IT WAS OCTOBER 15, 2017. I was standing in my kitchen holding the back door open for my dog. She was taking her time wandering around in our backyard, so I picked up my phone and started scrolling through Twitter. I immediately saw the tweet. It was from Alyssa Milano, retweeted by one of my friends. This is what it said: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”1
I stared at it for a long minute. I wanted to reply “me too,” and I did, four days later. But I buried it in a tweet about Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Anxious Bench post, “Me Too. And Why This Is a Christian Problem.” “#MeToo,” I wrote. “Thanks @kkdumez; It IS a Christian problem.”2 Most people probably missed that my #MeToo literally meant Me Too. I wasn’t brave enough yet.
I have told you my second darkest story about my experiences inside complementarianism. I have told you how my husband was fired after questioning the role of women in our church. I have let you glimpse the pain and trauma that that experience caused my family. I have told you how it pushed me to stop being silent, to speak the historical truth about complementarianism.
But I haven’t told you my darkest story.
I haven’t told you how I was once invited to a series of evening seminars led by a popular conservative speaker named Bill Gothard; I went. I didn’t know that Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles had already been plagued by scandal and accusations of abuse. I didn’t consider that Gothard’s teachings—that God’s perfect design was best expressed “in the authoritarian rule of men”—could become dangerous.3 I didn’t consider how the young man who had invited me might internalize Gothard’s teachings about how a wife owed total submission to her husband or how he might apply them to our dating relationship. According to Gothard, we weren’t dating. We were courting, which meant marriage was our future. I didn’t consider that as he listened to Gothard’s teachings about God’s ordained “chain of command,” this young man might become an abuser.
As a young woman growing up in the Southern Baptist Church, I internalized many teachings about biblical womanhood. “In my experience,” writes Kate Bowler, “evangelical girls learn about the limits of their own spiritual authority as an accounting of small details, little moments of encouragement or discouragement that nudge them toward a sense of being acceptable.”4 This was my experience too. Like the impressionable young person I was, I believed James Dobson’s perspective in Love for a Lifetime—that women are weak while men are strong. So I stayed with my boyfriend, hoping what I experienced as anger would mature into strength and that all would become right with my world.
It didn’t. I became broken, exhausted, and tired of God. I didn’t care that much about church anymore. The preacher’s words at the conservative church I attended rang with what I thought was the authority of the Word of God. These words were writing for me a future I no longer wanted but one I felt powerless to escape. I was supposed to be like Sarah, a woman commended in the Old Testament for deferring to her husband as lord and embracing her role as wife and mother. But I felt more like Hagar, rejected and afraid. Years later, when Rachael Denhollander spoke at the 2019 Southern Baptist Convention, her words captured my experience: “I think it is very telling that I have heard hundreds, literally hundreds, of sermons directed on the quiet and submissive sphere that a woman should have,” she said. “I have heard not one on how to value a woman’s voice. I have heard not one on the issue of sexual assault.”5 Not one time during those years did I hear a preacher speak out against abusive relationships; not one time did a pastor speak about the dangers inherent in patriarchal power hierarchies. What I did hear was what Rachael Denhollander heard—women are called to be wives and mothers, submissive and silent.
All my mental energy focused on keeping my life together. I still remember trying to watch Sleeping with the Enemy one night with a friend. The 1991 movie features Julia Roberts as a physically abused wife. I had to leave the room. It felt too close to home. I had become so good at checking out mentally, pretending that what was happening to me wasn’t really happening. But watching Julia Roberts’ fictional character straighten the canned food in her kitchen cabinet, trying to stave off the violent temper of her husband, made me see the harsh reality of my own relationship.
