Do egalitarians just Giving in to Culture?
My husband Keith (bless him!) spends an inordinate amount of time on social media arguing with complementarians. And he’s noticed some commonalities in their arguments.
So he decided to wite a series on the big problems with the way that complementarians approach the Bible, and the gender debate as a whole. The first post went up on Monday looking at how pulling verses out of context is the wrong way to do biblical interpretation.
Today he wants to ask, “who actually is ‘just following culture and ignoring the Bible'”?
Enjoy!
What if complementarians are the ones “following culture”?
I am not a theologian.
In fact, none of us at Bare Marriage are theologians, so rather than getting into debates about Biblical interpretation, we try to stick to what we know. We know that Sheila’s research (in agreement with other peer reviewed research) consistently shows:
- Marriages flourish when both husband and wife are equally valued and work together as a team
- Hierarchy in marriage results in negative outcomes.
You can see our book The Marriage You Want for more, including super cool charts, especially in chapter 1!
The data speaks for itself and is clear. Now, if that doesn’t happen to line up with somebody’s interpretation of what the Bible says, frankly I believe the onus is on them to explain their view, not me.
But often online I am confronted by people who are more than ready to ignore real world evidence unless I can “square it with the Bible”. So, eternally the optimist, I try to explain how I interpret the Scriptures in light of what I know. I basically present what I believe is a cogent case for Biblical egalitarianism.
It makes total sense to me, but often not to the person on the other side of the conversation who then calls me “unbiblical”, “feminist”, “heretic” or some combination of the three. I expect many of you have had similar encounters, so I offer today’s post by way of encouragement.
Which “culture” are we trying to bend to?
The argument often leveled in these discussions is that we are trying to make the Bible fit what worldly culture says is right rather than just believing God’s unchanging truth. It is worded differently each time, but basically always has three components:
- My side (the one limiting women) is based on God’s unchanging truth
- The church has believed like me for its entire history, and
- You are being influenced by culture to make the Bible say what your culture wants it to say
However, “women are equal to men and should be given the same rights and privileges as men in society” is not “culture”; it is an idea. Now a particular culture may be shaped by that idea or by its absence or outright rejection, but the idea itself is not “culture” and conflating the two is a dishonest rhetorical sleight of hand.
Regardless of its presence or absence in a culture, an idea is either true or it is not true and it must be evaluated on its merits.
The idea that women are inferior to men has been largely abandoned
Philosophically, the fight is over in this case; the validity of this idea is no longer contested. For most people, “women are equal to men” has taken its place among the truths that are considered self-evident. Even those who want to limit women no longer use “inferiority of the female sex” as their argument, but are the very first to say, “OF COURSE we believe women are equal, we just think they have different ROLES.”
Moreover, women’s equality has been proven not just philosophically, but practically in the real world. Over the past two centuries, prior assumptions about women’s inferiority have been repeatedly debunked by evidence of women succeeding where they had been told they never would due to the “fragility of their sex.” At one point, our society held that:
- Women would never succeed in medicine as their fragile minds wouldn’t be able to tolerate the strain of higher education.
- Women would not succeed in the workplace as the anxiety of the public sphere would put undue the strain upon them and cause a nervous collapse.
- Women would never succeed in politics because the aggressiveness and excitement would cause them to have nervous breakdowns due to their delicate dispositions.
Today we not only see these beliefs as patently ridiculous, but even the idea that they were once sincerely believed we find disturbing. And let’s not forget that women demonstrated their competence in these areas not in an environment of support, but in an environment that generally ranged from patronizing neutrality to overt opposition. Yet, refusing to give up, they pushed through and accomplished a truly momentous feat.
Admittedly, not everyone concedes the point that women have proven themselves as equals. One occasionally still encounters the odd person who genuinely believes that women are not as capable as men in education, business or politics, But data disagrees:
- Today, women represent about half of physicians worldwide and a recent study showed their patients do better! (and I’m sharing this study as a male physician myself!)
- Current research shows women exceed men in all aspects of leadership
- A study of outcomes during the global Covid-19 pandemic showed that countries led by women had lower infection rates and mortality.
It is clear to an unbiased observer that any ideas of female inferiority persist in society not because of evidence, but in spite of it. The source of such convictions isn’t data, but simply old-fashioned sexism.
