A local mayor recently made headlines when an e-mail he wrote became public. The e-mail was to a council member and requested that only men be selected to offer up prayer at city council meetings. He included several verses from the Bible defending his position. The Bible verses said “Let your women keep silent in churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church,” and also “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” When media caught wind of the e-mail, the mayor did not deny or retract what he’d said. Instead, he defended his position, stating that, “I believe a lady can be president of the United States. I believe a lady can be CEO of a company, the superintendent of a school district.” He simply didn’t want them praying at a council meeting.
Of course, his statement sparked outrage from residents of the city and beyond. I am guessing that, for many, especially those who did not grow up within conservative Christianity, there was probably also a general feeling of shock over a city mayor quoting a 2000 year old religious document about how women should behave. And I’d guess that equally perplexing to someone unfamiliar with the mayor’s worldview, was his response to the media, where he basically stated that he does indeed view women as equals and that he believes that women can be presidents or CEO’s; they just can’t preach or pray or lead men in anything spiritual.
This juxtaposition of women being viewed as capable of leading men in business and government but not as being worthy to say a simple prayer in a public space is quite confusing. It is also completely illogical, but it is 100% familiar to me. It is exactly what I heard from men in leadership positions my entire life. And if, like me, you grew up in an evangelical, Baptist, “Bible” or otherwise theologically conservative church, it’s probably all too familiar to you, as well.
In some ways, I think it may have been easier if I had just been told flat out that women weren’t equal to men; maybe I would’ve climbed out from under that falsehood more quickly and easily. Instead, I was told that women were indeed equal to men but that we were different. Men were the spiritual leaders; women were the helpers. This is how God intended it, and the evidence was right there in the book that we esteemed as completely inerrant and inspired by God. Therefore, to question the church’s position on women’s roles was to question God himself.
How women were viewed outside of church life varied from church to church and even from family to family. There were many families and pastors who felt that women should be a “help-meet” both within the church and within her family, with the man making the decisions and the woman supporting those decisions. She was often expected to do this by staying home with her children while her husband earned an income. But it became more and more difficult for the church to maintain such archaic standards when it was becoming obvious that women absolutely could gain high level professional positions and that they could do a superb job at them. And so, the position of many churches and pastors became that women could hold any role they were qualified for in “secular” culture, just not in the church.
I was fortunate to be raised by parents who expressed a belief in equality for women. My parents made decisions together, and I was always encouraged to get an education and pursue a career. It was at church that I got mixed messages, though. For example, only my father, not my mother was on the “elder board,” the group of men who made the spiritual and administrative decisions for the church. (Many churches actually have separate elder boards and administrative boards, and women are allowed on the administrative boards only, increasing the irony of the entire situation.) My dad administered communion with other men, the pastors were all men, and the church decisions were all made by men. But at home, my mom was the spiritual guide, who encouraged prayer, Bible reading, and general devotion to Jesus. My mom was not the type of woman who let men push her around, and she spoke up to the church leaders about her feelings countless times. My father loved that about her, but a lot of men definitely did not.
I want to take a moment to stop and stress here how very normal most of these male leaders were, though. They weren’t outspoken chauvinists. They were mostly kind and gentle and, I believe, they sincerely wanted the best for everyone in the congregation. Most of them had simply bought into a misguided belief system that lead to very unhealthy views of women. On the one hand, they were dedicated to the teachings of Jesus and the radical love that he showed for everyone, with a special emphasis on humility and loving the “least of these.” On the other hand, they were convinced that a very old book held the literal words of God, binding them to the same view of women held by society approximately two thousand years ago. That wasn’t an easy balance to maintain, I’m sure. But unfortunately, there were many victims of this toxic theology, and I believe the number one victims were the girls growing up under these teachings.
There are many moments that stand out in my mind as I piece together what it meant to be a female in a religion that valued male spirituality only. One such memory occurred the summer after my first year in college. I had been part of the same church congregation since childhood; my parents had been founding members, and I was very connected and active within the church. I felt compelled to start a summer Bible study for the other college students, and my parents encouraged me to go and speak with the pastor about it. The pastor told me that he thought it was great idea; I just needed to find a male to “officially” lead the group. At that point, it still had not fully sunken in that I was not seen as someone who could be a spiritual authority just because of my gender. I could recite all of the Bible verses about it, but it had not sunken in. I was too strong of person, too strong of a leader to make that realization quite yet. And so, I found a male to come along to the group meetings, but otherwise, I proceeded to lead the group all by myself.
I was very attached to my religious belief system, and I only considered attending religious colleges. In spite of graduating Summa Cum Laude and being chosen as a National Merit Scholar, spirituality always came first. I gave up my chances at attending a top-ranked school to follow the path I felt God had laid out for me. I decided to attend none other than Jerry Falwell’s uber-conservative Liberty University. At Liberty, in spite of it being a much more politically conservative environment than I was used to, the theology was pretty much the same. Women were professors, women were administrators, but women were never pastors, never seminary instructors, never ministers. The mantra at Liberty, as well as in my childhood church, was that women were not to spiritually lead men. They could lead other women and children, but not men. You’d think I’d have felt insulted by the time I reached adulthood and was still being told this, but honestly, I still believed that I could do anything. I felt, deep inside, that I wanted to be a minister, even though I knew logically that this path was not an option for me under the belief system that I held.