One night, after an encounter that felt particularly scary, I escaped into the safety of my home. When my hands started shaking too hard to open the door to my room, I just sank to the ground in the hallway. I knew the relationship was wrong. Horribly wrong. I had known it for a long time. I knew it because of the radically different example set by my own family. I knew it because of the radically different example I saw in the Bible. I knew how Jesus treated women. I knew how God always fought for the oppressed, for those who couldn’t fight for themselves. I knew that what God said about women was quite different from what men like Bill Gothard preached. Eventually my hands stopped shaking, and I stood back up. I opened my door, pausing for a minute in the liminal space of the doorframe, shadowed by the light from the hall. “Help me,” I prayed. “Help me get out.”
The next day, a miracle happened. He didn’t call. He didn’t come. For over two weeks, he stayed gone. To this day, I don’t know why. All I know is that time and distance gave me strength. With his voice gone, I could hear God again. Over and over, I read 1 Corinthians, marveling at how it said so much more than “women should be silent” (1 Corinthians 14:34–35). So much more, in fact, that those two verses—once overpowering to me—were dwarfed. I realized the dialogical nature of the letter and Paul’s overarching plea for the congregants to follow him as he followed Christ (10:31–11:1). Chapter 13 became my solace as Paul showed the Corinthians a more excellent way than division and strife—the never-ending love of Christ. At the end of those two weeks, I realized how dimly I had been viewing God’s calling on my life. Emboldened by the Word of God and the care of my friends and family, I walked away. I never looked back.
This is my #MeToo story. My #ChurchToo story.
This experience, along with my husband’s firing, frames how I think about complementarianism today.
From both of these traumatic experiences, one much more recent and one fading farther and farther into the past, I am scarred. I will always carry the scars. I have experienced the worst of what complementarianism has to offer. But it wasn’t until I began to pull on the historical threads that weave complementarianism together that I really began to doubt it. You see, I had fallen for the biggest lie of all: that adhering to complementarianism is the only option for those who believe the Bible is the authoritative Word of God.
After all, Paul says clearly that the man is the head and the wife is to submit. Except now I know that when Paul’s words are contextualized both theologically and historically, they read rather differently. So while experience shapes my perspective of complementarian teachings, evidence from my research as a scholar, my teaching as a college professor, and my professional and personal study of the Bible has led me to abandon these teachings. Evidence shows me how Christian patriarchy was built, stone by stone, throughout the centuries. Evidence shows me how, century after century, arguments for women’s subordination reflect historical circumstances more than the face of God. Evidence shows me that just because complementarianism uses biblical texts doesn’t mean it reflects biblical truth. Evidence shows me the trail of sin and destruction left in the wake of teachings that place women under the power of men. Evidence shows me, throughout history, the women who have always known the truth about patriarchy and who have always believed that Jesus sets women free. So let me give you my final pitch. Because isn’t it time for all of us to be free?
Because It Is Time to Stop It
One of my friends, shortly after seeing a draft of my table of contents for this book, asked if the final chapter would contain a new vision for a theological approach to women in the church. Her words panicked me. I am a historian; not a theologian—and a very practical historian at that. In fact, my first thought when I read her words reveals a great deal about me. My thought was about a Mad TV comedy sketch in which Bob Newhart plays the psychiatrist Dr. Switzer. Dr. Switzer’s novel advice to clients, regardless of their problem, is two words: “Stop it!” “There you go,” says Dr. Switzer. “I mean, you don’t want to go through life being scared of being buried alive in a box, do you? I mean, that sounds frightening. . . . Stop it!”6
For those who still believe that biblical womanhood is God-ordained, my advice is Dr. Switzer’s: Stop it! We have become so embroiled in arguments about Greek grammar and whose Bible translation is better that we have forgotten what Jesus told us was most important: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. . . . [And] love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37–39). We have forgotten that the harshest words Jesus utters in the Bible are not to the ordinary people and sinners around him—the tax collectors and prostitutes and gentiles and women, whom the disciples kept trying to push away. The harshest words Jesus utters in the Bible are to the strict male religious leaders functioning as self-appointed border guards of orthodoxy. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth” (Matthew 23:27). Doesn’t it sound like Jesus told the Pharisees “Stop it!” because what they were doing led to death instead of life?
