Equal in value, a complementarian axiom, does not mean equally valued, a complementarian failure.
I riff on Lisa Weaver Swartz’s comments in that opening sentence. I do not know what it means to say men and women are equal in value when men have all the authority and the power, and when women are called into a role of supporting men. This is not equality in any sense. It is instead a hierarchy, which women are to like because the men do.
We continue our series about a wonderful new book by Lisa Weaver Swartz, in Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power.
If the godly man revolves around three centers -- a churchman, a family man, and a manly man – the godly woman revolves around three other centers – they are women of the Word, they are submissive wives, and they are motherly nurturers. Their scripts complement the man’s scripts. Godly womanhood means women are “created to follow,” and the culture of Godly womanhood is framed and embodied at Seminary Wives Institute. This culture is an agent that constrains and forms women to fit in.
Women of the Word
Some women have hesitations about the “Gospel Story’s gendered prescriptions” and endure considerable struggle, but the culture informs them that emotions and feelings and experiences have to give way to the “inerrant Word and the ordered roles it dictates.” These women model and elevate personal devotional reading of the Bible daily, and consequently many of them know the Word. Some men know their wives are more godly and knowledgeable than they are – and some think this can lead to a “beautiful harmony.”
Submissive Wives
“The quintessential Godly Woman is also a supportive wife to the Godly Man.” That’s Southern’s ideal. This is done in part by creating a warm and hospitable home. Which means “domesticity was their primary responsibility, and they were often eager to meet its challenges.” This kind of woman can have agency, and she can at times speak prophetically to her husband. Core to this commitment is to celebrate Godly Manhood. Women at Southern are sometimes taught to prioritize “their husbands’ sexual preferences.”
What always stands out about this Godly Woman theme is the single woman, who can be demoralized or they can yearn for the Godly Man. But many single women find themselves in “unscripted social spaces” because the culture is about the married woman. Relationships of single women with married seminaries can be awkward because the men often express their discomfort. They can become “reluctant conversation partners.”
Motherly Nurturers
Women are scripted as nurturers. They create homes to which husbands return to find some “reprieve from the challenges of public work and ministry.” A kind of June and Ward Cleaver, eh? As a nurturer the wife provides physical and emotional care, as well as at times home school education for their children. But this theme emphasizes a scripted, gendered role for women in the Gospel Story and the Conservative Resurgence Story. Women are designed by God to be motherly nurturers.
Mary Mohler, Al Mohler’s wife, lives the script before the students “flawlessly.”
Summary of Southern: “Southern’s stories and their gendered scripts accomplish more than individual student formation. They shape community life, facilitate collective identity, and reinforce cultural boundaries against outgroups.” Furthermore, this gendered script “buttresses masculine authority, infusing it with historic – even transcendent – meaning and clothing it in embodied practice.”
Noticeably, Southern’s women “have little voice in the scripts and stories that direct their own lives.”
Weaver Swartz observes what many of us have observed: there is a “striking resemblance to the breadwinner/housewife family model that emerged after World War II.” That model formed when the men returned from the war and women, who had been working, returned home.
The script is white, it is middle class, it is American. African Americans and Mexican Americans and Asian Americans did not write this script.
Unmarried women are “intersectional losers” in this script.
This whole series -- SO true. I got my PhD at Southern from 2007-2011. Thankfully I was in a hybrid program so I only went there twice a year, two weeks at a time, for three years of coursework, in a cohort where more than half of the students and instructors were not SBC. But by the time I graduated, I would not have been accepted to the program I was in because the school continued to swing further and further to the right. The men's haberdashery was installed during my last year of coursework. Female instructors were banned from teaching theology to men. We had to take a one-day colloquium, "Gender Roles in Ministry and the Home," where the instructor said that what we believed about women's roles was a -- direct quote -- "second-tier heresy" issue. The instructor also suggested, "If you think women can be leaders in home or church, I wouldn't say you're not a Christian, but......" and left the door open for that idea. I like to say that I thank Southern Seminary for turning me into a full-blown Arminian Egalitarian. They claimed the corner on the truth of Christ (hyper-Calvinist, fundamentalist complementarian) but there was no spirit of Christ in these conversations. UGH. This series is reminding me how warped that world was, how discouraging it was for me as a female LEADER, and how thankful I am to be free from it.
SIGH! Thank you, Aaron. I suspect that most men in complementarian churches can't really get what women's noise is all about - except that it feels "unChristian." So the "answer" for a "good" woman is to confess and get in line as a good woman should. My tears are for all the women I've known who simply walked away, not just from the church but from everything "Christian." It's a heart-breaker.