The Making of Biblical Womanhood
It’s always been this way is a statement I have heard too many times to count.
The certainty behind those words in white American evangelical spaces has proven to be problematic. When we look to church history, we learn that things have not always been this way. Other times, we only have to think back a few years within our own contexts to see change, or fear preventing change.
I can’t think of an issue I’ve been told it’s always been this way about more than gender roles in the church. Until recently, I’ve been in conservative white evangelical spaces for most of my life. I know as well as anyone how complementarian culture can cast a long, dark shadow over churches.
It’s always been this way…
It’s easy to nod along with strict gender roles if you’ve been isolated to an inward-looking subculture. When one has nothing to compare their subcultural experiences and beliefs to, it’s easy to inappropriately universalize both. But how did we get where we are now?
Does the Bible really say women are never allowed to teach men? Should women only be homemakers or be strongly encouraged in that direction? Will society collapse if we don’t adhere to rigid — sometimes even cartoonish — gender roles, as is often implied in white evangelical spaces?
The Making of Biblical Womanhood excavates some of the roots of western Christianity and provides insightful answers. It shows us the why behind the modern white evangelical deference to domineering male leaders within a subculture that often disregards female perspectives and gifts. Story and history entwine beautifully in this book. Rather than provide a summary — seriously, just go buy it — I want to explore a few themes in the book and some of the conversation around it.
The Bible, untold stories, and history pose a serious challenge to the complementarian narrative
So many memories ebbed and flowed in my mind as I read The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Dr. Beth Allison Barr, Professor of History at Baylor University. After describing leaving a beloved church because her husband was fired for questioning the institution’s decision to not allow women in certain aspects of ministry, Barr writes:
“And the hardest truth of it all was that I bore greater responsibility than most in our church because I had known that complementarian theology was wrong…I knew that it was based on a handful of verses read apart from their historical context and used as a lens to interpret the rest of the Bible… Cultural assumptions and practices regarding womanhood are read into the biblical text, rather than the biblical text being read within its own historical and cultural context.”(6)
Such experiences in white evangelicalism are as stunning as they are familiar. What I found largely unfamiliar was the next 200+ pages, in which Barr shares a more robust history of women in church history — many from the medieval era, as Barr is a medieval historian— who taught and sacrificed so well for God, the church, and their neighbors.
While I was encouraged to see familiar stories like Mary, Martha, Phoebe, and Junia presented well in their cultural context, I must admit that I’d never heard the stories of women like Hilda of Whitby and Margery Kempe. Barr shows how, time and again, men have downplayed the role of women in church history, or changed the narrative of their stories so much that we miss their true character altogether.
This concept of biblical womanhood exists today as part of a set of gendered cultural practices that white evangelical leaders call complementarianism. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s basically a modern evangelical rebranding of patriarchy. The word is not found in the Bible. It came into being in the 1970/80s as a very American experience, although it has been exported to some other parts of the world with mixed results.
White evangelical leaders claim that complementarianism is the biblical view that men and women have different roles in marriage, the church, and on questions of social authority. They say that men and women have equal value in God’s eyes, but that does not mean they have the same responsibilities or can perform the same duties. Many white evangelicals treat this gendered lifestyle as a static concept stemming from the insularity of their own subculture, but even more theologically well-traveled complementarians view the living out of these beliefs as existing on a spectrum. It looks different in different places. Some common beliefs though are:
Only men can hold church leadership positions. Women may be allowed to lead, but cannot be given authority and teaching opportunities over men.
Men lead in the household, with the wife playing various supportive roles.
Women must submit to their husband’s leadership and needs, be it socially, culturally, or sexually.
The Making of Biblical Womanhood is an untelling of the complementarian narrative, using both history and Scripture to accomplish the task. Barr shows how a series of definable historical events paved the way for what is known as biblical womanhood today. Going to Scripture, she examines the first female deacons and apostles, who all subverted the gender roles of the empire around them to serve the early Church well.
