Complementarianism: A Gateway to Misogyny?

“We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.'
What is that, grandmother?'
To understand other people.'
Yes, grandmother. I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other people, I'm not worth being understood myself. I see.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin

Spoiler alert: My headline is antagonistic clickbait, a snarky and reactionary response to my complete and utter weariness with the pervasive claim that egalitarianism is a gateway to LGBT apostasy.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about this, and it probably won’t be the last. The argument goes something like this: “Churches that embrace women in leadership are churches that eventually fly rainbow flags in their sanctuaries while hosting abortion celebrations and declaring God is trans. Steer clear! The road to hell is paved with female pastors.”

It’s because of women’s toxic empathy, we’re told. We womenfolk can’t even help ourselves. Our poor little lady brains are just naturally wired toward gullibility, which is why we need the big strong sensible men to reel us in and protect us from our fanciful feminine wiles. Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Men do the thinking. Women do the feeling. Back to the sidelines, sisters. The thinking realm is no safe place for a lady.

You think I’m joking, but this week alone, I’ve seen no fewer than half a dozen articles saying precisely this, and the people saying it sincerely believe it. And now the theobros have even succeeded in recruiting otherwise intelligent women to amplify this messaging for them. In a now viral tweet, journalist Megan Basham echoed the sentiment that women are just too gosh darn emotional to be trusted with guarding sound doctrine. Ironically, Basham is an enthusiastic supporter of men like Doug Wilson whose doctrine on things like Federal Vision is demonstrably heretical, not “sound,” but here we find ourselves.

And listen, I’m more than willing to call a spade a spade. I’ve written pretty pointedly about women who allow their feelings to eclipse their obligation to sanity. And it’s a real problem. And there are, legitimately, way too many churches whose first step into full blown apostasy was the ordination of women, so I can see how the misconception takes root. But make no mistake, it is a misconception.

As I’ve argued before, if we are going to sideline 50% of the population based off the worst traits of some of their members, then men are a up a creek in this department, too. Men commit like 95% of the world’s violent crime. Is toxic empathy really any worse of a leadership trait than toxic aggression? I don’t think so.

But the thing that drives me crazy about this entire debate, the thing that bothers me even more than the illogical nature of it, is how aggressively lacking it is in intellectual honesty. The “egalitarianism is a slippery slope” crowd often pretend like there’s no way to disagree with their position without being in overt rebellion to the authority of Scripture. They’ll call it a secondary issue while simultaneously treating it like actual apostasy. On other contentious topics throughout Christianity, topics like pedobaptism and predestination, they’re generally pretty happy to treat you like a brother or sister in Christ despite your disagreement on the isolated issue. But we egals aren’t treated like spiritual siblings; we’re treated like pariahs who need to be thoroughly rebuked and expunged from the body before we are permitted to lead anyone off the straight and narrow. There’s a palpable contempt and distrust where we are concerned.

I heard this at least half a dozen times today alone: “No serious biblical scholar believes women should be allowed to preach, Kaeley,” they insist. “Either you agree with me, or you’re rebelling against the clear teaching of Scripture. There is no debate to be had, no ambiguity at all.”

But that’s simply not true.

Terms like “clear teaching” and “no ambiguity” are used to silence necessary discussions before they have a chance to start. The reality is that there is a robust debate to be had on the way we interpret the texts used to sideline women. Take, for example, the verse in 1 Timothy 2:12, which reads, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;^[a] she must be quiet.” Complementarians read this at a superficial level and say, “See? The Bible says women can’t teach men. It’s crystal clear. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Case closed.” They insist the verse was instructive for all womankind for the entirety of existence.

People like me read the text and say, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? Who was Paul writing to? What was going on at the time? Do you know much about the church at Ephesus? Do you know that it was the pagan witchcraft center of the known world? That it was heavy on female goddesses? Did you know that women were grifting over from the temple of Artemis into the Christian church and doing damage? Isn’t it possible and even likely that Paul was speaking directly to this situation? That when we consider the rest of Scripture as a whole, we see God appointing women as His mouthpiece time and time again?

If God never wanted women to lead or preach, why do we see Him equipping women to do precisely this in the rest of Scripture? Deborah served as a judge over all Israel. Huldah advised kings. Anna prophesied in the temple. Phoebe was a church leader. Priscilla taught Apollos. Euodia and Syntyche co-labored with Paul. Junia was outstanding among the apostles. The first person to preach the miraculous news of the resurrected Christ was a woman. This was not an accident. How do we square any of this with the belief that women are never to lead in church? I don’t think we can.

But we never seem to get this far in the conversation because the discussion generally ends when hard complementarians call people like me rebellious Jezebels who hate “created order” and are threatening the integrity of the church.

