14 July 2023

Review Article: Complementarism

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Kristin Kobes du Mez, Liverlight: New York (2020), 368 pp, (£20.40 Amazon)

AND

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

Beth Alison Barr, Brazos Press: Grand Rapids (2021), 256 pp, (£11.75 Amazon)

The two books in this review will be familiar to many readers. They have figured in US best seller charts and have been broadly approved of by both the secular and Christian press. Given the accusatory subtitles and satirical iconography on both book covers, and the assertive and often caustic voice adopted by their writers, this attention is no surprise. This review seeks to ask if their attention is justified, and if they bring a material contribution to the debate on sex, gender and power in the evangelical church.

Kristin Kobes du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Captured a Faith and Fractured a Nation (June 2020) and Beth Alison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (April 2021) are examples of an increasingly vocal movement “deconstructing” evangelical culture.^[1] Some such critics have left the faith altogether. Others, like these two writers, reject the descriptor “evangelical” but see themselves as prophetic, orthodox Christians, pointing to the sins of a bloated, historically ignorant conservative church culture. As consumers of the values and trends within American Christendom, UK evangelicals must pay careful heed to both their assertions and their approach. Du Mez and Barr pinpoint disturbing traits which are evident, though maybe in much more muted tones, in British church culture. It is undeniable that ungodly understandings of and desires for power have and continue to corrupt the church’s life, and that harmful conceptions of gender are sometimes involved in these sins. At the same time, their methodologies and subsequently some of their conclusions, have serious flaws, which we will do well to note.

Problematic masculinity

Du Mez’s contention in Jesus and John Wayne (JJW) is that in the first half of the twentieth century, in evangelicalism, politics and the secular entertainment industry a form of “muscular”, “rugged, American masculinity” was promoted in a symbiotic and therefore mutually reinforcing manner.^[2] This came from men “who were anxious about their own status, and the nation’s”, and provided a defence against different waves of perceived threats, including communism, feminism, Islam, globalism and industrial decline.^[3] For Du Mez, John Wayne epitomises this commodified value system: in numerous films, his risk-taking stands against enemies (invariably untrustworthy non-whites or non-Americans) neatly combined “resurgent nationalism with moral exceptionalism” and implied an often vulnerable, subservient femininity.^[4] He was the ideal American, despite the moral disarray of his private life, the kind of man Christians had in their minds’ eyes as they read about how to be a man or thought about who to vote for. Though Du Mez’s research on masculinity began over 15 years ago, Donald Trump’s presidency is presented as definitive proof for her thesis. His shadow hangs over the whole book, being discussed in the introduction, at the start of chapter one and at the end of the final chapter. Du Mez argues that the evangelical embrace of his political career wasn’t a surprise, nor was it pragmatic; instead, it was the natural result of decades of evangelicalism’s deliberate involvement in the Republican Party and its celebration of charismatic, domineering, even abusive, male leadership. It is a convincing argument.

Du Mez substantiates this thesis through an overview of evangelical subculture from the 1950s onwards. She identifies numerous figures (including Billy Graham, parenting broadcaster and writer, James Dobson, and Jerry Falwell Senior and Junior) who sought to influence Republican Party tactics, including an aggressive foreign policy, and to ensure Republican voters from among the evangelical constituency. She suggests, too, that from the 1960s onwards, evangelicalism shifted from a northern and progressive outlook on race to one which, though supportive of equal rights and desegregation in theory, was reluctant to give welcome or opportunities to black believers, or to examine its complicity in racism. We learn about a persistent focus on women’s calling to domesticity and submission and 1990s purity teaching which emphasised female responsibility and male lust. The Gospel Coalition and the “Young, Restless and Reformed” movement come under her scrutiny as she explores how networks and organisations, as well as churches have shielded culpable individuals. These different threads, Du Mez contends, came together to create an inward-looking evangelical culture which facilitated and excused sexual abuse, and fostered xenophobia. She depicts a culture saturated by a desire for power and reputation, where good sacrificial, gentle leaders were absent, or cravenly silent. This analysis of how unbalanced constructions of manhood can be perpetuated across secular and church environments is sobering and at times shocking, especially given the exposure of recent and historic abuses of power in British as well as in American evangelical churches and parachurch organisations.

