Transcript from recording with some editing for clarity:
Part of my story is that I wanted complementarianism to be the answer for all my searching for my whole life.
I came into a complementarian theology because I wanted it to be right. I wanted it to make sense of everything I experienced throughout my life as a woman, as a woman of color, as someone adopted into white culture, into fundamentalist, evangelical culture. I was raised on Dobson Gothard MacArthur, all of it. It was a lot. I was neck deep in all of that as a child throughout my upbringing and by the time I was in my 20s, I felt so alone and so broken and so confused by everything that had happened to me personally, let alone anything I would learn about others and collective American and Global history.
There’s so many things that I could point to that I’m trying to kind of systematically go through my life and connect all the dots because so much of it makes sense. I mean it makes sense now looking back over my life. What drew me to the PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) at the time? What drew me to Tim Keller and the church that I was at at the time, what drew me to my husband, a pastor in the PCA.
You know, my husband and I have talked a lot about this over the past several years even after getting married. And we had talked about all the things and we thought that our commitment was to staying in the denomination to try to move the needle, as as they say, but we just realized that it was not gonna happen the way, not in a way that we could flourish and thrive in, and we needed to leave. So much of what we both wanted complementarianism to be in practical terms just fell apart. Like we just, we couldn’t, we couldn’t make the argument anymore that it was ideal and that it did actually work.
And here’s the thing, you can have a theory that sounds good. Like it sounds good on paper and it makes sense, but when you keep trying to test it in a lab and it just keeps failing and you can’t figure out why. You can’t quite put your finger on why it keeps failing, because on paper, it should work. You can’t quite get the results that you think you should be getting so you gotta keep going back and figuring it out like what is it? What variable am I missing? What is it that’s making these tests fail and you start to get some clarity on that, right? Like you start to realize, yeah, there’s an imprecision almost.
It’s almost like, when you do in chemistry, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a chemistry class. You know, in chemistry, when you’re not precise, you’re not doing exactly what you’re supposed to do, you’re going to get a different result and sometimes, you know, things are gonna catch on fire or blow up in your face right? if if you’re not careful.
and so the more that we had these test cases, like these real life trials, if you will, sometimes literally church court trials, sometimes personal trials, you start putting your finger on exactly where things go wrong. You say, “You know what? Our theory is wrong. The theory that we’re trying to hold to, cling to with all our might, it’s not holding up.” And it makes me think of an inner tube that you’re trying to use as a safety device. It wasn’t made to be a safety device. It’s not gonna hold up. It might keep you afloat for a little while, but in the end it’s gonna fail you.
I just can’t help but think about how complementarianism kind of kept my husband. I’m going crazy for a while. We were definitely what you’d call soft complementarian. I mean in our marriage, we had very, very well balanced ideals and values when it comes to gender roles and hierarchy and all that jazz; we definitely had our own rhythm. There was not a sense that my husband had the final say if we disagreed on something. Absolutely not and there were many times when he and I would have to talk out something because we didn’t agree. and that is not many. That’s not the right I could probably tell you and I could probably count them on one hand how many things we actually disagreed with and I could tell you about how those things played out. It wasn’t always one or the other thing. It was not always my husband just did what he wanted to do. It was not always I just got my way. We know how to have conversations like grownups.
But here’s the thing: so much of general society, we put a lot of weight on gender roles and those need to just be scratched. I mean, we’re done with that. And I hope this next generation will be so much more healthy and balanced about all of that. I think they are. It seems that way, but I’m always not sure. I’m never sure. It feels like it with our kids. We have both younger kids and we also have 20-something kids and they all tell us things. I feel like to some degree, our younger kids are gonna be OK. I mean they’re gonna see through a lot of the nonsense. I hope so. We’re doing what we can on that.
Meanwhile, you know my two girls are subjected to gender roles everywhere they go and so I definitely feel like it’s my job as their mom and the input from their dad is incredibly important . More on that another time.
All this to say, it’s a big mistake to underestimate the value system of the rising Christian Nationalists and their views on gender equality, in light of the reality of the lengths they will go to for their beliefs and power. To ignore their rhetoric or try to diminish their impact is to sacrifice our daughters and sons to the misogynist regime.
more to come…
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Asking For Me 
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