I only skirted the fringes of the Bill Gothard movement. But I can tell you from experience that it was a whitewashed tomb. It almost buried my young self. I remember once, years later, as I sat in my first faculty office, a newly minted PhD, a friend dropped by. He was part of both my academic and evangelical world, and we had been talking about the (most recent) evangelical sex scandal exploding the news. “I think there’s a link between complementarianism and abuse,” I told him. He shook his head, frowning a bit. “There’s no proof of that,” he said.
But there is. We can no longer deny a link between complementarianism and abuse. So much evidence now exists that John Piper, Al Mohler, and Russell Moore have gone on the defensive, trying to proclaim how their “Christian patriarchy” is different (see my first chapter).7 Du Mez eviscerates their claim, providing the proof my friend could not see—that the conservative church model of authoritarian leadership combined with rigid gender roles fosters a culture of abuse (decade after decade, church after church, leader after leader). Does this model hurt everyone? Of course not. It just hurt the thirty or more women who made allegations against Bill Gothard.8 It just hurt the victims who filed a class-action suit against Sovereign Grace Ministries for creating an environment in which, they alleged, the sexual abuse of children flourished.9 It just hurt the seven hundred victims of sexual abuse linked to Southern Baptist churches over a period of twenty years.10
It just hurt women like me.
Conservative evangelicals preach “a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power,” Du Mez writes. “It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making.”11 Not only do legal cases and newspaper reports and victim allegations tell us that Du Mez is right, but my own life bears witness. Hierarchy gives birth to patriarchy, and patriarchy gives birth to the abuse of both sex and power. I will never forget the words of Gwen Casados, who lost her daughter Heather to a drug overdose fourteen years and one suicide attempt after she was sexually molested as a teenager in her church choir room. “I never got her back,” her mother said.12
The historical reality is that social systems that invest some people with power over the lives of other people result in the destruction of people. Ed Stetzer recently observed that “the Venn diagram of reformed, complementarian, and misogynist has a pretty significant overlap.”13 This sounds like what Gerda Lerner described in 1986—only her Venn diagram was the significant overlap of patriarchy with militarism, hierarchy, and racism.14
Isn’t it time we take Dr. Switzer’s advice? Isn’t it time we stop an “appeal to the Bible that has awful consequences for millions of women”?15 Isn’t it time that white Christians realize that the roots of biblical womanhood extend from white supremacy? In order for early modern Europeans to biblically justify their white superiority, they had to champion the subservience of both women and Black people. As Katie Cannon explains, “Ideas and practices that favored equal rights of all people were classified as invalid and sinful because they conflicted with the divinely ordained structure that posited inequality between Whites and Blacks. . . . The institutional framework that required Black men, women and children to be treated as chattel, as possessions rather than as human beings, was understood as being consistent with the spirit, genius and precepts of the Christian faith.”16 Patriarchy walks hand in hand with racism, and it always has. The same biblical passages used to declare Black people unequal are used to declare women unfit for leadership. Patriarchy and racism are “interlocking structures of oppression.”17 Isn’t it time we get rid of both?
Once again, I propose that we stop fighting to make Christianity look like the world around us and start fighting to make it look like the world God inspired Paul to show us was possible: “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” (Galatians 3:28).
Because It Is Time to Fight Back
In July 1948, a medieval scholar and writer of detective fiction fought for women’s ordination. You have already met her. Her name is Dorothy L. Sayers, and she penned a response in 1948 to her friend C. S. Lewis. Lewis, the beloved author of the Narnia books and (my personal favorite) Surprised by Joy, was concerned about the Church of England’s movement toward ordaining women. He wrote to Sayers, asking to use her influence as a respected Christian intellectual to stand with him against female ordination. “The defence against the innovation must if possible be done by a woman,” he wrote. Lewis was certain Sayers agreed with him. After all, Lewis supported women as teachers and preachers. He just drew the line at the sacramental role of the priest, and he thought a woman’s voice advocating for this position would be especially useful.18
Sayers wouldn’t do it. “I fear you would find me rather an uneasy ally,” she wrote to him. “I can never find any logical or strictly theological reason against [women’s ordination]. In so far as the Priest represents Christ, it is obviously more dramatically appropriate that a man should be, so to speak, cast for the part. But if I were cornered and asked point-blank whether Christ Himself is the representative of male humanity or of all humanity, I should be obliged to answer ‘of all humanity’; and to cite the authority of St. Augustine for saying that woman is also made in the image of God.”19 No logical or theological reason exists to prohibit female priests (much less preachers and teachers), wrote Sayers. And so she refused Lewis’s request. She refused to remain silent about her views on women, and she fought for female ordination based on the imago Dei.
