“I remember Anne Graham Lotz came and spoke at my Bible college,” she continued her story as she dug in the flowerbeds. “A group of men walked out because her tone was too authoritarian.”
“Really?” I asked Jo. “They walked out on Billy Graham’s daughter?”
Jo nodded.
Though some evangelical college students are staunchly egalitarian—as demonstrated by the number of students who left Southern Seminary—some are just as staunchly complementarian—as demonstrated by the walkouts Jo told me were common when the school brought women whom students perceived to be preaching. And yet, women speakers still come to conservative Christian college chapels and stand on those stages, and professors still propose classes with content they know at least a few students will declare heretical, because they know that somewhere out there in that chapel and in those classes, there are students like Jo.
“As much as my college is this scary place in my brain, it was also a very safe, controlled place to become myself,” Jo explained. “Because an underground of renegade people and professors were drawn to me, or I gravitated toward them.” Among them, Jo began to believe that maybe things were changing in the church, and that when she graduated she could help move the needle even further, establishing the validity of women’s religious leadership once and for all.
After college, Jo started working at a nondenominational evangelical church. By thirty-one, she had worked her way up the ladder and was just one step away from being director of children’s ministries, the highest-ranking position available to women at the church. But her position always felt a bit tenuous. There was something about the dauntless way she talked, the cocksure way she walked, the brashness, the grit about her that bothered people. Having purposefully tempered her femininity and embraced her gender-neutral “humanity” to get into religious leadership, she now found herself being told she wasn’t feminine enough to lead.
“I was told that I speak too masculinely,” Jo rolled her eyes.
“But your vocal register is actually pretty high,” I countered.
“Apparently, it’s the way I speak that’s the problem,” she explained. “Too straightforward, too direct. I’ve been told on several occasions it intimidates people.” Jo scooted over again and began weeding a new section of the garden. I followed behind her. “About a year ago, I was co-leading a Bible study and a young man in the group said, ‘I’d like to be a leader too,’ ” she continued. “I said, ‘There are no open spaces for new leaders right now.’ He called the next day and left a message on my voice mail saying that my tone and mode of communication was masculine and for the sake of the Bible study, the men in the study, and my marriage, I should read John Piper’s book What’s the Difference?: Manhood and Womanhood Defined According to the Bible. I skimmed through sections of the book and threw up.”
“Literally?”
“Not literally. No. But have you read it?”
I shook my head.
“It is so offensive,” Jo said, wiping her forehead with the back of her arm. “This guy blamed my ‘masculinity’ for why there weren’t more men in the Bible study, though half of the leaders and half of the participants were men.”
I was pretty sure I’d heard this story from her before. “And he contacted the head pastor about it, right?” I said.
“Different guy,” Jo laughed. “That was a different instance.” She dropped a fistful of weeds into the grocery bag beside her. “That was somebody I had dated. He had confided in me that he didn’t even know if he was a Christian anymore. Then after we broke up, he said he wanted to lead a small group in the singles’ ministry that I ran. I said, ‘If you’re doubting your faith, then now’s probably not a good time for you to be a small-group leader.’ I said, ‘Why lead a small group when you’re not even sure you believe what you’re saying? Let’s take this time . . .’ whatever. He freaked out. He wrote a letter to the pastor. He even had his parents write a letter to the pastor. He accused me of being an emotional woman and an example of why women should not be in leadership. He tried to get me fired! But our head pastor was like, ‘This is stupid.’
“Privately, the head pastor actually tells me that he agrees with me about women’s rights,” Jo then said, turning and facing me. “We have little chats about it all the time. But he is only willing to go so far. He says, ‘I agree with you, Jo, but this is not my battle to fight. I’m not going to back you up here.’ He could create a lot of change, do a lot of good if he would. Actually, both he and my boss—a real steal magnolia type of lady—secretly agree with me on women’s rights, but they refuse to take it up.
“So the guy didn’t get me fired, but he did ruin my reputation,” Jo turned back to the flowerbed. “He tried to get all the men in the group on his side and they had meetings about how horrible and power-hungry I was. Then the men tried to organize a meeting where they were going to confront me on my poor leadership skills, mostly because I was a girl, by putting me in a boat alone with them in the middle of a lake. True story.”
“Did you go?” I asked.
“No,” she guffawed. “I’m not stupid. I’ve watched a lot of Law & Order.”
I laughed. “You know not to get in a boat with a bunch of men—”
“Who are mad at you. Yes. Yes I just know that. I’ve watched Double Jeopardy. It’s a bad idea. But what the church forgets,” she said, standing up with the grocery bag in her hand, “and I’ll preach it from the pulpit, because there are some who will let me—is that God is above gender. He sometimes expresses himself as a mother in the Bible. And so we are the image of God most fully when we are together as one. Equal.”
It’s important to note that Jo never attempted to break or change any of her church’s rules. She wasn’t advocating for women to be ordained, or publicly arguing that the genders should have equal authority. She didn’t write op-eds. She didn’t blog. She didn’t post egalitarian content on social media. All Jo did was take the leadership roles that were offered to her, roles that had been approved by the church’s male decision-makers for both her gender and for her specifically, and then, just be herself. And that was all it took to make people try and get her fired.