At Liberty, we had “convocation” every Wednesday morning. Convocation was usually preaching and band-lead worship music. We frequently had guest speakers come to preach, as well, usually men. But every once in a while, we had a woman come to speak. There were CEO’s of successful companies, authors, and radio personalities. I clearly remember that each and every time a woman spoke, the Liberty staff that introduced her would go out of their way to stress that she was not “preaching,” she was only sharing her professional knowledge with us. But those women shared as much spiritual wisdom as any of the men; the school just couldn’t call it preaching. I did start to see through the smokescreen just a little around that time. But since the inerrancy of Scripture was the number one most important principal of the theology I was taught, I had no way to get around the verses saying that women could not hold positions of leadership in church. And so I just carried on.
After college, I got married quickly. I considered going to seminary, then decided instead on a graduate degree in theology when I finally realized that I couldn’t become a pastor. When my husband didn’t find a job near any of the theology schools I was considering, I ended up settling on a counseling program. My hope was that I could be a staff counselor at a church, the next closest thing to being a pastor, I thought.
I wasted no time in letting my husband know that he needed to become the spiritual leader of our household. This was really the first time that I was directly confronted with the ludicrous things I espoused to believe. When I was single, I could skirt around some of the verses about women that weren’t directly addressed to me. But as a wife, the Bible made it clear that I needed to be “lead” by a man. And again, because I had been taught a clear separation between the spiritual world and the “secular” world, I never felt that I couldn’t be as (or more) professionally successful than my husband; I just needed him to step up and be the pastor of our little home. (Pausing to gag now.) My husband didn’t seem very interested in becoming any kind of leader over me, and that was a point of contention between us for quite some time.
A few years into our marriage, we had a repeat of the experience I’d had just after high school. I saw the need for a young adults group at our church, so I decided to start one. My sweet husband couldn’t care less about starting a group, but I pushed him into “co-leading” the group, which just meant that he came to the Bible studies with me each week and that the pastor had a male to officially list as the leader. Every once in a while, the pastor would call my husband up in front of the congregation to say a few words about the group, and I’d go up there with him. My husband would always say, “Oh, it’s actually my wife who leads the group.” But the pastor continued addressing him as the leader for the length of time we attended that church.
Looking back, I cannot believe how very long it took me to come to my senses. I cannot stress enough, though, that to deny the church’s teachings on women’s roles (or on any teaching that was supported with a Bible verse, for that matter) was, in a sense, to risk one’s entire faith. We were taught that the Bible and every word in it was absolutely inerrant and completely literal. We were also taught that our belief in Scriptural authority was central to our entire faith. So there was no getting around verses that clearly stated that women were to submit to men without challenging the very core of everything I was still trying so hard to believe.
Finally, though, my beliefs about women and the church began to unravel. I had a particular friend who attended one of the largest “Bible” churches in our area. I had attended a “Women’s Conference” at that church and was absolutely dumbfounded when a man walked onto the stage and introduced himself as the Pastor of Women’s Ministries. So when my friend told me that she attended that same church, I could not help but blurt out how ridiculous I felt it was to have a male pastor over women’s ministries. I don’t remember her response, but I remember that I felt comfortable telling her my feelings because I saw her as a strong and independent woman.
About a year later, it was another encounter with this same friend that, for some reason, really solidified my being 100% done with pretending that men were in charge of my spirituality. My friend was publicly stepping down from a position, and she said to everyone present that she had prayed about it and that her husband had told her that it was what she should do. I had heard women say similar things countless times before, but maybe because I heard it coming from a strong person whom I very much respected, I felt a new kind of anger inside me. It was an “I’m done with this shit,” kind of anger. I came to find out a few years later that my friend was actually done with that shit, too. Thank, goodness. (And for the record, her husband was a good guy who didn’t tell her what to do. I think she was just saying the politically correct thing and getting the Hell out of there.)
In spite of all of the years that I was taught that I couldn’t do the things that men could, I somehow never believed, not for even one second, that I wasn’t as good as a man. Never. And I can thank a lot of people in my life for that. In spite of the fact that I was raised with such a twisted theology, I also had supportive parents, teachers, and mentors who believed in me. And so I believed in myself.
But growing up in a spiritual community where only men passed down the moral directives, only men made the decisions, only men provided pastoral guidance, had definite negative effects on me. It was devastating in many ways, and it ultimately provided a death blow to many of the would-be positive aspects of my faith.
I think a very important thing that many people don’t realize is that the churches who teach women to spiritually submit to men are all around them. They are the huge megachurches that you pass on the highways, as well as the small fundamentalist ones you see on country roads. They are the hip churches that serve fair trade coffee, as well as the little white buildings full of older congregants. These churches are full of regular people who go to school with your kids and go to work with you.
Or maybe one of these churches is the place that you call your spiritual home. The people there are kind, and the pastor preaches that men should lovingly and gently lead their wives. What’s the harm in that? Make no mistake; your daughters are hearing the message that they are not as good as your sons, and it is impacting them. Whether they realize it right now, it is damaging them. By allowing them to be told that they are not worthy to be spiritual leaders, and by allowing them to believe that they are not as good as men, their self-esteem cannot be what it could otherwise be.
That is why I will no longer set foot in a church that excludes women (or LGBTQ+ persons) from their leadership team. It’s time for churches to face the reality that their outdated theologies are actually hurting people. I know that it is a very difficult reality for some of the kind-hearted people who attend these churches to face, but it is an important reality. It is quite possibly the most important reality if these churches want to be the loving places that they espouse to be.
There is a protest being planned against the mayor who made the anti-women statements, and I think that is great idea. But I also think that understanding the worldview behind his statements is important. With understanding and action, there is hope for change.