Even complementarians accept women’s equality
Perhaps the greatest argument for the universal triumph of the idea of women’s equality is the fact that it is accepted even by those who oppose women achieving full practical equality in daily life.
If you tell a complementarian that their view of wifely submission means they believe women are inferior to men, they will be offended and quick to correct you. I think they are sincere. And that impression is bolstered by the fact that they continue to insist they believe women are equal to men even as you point out how it is philosophically impossible for women to both be
- (1) equal to men and
- (2) in an unchangeable, arbitrary, and permanent position that is inferior to that of men.
It is a rare person who collapses under the pressure and says (as one man did online with me recently):
“I don’t agree what you are saying. But if I did, I would accept women being inferior before I would go against God’s word.”
Most of them are so committed to the idea that women are equal to men that they prefer to convince themselves it is possible to believe the two contradictory ideas.
But let’s set aside the self-contradiction since Sheila has dealt with that elsewhere and instead talk about the problem that true acceptance of women’s equality raises with the idea that “The church has believed like me for its entire history”.
Has the church always believed women weren’t inferior?
While it is true that through Church history, women have been relegated to the status that modern Complementarians wish them to have (or lower), it is decidedly NOT true that through history the church believed women were fully equal to men. Marg Mowczko has compiled a rogue’s gallery of misogynistic comments by early church fathers demonstrating that unequivocally their belief was that women were made subordinate by God because they were inferior beings to men. Just a few:
This, then, the mark of the man, the beard, by which he is seen to be a man, is older than Eve, and is the token of their superior nature.
”And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?”
“For woman seems to be a creature somewhat different from man, in that she has dissimilar members, a varied form and a mind weaker than man. Although Eve was a most excellent and beautiful creature, like unto Adam in reference to the image of God, that is with respect to righteousness, wisdom and salvation, yet she was a woman. For as the sun is more glorious than the moon, though the moon is a most glorious body, so woman, though she was a most beautiful work of God, yet she did not equal the glory of the male creature.”
“On this account, all women are born that they may acknowledge themselves as inferior in consequence to the superiority of the male sex.”
Why does this matter? Because we can’t even begin to talk about Biblical arguments until we recognize how incredibly wrong the early church was in their understanding of women.
When someone today who believes that women are equal to men but should still be subordinate to them says, “My interpretation of the Bible verses about women is correct because it is the historical interpretation” it sounds convincing. But in effect what they are saying is “My interpretation of the Bible is correct because it agrees with that of people whom you and I both agree were overtly misogynistic.” And if an egalitarian’s interpretations of Scripture can be influenced by culture, it must also follow that the early church’s interpretation could have been influenced by their notions of female inferiority as well!
Complementarians are holding on to historic and cultural misogyny, not the Bible
The Bible contains verses that appear to elevate women and verses that appear to put them down. How does one make sense of that? For me the egalitarian interpretations presented in works like “The Bible vs Biblical Womanhood”, “How God Sees Women” and Marg Mowczko’s website make more sense than the complementarian ones. Egalitarians accept the new discovered truth that women and men are truly equal and they see the Scripture in that light.
And to say we must “put away ideas of women’s equality and just read what the Bible says” is to me exactly the same logic as saying one should put away their ideas of cosmology and accept that the sun goes around the earth (Psalm 19:6) , which is flat (Isaiah 40:22), unmoving (Psalm 104:5) and encased by a solid firmament (Job 37:18). It’s just nonsense.
Complementarians point the finger and say “you are bringing your culture into the Bible!” Yet it is not culture that we are bringing, but the recognition of a truth of the universe, not seen by prior generations. Meanwhile, complementarians have four fingers pointing back at them as they continue to read the Bible through the lens of an earlier culture that was based upon the incorrect idea that women are inferior to men – just like the pagan nations around them, I might add.
Egalitarians are not “following culture”, they are following an idea to its natural conclusion.
In the verses that elevate women (despite being written in a culture that saw them as “less than”), we see the glimmers of hope that one day sisters and brothers might stand as equals before God. And now that that day is here, we embrace it. In contrast, complementarians, while saying they form a continuous line with history, do not actually preach “let’s keep everything the way it has always been.” Instead, they preach a weird hybrid where they ostensibly accept that men and women are equal in a way that previous generations never thought of but also believe that should have no bearing on how we interpret Scripture or how we interact with each other. In other words, complementarians accept the idea of equality but refuse to give up the culture that arose around the idea that women are inferior.
