A long time ago, I wanted to be a pastor.

My spiritual director, an elderly female Episcopalian priest who works as a hospice chaplain, told me stories of ugly, humiliating sexism. She was the first female priest to be ordained in her state and faced a LOT of opposition.

*My current spiritual director, I should say

But growing up in conservative evangelicalism, I didn't have her experience. I voiced my interest in seminary or the pastorate maybe twice.

Both times, the male spiritual authorities responded in the "calm, loving" tone that we all practiced for the unsaved or deceived.

Throughout high school, I had this conversation multiple times and I know the affect so well.

It's a performance of wistful faithfulness and compassionate certainty. Sometimes there's a personal story of how they, too, once wanted to see women in leadership.

But ultimately, We as Christians must sacrifice our personal ambitions to Christ, our feelings to reason, and our desires to the authority of the Bible.

So the whole conversation is reframed as (untrustworthy) personal desires vs. the clear teaching of the Bible.

In other contexts, I heard these same figures make jokes about female pastors. And in other contexts, some of these same figures spoke to me and other women with kind of shocking paternalistic sexism-- it rankled even then, but I forgave them, and the memory no longer hurts.

Anyway, I thought that if I couldn't be a pastor, because it was tragically forbidden by the Bible, maybe I could be a theologian or apologeticist?

That was more ambiguous in my church community, but when I raised the possibility it was certainly treated as embarrassing!

My junior or senior year of high school, I attended a Together for the Gospel conference. It was a heady time! I did a lot of soul-searching and prayer. There were booths for various seminaries and pastor's colleges, so I went to ask about admissions.

I'm sure the reps thought they answered respectfully and kindly-- I could tell they were trying very hard. And I do appreciate the effort.

But I left the row of booths feeling both hollow and embarrassed.

I spent the rest of the conference oscillating between anger at God for making me a woman. Not just because of the pastorate-- because I hated being reminded that I was the weaker vessel, emotional, my role was loving submission, that I was lucky & never had to worry doctrine.

But thing I'd swing the other way and fall into deep, deep self-blame. Does the vessel ask the potter, "Why have you made me this way?" I begged God to change my heart, because while I'd considered praying God to miraculously change my gender, I really didn't want to be a boy.

I spent hours agonizing over why I wanted to teach. When I shared it with my female mentors, they were less sympathetic than the male authorities.

Aha, the root sin of mother Eve: a grab for authority and power. We all know this temptation!

So I spent hours, filled pages, confessing that I must have a root of pride or desire for power. I begged God to change my heart. I did everything I could to help the change along.

Do you know what happens when someone is consistently taught to interpret their experience and desires a certain way? Eventually it takes.

I was 20 years old, and by now I *did* want to wield power and authority.

Years of complementarian theology, training for evangelization, and worldview apologetics had taught me that authority and power were paramount.

Colson, Pearcey, and Van Til taught me the cultural mandate. "Subduing the earth" meant wielding cultural and political clout.

Our goal-- the one we talked about privately, in caregroups and homeschool debate and worldview meetings and at conferences-- was to build cultural systems that "naturally incentivized" people to live Godly lives, and...

...well, we wouldn't say punished, we'd say "let the natural consequences fall" on people who made ungodly choices.

We believed, you see, that political progressives had corrupted the natural state of things, so ppl bad choices were being unjustly protected from consequences.

And good people making good choices weren't reaping their just rewards, of course.

Unsurprisingly, the 2 common examples of bad people being shielded from their choices were 1) Welfare queens and 2) Gay people having retroviral drugs to protect them from AIDS

I was constantly hearing about "liberal Christians" (which meant both liberal Protestantism and Christians with progressive leanings) who were guided only by feelings and kind of cowards. They automatically assumed that wielding power was a bad thing. Really a shame.

We knew with certainty that God commanded Christians to influence the world around us. We knew that people make choices based on what's available to them.

So we needed to
1) limit total number of options
2) limit access to bad options
3) heavily advertise good options

By the way, this was all described to me with a specific attitude of dismissive self-awareness.

"Now there those who'd say we're somehow controlling people or trying to take their freedom, but that's a total misread of this situation because *we know that*"

So I always knew there were critics, but they just weren't in touch with our real mission and goals and they'd already been countered.

Wielding power was a good, Christian thing to do.
I wanted to wield power.
I was bad for wanting power within the church, because, my gender.

I wasn't alone, by the way! I discussed this problem at length with other girls. And there are good, biblical avenues for the power-oriented female activist!

Prolife activism was a big one! We weren't just saving babies, we were helping shepherd women towards motherhood!

Phillis Schlafly style weaponized antifeminism was also on the table. It was repeatedly suggested that the truly brave, truly countercultural thing was complete submission.

