Why Evangelical Gender Discourse Is Unserious

The release of Preston Sprinkle’s new book From Genesis to Junia has, I think, broken something in me. I’m tired of complementarians protecting harmful systems and abusive leaders. I am also tired of egalitarian abuse survivor advocates preaching to the choir, and I’m tired of gate-keeping and double-standards on both sides.

Whether it is complementarian websites releasing one more boiler-plate complementarian review of an egalitarian scholar’s work, or prominent egalitarian voices subjecting anyone who speaks out to purity tests or casual sexism, I find myself deeply convinced that the entire evangelical discourse about these issues is hopelessly broken.

Why should I write about it? Because I have my experiences with both communities to give me insight into their distortions. I have the receipts—literally. EMDR therapy receipts from the spiritual abuse I experienced when I advocated for change and repair in a complementarian context, and the internet record of being on the receiving end of a pile-on led by prominent voices in the abuse survivor advocacy movement when my praise for Jesus & John Wayne was not whole-hearted enough. I have been through the wringer of recovery for the last five years, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

Over the past five years I have watched as the conversation has continued, and I’m convinced that the situation has not improved in part because so many of those invested in it publicly work from a place of anxiety and fear. The tragedy is that this leaves many women unsupported as they work out their vocational callings because leaders seem unable to give the aid and guidance that requires calm and deliberation.

Why are they anxious? Because both have dramatically escalated the stakes of the debate: For complementarians, the debate about this issue has become a proxy for one’s relationship to orthodoxy. To deviate from “complementarianism” is regarded as drifting from the Christian faith itself. Similarly, egalitarians, in many cases, use devotion to egalitarianism as a proxy for one’s commitment to justice.

The outcome of these twin errors is that the question becomes either “do you agree with us or are you on the road to apostasy?” or “do you agree with us or are you a bigot?” And who is left behind by these framings? The many women in pews who simply are trying to follow Jesus faithfully in the reality of their daily life and are instead finding that the complementarians don’t know how to help or support them (or do not want to) and the egalitarians only want activists who reliably repeat the party line.

The benefit of all of this is that I see things like the response to Sprinkle’s new book from two perspectives—and do you know what seeing from two perspectives gives you? Depth perception. My hope is that my situation can be a benefit to all of us who are impacted by this issue.

My experiences in complementarian spaces are well documented. I was an employee at Bethlehem College & Seminary for six years—the “unnamed former employee” that Christianity Today referenced in their reporting on the claims of spiritual abuse at the church, and attended Bethlehem Baptist for fifteen years. I do not call myself a complementarian (neither do I call myself an egalitarian).

In my own personal study I have recently revisited the arguments made by prominent complementarian scholars. What I have found is that their own arguments almost certainly lead them into heretical claims about the doctrine of God.

Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware, for example, have each argued at length that the Father and Son exist in eternal relationships of authority and submission, such that the Father can will one thing, the Son could will another, and when the two are in conflict the Father’s will wins. Grudem made this argument in his bestselling Systematic Theology while Ware made similar claims in a 2006 Evangelical Theological Society lecture and in his 2005 book, Father, Son, & Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance. Ware has gone so far as to suggest that the Father is capable of acting “unilaterally” apart from the Son and Spirit. It is hard to see how such claims avoid ending up in some form of tritheism, which the church has always rejected. To hear self-anointed guardians of orthodoxy departing from the church’s teachings on something as core to the faith as the doctrine of God is striking.

This point is especially infuriating when one recognizes that Ware and Grudem make this argument in order to anchor relationships of headship and submission within marriage in the eternal relationship of headship and submission that they claim exists within the Trinity. But if that is not actually what the church has confessed for nearly 2000 years in its teachings on the Trinity, then Ware and Grudem not only are rejecting the historic teaching of theologians like Augustine and Athanasius, but also they’ve built their teachings on gender relations on unorthodox foundations. The complementarianism of Ware and Grudem, at least, rises and falls with a view of God that is probably heretical, if one accepts historic Christian teachings about God. I find this sort of scholarship not just incredibly hard to defend, but offensive.

On the other hand, it has been bewildering to see the response to From Genesis to Junia in egalitarian advocacy spaces. Many social media posts have been quick to put Sprinkle in his place: “Why read a man, when there are women to read?” Some insinuate that his acknowledging his privilege as he comes to the argument is actually a statement about his opinions about the reliability of the women who engage in the discussion. Others are more generous, welcoming his theological shift but critiquing his sources and asking that he perform penance to repair the damage he caused by holding different convictions previously. I sympathize with several of these responses—women’s scholarship is often overlooked, and a change of mind ought to be accompanied with action. But even so, I find these responses frustrating and unsatisfying.

Several years ago, in the midst of my church life falling apart, I wrote a review of Jesus & John Wayne that praised the book’s thesis but raised some issues with methodology. In fact, my review was quite similar to some of the reviews of Sprinkle’s book. But, in contrast to the response to these reviews, people in those same communities piled on—swarming my Twitter account (that had maybe 50 followers at the time, compared to their thousands) with anger and dismissal.