A few hundred years before, another female writer did something similar. You have also met her already. Her name is Christine de Pizan, and she used her pen to fight against misogyny during the fifteenth century. Through an unfortunate series of events, Christine de Pizan found herself a young widow with a family to support and no money. She was a well-educated woman, thanks to her father (as women were barred from university education at this time), and she had a web of connections with the French royal court. She soon began to write professionally, first as a manuscript copyist and later as an author. She began with poetry (love ballads) and devotional religious texts. Then, in 1404, she got her big break. Philip of Burgundy commissioned her to write a biography of his brother, Charles V. The rest, as they say, is history.
Of all she has written, she is perhaps most famous for her defense of women. One of the “bestsellers” in Christine’s world was a thirteenth-century text called The Romance of the Rose (yes, medieval people read trashy romance novels). It was an allegory about a young man questing after a rosebud (the symbolism should be clear). Although the text’s original author, Guillaume de Lorris, was less hostile toward women, another author—Jean de Meun—wrote rather differently about women in the lengthy conclusion he added to the text. Indeed, Christine de Pizan regarded the poem (especially as revised by Meun) as crude, immoral, slanderous, and misogynistic. The popularity of the text made it even more appalling (sort of like how I feel about Fifty Shades of Gray). As Christine wrote about Jean de Meun, “He has dared to defame and blame without exception an entire sex.”20
So Christine de Pizan fought back. She wrote a series of letters attacking the misogyny of The Romance of the Rose. She staked out an explicitly pro-woman position defending and empowering the female sex. She accused men of maligning and mistreating women for no good reason. She advocated for women to exercise more authority in their lives, instructing women on how to be strong and capable and even work in the world of men. She also confronted misogyny directly (such as in her later The Book of the City of Ladies), using her writings to try to change the prevailing negative ideas about women. While scholars disagree about how progressive (feminist) Christine actually was, they agree that Christine championed education as a path forward for women. She worked for not only better education for women themselves but also better education about the significant and often overlooked roles women have played throughout history.21
But why did she do this? The Romance of the Rose did not directly affect her. She had built a productive career, and her family was doing well. Why did she bother? Christine de Pizan realized that the battle against misogyny was bigger than her own life. The attitudes conveyed in The Romance of the Rose affected real women—women who might not be able to fight for themselves. Christine showed this in one of her letters against The Romance of the Rose, which told the story of a woman who suffered directly from the misogynistic text. She wrote,
A married man . . . believed in the Roman de la Rose as in the gospel. This was an extremely jealous man, who, whenever in the grip of passion, would go and find the book and read it to his wife; then he would become violent and strike her and say such horrible things as, “These are the kinds of tricks you pull on me. This good, wise man Master Jean de Meun knew well what women are capable of.” And at every word he finds appropriate, he gives her a couple of kicks or slaps. Thus it seems clear to me that whatever other people think of this book, this poor woman pays too high a price for it.22
Ideas matter. Ideas that depict women as less than men influence men to treat women as less than men. Ideas that objectify women result in women being treated like objects (sex objects, mostly). So it’s not any surprise that Paige Patterson, who commented on the body of a sixteen-year-old girl to a crowd of Christians (resulting in their laughs and applause), shares the same understanding of women’s roles as the Baptist churches involved in the sexual abuse of hundreds of women.23 Christine de Pizan understood that ideas matter. She understood so well that she connected the ideas presented in a popular book to the abuse of an unnamed woman who was trapped in an abusive marriage. She fought for this woman by fighting against damaging ideas about women.
