of home and family while men lead, protect, and provide. Take, for example, what Dobson wrote in 1994 about why men should be sole breadwinners: “I wish it were possible for me to emphasize just how critical this masculine understanding is to family stability. . . . One of the greatest threats to the institution of the family today is undermining of this role as protector and provider. This is the contribution for which men were designed. . . . If it is taken away, their commitment to their wives and children is jeopardized.”39 About ten years earlier, Dobson had counseled a woman—terrified of her husband because he routinely beat her but still wanting to stay in the marriage—that divorce was not the solution, that she should work toward reconciliation instead.40
Evangelical women like me were taught that God’s design for marriage was submissive wives (preferably stay-at-home) and leader husbands (preferably breadwinners). I remember attending a Disciple Now event when I was in high school. The leader explained to us that God designed women specifically to be wives and to devote themselves to their husbands. This is the first time I remember hearing that at church. But it wouldn’t be the last, because that year saw the publication of what Du Mez calls “a manifesto in defense of God-given gender difference”: John Piper and Wayne Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.41 While Piper and Grudem admit that the prescription in Genesis 3:16, “He shall rule over you,” is a result of the fall, they still argue that male headship was ordained by God before the fall. They write, “But the silence at this point regarding the reality of Adam’s loving leadership before the fall gives the impression that fallen ‘rulership’ and God-ordained headship are lumped together and ruled out. Again the Biblical thrust is ignored: Paul never appeals to the curse or the fall as an explanation for man’s responsibility to lead; he always appeals to the acts of God before the fall.”42
A few years later, Grudem published the first edition of his popular Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. He amplified what had been laid out in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, arguing that “the curse brought a distortion of Adam’s humble, considerate leadership and Eve’s intelligent, willing submission to that leadership which existed before the fall.”43 The rest, as they say, is history. The fait accompli presented to evangelical women was that God’s design for male headship and female submission was an eternal and divine condition.
Once I finally came face to face with the ugliness and pervasiveness of historical patriarchy, I realized that rather than being different from the world, Christians were just like everyone else in their treatment of women. When Dobson upheld a battered woman’s desire to remain with her husband, he was just one more voice in more than four thousand years of history that agreed: women’s place is under the power of men.
The Historical Truth about Patriarchy
In many ways, the debate between egalitarians (those who argue for biblical equality between men and women) and complementarians (those who argue for a biblical gender hierarchy that subordinates women to men) is in gridlock.44 While complementarians like John Piper and Wayne Grudem proclaim that male headship existed before the fall, egalitarians like Alice Mathews and Philip B. Payne proclaim that it only came after. But when I had my epiphany about the beginning of patriarchy, it wasn’t just the biblical text that convinced me. It was because the biblical text fit so well with historical evidence. In other words, the debate over the interpretation of Genesis 3:16 is not just a case of he said / she said. Historical evidence about the origins of patriarchy can move the conversation forward.
Let me show you what I mean.
In 1986, Gerda Lerner famously argued that patriarchy is a historical construct—linked to “militarism, hierarchy, and racism.”45 The Epic of Gilgamesh, according to Lerner, stands at the beginning of not only history but also patriarchy itself. The story testifies to one of the earliest emergences of complex human society: civilization. As soon as humans forged an agricultural society and began to build structured communities, they also began to build hierarchies of power, designating some people as more worthy to rule than others.
Let me pause for a moment. This book is my story—a white woman whose experiences as a pastor’s wife and scholar have led me to reject evangelical teachings about male headship and female submission. I am fighting against patriarchy for women, but women are not the only ones hurt by patriarchy. Biblical scholar Clarice J. Martin reminds us that while patriarchy defines the boundaries of women’s lives, it also defines “subjugated peoples and races as ‘the others’ to be dominated.”46 Patriarchy walks with structural racism and systemic oppression, and it has done so consistently throughout history.
It frustrates me how Christians try so hard to untangle the interlocking narratives of patriarchal oppression—loosening their hold on one group while tightening it on another. In her groundbreaking article, “The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in Afro-American Biblical Interpretation,” Martin asks a provocative question: “How can black male preachers and theologians use a liberated hermeneutic while preaching and theologizing about slaves, but a literalist hermeneutic with reference to women?”47 I would like to ask the same question of white preachers and theologians. When we rightly understand that biblical passages discussing slavery must be framed within their historical context and that, through the lens of this historical context, we can better see slavery as an ungodly system that stands contrary to the gospel of Christ, how can we not then apply the same standards to biblical texts about women? Martin challenges African American interpreters of the Bible to stop using “a hierarchalist hermeneutic with regard to biblical narratives about women.”48 Only then can all Black people truly be free.