So who is really following culture and who is following truth?
What do you think of Keith’s argument? Let’s talk in the comments!
Interesting analysis. In my Sociology of Health class, the professor mentioned that it is very common for persons to hold two conflicting ideas to be true true at the same time- in other words this phenomenon which you have described is someone of a general human trait. I believe if your mind is constantly renewed by the truth of the Holy Spirit, then these areas of conflict should lessen. Also having an open mind and seeing ideas through a historical and sociological lens helps us to slowly reason out a logical way of thinking.
Exactly, they seem to think following the culture the Bible was set in, including the cultures Paul was writing to is following the Bible because as they put it “God never changes.”
Sounds a lot like Returning to the Pure Original Islam As It Was In The Days Of The Prophet that X-TREME Islam (Saudi, Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Daesh) keeps pushing — “IT IS WRITTEN! IT IS WRITTEN! IT IS WRITTEN!”
And Islam IS so linked to Arab Tribal Culture that converts to the X-TREME and X-TREME Adjacent versions “have to all become Arab Tribesmen”. Much like all those 19th Century missionaries who were so immersed into European Christian Culture that they required native converts to dress and act exactly like White Europeans. (Such as New England Calvinist missionaries to “Owhyhee” in their heavy black woolens and stone New England houses and churches with fireplaces in each room for those New England Little Ice Age Winters — in HAWAII!)
The other thing I will note as incorrect is the notion that egalitarian theology is some new fangled thing thought up by the second wave femanists. The amount of rights a woman had varies quite a bit depending on where we are and when we are in history but equality or near equality did exist in Christian places. Complementarians can’t even argue historical precedence because it isn’t there either
I find it fascinating you being this up because I have thoughts about this.
I find at least in my experience that when folks say they have a problem with feminism it is with a kind of feminism.
Namely the Simone de Beauvour kind or the more radical kind. The ki d that acts like pregnancy is akin to parasitism and which treats men as an enemy.
For guys like me that kind of thought process feels straight up just anti human.
But the things Sheila is advocating for for just reminds me of what makes my grandparents so happy after like forty years of being married. They see each other as friends as partners and that Jesus wants them to care about each other.
I think the fear is a kind of zero sum fear. If we do not defend tradition then it must mean that the judeo Christian ethic has failed snd the ethic of folks like Simone or the like have won.
That is what I think is going on here.
What do you all think?
More Boolean than Zero-Sum:
1 or 0, True or False, Black or White, Winner or Loser, Top or Bottom, Dom or Sub, Predator or Prey, All or Nothing, NO intermediate or mixed states possible. “HERE AHURA-MAZDA, THERE AHRIMAN!”
P.S. I’ve been getting some clickbait in my YouTube feed about Femmies calling upon pregnant womyn to abort all male foeti for the Sisterhhod and bragging about it online. No way to tell if its true or isolated loud crazies or AI-generated, but the way some of “the more radical kind” talk, it sounds plausible if you figure the rules of Spite (“I don’t care if I win, YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE!”) are in effect. Decades ago I got caught in a family feud where the Rules of Spite were in play, and they are far worse than the Rules of Zero-Sum.
I find myself thinking this is a kind of Zero Sum thinking.
So when culture is ment8oned here what i think they are saying is something like this.
If we do not defend the Juseo Christian ethic then we capitulation to people like Sartre abd Beauvoir who called pregnancy parasitism and invasion.
I disagree with that assessment by them.
I ghink that one can take from scripture the notion that all people are invented in God’s image and thus they have rights while also rejecting ideas I think fly in tge face of reality.
But I think this is the conflict really.
Yes! Thank you for talking about this. I tried to explain this to complementarians once, but they couldn’t understand me.
You can see from the writings of the church fathers that they were greco-Roman men who largely held the normal greco-Roman assumption that women were deficient in virtue, rationality and intelligence. Of course they did, that was what almost everyone thought especially the philosophers, which they basically were. They got their basic ideas from Plato, Aristotle etc not the Bible as they weren’t Jewish.