Telling Gaps

Du Mez writes very well. Her narrative is fast-paced and well-structured. In covering so much ground and mentioning so many individuals, however, she minimises important distinctions between figures and even omits significant detail. Billy Graham, for example, did support military action and shared a platform with Nixon, but he also advised Democratic presidents. She also fails to reckon properly with the reasons behind evangelicals’ responses to aspects of social change from the 1950s onwards. For example, while Du Mez identifies “fear” as the motive inducing what she sees as a reactionary response to progress in civil and women’s rights, the sexual revolution and the domestic and international spread of atheistic worldviews, she doesn’t consider that compassion for victims of family breakdown or concern for the lost could have played a part in some campaigns.^[5] Perhaps more significant is an unwillingness to distinguish between innocuous words or behaviours and explicit corruption. This means that Billy Graham’s athletic metaphors, the Promise Keepers’ call to servant leadership, or John Piper and Tim Keller’s acknowledgement that Mark Driscoll had been used by God, despite his evident sin, are presented as part of a problematic culture. This seems an unfair and even simplistic approach, resulting from her unsympathetic hermeneutic. Sadly, Du Mez’s important and valuable exploration of power is weakened by a reluctance to admit distinctions, or even to discuss the range of meanings and values within expressions of manhood. Language of strength, protection, courage and even battle, is not necessarily harmful, though of course it can be used to validate aggression and minimise the call all Christians have to gentleness and compassion A willingness to consider this, and the variegation and complexity of evangelical cultures and their contexts, would make for a more accurate assessment of evangelical culture.

In part, the weakness of analysis stems from Du Mez’s conclusion that evangelicalism itself is not so much a theological or ecclesial position, but a cultural construction, a form of white patriarchy which persistently seeks to hold on to power, not through the local church, but through a broader consumer culture.^[6] To support this perspective, Du Mez highlights the truth that black protestants behave and vote differently from white evangelicals, with most eschewing that label even though they may hold very similar doctrinal views. She also notes, sadly with some accuracy, how little theological literacy, and even church involvement, there is among self-described evangelicals. Significantly, biblical interpretation for her becomes a choice between a Christ who may be either a “conquering warrior … or a sacrificial lamb who offers himself up for the restoration of all things”, but not both.^[7] In the same way that she sees any description of masculinity which involves military imagery as dangerous, she rejects a biblically nuanced understanding of Christ’s identity. Similarly, she sees inerrancy as a recent and politically convenient idea, rather than a new expression of an historic doctrine. Defining a broad movement in this way allows Du Mez to bypass its spiritual and theological dimensions and makes for a thinness in her exploration of a complex subject. The reasons for particular stances and activism are reduced to a self-serving desire for power, rather than any gospel focus, or commitment to biblical faithfulness or the good of others however poorly worked out. Networks in the early 2000s, for example, were based “most foundationally on a commitment to patriarchal power”, rather than anything else.^[8] This is an outrageous declaration which deliberately obfuscates the way in which complementarian views were just one of several theological concerns uniting reformed Christians, the foundation of which was a commitment to a particular understanding of scriptural, rather than patriarchal authority.

A Shared Secular Framework

Patriarchy is the key idea shaping both JJW and to an even greater extent, Beth Alison Barr’s, The Making of Biblical Womanhood (MBW), a book which argues that conservative evangelicalism’s sometimes prescriptive description of femininity is far from traditional and biblical. Du Mez and Barr continually use the term to refer to the hierarchical social structure within the conservative evangelical world.^[9] Barr takes time to explain her use: it is a system “that promotes male authority and female submission”.^[10] The word has had a popular resurgence over this last decade as fourth wave feminism has flourished, but in academia, it has largely been abandoned for being far too broad to be a useful tool for analysis.^[11] In these two books, however, it becomes a convenient rallying point for grievance, shorthand for the systematic oppression of women. While Du Mez’s more detailed argument mitigates some of the methodological weaknesses which come with the term, for Barr, they are clear to see.

