The marginalization of evangelical feminism

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2004 by Sally K. Gallagher

Synthesizing biblical exegesis and a burgeoning social science literature on gender would be a central theme of evangelical feminists for the remainder of the decade (Follis 1981; Gundry 1977, 1980; Mollenkott 1977; Scanzoni 1976; John Scanzoni 1976, 1979).

Resistance to Evangelical Feminism

Unable to dismiss the movement, conservative evangelicals worked to discredit it. Their opposition focused on three areas in which evangelical feminists appeared to abandon non-negotiable truths about the Bible and human nature that are central to evangelical subcultural identity. At both the academic and popular levels, conservative evangelicals argued that gender egalitarianism undermined the authority of the Bible by claiming that texts related to gender were culturally relative rather than timeless truths (Clark 1980; Henry 1975a, 1975b; Hurley 1981; Knight 1976).

    At stake here is not the matter of women's liberation. What is the
    issue for the evangelical is the fact that some of the most ardent
    advocates of egalitarianism in marriage over against hierarchy reach
    their conclusion by directly and deliberately denying that the Bible
    is the infallible rule of faith and practice. Once they do this,
    they have ceased to be evangelical: Scripture no longer is
    normative. And if it is not normative in this matter, why should it
    be normative for matters having to do with salvation? (Lindsell
    1976:45).

For Lindsell and other conservatives, the issue was not women's employment or women's rights per se, but the credibility of a hermeneutic in which the Bible is understood as teaching subordination and hierarchy as the basis of stability within marriage. Cultural variables did not significantly affect the meaning of the text: wives should submit to husbands on the basis of the order of creation (Foh 1979). For conservative teachers and theologians, the words of the Bible seemed clear: difference in function and authority were ordained by God at creation and the limitations Paul placed on women in the church and at home were not culturally specific, but universal.

At a more popular level, best selling volumes by Darien Cooper (1974), James Dobson (1975), Elisabeth Elliot (1976, 1981), Gene Getz (1974, 1977), Beverly LaHaye (1976), Tim LaHaye (1977) and Marabel Morgan (1973) made the case that the self-evident truth of gender hierarchy and difference were not only the clear message of the Bible, but unavoidably reflected in the physiological and psychological differences between women and men.

    How can we bypass matter in our search for understanding about the
    personality? There is a strange unreality in those who would do so,
    an unwillingness to deal with the most obvious facts of all....
    Every normal woman is equipped to be a mother. Certainly not every
    woman in the world is destined to make use of the physical
    equipment but surely motherhood in a deeper sense, is the essence of
    womanhood.... It is a going down into death in order to give life,
    a great human analogy of a great spiritual principle (Elliot
    1976:61-62).