What I found most intriguing though was Barr’s examination of the Apostle Paul. This is where most white evangelical leaders go to argue for complementarianism (see 1 Timothy 2, as just one example). It’s easy to read Paul as having some retrograde views on women if you take the “plain-reading” approach to the Bible as many evangelicals do. Barr mentions how some of her students who read the Bible this way tell her “I hate Paul” due to how uncharitable he appears to women. (39)
But Barr shows that Paul was especially revolutionary when his writings are viewed in his context of the patriarchal Roman Empire. Her response to some of her students has been “it isn’t Paul they hate; rather, they hate how Paul’s letters have become foundational to an understanding of biblical gender roles that oppress women.” (41) She asks:
“Could we have gotten Paul exactly backward? What if his focus was never male headship and female submission? What if his vision was bigger than we ever imagined? What if instead of replicating an ancient gender hierarchy, Paul was showing us how the Christian gospel sets even the Roman household free?” (55)
Later, Barr shows how the failure to ask such important questions has led to undesirable results over the centuries:
The emphasis on Pauline texts by early modern reformers was born into a secular world already supported by a gender hierarchy. Rather than Protestant reformers reviving a biblical model, they were simply mapping Scripture onto a preceding secular structure. Instead of Scripture transforming society, Paul’s writings were used to prop up the patriarchal practices already developing in the early modern world. (123)
We see the same thing today in much of white American evangelicalism. Scripture has been mapped onto American culture since before the country was founded. The Bible has been used to justify slavery, the murder and forced displacement of indigenous peoples, segregation, and — yes — harsh gender roles that have given way to abuse in our institutions and culture. And many of those who preceded and founded modern white American evangelicalism played negative roles in those darker chapters of our history.
Why is it this way? The Making of Biblical Womanhood provides a robust multi-faceted answer, but two thoughts came to mind as I turned the pages.
First, many white American evangelicals hold to a heavily-biased version of history that glorifies the good, downplays the bad, and, in some cases, rewrites history altogether. Put another way, evangelicals have crafted their own history, one that portrays them as the heroes of Christianity and the United States, and retold it back to themselves for decades. Enough time has passed that, for a lot of people, this is the only version of history they know.
This reality has made some evangelical gatekeepers incapable of listening to other perspectives and stories that challenge their beliefs, because much of their work is done in an intellectually ghettoized and self-legitimizing culture. The logical implications of this can be incredibly destructive (i.e. widespread evangelical support for Trump). When something or someone doesn’t fit neatly into their cultural and theological grid, they are treated as a threat to be destroyed. We’ll examine that more in a minute.
The absence of a more robust historical view and a lack of understanding how the past shapes us today is not an empty void. More often than not, ideology has taken its place. Statements like it’s always been this way are a tell-tale sign that the nuances of history are unknown or unappreciated.
Second, I think many of us have underestimated the consumer culture surrounding the English Standard Version (ESV) translation of the Bible, which is very heavy-handed on gender politics. I can’t think of a single time I’ve heard a complementarian argument come from any other translation.
There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that entrenching complementarian teaching was a major goal of at least some of the translation committee. To borrow a phrase from biblical scholar Mark Strauss, some evangelicals treat the ESV as the “Standard English Version” (i.e. it’s the only reliable translation). On page 23 of his critique of the ESV, he writes on gender:
“One wonders why, if the ESV footnote acknowledges that ‘adelphoi’ here means ‘brothers and sisters,’ it was not translated as such. The most likely answer is that the translators were concerned about their constituents, who would have objected to this perceived condescension to a feminist agenda. All translation is to some extent political, and in this case perhaps it was deemed necessary to sacrifice accuracy for expediency.”
Yikes.
Altogether, Barr’s examination of Scripture within the cultural contexts of the time passages were written, untold female stories, and history pose a serious challenge to the complementarian narrative. That’s useful on its own, but it also raises another important question that can’t be avoided.
Theological commitments, ignorance, or idolatry?
One of the primary sets of questions I found myself wrestling with while reading The Making of Biblical Womanhood had to do with motivations.
Do men and women who believe in this narrow type of womanhood believe because of their reading of Scripture, or because they were told this is the only way to live? Do those who reject the evidence that gender roles in Christianity can be culturally-rooted do so because of evidence they perceive saying otherwise, or because they’ve confused a certain lifestyle with the Gospel? And why do some complementarians act as if tweaking rigid gender roles will lead to the end of Christianity and the downfall of the United States?
Like history, the answers are complicated.
I know more than a few kind-hearted complementarians who take Scripture seriously and respect people who disagree with them on this issue. I’ve even seen some stand up to abusers and be verbally pummeled for doing so. For those of us who have been chewed up and spit out of a white evangelical institution, we know that’s not nothing.
Most people I’ve met over the years though live under complementarianism without having even heard the term or knowing the history of where it comes from. This stems from leaders telling them it’s always been this way and blind loyalty to their institutions. People don’t know what they don’t know. There should be grace for that up to a point; however, we must also understand that honest ignorance can be dangerous. More on that later.