So, yes, if you DON’T believe the same things about women as they did, then why are you following their understanding on the subject, for example about who should be in church leadership.
Interesting thing about Roman Catholic priesthood as well… A big part of the reason it’s only men is that the priest represents Christ to the church, a male giving life to them while the feminine church receives… Seems to be based on the incorrect Roman ideas of the time about how babies were made. They thought a father provided the “form” of the baby and the mother provided the “matter”, the form like the personhood, the life, the soul, the spiritual essence. The matter is the body, the worldly bit.
Form was associated with the male and matter with the female, thus women were thought to be more ruled by their senses than their intellect. I think the ancient Greeks actually invented “men are more rational, women are more emotional” with this idea! I noticed that in the old testament there’s never this idea of “men are from mars women are from Venus”. Men and women are treated differently but it’s never said this is because they are different emotionally, or in their essence, or their intelligence, or anything like that. I think it’s a Greek idea.
Yes, I think it’s Greek too! And it certainly became the predominant Western idea (and still is really).
I find it telling that the theological move that underpins current complementarianism only emerged in the early 1980s, just when women’s place in society as equal to men was being cemented (following the liberal ’60s and ’70s, and the freedoms for women that those decades provided).
Unable to base women’s subjection on biological/social grounds anymore, a theological reason was found – the eternal subordination of the Son. ‘Headship’ emerged as part of this argument and the idea that men and women were modelling the relationship between the Father and the Son, with the Son’s willing submission to the Father being the pattern for women towards men (generally or within marriage).
While many of those theologians have since retreated from the eternal subordination theory, they cling to the submission of women – as you have demonstrated over and over.
It was only recently that I realised this history – something that was hugely impactful on me as a teenager in the 1980’s – received as an eternal truth through youth group/preaching, and yet only established mere years earlier!
It’s just crazy making, isn’t it? And to think that they actually embraced a historical heresy rather than just acknowledge that women were equal!
Tells you what’s Really Important to them, doesn’t it?
The difference I’ve noticed between science and religion (not that we have to pit the two against each other) is that science self-corrects. To add to the bizarre list of what science had to say about women, there was also the idea around the beginning of the twentieth century that college education would cause infertility because all the energy from the uterus would be sucked up by the brain. I find this equally insulting to motherhood, by the way, as if it doesn’t take brains to raise a child! But when new studies contradict old ones, scientists don’t hurl personal attacks against one another (or if they did, they’d be laughed out of the profession), rather, the entire field changes course. When Sheila pointed out in her article for Sociology of Religion that Sally Gallagher didn’t interrogate complementarianism in the bedroom, Gallagher did not go after her. Gary Thomas, on the other hand, has publicly stated that he hates her and wrote another book to double-down on his damaging rhetoric. And he is a fellow Christian! They will know you by your love?
Very true! (and we quote Gallagher’s work all the time, too. We like to think that we’re expanding on it!)
Excellent post, Keith! I especially appreciate your references to studies that demonstrate how women excel, beyond men, at things like medicine and leadership. That blew me away. Thank you.
I want to point out that one of the biggest tragedies here is that feminism (which,strictly speaking, means only the belief that women are equal to men and therefore deserve equal rights politically, legally, etc.) is the child, the offspring, of Christianity. According to what I have read, it was the evangelicals plus the Quakers who first fought for women’s rights on a large scale because as they worked for the emancipation of enslaved peoples, they realized that the same Bible verses they were using to argue against racism also applied to women’s oppression, and they took that on as a cause. Feminism and egalitarianism are here not because our current culture invaded the church, but because the church invaded and changed its current culture. The church was doing its job of being salt and light to the world. But now that the church has brought the Kingdom of Heaven that much closer to Earth, now that their salt and light have remade a piece of the world to be closer to God’s original plan, today’s evangelicals say, “Oh, the world now believes in equal opportunities for women. We can’t be like the world! We must fight against this.” And yet the world believes this only because we first taught them to. How utterly tragic. And stupid. We also gave the world hospitals, orphanages, and the abolition of slavery. Perhaps the evangelicals should now also fight against those. (Oh wait. Some of them are.)