Some may see the existence of women leaders, like Jo, as a sign that complementarianism is on its way out in the church. Though I’d really like to believe that’s true, it’s important to look at the experience of women leaders themselves before we jump to this conclusion. In fact, many evangelical women leaders I’ve spoken with appear even more bound by complementarian gender expectations and other purity culture stumbling blocks than their peers. As a face of the church, they are expected to model the perfect woman—supportive of their husbands’ leadership and of the leadership of men in general, gentle in spirit, and of course, undeniably feminine and pure. I’ve heard stories of everything from a pastor’s wife whose congregants insisted she needed a more modest style, inspiring some of them to go out and buy her new clothes, to a female pastor whose congregants regularly approached her at the end of a sermon not to say how moved they were by her words but how they felt about her hair that day. In the words of Reverend Layton E. Williams, female pastors’ “voices are critiqued for pitch and vocal fry” and our “hairstyle is regulated more ardently than our theology. . . . We’re faulted for clothing, make-up, identities, and even body shapes that reveal our existence as sexual beings.”5
The aforementioned Dr. Julie Ingersoll documents devastating stories among women who are leading or in some other way challenging the gender-based status quo in evangelical churches and other institutions. She writes:
They do talk about “war stories,” they feel embattled, and they carry with them scars that include experiences of broken families, derailed careers, and, sometimes, abandoned spiritual lives. They suffer from fatigue, despair, cynicism, and emotional distress that often reach the level of clinical depression. They sometimes even long for death.6
Among the quotes Ingersoll features in her book is one from a
n evangelical faculty member whose struggle brought her to the brink of suicide:
But as I started thinking through all this . . . I got seriously suicidal on several occasions. This spring, I just thought about taking huge doses of antidepressants. There were several times I had just made up my mind that this was “it.” . . . Although God created me a woman and, one must assume, gave me those teaching and preaching gifts, He also made it impossible for me to please Him. . . . I can’t please Him in the institution that represents Him. So the only way, ultimately, that I could please God would be to kill myself. Because nothing I could ever do as a living human being, because of being a woman, could ever please God.7
To be sure, egalitarianism is making inroads in the evangelical church thanks to the hard work of many dauntless individuals, but we still have a long way to go.
* * *
Ten years after we gardened together (or she gardened and I watched), I went back to Jo’s midwestern house. We strolled into her backyard to sit at her mosaicked table where we talked for hours, her kids occasionally running out and yanking at Jo’s shirt for her to look-look-look-look-look.
“I was offered the children’s ministries director role when my boss retired,” the now forty-one-year-old, who had been associate director at the time of our last interview, told me as we pulled our chairs out.
“That’s awesome!” I said.
“But around the same time, an associate pastor position became available at the church,” Jo continued. “And it struck me: ‘I would be so good at that. That’s the job I should be doing, not this children’s position.’ But I would have been laughed at if I had even applied for the associate pastor position. My only choice as a woman was to work with children, even though I knew by then I didn’t want to.
“And then one day, Johnnie and I were holding our newborn baby girl in our arms. We looked at one another and we said, ‘We have to make a choice. Are we willing to have our daughter taught the things that we were taught? This precious bundle who will inevitably come into the world and make mistakes—are we willing for her to be told that she is evil, a worm?’ And I was like, ‘Over my dead body will she ever be told that.’
“Then I thought, ‘If I can’t accept that for her . . . why do I accept it for me?’ I realized, ‘I’m beating my head against a brick wall trying to change the church and they don’t want to be changed! I don’t have to be in a system that is fighting with people all the time. I don’t have to reform or revolutionize that system in some way for women’s equality or whatever it might be.’ Know what I mean? People are going to do what they want to do, and you don’t have to judge them for that. Just accept them where they’re at. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay.”
Today, Jo attends an evangelical Lutheran church. By some people’s standards, this makes her still an evangelical, but the mainline/evangelical merger she aligns with now is less centrally located in the evangelical subculture than the nondenominational one within which she spent most of her life, so Jo herself would never say she was evangelical today. And neither would her old friends.
“I have friends who are sort of friends of mine in secret, because they can’t be seen with me,” Jo disclosed. “I’m the naughty person to get together with. They say talking with me is such a relief for them, and they will go on and on about how crazy their lives are at their churches, but they won’t leave. They’ll be like, ‘This is crazy, and this is crazy, and this is crazy.’ But they still show up on Sunday with smiles on their faces because it’s their whole world. And it’s their kids’ world. To leave would be to give everything up. When I left, this huge boulder came off my shoulders.”
“What did it feel like?”
“Well,” Jo paused for a moment, looking away, “terrifying. I mean, relieving, relaxing, awesome, amazing, but also, I would cry a lot. Because the boulder was holding me in place; it was anchoring me in one place. So it made me feel safe, in some way, even though it was terrible pressure. Without it, it was hard to know how to interact. I only knew how to speak Christianese. I only knew how to approach people who came from the same viewpoint as me. I was taught that anyone who didn’t was unsafe. So my anxiety was high. But, I’ve always been anxious. I have a panic disorder. That’s what my therapist told me anyway.
