One of the most disturbing revelations of the Epstein Files is how similar the power dynamics of the men at Epstein’s Little Saint James Island were to the men in mainstream complementarian ministries.
Of course, most pastors aren’t actively assaulting children. So conservative evangelicals often dismiss any talk about systemic issues as sinful empathy-driven overreactions of “the progressive gaze” to the isolated abuses of a few. But when we analyze the way men, women and children relate to one another in the Epstein Files and in complementarian ministries, there are rhymes of power that simply cannot be ignored.
In Episode 108 of “Highest Power: Church + State,” I interviewed GRACE Executive Director Laura Thien and Director of Institutional Response Robert Peters about similarities they’re noticing between the response to sexual abuse in the church and in the Epstein Files.
“We are elevating men to power who are not worthy of that power,” Peters said.
“We are elevating men to power who are not worthy of that power.”
Thein added, “I do think we’re seeing this in both the Epstein case and in the broader sense of what happens in church abuse cases, which is willful ignorance, if you will, at best case scenario, and on the other end, an absolute refusal to acknowledge the issues at hand.”
One of the issues is the way complementarian churches and parachurch ministries think about pastoral authority and power to begin with. The problem doesn’t begin the moment an abuse case occurs or gets covered up. The problem has been festering and growing there the whole time, specifically in relation to who gets a seat at the table.
Different forms of patriarchy
According to philosopher Kate Manne, the old patriarchy is “treating women as a kind of property.” It’s a purity culture that hoards and hides women and girls as virgin property to be owned.
But as she’s discussed the culture revealed in the Epstein Files, she’s identified a new form of patriarchy that involves “men banding together to share, trade and sell property in groups where they’re not competing for particular women.” It’s a capitalistic commodification culture that feels like “a source of both camaraderie and male bonding over this shared and traded property rather than jealously hoarding the resource of a particular woman.”
Anand Giridharadas, publisher of The Ink, noticed the same thing in his examination of the Epstein Files.
“It was highly instructive about how this larger network of power operated,” he told Terry Moran in an interview. “I think there’s a hybrid here of women as crypto and women as servile daughters-in-law. Women are a commodity to be traded but women also don’t belong anywhere when anything real and important is happening.”
He told Moran that reading the latest installments of the Epstein Files felt like reading a culture.
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Excluded from the table
Giridharadas has spent many hours exploring this culture in the latest releases of the Epstein Files. “There are connections in terms of the indifference of this Epstein class, the dehumanization it engages in, who it sees as people and who it doesn’t,” he told Moran.
When he started examining the pictures, what stood out to him wasn’t so much who was present in the photos, as who was absent from them.
“Thousands and thousands of photos,” he recalled. “And it’s obviously women and girls everywhere because of the sex crimes investigation.”
Then after pausing, he added, “Except during mealtime.”
“Why would the women and girls suddenly disappear during mealtime in patriarchal cultures?”
He continued: “I noticed this really, really strange thing. That as soon as there was a table, food, hors d’oeuvres, a main course, some red wine on a table, the women disappeared.”
Why would the women and girls suddenly disappear during mealtime in patriarchal cultures?
“These are men who basically want a frictionless experience of the world. And they associate many different types of things with friction,” Giridharadas suggested. “Like a 40-year-old woman opposite you at dinner is the nightmare of these men because a 40-year-old woman with opinions, whose passport you don’t have in a locker, an actual grown woman with thoughts and opinions who can leave and come and go as she pleases and is free and is mature and has strength, these men were so terrified. They clearly organized themselves logistically to never be in the presence of such women. You do not see 43-year-old women in the Epstein Files.”
He concluded the Epstein culture was one of men wanting power distance over women.
“For some very small number of men, that means pedophilia,” he said. “For a larger number of men, it means … only being comfortable at the table when it’s like a guy’s thing, that the women are kind of accessories, women are for fun time, women are for the pool, but not the dinner table because the dinner table is for conversation and conversation is two-way. And these guys don’t want to hear anything women have to say.”
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A network of men in power
Most of the men mentioned in the Epstein Files claim they didn’t know what was happening and therefore were not involved in a coverup. But even if that’s true, Terry Moran says the men in Epstein’s network still must be held accountable for the culture they created that allowed the abuse to take place.
“I don’t give them a pass because they didn’t know precisely what was going on. First, there was an atmosphere around Epstein,” Moran said. “You had to ignore what was in front of you.”
“You had to ignore what was in front of you.”
Then he added, “Even though they weren’t involved in his sex crimes, this networking power, this networking life that runs the world right now … it’s one blob that is connected. And Epstein offers us insight into it in a way I would not have expected had it not been for this reporting.”
Giridharadas’ full story can be read at The Ink in a piece titled “Never Eat with Women.”
Complementarian pastors and the power of men
Notice the rhyme. Just as men in politics consider their office to be an ascension to power, so do many pastors. But with complementarian ministries in particular, the pastorate as ascension to power has a gendered twist.
Remember what John MacArthur said to Beth Moore when he famously told her to “Go home.” He said women who want to preach aren’t seeking equality. They’re seeking power. He said, “This is the highest location they can ascend to — that power in the evangelical church.”
In other words, to MacArthur, the pastorate is an ascension to power. Just as in the Epstein Files, complementarian churches create a power distance between men and women.
