Cathleen Falsani, former religion reporter at the Chicago Tribune, used to say her job was cultural translator — converting the language of religious people for secular publication, and then translating the secular culture back to the faithful. Having worked in both religious and secular roles, I feel that way sometimes, especially when religious folks make head-scratching news like the Baptists did this month.
In case you missed it, the Southern Baptist Convention met in Indianapolis and considered, among other things, a resolution banning churches that allow women to serve as pastors. The measure failed to gain the two-thirds supermajority it needed, but 61% of voters supported it.
Are 61% of Southern Baptists misogynists? Is the denomination simply opposed to empowering women? What’s going on here?
A woman’s place
First, it’s worth noting the progressive change in attitude on this issue among the faithful.
Since 1998, the Association of Religion Data Archives has conducted a periodic survey called the National Congregations Study that gives a snapshot of the beliefs, practices and demographics of all American religious congregations. In the latest installment of that survey, published in 2021, 56% of all religious congregations in the U.S. reported that a woman could be allowed to serve as the community’s primary leader — that’s up from 47% in 2006 — and 89% of congregations would allow women to serve on a governing board.
Acceptance of women in leadership roles varies widely among subgroups: 95% of mainline Protestant congregations accept female leaders, at least in theory, compared with two-thirds of Black Protestant churches and a third of white evangelical churches. In a separate 2020 survey, 72.8% of American evangelicals agreed that women should be allowed to preach in Sunday services, a common function of pastors and senior church leaders.
An older study, from 2011, isolated responses from Southern Baptist churchgoers and found that almost 65% agreed that women should be allowed to serve as clergy, though that survey didn’t delineate between senior and associate pastor roles.
But practice doesn’t track with theory; only 13.8% of all American congregations are led by women, and those congregations account for only 8.1% of all worshippers across all faith traditions.
Among white evangelicals, where most Southern Baptists fall, only 3% of congregations are led by women. That’s only slightly more than Roman Catholic congregations, where priesthood is reserved for men (some Catholic communities are priestless).
Minority faiths tend to empower women more. Of non-Christian congregations reporting, 32.6% were led by a woman.
Within religions, these differences often fall predictably along geographic and political lines. Women are more likely to be in positions of leadership among liberal congregations on the coasts than in conservative congregations in the South or Midwest.
It’s important to recognize that this is a more complex issue than the binary answer to “can women be pastors?” Some congregations ordain women but don’t allow them to be the primary leader. Others allow women to perform certain sacerdotal duties but not all. When researchers include questions about whether women should be allowed to preach, offer sacraments or sit on governing boards, the responses get complicated.
People of the book
Adherents to conservative faith traditions like Southern Baptists submit themselves to obeying holy writ, even when they would rather not. Every Southern Baptist expects to live at odds with prevailing cultural norms at some point. In fact, to do so is often a point of pride. Countercultural movements arise regularly in conservative religious circles seeking to “stand against the tide” of cultural norms in dating, dress, family planning, health care, finance, business, entertainment, housing, philanthropy and dozens of other categories. All of these movements can connect a group’s raison d’être to sacred writings and thereby turn its chosen issue into a crusade of sorts.
In the case of women, most Christian restrictions find their basis in the writings of the Apostle Paul. Aside from Jesus, Paul may be the teacher with the most far-reaching impact in the history of Christian thought. Paul wrote about half of the books in the New Testament, including several letters to young churches in which he laid out rules for orderly worship and church governance.
“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man,” Paul wrote to his protege Timothy. And to the church in Corinth: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.”
Those sentences plainly seem to forbid female leadership. When religious people read them, they find themselves caught between cultural norms illuminated on their TVs and ancient commands printed in their holy books. That tension is the root of so many points of variance between religious people and people who scratch their heads at religion.
In 2019, John MacArthur, one of the most influential figures in modern American evangelicalism, got into a spat with Texas Bible teacher Beth Moore over her insistence on preaching. After women spoke at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, MacArthur took it as a sign that Baptists no longer believed their Bibles.
“When you literally overturn the teaching of Scripture to empower people who want power, you have given up biblical authority,” MacArthur said.
That philosophy was echoed by Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, leading up to this month’s convention vote. Mohler wrote and spoke publicly of his opposition to women in the pastorate, calling it “contrary to Scripture” and a slippery slope toward more egalitarian interpretations on issues of gender, homosexuality and marriage.
“If you adopt a system that allows you to get around the plain teachings of scripture in one area, you are going to have a very hard time closing the door on someone else using your same argument on a different issue,” Mohler wrote.
Open to interpretation
Of course that’s not what’s happening in the 3% of evangelical congregations led by a woman. No serious person of faith would consciously jettison the teachings of the Bible to create a theology of her own making. Those congregations who empower women have not done so. Rather, they have found justification for their position in the sacred texts, not outside them.
For instance, Paul’s commands about women could be interpreted as unique to the churches he addressed, and not universal for all time. That interpretation is especially appealing in the letter to Timothy in which Paul also forbids women to wear gold or pearls to church.
Also, the submission Paul enforced “as the law says” may refer to the ancient Roman law of tutelage. For a woman to speak in church would not have broken the law of God, but the law of Rome, and therefore censured. Since America has no such law, Paul’s command here may be null, some interpreters say.
Another issue: The title of “pastor” debated by Southern Baptists is not a biblical office. The New Testament describes only two ecclesiastical offices: elder (or overseer) and deacon (or servant). And the most common pattern of church leadership seems to be a board of council of elders rather than a single all-powerful leader. That’s a wise move for churches for the same reasons it’s a wise move for corporations, political parties and even neighborhood associations that employ a plurality of voices for governance.
But many Southern Baptist churches operate with a single leader, the pastor serving as the only or most powerful overseer. Indeed, according to the National Congregations Study, more than half of American congregations are led by a single leader with no additional paid ministerial staff.
And some evangelical churches have all three offices — elder, deacon and pastor.
It’s hard to claim the biblical high ground in a debate over an office the Bible doesn’t address.
Something else must be said here: This debate is not only about differing interpretations of sacred writings but about differing weights given to those interpretations. The Bible affirms that some commands are more important than others. Loving God and loving your neighbor top the list. Matters of church governance are simply less important. Believers can agree to disagree over what Paul calls “disputable matters.” Only when every issue becomes a holy crusade do you get the likes of Al Mohler.
In fact, this may be one way that church leaders are following the very culture they seek to “stand against.” In our current ideological debates, every issue is an existential one. Every politician warns us that a vote for the other guy is an extinction-level threat.
Last year, I was invited to speak to a class of students at the University of Texas at Dallas. We discussed many issues, from climate change to election integrity to puberty blockers, and every single one was considered a matter of life and death.
In such an environment, the job of a cultural translator is a fraught one.
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