The problems with Barr’s use of the ideology of patriarchy are threefold. First, it can blunt understanding of how class, nationality, economics, and significantly, human biology, shape attitudes; second, it blurs distinctions between very different experiences (churches which disallow female elders and fringe movements which prevent women from working outside the home; pay rates in Texas and laws in ancient Gilgamesh are all deemed patriarchal); last, and most importantly, its own exclusive logic is at odds with more than a few verses of the Bible. If patriarchy, a promotion of male authority, is “a product of sinful human hands” which the gospel overcomes, then both Old and New Testament promotion of masculine leaders have to be explained away as sin, as do directions on marriage and the use of male names for God.^[12] Barr’s chapter on Paul follows a standard egalitarian argument that to preserve the reputation of the church he was fitting in with the secular expectations in regard to gender roles, and that a “redemptive trajectory” should be followed, but she does not develop her reasoning, beyond a discussion of Bible translation practices later on. By using this ideological terminology then, Barr sets up an argument that she doesn’t follow through, and she also forecloses a worthwhile analysis of the detail of how certain iterations of “biblical womanhood” have indeed promoted a distorted version of femininity and made women vulnerable to abuse.

Barr’s Idiosyncratic Stories

MBW is a book of two interwoven stories. One, threaded throughout the pages, is Barr’s own experience of the complementarian church and the treatment, from clumsy to cruel, she says she has received. This, she says, is what has led her to tell the book’s other story, of how the church through the ages has kept on mirroring secular patriarchy. These two levels mean that the book has a heightened emotional pitch and makes high claims of authority. Barr presents herself as a truth-speaking victim, as well as a historian. Repeatedly using the first person, she ties her research to her experiences, using this as a validating and illustrating mechanism. For example, she claims that “from my own experience … inerrancy creates a climate of fear”. ^[13] She frames questions her students ask her, and their astonished responses to her answers, heading one sub-chapter “Wait, Dr Barr, What?”.^[14] Whereas Du Mez concentrates largely on the construction of masculinity over one century and in one country, and so creates a tight and to some degree plausible, if polemical, argument, the very breadth of Barr’s chronological and ecclesiastical range and her emotive, personal grievance, makes for a less convincing whole. 

Barr’s specialism is Medieval Church history, and so this occupies a significant part of the book. She argues that prior to the Reformation, while patriarchy shaped society, some women had prominent teaching and preaching roles in the church, and this means that post-reformation, and especially later evangelical, views of womanhood are an aberration from traditional Christian views of womanhood. Tudor mystic Margery Kempe, the astonishingly learned Hildegard of Bingen, Christine of Pizan, “Bishop” Brigit of Ireland and numerous other Saints are all introduced. She is right that the religious life provided unique opportunities for devotion, study and self-expression. Yet not all this history is quite as it seems.^[15] The “preaching” she says undertaken by many was most often not to mixed church congregations, so doesn’t quite fit what most readers might understand by the word. The “ordination” of Brigit was said to have been a mistake.^[16] Hagiographies of women who defeated dragons didn’t necessarily mean that the men who told these stories were themselves open to female leadership in the church of their day, any more than Catholics who venerate female saints today are ready to see women preaching. If Barr overstates these stories, she at the same time underestimates the activity of women in the first few centuries after the Reformation, many of whom wrote, studied, and influenced the church, though in a very different context.^[17] Barr herself acknowledges that there is a range of scholarly opinion on the reasons for shifts in female activity in the Enlightenment period and beyond, including technology and economics, however, her conclusion is simplistic: the church has simply replicated the period’s secular “cult of domesticity”. Again, when she gives examples of female authority, whether the Countess of Huntingdon in the eighteenth or women revival preachers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, her depictions often overstate their power. Evangelistic proclamation or involvement in strategy is not the same as pastoral leadership. Given the good range of material she cites, these chapters present a lost opportunity to explore the detail of how women worked in the church in previous generations in their wider context, a story that is certainly worth retelling.

One striking element of the book is how often Barr’s illustrations of “biblical womanhood” ideology, intended to shock the reader, are brief anecdotal descriptions of teaching on submission or domesticity, alongside restatements of Bible verses or simple observable fact. For example, we hear about a conference seminar about baking as an example of stereotyping, and that James Dobson taught that women were “physically weaker”, an undeniable reality.^[18] Tudor homilies preached “let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord”, a mere citation of Ephesians 5:22, echoed by writers five centuries later in their “literal” reading of Paul.^[19] Again, Barr’s range of material and her ambiguous engagement with Scripture weakens her argument; to really claim that “biblical womanhood” is a damaging category, she needs to provide more extreme examples and more detailed analysis.