In complementarian churches, only men are pastors. Only men are elders. Sure, women can be seen in all kinds of photos of church life. One of the complementarian churches I was a member of went so far as to allow a woman to baptize her daughter, as long as an elder stood in the pool with them. In order for the baptism to be biblical, there had to be a penis in the pool. We even allowed women to occasionally sit off to the side during an elder board meeting. But they couldn’t speak unless called upon. As a rule, when you get to the complementarian elder board table, the women disappear. It’s where the men get down to talking business.
And it’s not limited to churches. Even complementarian parachurch ministries have this same problem.
The Gospel Coalition and Desiring God
To illustrate this dynamic, I spent this week examining two of the most influential complementarian parachurch publishing ministries in the world — The Gospel Coalition and Desiring God.
Many complementarians point to TGC and Desiring God platforming female authors as a sign they aren’t sexist patriarchs like many of us claim. And to be fair, TGC and Desiring God do platform a lot of women.
Based on the author sections of their websites, The Gospel Coalition has published 698 different women, while Desiring God has published 168. That may sound like a lot. But consider those numbers in comparison to the number of men they’ve published.
The Gospel Coalition authors
Men — 77%
Women — 23%
Desiring God authors
Men — 81%
Women — 19%
These disparities get compounded when we consider how often they’re being published. For The Gospel Coalition, I took a random sample of 150 men and 150 women who write for them in order to come to these averages. Thankfully, Desiring God conveniently lists the number of published pieces next to each author’s name. So while TGC’s numbers are estimates, Desiring God’s numbers are more precise.
TGC pieces per author
Men — 16.7
Women — 4.5
Desiring God pieces per author
Men — 25.0
Women — 5.8
The numbers are consistent between each ministry. They publish four times the number of men than they do women. And for each contributor, they publish four or five times the number of pieces per man as they do per woman.
Gender roles in Christian publishing
In my upcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism, one of the storylines I trace is how the Christian music publishing industry platforms artists who embody the gender role ideals of complementarian theology.
As Christianity Today correspondent Kelsey Kramer McGinnis asked me rhetorically, “When is the last time you saw someone over the age of 60 on the stage in a popular worship music video?” And according to historian Leah Payne, those who are platformed in the Christian music world have been at least partially platformed because they can be “seen as marriage material.”
It makes sense as Christian publishing has moved from the Christian bookstore to online that some of these tendencies would play themselves out in complementarian online publishing ministries that are looking for gender role models.
One of the patterns I noticed in the authors of these ministries is how the men skewed much older than the women. Of course, both TGC and Desiring God have a lot of younger authors. But while about 90% of the women at TGC appeared to be of a younger, child-bearing age, just 67% of the men appeared younger. Similarly, while 82% of the women at Desiring God appeared to be younger, 71% of the men did.
“The men are cast as powerful, aged and wise, while the women are young and fertile.”
It may seem subtle, perhaps unimportant to many. But the men are cast as powerful, aged and wise, while the women are young and fertile.
This is exactly what Giridharadas noticed in the Epstein photos. He said, “The (women) who are around are never going to be the age of the men, if at all possible. They will be younger, poorer on more precarious footing, with less power.”
And this plays out in the particular topics they write about. The men tend to write about every theological topic under the sun. But the women tend to focus on topics such as women’s roles in the home and in the church, homeschooling, body image, processing emotions, abortion, parenting and other concerns young complementarian wives and mothers might be interested in. It’s not nearly as common to find a woman focusing on atonement theology, the Trinity or many of the theology-rich themes the men write about.
Some of the titles of articles written by women included “Why I Joyfully Submit to Male Church Leadership” and “Front Row Seat: Supporting Our Husbands.”
So women are essentially spectators, watching their men perform and cheering them on. Men are the only ones with any real, ultimate power.
The complementarian board room
While the women disappear at the tables the men in the Epstein Files gather around, what happens to the women at the tables the men at complementarian parachurch ministries gather around?
The Gospel Coalition board members
Men — 11
Women — 0
The Gospel Coalition council members
Men — 41
Women — 0
The Gospel Coalition Council emeritus members
Men — 15
Women — 0
Desiring God directors and officers
Men — 15
Women — 0
But these aren’t the only two complementarian ministries out there. What about some of the other more influential ministries, like the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors that provides counseling certification for churches or the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, whose vision is to influence “the vast majority of evangelical homes, churches, academic institutions and other ministries” to adopt and apply their theology of manhood and womanhood?
Association of Certified Biblical Counselors board of trustees
Men —17
Women — 0
The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Men —7
Women — 0
Among these four influential complementarian parachurch ministries today, that’s 106 men gathered around their top leadership tables compared to zero women. These men act like they’re separated from the world and offering better news, the true gospel lived out through their complementarian ethics.
But anyone with an ounce of common sense about them can observe these disparities and admit the leaders of conservative evangelicalism today are not offering an alternative to the culture found in the largest sexual abuse coverup since slavery. These men are following Epstein’s example, walking in Epstein’s footsteps, creating the very culture Giridharadas noticed in the Epstein photos.
“Many of the men in Epstein’s network coveted contact with women and girls — but not all forms of contact,” Giridharadas observed. “You would swim with women and girls, but you wouldn’t attend a lecture with or by one. You would sit across from women and girls at a private jet table, but you would avoid a sit-down dinner with them. You might pose for smiling photos with women and girls, but you were unlikely to be photographed getting lost in an idea with them. A woman or girl might sit on your lap, but you wouldn’t want her sitting to your left.”
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.