As a Christian woman who grew up in the Southern Baptist world, I agree with Christine de Pizan. She realized that at the root of abusive behavior toward women—physical, emotional, psychological, economic—lay misogynistic ideas about women. She realized that misogyny hurts all of us, whether we recognize it or not, and it especially hurts those already marginalized by economics, education, race, and even religion. Christine used what she had to fight against that misogyny; to love those whom God loves; to help make the lives of women better, even the life of that “poor woman [who] pays too high a price.” Christine realized that to change the lives of women, she first had to change ideas about women.
As a pastor’s wife silenced in complementarian churches for many years, I also agree with Sayers. Although her response was not quite as dramatic as Christine’s attack on The Romance of the Rose, Sayers was just as bold. She refused to be silent. In her letter to Lewis, she refused to capitulate her convictions about women as equally made and gifted in the image of God. She actively spoke out on women’s behalf, clearly stating that there was no logical or theological reason to prohibit women’s ordination. She said this even when it meant challenging and possibly alienating her friend. I wish that I had had Sayers’s courage earlier in my life. Both Christine and Sayers exemplify a continuity I have found in my years researching and teaching women’s history: women never stop fighting to do what they believe God has called them to do.
Because It Is Time to Remember That We Do Not Stand Alone
In 1998 I bought a book I couldn’t afford on my graduate stipend. But my husband had just spent $50 on a new U2 CD, so I bought my book. Edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker, it is titled Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity. Kienzle and Walker argue that a narrow definition of preaching has obscured preaching women throughout Christian history. Yet regardless of whether the ecclesiastical establishment recognized their work, women persisted in preaching the gospel and ministering in the service of God. “The recurring presence of women’s preaching attests to both the continuing struggle within Christianity over problems of authority and the indomitable spirit of women’s voices,” write Kienzle and Walker.24 From Mary Magdalene to Waldensian women, Ursuline nuns, Moravian wives, Quaker sisters, Black women preachers, and suffragette activists, history shows us that women do not wait on the approval of men to do the work of God. We can hear women’s voices in our Christian past, and despite all the obstacles in their way, nevertheless, “they are preaching.”25
I have a mug in my office that bears the slogan “Write Women Back into History.” My goal isn’t just to change the stories I teach in my history classes, to let women know that they are just as much part of the human story as men are. My goal is also to change the future by more accurately understanding our past. What if evangelicals remembered women like Christine de Pizan and Dorothy L. Sayers? What if we remembered that women have always been leaders, teachers, and preachers, even in evangelical history? What if our seminaries used textbooks that included women? What if our Sunday school and Bible study curriculum correctly reflected Junia as an apostle, Priscilla as a coworker, and women like Hildegard of Bingen as preachers? What if we recognized women’s leadership the same way Paul did throughout his letters—even entrusting the Letter to the Romans to the deacon Phoebe? What if we listened to women in our evangelical churches the way Jesus listened to women?
Women stand with a great cloud of witnesses. We always have. It is time, far past time, for us to remember.
Because It Is Time for Us to Stand Together
It was late July 2017. I stood, with my map of London, right behind Royal Albert Hall. I was looking for suffragette historical sites that I could walk to that day when I suddenly realized where I was: Royal Albert Hall is one of the most important suffrage sites in London.