Disturbingly, I’ve met quite a few white evangelicals who openly commit idolatry to complementarian culture. Their faith — if such a thing can be called faith — is built on hyper-narrow views of a gendered, white ethnocentric lifestyle, not the redeeming love of Christ. The subtitle of Barr’s book is How The Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. This isn’t a punchy marketing ploy to sell more books. For some white evangelicals, subjugating women is Gospel truth. Let me provide just one example.
Purity culture was all the rage as I was coming of age in the 2000s. Girls were told to dress modestly to protect their sexual purity and, more importantly, the purity of the boys around them. Boys were often taught that their biggest battle was controlling their sexual impulses. As I mentioned in my review of Jesus and John Wayne — another fantastic book you should read — talking about sex and purity all the time only made teenagers think about sex all the time. My generation was told that if we saved ourselves for marriage, sex would be fireworks (spoilers: for a lot of people, it wasn’t).
Perhaps inevitably, purity culture was bound to make an appearance in The Making of Biblical Womanhood. Barr shares a story of one of her brushes with purity culture while working with a youth group. After describing a camp employee trying to enforce a confusing dress code during a “sticky hot” summer — come visit the American South in July if you want to experience that— she shares what happened next:
“She wasn’t happy with me, but she let us continue. That conversation was the beginning of a weeklong modesty battle with camp leaders. After the worship service, one of the camp directors paid me a special visit to tell me that the girls needed to comply with the recently changed dress code. Tank tops were not allowed. I challenged him. Sleeveless was allowed. Our youth had only brought so many things to wear. I was unmoved.
Apparently the camp leaders were unmoved too. They showed up at my door that night with a box of extra-large T-shirts for the girls to wear. I think my mouth fell open. I was really upset. I returned the box.
The next morning, the girls and I were called into a special meeting. One of the young men working at the camp came to talk with us. It is really important, he told us, that beautiful young women be careful in how they dress. Boys have difficulty controlling their imaginations, and when they see a bra strap, well, it can cause them to sin. Modesty honors God, and didn’t the girls want to honor God?
Once again, we were given a box of shirts. This time the message was clear — cover up, or we will ask you to leave. We never went back to that camp.” (154–155)
So much cringe.
My experience with purity culture was more nuanced than others in my generation. Looking back, there were people around me who bought into it. There were also good men and women who lived the complementarian lifestyle, but strongly emphasized good character development in ways that undermined purity culture. Someone once gave me the book I Kissed Dating Goodbye and a leader cautioned me that it was “problematic.” I don’t remember purity rings at my childhood church. I did see them elsewhere, displayed more as a marker of tribal loyalty than adherence to any sexual ethic. Being a teenager is already confusing. Purity culture made it worse.
What purity culture felt like for a lot of 2000s teens. Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash.
Purity culture made boys feel like we would never be able to control ourselves. It sexualized girl’s bodies against their will. It made many feel ashamed for no good reason. I saw some of the harm of purity culture despite avoiding the worst of it. It’s not hard to imagine how destructive it was at churches where impossible standards were enforced with brutal abandon.
I write this to show how one aspect of the bad fruits of complementarianism decimated my generation in so many ways. It remains a primary driver of the deconstruction phenomenon and casts a long shadow over our marriages. Sadly, for many white evangelicals, that doesn’t matter. Adhering to rigid gender roles and expectations is far more important than the damaged people in the rear-view mirror. Questioning what white patriarchal authority says is treated as questioning God himself. And that’s exactly how this subculture morphs from being a lifestyle choice into open idolatry.
Not every white American evangelical commits idolatry to complementarian culture, but enough certainly do to cause severe problems. Others are so resistant to discussing minor changes that it is easy to confuse their cultural commitments with idolatry. In my experience, this stems from a mix of monolithic interpretations of identity in Scripture, failure to confront fear in the face of abuse, not being taught how to deal with conflict, and discomfort with living in the tension of completely trusting a God who is so mysterious that He cannot be fully understood. The urge for certainty and clinging to false notions of it pulls us away from Christ.
Which brings me to the final point I want to explore.
Posture, character formation, and the fruits of the spirit can never be undervalued
I want to shift gears and examine how The Making of Biblical Womanhood is being received. If you go online, you’ll find that people have very strong emotions about the book. Disturbingly, some manifestations of those emotions are far from Christlike.
Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and writer at The Gospel Coalition, opened his critique of the book by casting doubt on some of Barr’s real-life experiences, a move that is both not befitting of a pastor and common in this subculture. His words are aggressively ungenerous and odd, something Barr points out in her response. At some point though, DeYoung seems to have just moved on.
Others haven’t.
