My final paper for my Women in Christianity class:
Historian and Baylor professor Beth Allison Barr wrote in her groundbreaking book The Making of Biblical Womanhood “Patriarchy may be a part of Christian history, but that doesn’t make it Christian” (Barr 37). Yet this notion has spread throughout U.S. evangelical subculture, most infamously in the 1970s and 1980s through the anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist and attorney Phyllis Schlafly’s speeches and interviews. When asked why she fought so vehemently against the Constitutional Amendment that would grant women equal protections and provisions under the law, Schlafly replied that not only were women’s rights already protected under other pieces of legislation but, more critically, the Equal Rights Amendment would lead to the downfall of the family, “‘the basic unit of society, which is ingrained in the laws and the customs of our Judeo-Christian civilization’” (Zaina 1). Although her claim of women already obtaining equal protection under the law could have a paper in and of itself, I wish to turn our attention towards Schlafly’s latter claim, the concern for the family rooted in so-called Judeo-Christian culture.1 Despite her high education, Phyllis Schlafly seems unaware of certain aspects of Christian history. Thus, dear reader, I will attempt to prove that due to her conflation of Roman gender ideology and philosophy with the Christian New Testament, she upheld complementary gender ideals that undermine Paul’s radicality and Christianity’s egalitarianism.
Schlafly’s mistaking Roman patriarchal ideologies for Christian principles led her to promote complementary thought that reinforced female subordination instead of accurately reflecting Christianity’s message. Before Christianity solidified as a separate religion from Judaism, the faith began during Rome’s occupation of Judea, following three centuries of Greek occupation imposed by Alexander the Great. Both the Greek and Roman civilizations shared a great deal in their ideologies surrounding culture, art, religion, and most pertaintively to this paper, gender dynamics. In these societies, the only explanation for the difference between the sexes was sex polarity – that is, the belief that women were inherently inferior to men and that men are the epitome of perfection, biologically, intellectually, and spiritually.2 A strict polis/oikos divide designated separate spheres where men could rule and revel in public while women were sequestered away in privacy and were the property of their husbands.
Surely as in any colonization era, the Romans weaponized these thoughts against their colonized peoples, yet historian Karen Jo Torjesen shows us something unheard of during this time: “Inscriptional evidence shows that Christian women (also) held the office of elder in their communities,” and even “where Christian communities adopted the Jewish model of governance…, women continued to be chosen for this office” (Torjesen 19). Despite the lack of clarity of why Jewish women were not normally given the job of elder – be it their own tradition or imposed colonial values – here the fact that early female Christian women were permitted to be elders was rare, even radical both in the Jewish community from which they sprouted and in the historical moment of living under Rome’s legal and societal patriarchy. As a result, it seems that Schlafly’s concern for the family crashing down if women work, specifically in the church, is unfounded. Christian women did work in spiritual spaces since the religion’s inception, meaning she erased Christianity’s radicality in her declaration of alleged Judeo-Christian family values.
Additionally, Torjesen details how some of the churches Paul describes in his letters, such as “the church at Phillipi, (were) not only founded by a woman, but (their) leadership continued in the hands of women” (16). No mention is made of these women’s impropriety of organizing and leading men, nor does there seem to be any concern that these female leaders will be the destruction of their families. Rather, women are the ones nuturing and rearing these communities, giving birth to and, in a sense, mothering the Christian faith through their efforts in a society that said they shouldn’t be outside of the home. Therefore, Phyllis Schlafly is not arguing for a construct of family rooted in Christian tradition but rather the very Greco-Roman structure that sought to destroy Christianity, labeling it as deviant, dangerous, and weird.
Schlafly not only incorrectly exchanges early Christian women’s leadership in the Church for ancient Rome’s strict polis/oikos divide, she also conflaes the radicalness of Paul for Roman gender ideals about the female body. For those of us who were born and bred in the American evangelical church, we are all too aware with Paul’s supposed thoughts on women, myself:
Scarred by how Paul has been used against (us) as (we) have been told to be silent (1 Corinthians 14), to submit to (our) husbands (Ephesians 5), not to teach or exercise authority over men (1 Timothy 2), and to be workers at home (Titus 2) (Barr 39).
While Schlafly never explicitly references Paul, she does reference Judeo-Christian thought, and as Paul was not only Jewish but also is credited with over half of the Christian New Testament books, much of these ideologies are rooted in his works, his disciples, and his followers (Zaina). Regardless of the historical moment influencing Paul’s writings, the demeaning of women’s labor and diminishment of their humanity in these verses has been used to force women back into the Greco-Roman binary of polis/oikos that both the Romans and Schlafly championed, better known in contemporary Christian circles as complementarity. Barr defines complementarity as “the theological view that women are divinely created as helpers and men are divinely created as leaders” (5). Schlafly’s assertion that the American housewife belongs in the home while her husband is to be off in the world fits this ideology that derives some rationality from Genesis 23 but mainly from Paul’s passages quoted above.