Between 1908 and 1913, the hall hosted around thirty different suffrage events, including the Women’s Social and Political Union meeting in spring 1908, headed by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel, Sylvia, and Adela. As Sylvia described the moment, “Every seat in the great Albert Hall was sold long before the day of the event, and hundreds of people were turned away at the doors. The vast audience was composed almost entirely of women, and there were 200 women stewards in white dresses.”26 Royal Albert Hall became known as the “Temple of Liberty” for women fighting for suffrage in Britain. Their goal was universal suffrage—for all women to have the right to vote. Eventually, they achieved this victory, and (despite British imperialism and imperialist attitudes among suffrage leaders) the vote for women in Britain would include women of color and working-class women.27 But suffrage came slowly, in stages. In 1918, only a limited group of women received suffrage, and it would take another ten years of fighting before women received equal voting rights with men.28
In 1917, one year before women’s first (partial) suffrage victory in England, the women of the Royal Albert Hall choir performed a concert for the National Service Mass Meeting for Women. The meeting honored women who worked in support of the Great War (ambulance drivers, nurses, Land Army, etc.), and it was attended by Queen Mary.29 The choir sang a song that would become emblematic of women’s perseverance in their fight for the vote. Indeed, the next year it was sung for the first time (but not the last) at a suffrage demonstration.
The song was William Blake’s poem “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time,” put to music by Sir Hubert Parry and reborn as the hymn “Jerusalem.”30 I stood on the steps of the Royal Albert Hall in the hazy morning light. I could imagine the words echoing throughout the curved building, filtering beyond its walls and into the streets of London.
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.31
I looked up at the rounded red and gold dome, rising in the still gray sky above. I knew my fight wasn’t over. We still didn’t know what the future held and the trauma of the past hurt every day. But my family was free. The oppressive atmosphere we had lived under was gone. I could write and teach without fear of retribution; my husband could teach and preach without fear of losing his job; our children were no longer being taught dangerous heresies about the eternal subordination of Jesus or damaging patriarchal ideas about women and men.
My daughter was free, but other women’s daughters were not.
Like the suffragists still fighting in 1918 for universal women’s suffrage in England, I could not cease from my Mental Fight either. I had already decided to stop being silent. Now it was time to speak loud enough for the evangelical world to hear.
Biblical womanhood is Christian patriarchy. The only reason it continues to flourish is because women and men—just like you and me—continue to support it. What if we all stopped supporting it? What if, instead of letting denominational divides and peripheral theological beliefs continue to separate us, we stood together as people of faith who believe that God has called us to change this world? Historically, one of the greatest problems for women is that we do not remember our past and we do not work together to change our future. We do not stand together. But what if we did?
What if we heeded Beth Moore’s plea to grapple with the entire texts of how women are portrayed throughout the Bible—not just in a few selected Pauline texts. “Above all else,” Moore writes, “we must search the attitudes & practices of Christ Jesus himself toward women. HE is our Lord. He had women followers!”32 What if we actually did this, and refused to let 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 drown out every other scriptural voice?
What if we stopped forgetting our past and remembered that women—just like us—preached their way through the landscape of Christian history? What if we remembered that we are surrounded by a cloud of female witnesses and that we will never stand alone?
What if we listened to Dorothy L. Sayers’s argument that she “can never find any logical or strictly theological reason against [women’s ordination]”?33 What if we realized that God has never stopped calling women to do his work—as preachers, teachers, missionaries, evangelists, and authors? What if we realized that when we look at the whole of the global world, it simply doesn’t make sense to define occupations by gender? What does make sense is Paul’s reminder that all of our work is important and that by doing what we are called to do, we build up the Body of Christ together. What if we finally stood together, united by our belief in Jesus instead of divided by arguments over power and authority?
What if we followed the example of Jesus, who let Mary of Bethany sit at his feet like a male disciple and who overruled his disciples to make sure he heard the words of the woman of Canaan? What if we realized that, even when the male disciples pushed women away, Jesus always listened to women speak? Complementarianism is patriarchy, and patriarchy is about power. Neither have ever been about Jesus.
I don’t remember when I started it, but for a long time now, I have been dismissing my students from class with this phrase: Go, be free! I think that is a fitting way to end this book as well.
Jesus set women free a long time ago.
Isn’t it finally time for evangelical Christians to do the same?
Go, be free!