Why Complementarian Gender Theology Is New

How complementarianism, far from being a timeless biblical truth, emerged as a reactive response to evangelical feminism and cultural shifts

I want to follow up on last week’s essay about moving beyond the evangelical Boomer gender theology known as “complementariansm.” (If you aren’t familiar with complementarianism, see this post. But it is basically the establishment conservative evangelical position on gender roles).

Some people say that I am wrong about complementarianism being new. They say that it is simply what the Bible teaches.

I will show that is not true by looking at two different sources. First, the complementarians themselves, who acknowledged they were breaking with the position they inherited to create something new. And the second, sociologist James Davison Hunter.

Here’s what John Piper and Wayne Grudem wrote in the original 1991 Preface to Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism.

We have edited this book in the hope that it might lead to a constructive solution to this controversy [over gender roles]. Our secondary purpose is to respond to evangelical feminist writings like those mentioned above—hence the subtitle, A Response to Evangelical Feminism.

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But our primary purpose is broader than that: We want to help Christians recover a noble vision of manhood and womanhood as God created them to be — hence the main title, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Our vision is not entirely the same as “a traditional view.” We affirm that the evangelical feminist movement has pointed out many selfish and hurtful practices that have previously gone unquestioned. But we hope that this new vision—a vision of Biblical “complementarity”—will both correct the previous mistakes and avoid the opposite mistakes that come from the feminist blurring of God-given sexual distinctions. [bold emphasis added, italics in original]

We see here that their project is clearly reactive in nature. They are responding to the evangelical strand of second wave feminism.

We also see that they are explicitly breaking with pre-feminist views of gender (“a traditional view”). And that they themselves say they have a “new vision.”

When I note that complementarianism is new, critics defend it by saying that the Bible is complementarian. That’s true. But you know what? The traditional view that Piper, Grudem, and company rejected was also complementarian.

Why were they allowed to reject the preexisting complementarianism but we are not allowed to question theirs?

The excerpt also shows again the immense Boomer self-regard. They point out that evangelical feminism (also heavily Boomer inflected) raised valid objections to “practices that have previously gone unquestioned.” While the exact meaning of “previously gone unquestioned” is open to multiple interpretations, one of them is “never before questioned.” That would render the meaning something like, “Our generation discovered truths nobody else in human history ever noticed before.”

Now, there’s a sense in which this could be true. Since culture is always changing and never repeats itself, there are always truths regarding present culture that can be discovered. But if that was true in the 1970s, it’s still true today. Our generation can equally discover new truths in our very different culture about problematic practices that have previously gone unquestioned by the Boomers.

I also want to provide an excerpt from sociologist James Davison Hunter’s 1987 book Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation. Hunter is an eminent sociologist of evangelicalism and culture. Whatever he says about culture deserves to be taken very seriously. He’s also a Boomer himself, so can hardly be accused of anti-Boomer bias. This is an academic, peer reviewed book published by the University of Chicago Press. I’m giving a lengthy excerpt as this book is out of print.

Popular Evangelical literature has, since the mid-1950s, suggested three fairly distinct strategies. The first [traditionalism] was more prevalent up to the mid-1960s. It began by acknowledging that cultural changes are occurring widely but ended with the the conviction that biblical norms, as unpopular as they may be, need to be reaffirmed. Even as late as 1969, one author wrote that the Apostle Paul “does not appeal to the cultural norm as the basis of his command to the Christian woman to submit to male leadership” but “to timeless spiritual principles.” Wives should find their fulfillment as helpers to their husbands because “God created Eve to be Adam’s helper.” “God did not create woman as a second Adam,…free to determine her destiny apart from [him].” Men have social and spiritual priority in the family and in the church “because of the priority of man’s creation. ‘Adam was first formed, then Eve.’” Moreover, Eve was the first to sin. As helper she should recognize her responsibilities in the home. As another writer explained, “it is as mothers, wives, and homemakers that [women] make their unique contribution to humanity.”

Since that time a slight shift in orientation has occurred. Many Evangelicals [complementarians] came to express sympathy with the feminist critique by thoroughly rejecting any suggestions that submission implies inferiority or that headship implies superiority. One author labeled such notions “insidious.” To be sure, the sins of sexual oppression need to be opposed. The distinctions in roles and responsibilities are nevertheless biblically inspired and deserve to be taken seriously regardless of the “sinful distortions” that can occur. The husband has no right to “bully his wife” to “exercise tyranny” over his family, to be “rigidly authoritarian",” to give into “aggressive domination” and “dictatorship” in the administration of the household. Rather, he is “to be the fountainhead of love in the home. This is a love which nourishes, cherishes, and protects his wife.” The emphasis on the requirement of the husband to love his wife (defined as follows: to be “sensitive to her emotional needs,” “to be patient with her,” to show “eager and solicitous concern for her happiness",” and to consider her “opinions as seriously as he regards his own”) is so prominent that the relationship remains hierarchical in principle only. This become especially clear when lay and professional experts affirm the authority of the husband but simultaneously describe wives as “equal partners,” “total companions,” “friends,” “joint heirs,” “true comrades,” and the like. By redefining the husband’s authority as an administrative technicality, the marriage relationship as a functional equality, and her nature as a “weaker vessel” in exclusively physiological terms, Evangelicals have been able to maintain the integrity of their commitment to biblical literalism while at the same making the submission of women much less intellectually and emotionally objectionable. We are thus assured that subjection of this kind is “not at all demeaning.”

The third strategy for addressing biblical inferred status inequalities between men and women/husbands and wives is the one put forward by Evangelical feminists….

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The relationship between Evangelicalism and the family is laced with irony. The idea family celebrated by Evangelicals (especially its ministers and specialists) is claimed to be both traditional and biblical. This is the family of the Judeo-Christian heritage - and ideal inspired by the divine; its qualities, timeless. Yet perhaps the only transhistorical aspect to this ideal is that it involves a fundamental relationship between a man, a woman, and their children. The participants of this relationship have remained the same. Maybe the only other quality which comes close to transcending the vagaries of historical change in the past two millennia has been its hierarchical nature. An intractable form of patriarchy has characterized family organization for virtually all of this time. But the similarity between this ideal family and whatever else preceded it stops here. The ideal Christian family currently celebrated is decidedly bourgeois in its sociocultural ethos, its quality of relationships, and its definition of family roles. It is, then, largely foreign to Christianity before the modern age. But in a very real sense, the ideal Christian family is not even bourgeois. It is a hypersentimentalized variant of that model. As such it would be more accurate to label this model neobourgeois. That this model is historically unique there is little doubt. Whether or not it is biblical and the divinely intended model, as many Evangelicals have claimed, is another matter. It may be; it may not be. If it is, then it has taken nearly twenty centuries of Christian experience to realize.

To the extent that hypersentimentalization is advocated in theory and adopted in practice, bourgeois patriarchal authority is undercut. Such authority, then, comes to exist in name (or in principle) only. Add to this the fact that large sectors of the Evangelical population (particularly within the younger cohort) no longer accept the legitimacy of traditional (bourgeois) role assignments, and one is left with a normative pattern of family life that is very untraditional indeed. In brief, the Evangelical family specialists (including many ministers) advocate and defend a model of the family that is said to be traditional but in fact has no real historical precedent (in Christendom or anywhere else) in the name of a constituency that has largely abandoned it in favor an androgynous/quasi-androgynous model [bold emphasis added, italics in original]

This book was published the same year that the Danvers Statement, the most widely accepted complementarian creed, was published.

If you want to understand Hunter’s tremendous talent and insights as a sociologist, just see how he here diagnoses complementarianism and its implications in real time.

As he makes clear, the specific evangelical complementarian system developed in this era - in contrast with a “generic complementarianism” that affirms the Bible’s passages on gender roles but implements them in various different ways in different times - is new. It has no historic pedigree.

Where I would differ with Hunter is in saying that these differences were more than slight. They represent a very different approach. In effect, the complementarians retained some of the language of traditionalism, but imbued it with new meaning. They put new wine in old wineskins.

We also see from both the complementarians themselves and Hunter that complementarianism was a “third way” approach that tried to navigate between traditional views and evangelical feminism. This is in keeping with its reactive nature.

I think it’s fair to say that the 1950s gender roles were very cultural specific and not a representation of timeless biblical teaching. But the same is true for the gender role vision promoted by complementarianism. I’m not saying it is 100% wrong, but it is clearly a product of a specific cultural moment in America.

Dealing with the problems of complementarianism requires that younger generations be willing to clearly and publicly state where the Boomer (and earlier) figures who created it got things wrong, and where changes in the culture require new approaches.

Again, the Boomers themselves never hesitated to say when they felt their predecessors got it wrong. It’s easy to blame them for things, but younger generations haven’t been willing to assert themselves. In fact, all too many of them will go to the mat to defend their Boomer heroes. You can’t blame the Boomers for that.

Of course, after initially fighting them, older generations were also willing to make space for the Boomers to get on stage and start leading. The Boomers themselves have typically not done this. So post-Boomer generations cannot expect the Boomers to readily allow for any changes or updating - quite the opposite in fact. Unfortunately, this then will necessitate some level of deconstruction of the Boomer approaches.

But ironically, it is the Boomers’ insistence that they were completely right that will end up sinking complementarianism as we know it, and likely so much else besides. It will descend below the waterline, weighed down by errors and the Boomer cultural particularities they refused to reckon with.