The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) has shown an especially strong distaste for healthy posture, good character formation, and the fruits of the spirit in their never-ending personal attacks on Barr. If you’ve never heard of CBMW, here’s how they explain themselves:
“In 1987, CBMW was established primarily to help the church defend against the accommodation of secular feminism. At this time many evangelicals were beginning to experiment with an ideology that would later become known as evangelical feminism. This was a significant departure from what the church had practiced from its beginning regarding the role of men and women in the home and local church. The effects of this departure have not been benign. As evangelical feminism continues to spread, the evangelical community needs to be aware that this debate reaches ultimately to the heart of the gospel.”
Those are…bold claims. Regardless of how that makes you feel, CBMW is taken very seriously in many white American evangelical circles, which is why I’m going to take them seriously here.
The response to The Making of Biblical Womanhood from CBMW can only be described as sinful. CBMW President Denny Burk seems to closely monitor Barr’s tweets and is constantly trying to cram her into box so he can more easily attack her — often misusing the Chicago Statement with creedal weight to do so— even though the authors were clear in the preface it should not be used as such. Disgustingly, CBMW Director Colin Smothers attacked Barr’s church community as a fundraising tool, which backfired as Christians across the country sent a flood of donations to her church instead.
These are just two of many examples. When white American evangelicalism’s flagship organizations and some of the subculture’s top leaders behave so poorly, we should not be surprised when some in the rank and file do the same. Evidence suggests that CBMW is little more than a fundamentalist gatekeeping outfit pushing a culture of brutal gender idolatry onto churches and cyberstalking those who disagree with them. And, remember, this is the organization many pastors and elders look to for guidance.
Watching some of this play out has reminded me how little value is placed on healthy posture, good character formation, and the fruits of the spirit in certain parts of white American evangelicalism. Even if these men were right in their views, they make it exceedingly difficult for others who might take them seriously to do so because their posture is dismissive and domineering and they are obsessed with gender roles (power structure) over good character formation and pursuit of truth (signs of sanctification at work). Time and again, we’ve seen them aim a flamethrower at the fruits of the spirit, emptying the tank as they conflate a narrow, culturally-rooted, and unmoored-from-history interpretation of scripture with biblical inerrancy.
Inevitably, they end up exhibiting the very behavior that Barr calls out in The Making of Biblical Womanhood. Power usurps some of the most practical aspects of what it means to be a Christian. Lower order doctrines and beliefs are treated as first order ones, and first order ones abandoned. Institutions are protected at the expense of victims. Leaders aren’t held accountable and victims are railroaded. In the end, the pursuit of a very narrow-minded Christendom usurps Christ himself. Don’t believe this is happening? Kevin DeYoung gave away the game in this shocking 2020 Gospel Coalition piece.
I love that this stock photo exists. Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Questions of gender roles in the Church are not a first order doctrine, but many evangelicals don’t know that because some of their leaders act as if complementarian culture is their god. It is shocking, but not surprising. This is a continuation of an aggressive American masculinity and subdued feminity bleeding over into certain parts of the church and being repackaged as “Gospel-truth.” In white American evangelicalism, the 1950s-era is looked back on with rose-colored glasses. Interestingly, that’s when government investment disproportionately benefited white evangelicals, the country was still racially segregated by law, and — you guessed it — gender hierarchy was deeply entrenched everywhere. It’s not difficult to understand why such a lifestyle became Gospel-truth. Once you have eyes to see it, you can’t unsee it.
Of course, not all evangelicals behave this way. I learned about the necessity of having a healthy posture, good character formation, and the fruits of the spirit in the evangelical church I grew up in. I will always be grateful for that.
But the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve learned that some of my earlier experiences are not representative of what many others have been through. CBMW’s teachings are everywhere in this subculture. It’d be delusional not to understand how their toxic masculinity, lack of good character formation, and abandonment of the fruits of the spirit trickled into faith communities alongside their abusive teachings.
Closing Thoughts
After reading the final pages of The Making of Biblical Womanhood, a wave of contradictory emotions washed over me. I felt inspired, hopeful, grateful, and pessimistic all at the same time.
Inspired by the female voices I’d never heard before. Hopeful that things can change because they have been different in the past. Grateful for Beth Allison Bar and her work to help people better understand the why behind the what. Pessimistic because I’m intimately aware of the dominant church culture surrounding me here in Tennessee, arguably the geographic headquarters of white American evangelicalism in more ways than one.
In many churches here, issues far less consequential than gender are fought against tooth and nail. I’ll never forget the time a frustrated local pastor told me that changing the light bulbs in his church was viewed as a slippery slope. I chuckled. The story he then told showed he wasn’t kidding.