And motherhood, of course. "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." "Children are arrows." etc.

Women's ministry, too, could help Build Up the Next Generation of submissive wives and good mothers.

There was just one problem: by this point, I absolutely hated femininity.

I don't mean I was just a Cool Girl Not Like the Other Girls. I hated the fact that femininity stood for weakness, emotionalism, fallibility, irrationality.

I hated the social roles available to women. I was heavily involved in raising my younger siblings, and my experience

didn't match how motherhood was described in sermons, women's ministry, and parenting literature. It was hard. It was frustrating. Tiring. I felt like I was losing the focus, the intellect, that I liked best, before I even had a chance to unfold it.

And I hated the way femininity was performed. My peers advised me to "let the boys win" in sports, in debates, to practice deferring to their suggestions. Why should I listen to them for no reason? Why did I have to clean up the dishes, but they could sit around and debate?

Even the style: long, flowy skirts, no makeup, long hair in curls, white collared shirts, white tennis shoes. It wasn't how I wanted to look. I felt unhappy and trapped, because I saw fashion as a language-- and I was telling a lie about who I wanted to be.

So I didn't want to be part of women's ministry. I didn't want to pretend to be a happy, joyful, homeschooling, complementarian wife.

That my mother's calling, and she was AMAZING at it. But I knew it wasn't mine.

Oh, and by this time? I didn't hate, but I feared, masculinity. Purity culture taught me that men are barely-restrained containers of rapey gunpowder. My church's handling of a sexual abuse scandal confirmed this view.

Men were *dangerous.* You couldn't trust men.

I mean, that's the double vision.

Out loud: Of course we can trust men. They're the rational ones, gifted to be leaders, benevolent protectors, and we're so happy to be their helpmeets.

Whispered: But they keep hurting us, and our children.

Submit to a man in marriage? Ohhhh never!!! It was hard enough for me to submit to my father, and he was a gentle, humble man, sometimes dinged for not being a "strong enough leader."

I didn't see any other possibilities.

I wrote a long-running fanfiction, in which the witch Circe was actually a sci-fi genius, and she magically-- err, scientifically brought Deborah, Rahab, Ruth, Naomi, and Jael to her island.

Circe had cloning tech, and they populated the island with women, and men who came ashore were turned into beasts.

The fanfiction was mostly political debates in their Forum. Without any men, they could follow the Bible but also build a fully-equal democracy and explore ideas.

I couldn't imagine a real future where I'd be happy, so I turned to fiction.

In the meantime, I was, you guessed it, still praying every day for God to change my heart and make me enjoy being a submissive woman.

I look back on all these twisted years, when I hated myself, and hated my gender, and was so miserable.

I was putting more & more obstacles between myself & God's love, thinking that I was desperately following hard after Him.

I tell this story to illustrate a few points about sexism, misogyny, and complementarianism.

First, most of the complementarian men I knew weren't misogynists. Many of them were more functionally egalitarian than the left-leaning, self-proclaimed feminist men I've known. And

these complementarian men were respectful of women. They shut down jokes about fat women, insisted that women were beautiful and worthy of protection. They showed up in their marriages, in their coparenting roles.

That's worth noting.

But they still did some harm. They helped build and sustain sexist cultures. And they preached sexism with a velvet glove: sympathetic, emotionally sensitive sexism.

Underneath the compassionate refusal, the spore, the seed of sexism was still planted:

That women-- as a gender-- are weaker then men-- as a gender.

That women can't be trusted to correctly interpret their own experiences, or to interpret the Word of God. (Of course, they'd say, no one can, then happily "correct" the woman's interpretation)

That any change or challenge to male authority is coming from bad motives. (seeking power, not Christlike)

Strangely, this same motive is good and Christlike in other context.

Another nuance I want to point out:

2. The really nasty misogyny was coming from other Christian women, not men.

It came out in one of my least favorite sermonic rhetorical strategies, the self-condemining we:

"We as [group] are so bad"
-eg I'm willing to condemn myself, therefore I can condemn you too
-eg if you don't agree, you're not part of this group

Christian women's ministry would start with self-deprecating jokes: "We as women are so... so vulnerable, AS the weaker vessels, it's so. good. to come back to the truth of Scriptures!"

