Guys, we should listen to women.

A plea to the church bros and blokes to stop objectifying, disfellowshipping, and making sex talk really weird. Start listening to our sisters instead.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

This is for the guy I wrote about last time, the one who told me I would have authority problems in my marriage if my partner didn’t give up her strength. For the men I knew growing up who disparaged a woman in my church, calling her names behind her back and joking about why she was single, because she spoke up about what God had done in her life. It’s for the bros and blokes who use women and what’s considered feminine as insults. It’s for the patronizing pastors, who see gifted women as threats. The men who ask female seminary students, “Why are you studying here?” And for those who fuel a culture of “No!” and teach young girls they don’t belong.

It’s Women’s History Month, and I encourage men to make eye contact and listen, to stop being silent or the last ones to speak up when women aren’t dignified as divine image bearers, and to make a conscious effort to change the toxic bro culture that permeates our churches.

Objectification from male pastors

The last few weeks have angered me to new ends. First, there was the pastor in Waco who bragged about being hit on by a waitress when he was out with a friend. He went on to objectify her and make himself the hero who escaped the strongest of temptation because he remembered the Scriptures. He even described how her motivation of hitting on him was hatred of himself, his wife, and his unborn children. I could go on about this guy, but Sheila Wray Gregoire (co-author of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You Believed and How to Recover What God Intended) responded far better than I ever could. She explains how this sort of teaching makes women feel unsafe and contributes to a pervasive culture that devalues and undermines women. If your first reaction is to defend this guy, read Sheila first.

But I’d heard this sort of guy before, and it triggered a lot for me. His cadence and tone, especially when he described the woman’s appearance is, quite frankly, revolting. I had a ton of trouble not chucking my phone across the room as I tried to listen to a bit of the guy’s talk. I try to give people in viral videos the benefit of the doubt before I join the conversation. It’s not because I didn’t believe the women (and men) on Twitter who were justifiably offended. Rather, I want to understand context and try to understand why he would say these things—where does this thinking come from?

It made me think of the pastor I had growing up who regularly talked about his own wife and how “hot” she was. When just the guys could hear, he’d say in the same tone as the pastor from Waco, “The more you love Jesus, the hotter your wife will be.” Then he’d gesture toward his wife with an am-I-right-or-what face, and I guess we were all supposed to agree and not-so-subtly recognize his piety, or his wife’s hotness. I honestly don’t know which was more important to him. I remember his wife overheard him once when he said this, and she rolled her eyes and forced a smile like she’d heard it before. I felt awkward seeing her hear it and can only imagine what she felt. It was hard for me to engage with her for who she was because of how she was objectified publicly by her own husband.

Fear of female pastors from the SBC (and others)

Then there was the stuff about the Southern Baptist Convention disfellowshipping a handful of churches, most of them because they have female pastors. Many people have appropriately pointed out the tragic irony of an organization like the SBC ousting churches over appointing women to pastoral roles while failing to appropriately protect them from abuse in their churches. There has been a clear and rampant problem for years, and countless innocent people have been hurt by those who are presumed to have authority. Many of the ones who have spoken up have suffered intimidation, ridicule, and hostility. It seems oblivious, if not outright defiant, that the SBC has chosen this course of action.

It’s been a minute since I called myself Southern Baptist, but I’m still Baptist by and large. I’ve got a degree in biblical studies from an evangelical Christian university (that has a lot in common with the SBC), worked in Christian higher-ed administration for most of the last fifteen years at schools that either are Baptist or overlap significantly, and I’ve been a member at a Baptist church pretty much all my life. One thing that was clear in my time in the SBC was that authority mattered. A lot. And it’s glaringly obvious it’s supremely important still.

So these disfellowships are layered. First, there is a massive amount of import we place on the pastoral office and the authority we bestow on those people¹. I’ve got about a million things I could say about this, and I will probably ramble quite grumpily about it in the future. So, watch this space if that interests you. Second, there is a glaring problem with how we view women in many Baptist contexts, not least in the SBC.

My SBC church growing up had a woman who served as the Director of Adult Ministries. She was functionally a pastor like any of the others on staff, moreso than most given the nature of her work (we had a Pastor of Operations and Maintenance, who wasn’t a pastor at all—but he was male). She was tasked with the success and effectiveness of an entire ministry with more than a thousand men and women in it. She made decisions, and she led out of her gifting. She was a pastor, despite not having the title. And I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be reminded at every turn that you are less than simply because of your embodiment. Maybe she thought that system reflected God’s design, and maybe she wouldn’t have changed it even if given the chance. But I’m certain she never had that chance, because I can’t imagine anyone ever asked her. And I’m also certain she heard the jokes the rest of us did about who “wore the pants” in her marriage.

