In a 2021 article for Georgetown University’s Berkley Forum, Maxwell explained that years earlier, Southern Baptists doubled down on a specific vision of complementarianism “with the publication of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, which proclaimed that wives should submit to their husbands and that pastors should be men.” Even so, there have been women in the S.B.C. who gained great prominence as Bible teachers and speakers outside of the formal role of pastor; several people mentioned to me Beth Moore, who left the S.B.C. in 2021 over its handling of sexual abuse scandals and many members’ embrace of Trump.
Over the years, reinforcement of conservative beliefs about gender (and about sexuality and in vitro fertilization, which, the president of the S.B.C.’s ethics committee recently declared in a letter to the U.S. Senate, “specifically results in harm to preborn children and harm to parents”) has set various denominations on a collision course with religious Americans’ attitudes about gender equality. The coming clash is evident when you look at polling over the past 50 years.
In their 2010 book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” Robert Putnam and David Campbell describe the change in attitudes among religious Americans that began taking place in the 1970s. Religious women entered the work force at similar rates to secular women, Putnam and Campbell write. Perhaps surprisingly, “as Americans became more liberal on gender issues in the ensuing decades, religious Americans became feminist at least as fast as and sometimes even faster than more secular Americans.”
“By 2006, majorities of every religious tradition except Mormons had come to favor women clergy.” Further, the authors write, “nearly three-quarters of Americans said that women have too little influence in religion, a view that is widely shared across virtually all religious traditions and by both men and women.” When looking at evangelical Christians in particular, Putnam and Campbell note, “While evangelicals as a group are somewhat more skeptical” of what the authors call religious feminism, “that difference is almost entirely concentrated among an extremely fundamentalist minority of evangelicals.”
Since Trump emerged on the political scene in 2015, however, the voices in this minority have become louder and more aggressive. Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and the author of “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going,” told me that the combination of declining numbers of white evangelical Protestants and Trump’s influence has encouraged some conservative Christians to become more extreme in their messaging.