Female authority figures, not male ones, told me:

-educating women past high school is a waste, because the only use for female education is equipping them to homeschool kids
-the point of college is to find a good husband
-I shouldn't seek a grad degree, because I'd be

tempted to leave the home
-it's a tempting but bad decision to work outside the home, because you'll be abandoning your true calling (serving husband, having kids)
-banning abortions is good for women because it encourages single moms to learn self-sacrifice & true freedom

-due to our time of month, women are unfit to lead in any capacity
-marital rape is ok, it's fine, God redeemed it, I'm fine, I'm great!
-sexual abuse is the victim's fault (if not a child)
-sexual abuse is partly the offender's wife's fault (she didn't meet his needs)

-sexual abuse is probably the victim's fault if she dressed immodestly and cultivated worldly habits
-girls mature faster than boys, so, really, a biblical culture would place the age of consent at whenever she gets her period (11-14 yo)

-doing anything besides wifehood and motherhood will not bring total fulfillment. Women were created to submissively support men and bear children.
-therefore, any woman not doing this is to be pitied, because she doesn't "know true happiness/ purpose/ freedom"

-feminists are deluded and secretly, deeply unhappy
-feminists will try to trick you into joining them and being a career woman
-feminists are pushing a worldly agenda aimed at girls, lying to them, teaching them that motherhood isn't honorable. MOTHERHOOD IS EVERYTHING.

And honestly... I do understand where these women were coming from. I've worked for years to forgive, and understand, and I still love them as my sisters in Christ.

I can't think of even a single female authority who grew up inside conservativism. They're all converts.

They're all converts with bad experiences in their past. Many shared that "before when I was worldly," they experienced loneliness, neglect from fathers, a feminist insulted or mocked their ambition to mothers. Many are working-class or formerly working-class.

Staying at home with your children? Being protected and loved and cherished? Having your life goal's not just affirmed, but celebrated as God's divine purpose? Who WOULDN'T want that?

How could there be any other path to happiness and flourishing? They tried other paths, before, but now they're convinced.

And, I think, they forget that their daughters-- and often their husbands-- don't have exposure to the egalitarian beliefs they're giving up.

And this leads me to the last point of nuance:

3. The deep, bitter misogyny that bubbles out of men and women, is a *logical consequence of* sexist theology, but not *explicitly present in* the printed material.

Misogyny is a prejudice. A feeling. A group affect. The problem isn't that complementarian theology always results in the despairing misogyny that I-- and many male and female peers-- arrived at.

If it did, complementarianism wouldn't be attractive.

Complementarian teaching creates the possibility for misogyny. It opens the door. Maybe even beckons a few times.

Misogyny, as an affect, is cultivated by the complementarian cultural imaginary. The stories, tropes, jokes, sermon illustration, applications.

I can remember specific texts, specific sermons. I think they're written in good-faith: They want to make traditional gender roles look appealing, they want to "glorify biblical manhood and womanhood."

Sometimes inadvertently, sometimes on purpose, they make women look... bad.

I don't just mean women who don't fit the complementarian vision of femininity.

I suspect that most girls like me-- brainy, skeptical, kind of a tomboy, ambitious-- would get fed up with complementarianism's femininity sooner or later. I never saw myself in the stories.

At least not in the good stories. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of a figure and thought, Yes! That woman, I want to be her!

She was inevitably corrupted by the world, or got raped, or punished with miscarriages, or got old and childless and regretted her whole life.

And I know, love, and admire many women who LOVE the traditional imagery surrounding complementarian feminism. I don't resent their happiness; they love imagining themselves vividly as helpmeets wild at heart. They love the trust and relief at following someone else's lead.

I believe that they're happy. I believe that mode of flourishing exists.

But when I talk with my sisters in Christ who love this femininity, they also sometimes express a little doubt. Purity and "active submission," or whatever the current rebranding is, well...

it's still not as good, not as celebrated, not as honorable as robust masculinity and bold leadership.

Sometimes this is an opportunity for them to remember: the world looks for eye-catching heroism, God will remember and celebrate us.

If complementarianism-- as theology, as a culture-- wants to avoid creating misogyny in men or women,

I think the leaders should start from the point, "This theology is *vulnerable to corruption.* It isn't getting false accused by outsiders. There's a problem."

Complementarianism promises that men and women have different, but equal roles.

The world, looking on the outside, thinks there's a power differential-- but really there's not, because spiritually, subordination isn't about better/ worse than.

I don't think teaching "different but equal" is possible, unless you're willing to go HARD on radical social equality in every other respect.

Different but equal isn't "just misunderstood" by outsiders, "just mistaken" for a power differential. No, they see correctly.

As long as hierarchy is used to organize bodies to action, and people higher in the hierarchy receive greater praise, responsibility, power, and privilege than those lower in the hierarchy,

complementarianism in ^ context will reproduce this dynamic & the status it signifies

So complementarian must take place in a new kind of context

or it must make peace with the fact that, indeed, "different but equal" creates unequal social structures.

-- and inequality frequently generates a culture of sexism, and attitudes of misogyny.