She is right. Isn’t it time that Christians, committed to following Jesus, recognize what historians like Gerda Lerner have known for so long? Isn’t it time we stop ignoring the historical reality that patriarchy is part of an interwoven system of oppression that includes racism?
While aspects of Lerner’s monumental study of patriarchy have been challenged and modified by subsequent historians, her argument that patriarchy emerged with the beginning of civilization has not. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, a leading modern scholar on gender and history, writes, “Though the lines of causation are not clear, the development of agriculture was accompanied by increasing subordination of women in many parts of the world.” Both male labor and male power began to be associated with property ownership and the accompanying agricultural work. This led to boys being favored over girls for inheritance and to women becoming increasingly dependent on males who were property owners or agricultural laborers. Wiesner-Hanks continues, “Over generations, women’s access to resources decreased, and it became increasingly difficult for them to survive without male support.”49 Women became increasingly dependent on men as agricultural communities became the heartbeat of human civilization. It is striking to me, as a scholar and as a Christian, that when God told Eve she would be under her husband’s power, God simultaneously told Adam that agricultural labor would be necessary for human survival. Patriarchy, according to both the Bible and historical record, emerged alongside the emergence of agricultural communities.
Rather than patriarchy being God-ordained, history suggests that patriarchy has a human origin: civilization itself. From The Epic of Gilgamesh in ancient Sumeria to other texts like the Ramayana in ancient India, evidence from early civilizations reveals the development of gender hierarchies that privileged men (especially men of certain classes) and subordinated women. Patriarchy is a power structure created and maintained, literally, by human labor.
Against this backdrop, the Bible is nothing short of revolutionary.
While patriarchy certainly exists in the biblical narrative, Mathews encourages us to remember that there is a difference between “what is descriptive and what is prescriptive in the Bible.”50 Echoes of human patriarchy parade throughout the New Testament—from the exclusive leadership of male Jews to the harsh adultery laws applied to women and even to the writings of Paul. The early church was trying to make sense of its place in both a Jewish and a Roman world, and much of those worlds bled through into the church’s stories.
At the same time, we see a surprising number of passages subverting traditional gender roles and emphasizing women as leaders—from the Samaritan woman at the well giving Jesus a drink to Mary of Bethany learning at Jesus’s feet like a disciple to Martha declaring her faith in Jesus (which counters the lack of faith exhibited by most of the disciples). I laughed recently at biblical scholar Febbie C. Dickerson’s musings about Tabitha, a woman identified as a disciple in Acts 9. “I wonder,” asks Dickerson, “what would happen if preachers learned Greek and so recognized that Tabitha’s identification as ‘a certain female disciple’ probably indicates that she is one of many female disciples.”51 Biblical women are more than we have imagined them to be; they will not fit in the mold complementarianism has decreed for them.
Beth Moore recognizes this in her response to Owen Strachan in an online thread about women in ministry: “What I plead for is to grapple with the entire text from Mt 1 thru Rev 22 on every matter concerning women. To grapple with Paul’s words in 1 Tim/1 Cor 14 as authoritative, God-breathed!—alongside other words Paul wrote, equally inspired & make sense of the many women he served alongside. Above all else, we must search the attitudes of Christ Jesus himself toward women.”52 Moore, who has spent her life immersed in the Bible, realizes a disconnect between the construct of biblical womanhood and the real lives of women in the Bible.
Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world. Historically speaking, there is nothing surprising about biblical stories and passages riddled with patriarchal attitudes and actions. What is surprising is how many biblical passages and stories undermine, rather than support, patriarchy. Even John Piper admitted in 1984 that he can’t figure out what to do with Deborah and Huldah.53 The most difficult passages in the Bible to explain, historically speaking, are those like Galatians 3:26–28: “For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This is what is radical. This is what makes Christianity so different from the rest of human history. This is what sets both men and women free.
Isn’t it ironic (not to mention tiresome) that we spend so much time fighting to make Christianity look like the world around us instead of fighting to make it look like Jesus Christ? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Sarah Bessey, the progressive Christian writer, activist, and bestselling author of Jesus Feminist, is absolutely right that patriarchy is not “God’s dream for humanity.”54 Doesn’t the world of Galatians 3 seem more like the world of Jesus? Patriarchy may be a part of Christian history, but that doesn’t make it Christian. It just shows us the historical (and very human) roots of biblical womanhood.