Like Du Mez, Barr does recount a few shameful incidents of abuse which happened in complementarian circles and identifies the much-discussed teaching of ESS by some who sought to link marital order to a false understanding of the Trinity. In this way, both writers connect a belief in male headship in the home and Church with disturbing theological and cultural interpretations, drawing a straight line of causation, with Barr not even recognising any economic or political factors which might also be at play. Near the end of the book, Barr writes “Du Mez is right… Hierarchy gives birth to patriarchy, and patriarchy gives birth to the abuse of both sex and power”.^[20] Her answer is to “stop it” and “be free!”, encouraging readers to make the same journey she has done, moving from complementarianism to egalitarianism, and from a belief in Scripture’s inerrancy to a more liberal understanding of revelation.^[21]

In a recent podcast, Du Mez argues that this type of “activist history” is not necessarily different from historical narratives which support the status quo.^[22] She is right that no analysis can come from a neutral place without presuppositions, yet in both JJW and MBW, we find examples of church history crafted to promote ideology without due attention to nuance and with a resistance to ambiguity or theological context. It is interesting to compare these books with other recent egalitarian writing which does greater justice to complementarian positions and their surrounding contexts; “activism” does not need to be overtly hostile or lacking in detail.^[23] Still, both texts provide readers with urgent and important questions about the relationship between the evangelical church and abuse of power, particularly in relation to sex. Barr is correct that the contemporary church needs to listen to women and write them back into church history. We can hope that this deconstructive approach gives rise to a new willingness among Christians committed to a complementarian reading of Scripture to explore history and theology in a yet deeper and more honest manner and to apply this with even greater care within their church contexts.

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] These works frequently focus on gender. Examples include Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband ‘Master’ (Thomas Nelson: Edinburgh, 2012); Aimee Byrd’s Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (Zondervan; Grand Rapids, 2019); Nadia Bolz Weber, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation (Canterbury Press: Norwich, 2019).

[2] Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright Publishing: New York, 2020), 11. It is worth noting that Du Mez makes no reference to the British 19^th century “muscular Christianity” which was not exclusively, or even predominately, an evangelical phenomenon.

[3] JJW, 17.

[4] JJW, 31.

[5] JJW, 59.

[6] JJW, 6. By consumer culture, Du Mez is referring to the publishing industry, online writing and traditional news outlets, as well as items which can be bought in a store.

[7] JJW, 5.

[8] JJW, 204, (italics my own).

[9] JJW, 54.

[10] MBW, 13 & 15.

[11] For example, Charlotte Higgins, The Age of Patriarchy: how an unfashionable idea became a rallying cry for feminism today.  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/22/the-age-of-patriarchy-how-an-unfashionable-idea-became-a-rallying-cry-for-feminism-today. Accessed 2/1/23.

[12] 35 & 36, 25.

[13] MBW, 151.

[14] MBW, 190.

[15] Kevin De Young in his Gospel Coalition review lists several of Barr’s inaccuracies. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/the-making-of-biblical-womanhood-a-review/.

[16] This is discussed in many sources. See, for example, Britannica article: https://www.britannica.com/story/st-brigid-the-compassionate-sensible-female-patron-saint-of-ireland. (accessed 2.1.23).

[17] For example, Katharina Schutz Zell, 1498-1548; Olympia Morata, 1526-1555; Henriette Von Gersdorf, 1648-1726. 

[18] MBW, 166, 122.

[19] MBW, 122, 189-9.

[20] MBW, 207.

[21] MBW, 206, 218.

[22] https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/episode-170-kristin-kobes-du-mez-a-modern-church-history-of-toxic-masculinity/

[23] Christianity Today’s The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, for example, critiques a particular, at times very unhealthy complementarian culture, but pays attention to the nature of the mega-church, the rise of digital communication, and leadership personalities as significant factors in its production. Andrew Bartlett’s Men and Women in Christ (IVP: Nottingham, 2019) is a careful exploration of biblical texts from an egalitarian evangelical perspective which maintains an irenic tone throughout.