The Ideal Christian Woman: Questions
Some of you grew up with an ideal for the Christian woman. Please describe for us the features of that ideal Christian woman. What was she like? Name the first three words that come to mind.
Katie Gaddini, in her new book, The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women are Leaving the Church (Columbia UP, 2022), sketches how some single evangelical woman learned and experienced the ideal Christian woman.
She begins with a story about Jo who grew up in a more charismatic, egalitarian family and church. She also experienced co-workers asking her how she could be both feminist and evangelical (Christian) and Jo had steady, confident answers (at that time).
“In evangelical circles validation is often conferred via recognition from men, and women who look a certain way achieve that recognition.” How many of you recall the not-too-long-ago routine chatter from theobro husbands on the platforms talking about their “smoking hot wife”? What even did that mean?
Married women gain recognition, too. It is simpler for women who want to be leaders in the church to marry a pastor since that immediately gives such women a place for leadership.
55-45% women to men in the USA; more like 66-33% in the UK.
Words used in this chp: “quiet, gentle little wifey” and “more in the shadows” and “wholesome yet hot, strong yet submissive… sexy, in a modest, Christian sort of way” and “calm” and “modest, selfless, humble” and “blond, thin” and “white” and “not ambitious or career-oriented” and “political” (right wing, anti abortion, abstinence) and also engaged on social media.
Do these fit your world’s image of the ideal Christian woman?
How much of this is a performance of the ideal than reality?
What about women who do not fit the ideal?
Role models play an important part. Balancing ambition to change the world, to impact the church, to be a good wife, and to be a good mother – all are cards to play in this evangelical woman game. The secret for some is a private steady relationship with God in prayer and Bible reading.
Gaddini explores the poststructuralist category of normativity as what gives rise to the ideal Christian woman. It is created through discourse and symbols and images. They spread through their diffusion in a group, and the normative becomes the symbol of the group.
Books do the work for this for evangelicals. What books do you think shape the “ideal Christian woman” in our day or in your day? She mentions The Bride Wore White and The Virgin Monologues and the magazine Magnify. (I had not heard of any of these until I read this book.)
And “Christian influencers” who are women held up as celebrities. Who are they? She gives some names, like Rachel Hollis.
What are the biggest influences in your church and community for shaping the ideal Christian woman?
After moving from being a missionary in Asia for 20 years and becoming a pastor at a multi-site evangelical attractional model church in California, I began to be surprised about what the new, US white evangelical millennial ideal Christian woman was expected to be. The phrases used here such as “ quiet, gentle little wifey” and “more in the shadows” and “wholesome yet hot, strong yet submissive… sexy, in a modest, Christian sort of way” and “calm” and “modest, selfless, humble” and “blond, thin” and “white” and “not ambitious or career-oriented” and “political” (right wing, anti abortion, abstinence) and also engaged on social media all certainly fit. Image management and the female avoidance of the shame of not being seen as perfect (as Brene Brown prolifically describes in her research about US culture at large) were all palpable in this scenario. To be seen as nuanced in one’s opinion on abortion, to be seen as ambitious in one’s career or to not be small/thin was to be seen as flawed, dangerous or automatically discredited. Thanks for writing about this. We need more of this kind of conversation in the US church.
Scot, are you asking what I was taught she was like or what I thought she would ideally be like? Those two questions have very different answers. For me she is independent and active and adventuresome (I'm not taking time here to describe in more specific terms what I mean). To the contrary, growing up in a conservative church and attending a conservative college, I was given no reason to develop skills beyond good homemaking and the habit of saying, "Yes, Sir!" to almost everything. There really was no room for personal development beyond personal appearance and domestic skills. GROAN. But as an adult woman I've spent more than 30 years helping godly women gain freedom from those strictures. (And over time 46 women have graduated from my D.Min. program for women at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary - women who found their voice (!) - with a few more still in the pipeline.)