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

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.

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.”

The church teaches what it believes to be true.

Historically speaking, there is nothing surprising about biblical stories and passages riddled with patriarchal attitudes and actions. What is surprising is how many biblical passages and stories undermine, rather than support, patriarchy.

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

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.

Indeed, the further removed medieval women were from the married state, the closer they were to God. After the Reformation, the opposite became true for Protestant women. The more closely they identified with being wives and mothers, the godlier they became.

Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world.