And with one SBC annual meeting, the largest and most influential protestant denomination in the US said to women everywhere: “You just don’t matter as much as men.” Frame it however you want. Talk about roles, design, and order—it all means the same thing. Women aren’t created equally. Subordination based on embodiment is not equality. It can’t be. Especially when your entire denomination values authority above nearly all else. Now you face disfellowship if your church affirms women as pastors. On a side note, I think the church has over-emphasized the role and office of pastor for far too long, and it’s not healthy for men who hold those roles now. We should also revisit that while we’re at it.

And, for the love of God, stop with the weird sex talk

I grew up in the height of the I Kissed Dating Goodbye and True Love Waits cultural movements. You could find purity rings all over the place in our youth group. And our co-ed Sunday school classes would often split into gendered groups for talks about sex. There was a married couple who led a weekly class I was in sometime in high school, and they would rave about the vibrancy of their sex life. Some of that was perfectly fine and even encouraging, but it got weird when they’d talk about sex as the ultimate manifestation of Christ’s love for the church. Sex was the “great mystery” of God’s work in the world, not, instead, how we are united with Christ.

Then the Gospel Coalition released that article this week (and then removed it, posting a non-apology apology). From a forthcoming book titled, Beautiful Union by Josh Butler, the article draws stark parallels between the sexual union of a husband and wife with Christ and the church. You can still read an excerpt of the book, from which the article came, if you want to see for yourself. Butler takes the metaphor to an extreme, and it is hard to disentangle figurative language from physical action. Here’s a relatively tame quotation:

“Similarly, the church embraces Christ in salvation, celebrating his arrival with joy and delight. She has prepared and made herself ready, anticipating his advent in eager expectation. She welcomes him into the most vulnerable place of her being, lavishing herself upon him with extravagant hospitality. She receives his generous gift within her—the seed of his Word and presence of his Spirit—partnering with him to bring children of God into the world.”

One of the primary problems is how he describes male and female roles in sex. They reflect his views of the roles men and women in the church and home—male initiation and dominance, female passivity and submission. There is value in recognizing male and female sexual difference (see the aforementioned The Great Sex Rescue) as part of God’s design. But the issue with Butler’s anthropology is the explicit dominance/submission paradigm that creates a permanently asymmetrical relationship between men and women, reflective of male value over women. Here’s an article that explains how this sort of thinking isn’t simply a result of misguided hermeneutics, but a promotion of male sexual dominance and even rape. But Butler’s article isn’t just bad theology, it’s also bad biology, and just plain ick.

It’s representative of a patriarchal ideal that men matter and women don’t (qualify the amount as you may; the relationship remains hierarchical in complementarian theology). Now, not only do men take what they want from women, but so does God. How is this a world in which women matter? How can I raise my daughter to believe these things about her purpose?

And the unwillingness of the Gospel Coalition to say, “We’re deeply sorry,” is appalling. Acknowledging you hurt someone (or half the planet) necessitates an apology at the very least, not a “thanks for your continued support while we chuck this author under the bus.” I don’t need them to atone for systemic, oppressive ideologies in one fell swoop. But taking a first step would be nice.

And I wish I could say reading this article and book excerpt surprised me. But, I’ve heard it before. This isn’t one author going rogue. It’s the logical trajectory of ingrained patriarchal thinking being idolized as normative and from God. And I learned it twenty years ago from my Sunday School teachers.

So what can we do?

Each of these three instances of poor treatment of women over the last few weeks might seem like extreme examples, or things that can be dismissed as isolated events. But each of them is the result of a culture that values the voices of men at the expense of women’s, and it’s been going on for a long time. These things keep happening because of a divinely-sanctioned system that prioritizes maleness. And any deviation or exploration outside of that worldview are not only discouraged but despised. 

This way of being sounds like holding up the hotness of a wife as evidence of godly living. It sounds like refusing to recognize female leaders by calling them director, paying them less, and then mocking them in their success. It sounds like the elevation of sex and male dominance as divinely prescribed.

It’s what happens when poor theology goes unchecked. And I’m not sure what me writing this will accomplish. But I couldn’t be another bro who stays silent about these things.  

Here are a few things you can do yourself:

• Listen to a female co-worker’s story and (if apppropriate) ask questions without offering corrections or advice.

• Learn how to be a better alongsider. I’d recommend reading Good Guys by David G. Smith and W. Brad Johnson (though a book about the work place and not necessarily the church, the principles are highly transferable).

• Educate yourself on the ways women continue to be disadvantaged as a group by reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez.

• Sign up for Substacks from women: Kristin Du Mez, Beth Felker Jones, Beth Allison Barr, to name a few.

• Read women scholars: Logia Theology put together a database of women scholars across the divinity disciplines. The writers span three centuries, and the database is full of impactful thinkers. I guarantee there’s a contributor there you have never heard of, so look over the list, and give it a go.

1. Christa and I co-authored an article a while back about authority: “Who’s in Charge? Questioning Our Common Assumptions About Spiritual Authority.” We talk about authority in the church a bit, explore some of the nuances and difficulties of talking about it, and some critiques that may be helpful.