I also have to point out how hypocritical it is for complementarians to claim they are simply trying to follow God’s clear word when they are fixating on a very few verses that are anything BUT clear while ignoring the majority of the Bible where, over and over and over, God tells his people in very clear, unambiguous terms, that what he requires more than anything is justice and mercy for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant. I don’t hear complementarians loudly arguing for immigrants’ rights. It seems that what they are really concerned with is maintaining their own power. They won’t share it with women, and they won’t risk giving up their power and privilege to help the poor, either, so it makes sense for them to ignore the many clear orders to care for the poor and to fixate on and misuse the few unclear verses that they think support restricting women. It is not about loving Jesus. It is not about following Scripture. It is about consolidating and maintaining their own power.
” It is not about following Scripture. It is about consolidating and maintaining their own power.”
In this they are being conformed to the image of their REAL god.
Ooh, I like the way you put that. It’s a scary thought, but true.
First, to Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Martin Luther, and John Calvin – citations, please. I would like to know the chapter, verses, and context in which their words reflect the Glory of God’s Word. Secondly, to name a few, collective addresses Paul uses in his exhortations in the New Testament where men can find the equality of women: Romans 8:12, 10:1; 1 Corinthians 1:10, 15:58; Galatians 6:1; Philippians 4:8; and James 2:15 and 4:11. Hmm. Just thinking out loud here for a moment. That’s a lot of different cultures being addressed regarding the same collective group – brothers AND sisters. And lastly, can we all agree that these misogynistic men – past and present – have a bone to pick and are picking it at the wrong person? If complementarian men are willing to die in the battle to win the war, what does this say about their mental health? Their issue is not with women. Their issue is with God, and from what I have viewed on social media from Doug Wilson, Joel Webbon, Voddie Baucham, et. al., these men do not study to show themselves as approved. Instead of standing on the shoulders of God’s Word, they stand on the shoulders of dead, misogynistic men who may have been viewed as great in their time, but back then, they had to do so little to be so seen, and one of those ways to be seen was to merely crush or enslave women. Women are tired of this, and instead of throwing in the towel, they make changes, and they fight to be seen with an “in-your-face” attitude. Not that Jesus had an “in-your-face” attitude, but wasn’t He, too, about making changes and never throwing in the towel by his own doing? Misogynistic men double down on their arguments and, quite honestly, it makes me think of the time I removed my 4-year-old son from a park sandbox because there was a 5-year-old boy who threw a temper tantrum and sand at all of the other kids because he wasn’t getting his way. I wonder about that five-year-old today – was it Doug? Joel? Maybe Voddie? Women everywhere, myself included, keep with the spirit and attitude that we are enough and we are able to be “in-your-face” in any area of life. There is strength in numbers, so we should all stand together and use our gifts!
This whole thing has the aroma of “More Biblical Than Thou”.
I know you said you aren’t a theologian, but it’s very much worth pointing out, the comp. claim of their position being from a “plain, literal reading of Scripture”is bunk.
I thoroughly believe if an idea is true, you can hold it up to the Bible and it will ring true or false. It won’t be in conflict. Equality of the sexes isn’t in conflict. Neither is egalitarianism.
In my mind, the lynchpin is in Genesis where the author goes out of his way to say men and women are equal (…in the image of God created He them, male and female created He them… Sorry, memorized in KJV) and the “biblical hierarchy” is THE FALL. They contort to make it sound like God’s plan but it’s The Fall. The ruined state. A very plain, literal reading of Scripture tells you that.
Their claims fall to pieces in Genesis. And the exegetical and logical contortions they go through to make it work is impressive, illogical, and goes against every single exegetical method they claim.
Survivor of The Gospel According to Hal Lindsay and Christians For Nuclear War here.
Whenever I hear the phrase “Plain Literal Reading of SCRIPTURE”, all I can think of is how the Demon Locust Plague of Revelation was “plainly and literally” helicopter gunships packing chemical-weapon “stingers” and piloted by long-haired bearded Hippies.
I remember about the helicopters but forgot about the hairy hippies and missed the ‘plainly and literally’. The other week I thought about drones; those hairs are their antennae, you think?
“how it is philosophically impossible for women to both be
(1) equal to men and
(2) in an unchangeable, arbitrary, and permanent position that is inferior to that of men.”
Actually, it is.
Doublethink, Comrades, Doublethink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink