The Southern Baptist Convention ousting female pastors shows the Christian right’s radicalization
Yes, this is the 21st century: On Tuesday, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) decided to throw out one of its biggest, most popular churches because they let women be pastors.
No one should mistake Saddleback Church, founded by fame-chasing minister Rick Warren, for a liberal church. While less overtly homophobic than other evangelical ministers, Warren has nonetheless loudly opposed same-sex marriage. He pals around with the founder of Hobby Lobby, who successfully sued to block his employees from using their own insurance benefits to pay for contraception. And he believes in forced childbirth.
But in one small way, Warren’s church has acknowledged the ways the world has changed since the advent of electricity: They now have female pastors.
Back in 2021, Saddleback ordained three women as pastors, a move the church’s Facebook page celebrated at the time as “historic.” Then when Warren retired that year, he handed the reins of power over to pastor Andy Wood — along with his wife and fellow pastor, Stacie Wood. Even though Stacie Wood was supposedly only a “teaching” pastor, her prominent role in church leadership infuriated the leadership of the SBC enough. On Tuesday, Saddleback, along with four other churches, was kicked out of the convention for daring to have female ministers.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
In one sense, the move is a shocking one. American Christianity has been on the decline for decades. In 1976, four out of five Americans identified as a white Christian, but now that group is a minority at 43% of the population. This is largely due to young people leaving the church when they reach adulthood and never coming back. Saddleback, however, was a shining star of American evangelicalism, with over half a million YouTube followers and a weekly church attendance at its California home base of over 20,000 people. Warren’s book, “The Purpose-Driven Life,” has sold over 50 million copies since its 2002 publication. In theory, Saddleback should be the kind of church that the larger evangelical movement should look to as a model for how to grow and thrive. Instead, the SBC decided to kick them out of their little Jesus club, choosing sexism over popularity.
The SBC decided to kick Saddleback out of their little Jesus club, choosing sexism over popularity.
The SBC’s move isn’t happening in a vaccum. It’s part of a larger right-wing backlash to feminism that has only been growing more intense since Republicans christened Donald “Grab ‘Em By The Pussy” Trump as their misogynist overlord. While most of the country grows more accepting of women’s equality, the religious right has only grown more radical in its attempts to destroy women’s rights and send women back to the kitchen. The overturn of Roe v. Wade was just the tip of the emerging misogyny iceberg.
The SBC banned female pastors in the year 2000, as part of a larger anti-feminist backlash that also resulted in the organization endorsing the idea that women should “submit” to their husbands. Prior to then, as ordained minister and women’s studies scholar Susan Shaw wrote in 2021, there had been a growing movement within the denomination to place more women into pastoral roles. Hundreds of women had been ordained from the 70s through the 90s.
The debate stayed quiet for the better part of two decades, but in recent years, there have been more frustrations with this utterly backward policy. In 2021, popular Christian author Beth Moore publicly abandoned the SBC over “attitudes among some key Christian leaders that smacked of misogyny, objectification and astonishing disesteem of women.” Things got worse after a damning 2022 report showing how the male-dominated SBC allowed sexual abuse to thrive and protected accused rapists. In the midst of all this, Saddleback’s actions were clearly taken as a major challenge to the SBC’s culture of sexism.
Well, the sexists aren’t giving up that easily.
In 2021, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Albert Mohler, wrote a screed decrying “the feminization of liberal Protestantism” and acceptance of LGBTQ rights. He blamed the nation’s declining church attendance on “social justice activism” and “liberal theology.” As Kathryn Joyce wrote in Salon in June, the internal discourse of the SBC has “revolved around the charge that the SBC has become too liberal and is at risk of being overrun by ‘wokeism’ and critical race theory (CRT).” In reality, as Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) explained to Salon in 2017, attitudes like Mohler’s are what are running young people off.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
“It’s not just that conservative white Christians have lost this argument with a broader liberal culture,” Jones explained. “It’s that they’ve lost it with their own kids and grandchildren.” But rather than adapt and grow with the times, the Christian right is kicking even more people out. They would rather see their numbers dwindle further than accept the equality of women or LGBTQ people.
The religious right’s reaction to their declining popularity is to double down on the repressive and hateful attitudes that led people to reject them in the first place.
The full scale of this misogynist tantrum is also evident in a legal case that may make its way to the Supreme Court involving a taxpayer-funded charter school in North Carolina that has banned female students from wearing pants. The students are suing, rightfully pointing out that such a dress code violates Title IX, which bars gender discrimination in government-funded education. The school argues, however, that the skirts-only rule is important to “preserve chivalry” because a woman is “a fragile vessel that men are supposed to take care of and honor.”
There’s a lot going on with that case, including serious questions of whether the government should be funding schools that are imposing religious values in a fairly obvious violation of the First Amendment. Unfortunately, there’s good reason to worry that the current iteration of the Supreme Court, which defines “religious freedom” as the right of conservative Christians to force their faith on others, will not only take up the case but rule in the school’s favor.
Setting the legal questions aside, the blatant sexism on display is astounding, even for a conservative Christian school. Calling women “fragile vessels” and forcing dress codes that were outdated even in the 1960s is yet another sign that the religious right’s reaction to their declining popularity is to double down on the repressive and hateful attitudes that led people to reject them in the first place. There’s more than a whiff of delusion to this language about “fragile vessels” in an era where female athletes like Serena Williams are international superstars, some of the most powerful countries in the world have female leaders, and women outnumber men in the college-educated labor force. That women are full human beings and not mere “vessels” for male purposes simply isn’t a debatable proposition. It’s an objective fact.
But we live in an era where denying reality is just a way of life for conservatives. So Republicans are throwing a nationwide tantrum, trying to claw back decades of progress for women. On one hand, they’re having distressing successes, most notably when it comes to banning abortion. On the other hand, the more they try to crack down on women, the more unpopular they get. Americans have grown accustomed to women in the workforce and leadership roles, and our economic systems and other institutions have grown dependent on women’s labor. You can pass all the mandatory skirt rules you want, but putting the feminist genie back in the bottle won’t be so easy.