“It started when I was in Bible college. That’s where I can pinpoint it. I would have very anxious racing thoughts and a racing heart, so I would shut the door and stay in bed all day. But the actual panic attacks—where I can’t breathe, where I think maybe I’m dying—didn’t begin until I started working at my old church. I loved my job, yet there was a part of myself that had to be left behind when I went through those doors. I had a talk I had to talk, a walk I had to walk. There was a role I had to play, and I had to play it very well in order to be trusted, to keep my respect, to keep my job. I had to play the part of the perfect evangelical girl effortlessly, perfectly, flawlessly. And that takes a toll on you as a person. Because you can’t be perfect.
“I think the panic attacks in general just came from living in a world system that wasn’t working. I was a mess. But I told myself, ‘I’m a woman who has the right to vote; I have a healthy body; I have all my limbs; I’m not in a war-torn country; I have not been through the Holocaust.’ I was using every other person’s trauma to tell myself I had no business feeling anything.”
“What kinds of things caused the panic attacks?”
“I’ve never been able to get a grip on that. It’s like something subconsciously builds up, then suddenly, I can’t cope anymore. I’ve been on Zoloft for six years now, and still, I experience almost blushing shame regularly. Just talking to the pastor of my church usually costs me nights of sleep.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just have a physical reaction to talking to a pastor,” Jo waved her hand, as though dismissing her feeling as ridiculous. “He’s a perfectly nice man. He’s never done anything to me, but it’s like I’ve got post-traumatic pastor disorder. I’m so afraid of being diminished, talked down to, dismissed, patronized. Or of being looked up and down. I’m afraid that he’s going to fail me in some—not in some minor way, not a slip-up—but in a fundamental way that is harmful. I just get really sick to my stomach. I feel so much shame. And I’ve always felt that. Talking to men who are pastors in the past too, or any kind of church leader. It’s like I’m expecting to get slapped or something.
“Counselors say to me, ‘It sounds like you have PTSD but I can’t find the trigger; I can’t find the trauma.’ And I’m like, ‘I can! It’s twenty years long!’ They don’t get it. This is a whole new field!”
“Actually, it might really be,” I replied. “Some people are trying to get what they are calling Religious Trauma Syndrome recognized.”
“That would be amazing and accurate,” Jo asserted. “Put it in the DSM-5. Get it in there. Because it’s real, and all of us who experienced it need therapists. So get it in there; make it a thing; and then get people trained on it.”
Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), defined as “the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination,”8 was coined by Dr. Marlene Winell, the human development specialist whose work I mentioned previously. She suggests that RTS mimics other disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders, borderline personality disorders, and so on, and describes symptoms ranging from depression to sexual difficulty to negative beliefs about the self.
“When you told your counselor you knew the trigger, how did she react?”
“She was a he, and he was useless. You know, some doctors, some psychologists are so locked into what they learn in school that they never move on or make their thoughts bigger or incorporate other things into them. I never went to him again. I found a different counselor who said she couldn’t officially diagnose me with it, but said I had OCD tendencies around religion. So
I went around accepting that for a while but then I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
“Did she take into account external influences?” I asked. That diagnosis makes it sound like, ‘There’s something in you that is wrong, it’s making you react to your religious community this way. But your religious community itself, and all of the traumatizing, impossible-to-meet expectations it’s putting on you, we have nothing to say about that.’ ”
“I never thought of it that way before,” Jo cocked her head. “I just thought the diagnosis didn’t encompass the whole thing. But hey, you’re right.”
“I mean, I’m not a therapist,” I said quickly. “But it seems to me that it would be different to say, ‘Let’s look at this highly authoritarian, shaming system you are a part of as well as some other more personal things, like your coping mechanisms, your genetics, your family history—’ ”
“Yes,” Jo interrupted me. “I think my family of origin has a lot to do with my issues.” Jo had previously told me that anxiety and mental illness runs in her family.
“That’s important,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean that external influences don’t also play a role.”
“Good point,” Jo reflected. “I’ll take that one to bed with me tonight and think on it.”
“What were you experiencing that made your counselor say that it looked like you had PTSD?”
“For some reason in my early thirties, I began to really enjoy alcohol and prescription narcotics,” Jo admitted. “I described OxyContin as a down comforter for my soul and I was scheming about how I could lie to my doctor to get a prescription. So I started exploring why I wanted to numb myself. I was never a narcotics addict; I’m not an alcoholic; but I wanted to deal with this quickly so it wouldn’t become a problem. I went to a therapist because I would have rather cut off my hand than go to my church and tell them I was struggling with it. I would have been taken off of every ministry that I was on; I would’ve been shamed; I might have experienced church discipline. Church is supposed to be where you feel safe and come for prayer, but no, you don’t do that there. At church you show your shiny self that Jesus redeemed. You’re together.
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