The core backing for complementarity comes from American evangelics’ central belief of Biblical inerrancy – that the Bible is the pure, unfiltered, and indoctrinated word of God, and whatever the Bible precisely states is what God precisely meant. Consequently, Paul’s direction of “‘wives, submit to your husbands’” (Barr 47) is taken as Biblical truth as opposed to the fact that the author of these letters wrote them in a legal patriarchy and had his own unconscious biases. What complementarity fails to acknowledge is both the larger contexts of the verses and Paul’s words in comparison to what else was written concerning women around this time. Beth Allison Barr notes pointedly in her book:
Household governance (was) the domain of the Roman man – as master, father, and husband. The conversation (was) directed to men alone. By contrast, the Christian household codes address all the people in the house church – men, women, children, and slaves. Everyone is included in the conversation (49).
Paul’s inclusion in addressing everyone as the church – the body of Christ – is a revolutionary difference compared to Rome’s view of women and even Schlafly’s complementarity ideals. When Paul speaks to these women, he acknowledges their humanity and autonomy as fully functioning human beings, not Schlafley’s claim that the American housewife is content and happy at home without self-determination. Similarly, the Romans viewed the female flesh in an unflattering light, the (in)famous Greek philosopher Aristotle arguing how “‘we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity,’’ in Barr’s own words, that “Women were literally monsters” (51). Let us now compare the Greco-Roman thought on women’s anatomy with that of the Christian faith, Paul commanding “‘Men… to love the female body just as they love their own male body’ (Ephesians 5:27-29)” (Barr 52). Paul didn’t seem to care that women in Roman society were labeled as an atrocity; he saw the female form made in the image of God, just like the male body. This mutual esteem we see in Paul’s letters became muddled in the mix of Schlafly’s complementarity, the myth that Paul hated women and didn’t support them preaching proved faulty when the only deacon Paul named in all of his letters was Phoebe (Barr 65). Thus, Schlafly’s inability to see past her Biblical inerrancy and complementarity ideals in a revolutionary Paul have led her to not only oppose the Equal Rights Amendment but strip Christinaity of one of its most compelling components: its world-subverting egalitarian ideals.
Phyllis Schlafly’s misreading of Pauline letters and mistaking the early Christian female leadership for Roman gender norms led her to promote a complementary national narrative from an egalitarian religion. Sadly, Schlafly’s efforts were not only successful in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment, but more tragically many evangelical Christians were raised in and still believe complementarity gender ideals are Biblical womanhood instead of a patriarchal construction parading as Jesus. Yet all is not lost, for as Barr writes, Christianity’s original message was not patriarchal, since “complementarianism is patriarchy, and patriarchy is about power. Neither have ever been about Jesus” (218). Therefore, may we show our churches, our communities, and our world about what Christianity actually meant and means – a radical egalitarian religion that somehow, however miraculously, survived colonization, persecution, and death to maintain the flame that, in Paul’s words, “‘there is no longer male nor female’” (Barr 52) for all are one in Jesus Christ.
- See Loeffler, James. “The Problem with the ‘Judeo-Christian Tradition.’” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 1 Aug. 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/the-judeo-christian-tradition-is-over/614812. The term Judeo-Christian, an American development post-Holocaust, has tended to undermine Judaism’s autonomy as a separate religion from Christianity and, among philosemedic Christians like Schlafly, has resulted in severe anti-Semitism from the political far right.
↩︎ - See Zaina, Lisa. “Gender and the Church.” Theology 2233, 22 February 2024, Georgetown University. Lecture.
The Greco-Roman gender ideology operated in binaries, failing to acknowledge any gender fluidity or multiplicity, which is why I speak in terms of only women and men as opposed to other genders in this paper.
↩︎ - See Zaina, Lisa. “Gender and the Church.” Theology 2233, 22 February 2024, Georgetown University. Lecture.
Genesis 2:18 has been commonly translated as “And the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.’” (emphasis mine)
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Works Cited
Barr, Beth Allison. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Brazos Press, 2021.
Loeffler, James. “The Problem with the ‘Judeo-Christian Tradition.’” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 1 Aug. 2020, http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/the-judeo-christian-tradition-is-over/614812.
Torjesen, Karen Jo. When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity. HarperOne, 2011.
Zaina, Lisa. “Gender and the Church: Ancient Roots.” PowerPoint Presentation. THEO 2233. Georgetown University. 22 February 2024.
Zaina, Lisa. “Women in Christianity Final Paper: 5 May 2024.” Class Prompt. THEO 2233. Georgetown University. 15 April 2024.
Last Love 