The hoard was led by the very people I had looked up to as I walked through fire at Bethlehem. I was not out of the flames yet when they turned on me, and it felt like they had doused my already burning body with lighter fluid. What was most startling was the way that their responses mirrored the abuse I was experiencing at church. It was institutional protectionism. I was told by one prominent scholar that, given my experience with spiritual abuse, I should have kept my critiques to myself because they would lessen the reach and impact of Jesus & John Wayne. This sounded, to my ears, exactly like what I had been told of my criticisms of Bethlehem. Now, seeing the responses to Sprinkle, it seems like it only really matters who makes the critique and which side of the debate they are perceived to be on.

Here is where this is particularly complex for me: Just as I have been hurt in both spaces, I have also benefitted from them. So much of what I learned at Bethlehem helped me cling to my faith when its leadership turned on me and my friends. Likewise, so much of what these advocates teach helped me, even when they turned on me.

Despite the alienation I have felt from both sides in recent years, I do not think I am altogether alone. I believe that there are likely many of us who do not fit neatly into either category—struggling with the sexism or even abuse in complementarian circles as well as the hostility and suspicion in egalitarian spaces. We have been left on our own to sort through these issues while walking on eggshells everywhere. The stakes are high for us, as well, because the only thing worse than being rejected and abused by one group is being rejected and abused by two.

So, today I am wondering: Can we do better? Can we have conversations about gender, vocation, and the life of the church without it being beset by suspicion, anxiety, and anger? I really hope so. And while I lack the knowledge or planning or creativity to propose a complete solution to all the problems, I do have ideas for how to improve the conversation about women and the life of the church.

First, there seems to be a general lack of self-awareness in how people in this discussion fall into the same patterns as the people with the viewpoints they oppose.

• Are there things that you have done that you need to account for? Are there errors you have made in your strategy, in your scholarship, in your tone, or in your online presence that you need to correct, apologize for, or make right?

• Are you actually considering what others have to say, or are you making assumptions about their argument on the basis of your own past experience or, perhaps, your misreading of their claim?

• Have you made enemies of friends by being too quick to speak? Are you allowing people time to change before questioning their genuineness? Are you assuming authority that is not yours to take by using your platform to set standards for acceptance and conformity? Are you considering the impact of your words on the people you are critiquing? Are you requiring the same sort of restoration for harm done for yourself that you ask of others?

• How tolerant of disagreement are you within your own movement? Do you have enough humility to let others disagree with you without feeling the need to set yourself apart over small points of difference? Can you disagree well?

Secondly, I would encourage all of us to let go of some of our desire to control. When we believe we can actually change others if we just make the right argument or say the right thing we end up condemning ourselves to an endless quest for the right strategy to win over our neighbor. One of the lessons I learned through my experiences at Bethlehem was that nothing I could say would change people’s minds or hearts. There was no proof that was convincing enough, there was no tone that was winsome enough, and there was no argument that would, ultimately, make a difference. To use familiar language, I could plant the seeds, but it was God who would make them grow.

Both sides of this conversation seem to suffer from an anxiety about the urgency and importance of this issue. The issue is urgent, of course, but it is wrong for one side to act as if disagreement with them is tantamount to heresy (especially when one considers how their own theology differs from historic Christianity!) and for the other to act as if the only way one could disagree with them is by being a bigot.

I do not think the way we act when we operate out of fear or woundedness leads to health for either ourselves or the people we would hope to correct or persuade. So practically, I think this is something that can help our conversations about gender in evangelicalism. Perhaps coming at the conversation from a place of rest and confidence in God’s work would help us stop beating each other over the head with our words. We can only do what we can do, and if people do not respond as we would wish, well—that’s not our problem. There is peace to be had if we can only hold on to that truth.

Finally, I want to share this beautiful reflection on the legacy of St. Francis of Assisi—I think it has something to offer us here. The author focuses on the peace that St. Francis is known for. She says, “His life was not a mood, and certainly not a slogan. It was a discipline: chosen, trained, and sometimes costly…”

She continues,

He dismantled his life. What made him secure went first, then what made him respectable. And last, what made him powerful. He did not replace those structures with better ones, he just kept walking without them. And this is precisely when his ‘peace’ was born: not as a temperament, not as softness, but as subtraction, because something remained once he stopped defending himself at every turn…He learned not to react automatically to insult, to threat, and perhaps most importantly, to fear. He did not answer humiliation with humiliation. He did not turn fear into aggression. He did not pretend the world was harmless, but he refused to copy it.

This is what I want for us. In this conversation—a conversation that must be had—can we reject power broking and believe instead that we can organize our conversation “around something other than fear” and prove that “gentleness is not weakness when it is chosen, trained, and defended by discipline”? Can we do that, even when others do not? I want to be like St. Francis. Would you join me in the effort?