So let’s talk about “created order.” There was no subjugation of women in Eden, and there will be no subjugation of women in heaven. But complementarians tend to behave as though the curse Adam and Eve received at the fall is some sort of prescription for the way we are supposed to order our lives. It’s not! It’s something Jesus came to break. While it’s true we won’t be truly free of the curse this side of heaven, we don’t have to bend ourselves into pretzels behaving as though we get holiness points for maximum suffering from it. We don’t see men going out of their way to put in 80 hour backbreaking work weeks just to make sure they’re in proper compliance with the curse. We try to mitigate the curse as often as possible in this sense. So why are we so comfortable making enmity and subjugation the norm when it comes to gender relations? It makes zero sense.

“But men are the head of women,” the complementarians insist. “The Bible says it. Case closed.” But there’s room for debate even here. Does the Greek word “kephale” always imply authority? How is it used throughout the New Testament? How did original Christians perceive it? Are we reading the text correctly? Have we even bothered to ask ourselves this? These are questions that earnest egalitarians are eager to address, but when we raise them, we’re roundly accused of rebellion and told to pound sand.

God created the sexes with the intent that we should reign TOGETHER. That’s the original design! That’s His plan for our thriving. It is not good for man to be alone in any sphere of life, including leadership. Women bring necessary balance. Bad things happen when our voices are excluded from leadership circles.

Now men like Colin Smothers would argue that the egalitarian hermeneutic leans heavily on the same slippery slope that LGBT apostasy does in that we’re essentially saying the culture in which the Scripture was written doesn’t apply to us today, so now we can just make up our own rules, but Colin would be wrong. Arguments for women in Christian leadership can be made directly from the biblical text in a way that arguments for same-sex practice cannot. Jesus did not choose a trans identified person to first preach the good news of His resurrection; He chose a woman. He didn’t call a non-binary person out of the traditional role in the kitchen and into the fold of the male scholars; He chose Martha—a woman. There are precisely zero verses or stories in the Bible that celebrate LGBT ideology. There are, however, countless examples in Scripture of women leading and fighting and speaking and mixing it up with the men. Smothers’ comparison is a matter of apples to oranges.

And for all the rabid insistence that complementarianism is settled, untouchable doctrine, that no true Christians can really exist in this space without compromising our sexual ethics, there’s a startling lack of acknowledgment of the numerous groups of Christians who’ve maintained orthodox sexual ethics while elevating women for hundreds of years. Orthodox Methodists, Wesleyans, Assemblies of God, Evangelical Presbyterians, Christian Missionary Alliance, Global Methodists, and a bunch of others… Do they not exist? Just because they aren’t all cantankerous Calvinist loudmouths who insert themselves into the public discourse at every turn, doesn’t mean you can just pretend like they’re inconsequential. If egalitarianism is an inevitable slippery slope into apostasy, how have all these denominations remained faithful for so long?

And egalitarian views are bolstered by the endorsement of some pretty heavy hitting biblical scholars who also maintain orthodox sexual ethics— renowned men like N.T. Wright and Ben Witherington and Craig Keener. These aren’t lightweights. These are some of the most revered men in their fields of study. Here’s N.T. Wright reading Scripture in the original Greek and explaining his egalitarian understanding of it. Are these brilliant men to be treated as pre-apostates just because they don’t share the complementarian view? How in heaven’s name is this fair?

As New Testament Professor Philip Barton Payne put it, “The ‘slippery slope’ argument against women’s ordination is nonsense. It incorrectly identifies the ordination of women as what leads churches to ordain those in same-sex unions. Like most Evangelical egalitarians, I uphold the Bible’s authority and believe in traditional sexual ethics. We support gender equality in the Church not despite what the Bible teaches, but because of the Bible’s affirmations of women in ministry.”

The insistence that egalitarianism leads to apostasy reminds me the old fundamentalist trope about rock and roll music leading to unwed pregnancy: It’s a dishonest scare tactic designed to keep people from examining the issue further and deducing truth for themselves. If we really wanted to play this game, I could just as easily say, “Look! See all these complementarian leaders and the misogynistic content they’re producing. See how so many of them trap women in marriages to abusers? See how many of them cover for predators and shame rape victims into silence? It must therefore be true that complementarianism is a gateway to misogyny. I have all this evidence clear as day.”

But I won’t make that argument. Why? Because it’s not fair, and it’s not honest. And I know, in my heart of hearts, that there are a great many complementarian people who cling to the theological framework out of genuine commitment and obedience to their best understanding of what Christ requires. I don’t have to agree with their interpretation, but I can acknowledge the legitimacy of their conviction, and I can see how they arrived at their conclusions based on Scripture. It seems to me that if we are ever going to bridge the gap between the comp and egal camps, then a commensurate fairness would be helpful. Let the debate happen on a broad scale and a public forum rather than insisting there’s no debate to be had in the first place.

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