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

Isn’t it ironic (not to mention tiresome) that we spend so much time fighting to make Christianity look like the world around us instead of fighting to make it look like Jesus Christ?

Patriarchy is a power structure created and maintained, literally, by human labor.

Spacey’s character delivers a line I have never forgotten: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” I haven’t forgotten the line, because I disagree with it. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is godly.

The patriarchy that continues to appear in biblical text is a “mere accommodation to the reality of the times and culture; it is not a reflection of the divine ideal for humanity.”35 Patriarchy is created by people, not ordained by God.

The historical reality is that social systems that invest some people with power over the lives of other people result in the destruction of people. Ed Stetzer recently observed that “the Venn diagram of reformed, complementarian, and misogynist has a pretty significant overlap.”13 This sounds like what Gerda Lerner described in 1986—only her Venn

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

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.”

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.

The church teaches what it believes to be true.