The past few years, I’ve come to believe that this subculture will never change. I’ve often wondered how we can move forward when this is the dominant church culture in your geographic area, even if you aren’t directly in it.
Arguing with a lot of white evangelicals from a different interpretation or translation of Scripture doesn’t seem to help. Providing stories of the pain, abuse, or broken marriages stemming from complementarianism doesn’t either. Again, I’ve heard phrases like it’s always been this way and but the Bible says too many times to count. I take such conflations of one’s reading of Scripture with the concept of biblical inerrancy seriously because those people wanted me to take them seriously.
But I’ve since come to understand that this framing isn’t helpful. The self-annihilating white evangelical culture war against everyone who has even mild disagreements with them is as two-dimensional as it is destructive. It is somehow both boring and infuriating at the same time. I’d rather lean into the messiness of history. I’d rather be in diverse relationships that provide a richer view of the world and what God is doing in it. I want discipleship to change and sanctify me because that’s what discipleship is supposed to do. I want men and women to experience the fullness of God in community.
Perhaps closing with a story can hint at a potential path forward. I recently had a conversation with a friend who believes in gender roles. He read The Making of Biblical Womanhood a few months before me. I asked if Barr’s work changed anything for him. After some thought, he said:
“I still think gender roles are biblical. My big takeaway though is that we can do the right thing the wrong way for the wrong reasons, to the point that it’s not right anymore. All the hurt marriages, support of Trump, and people leaving churches tells me we’re doing this wrong. So many women in this book lived so much better than we are. Why wouldn’t we want to be more like them?
I don’t think I can call myself a Christian if I can’t listen to people who have been hurt by my beliefs. I don’t want to abandon what I believe, but I want better results. I think that’s possible, but I also understand why a lot of people don’t.”
There’s a lot there, and I’m not suggesting that softer complementarianism is the answer. Barr closes her book with a benediction for women who have reached their breaking point: go, be free! (218). If this gendered cultural system is crushing you and your faith, leave. Run if you must.
What is in his words that I find hopeful though is a real desire to do better. I hear a recognition that there are dangerous problems baked into complementarianism. I hear a respect for egalitarians and a broken heart for the abused. This subculture may never change, but people can.
I’m convinced this stock photo was made for this piece. Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash.
Like my friend, we should all be focusing less on building up fortresses that turn into subcultural concentration camps and more on listening across the chasm of our differences and lived experiences. This does not mean the answer is an unresponsive centrism. The answer is having churches that love God and our neighbors well within a culture of goodness. There are many ways to do that, because every expression of the Gospel in community is enculturated. After all, we’re all human.
This also means there is common ground. If there is one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the brutal gender idolatry pushed by CBMW and others does not belong in the church. It is neither just nor biblical. If a faith community chooses to live by defined gender roles with strong systems of accountability and ample ways for men and women to serve because it matches the personality of the church, then that is what it is.
But it’s another thing entirely to openly oppress people, including complementarians who sincerely want to live for Jesus and who demand accountability. The CBMW is one of the main roots of an oppressive cultural system that those who believe in gender roles and those who do not can work together to uproot and overthrow. And, to be blunt, if you wish to remain in a church culture built on gender roles, you should find a better apologetic for your beliefs, because the CBMW has proven to be one of the worst.
I think this is what makes The Making of Biblical Womanhood so incredibly freeing. One reason Barr’s research is helpful is that the history she provides is story-centric. Everyone can relate to these stories. They are colorful and take us outside our boxes. They tell us something about different times, places, and people. And they tell us something about ourselves.
Barr has pried open a space for real people to have real conversations about an issue that touches us all. She has blazed a path around the absurd intransigence of gatekeepers by showing that this narrow view of biblical womanhood is deeply influenced by historical moments and modern culture, and thus often departs from Christianity.
Systemic change that brings glory to God and expands human flourishing is rarely achieved overnight. But I’ve seen the once impossible becoming possible. The freedom found in Christ stands in stark contrast to the shackles that John Piper, Wayne Grudem, and many other white evangelical leaders have forced onto people for decades. We can all rejoice that Barr reminds us our call is to follow Jesus, who breaks such chains as we move closer to him.
The Making of Biblical Womanhood is as much a story of Barr’s love for truth and her brothers and sisters in Christ as it is a work of history. The revolutionary love of Jesus can be felt in the turning of every page, which is why I encourage others to take her work and voice to heart.
I explore faith and American church culture from Memphis, TN. Never miss an article by signing up for my free newsletter or becoming a member. You can also subscribe to my podcast.
