The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

The reason the teenage girls in our youth group were forced to put on baggy T-shirts wasn’t because Jesus cares that much about bra straps. It was because the leaders at that camp had confused nineteenth-century ideas about women’s purity (not to mention male culpability) with what it meant to be a Christian woman.

I do not see a conflict between my feminist identity and my cooking skills. I don’t have a problem with women, or men, taking pride in domestic prowess. What I do have a problem with is how we continue to teach the cult of domesticity to modern Christian women.

Historically speaking, there is nothing surprising about biblical stories and passages riddled with patriarchal attitudes and actions. What is surprising is how many biblical passages and stories undermine, rather than support, patriarchy.

As women’s activities were redirected into the household, women became less “collective, visible, and active” in the late medieval parish.

Complementarianism is patriarchy, and patriarchy is about power. Neither have ever been about Jesus.

Ironically, complementarian theology claims it is defending a plain and natural interpretation of the Bible while really defending an interpretation that has been corrupted by our sinful human drive to dominate others and build hierarchies of power and oppression. I can’t think of anything less Christlike than hierarchies like these.

What evangelicals have failed to realize, explains historian Randall Balmer, is that the “traditional concept of femininity” that we believe to be from the Bible is nothing more than “a nineteenth-century construct.”

The church teaches what it believes to be true.

Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world.