So Paula White’s a complementarian? Really?

While many express concern about Paula White’s leadership in the White House Faith Office due to her adherence to the prosperity gospel and her bizarre, tongue-speaking prophecies for Donald Trump, one of the surprising developments of this past week was video of her embracing conservative evangelicalism’s view of male headship.

It’s often strange to see complementarian men like Mark Driscoll, Josh Howerton and Robert Jeffress huddling close to Trump with White alongside them in the room, given their opposition to female pastors and to White’s over-the-top version of prophecy that included speaking in tongues while calling angels from Africa to fly over the Atlantic Ocean to overturn the 2020 election.

In a podcast from 2024, Driscoll and evangelical worship leader Sean Feucht discussed the need for “men of God” to be “the only ones” offering prophecy. Driscoll criticized what he called “the weird, counterfeit, bizarro tinfoil hat, medical marijuana, Trump prophets.” He continued, “I mean, those guys are just, they’re just flat out freaking weird. They’re just weird. And they’re, you know, all their prophecies are about America and Trump, not about Jesus and the kingdom. I mean, they’ve really, you know, they thought they were kicking it through the uprights and they were kicking it into the concession stand.”

Misogyny aside, Driscoll could not have been more accurate in his portrayal of the prophecies that come out of White’s mouth. All these men believe men should lead women, that women should not be pastors. And yet, there’s White, a female pastor, leading the White House faith office. And she’s the one inviting these complementarian men in. They need her for access to the president.

In an episode last week of “The Steve Gruber Show,” White unexpectedly embraced the complementarian view of gender hierarchies.

“God has an order,” she said. “The head of my household is my husband, Jonathan Cain. Period. And we have a loving, amazing relationship. But if there’s ever a time that a decision has to be made and we don’t agree on something, he’s the head.”

God has an order

“Men! Men! Men! I say that all the time on this program,” Gruber declared, hardly able to contain his excitement. “We need more fathers, more leaders, more community leaders, more men that are real men. Toxic masculinity? Throw that term out the window. Be a man! Step up and be somebody!”

His words are reminiscent of the conversation between Driscoll and Feucht. When Feucht asked Driscoll what has been missing in our nation, Driscoll said, “Balls.”

“Balls,” Feucht echoed.

“Balls,” Driscoll repeated.

“Well said. Yeah,” Feucht affirmed.

Then Driscoll added, “That’s what’s missing. The de-masculination of men.”

It’s the same theology Robert Jeffress preaches at First Baptist Church in Dallas. In a sermon titled “Order in the House,” Jeffress defines order in the home as “a military term to submit. It means to place yourself under the leadership of your husband. It’s something you do voluntarily. It doesn’t have anything to do with inferiority or superiority. You may be smarter and more spiritual than your husband. But you do so because that’s the order God has created. Wives are to follow the leadership of their husbands.”

According to Josh Howerton, another Dallas megachurch pastor whom White invited to the White House last week, women are to cheer their husbands on by chanting, “Hercules! Hercules!” for taking “even the tiniest step” of leadership. He adds, “The Bible says the husband is the head of the family, is the head of the wife. That is an indicative. It is not an imperative. It’s not a command. It’s a statement of fact.”

Soft and hard complementarianism

Many of us who grew up in independent and Southern Baptist churches and were concerned about the misogyny of exclusive male headship would bring up examples in the Bible like Deborah, who was a prophetess and judge in Israel. But men like John MacArthur, who promote male headship, would respond by saying women like Deborah in the Bible “were clearly the exception and not the rule” and that “God allowed women to rule as part of his judgment on the sinning nation.”

Even though White has promoted an apostolic vision of her calling in the past, she told Gruber, “People were like, ‘Well how could you have pastored or how could you have done this?’”

Then White answered, “By default. Because two men failed. And I was sent under spiritual authority to carry a load, which is very hard.”

In other words, as Driscoll and Feucht would say, the men didn’t have the balls to lead. So White had to step in by default due to the failure of male headship.

Men like MacArthur, Driscoll and Howerton promote the idea of “hard complementarianism,” in which God has created an intractable order of male authority and female submission.

“White would appear to be embracing what is often called ‘soft complementarianism.’”

But White would appear to be embracing what is often called “soft complementarianism,” in which women are allowed to exercise leadership if the men who are ultimately in charge allow them to. This is the same mindset in some churches where women are allowed to preach if the elders allow them to but are not allowed to be elders.

In a strange statement to Gruber, White appears to apply this soft complementarian mindset to her relationship with Trump in the White House. She told Gruber, “I’m up here working on the initiatives for President Trump, who’s been in ministry for 40 years and understands it.”

“In ministry?”

Perhaps she misspoke. But given the context of promoting male authority in marriage and ministry, and then mentioning Trump’s authority over her, White appears to be framing Trump as a spiritual leader, perhaps even as a political pastor, under whom White is allowed, despite being a woman, to lead.

Male headship through sexual hierarchy

Of course, the theme in all this is ultimately men creating a sacralized hierarchy that crowns their genitalia at the top.

Driscoll once told the men of his church their penis was God’s penis. He said, “Knowing that his penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.”

Jeffress also applies his male headship to sexuality.

In his “Order in the House” sermon, Jeffress said men and women “have differing needs and those needs, by the way, extend to the sexual realm.” While citing a survey that claimed women would supposedly prioritize sex “slightly more than a piece of chocolate cake with whipped cream on it,” he said, “If you gave that same survey to 500 men, I guarantee you the priorities would have been a lot different.”

So when he suggested men love their wives by taking care of their wives’ needs, he said they could “take her and the family out to a restaurant or use Door Dash,” or “hire a cleaning service for a day.” In other words, men must have their sexual release prioritized, while women simply want to have a meal and some cleaning paid for. The focus isn’t on the men sexually pleasing their wives, or cooking and cleaning on their own. They simply cut a check and receive sex.

Howerton has a very similar mindset as well. In the controversies we considered last year, he told the women of his church in a sermon that on their wedding night they are to “stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do.”

And White herself appears to affirm this male-centric view of sexuality as well. In a service on Aug. 23, 2015, White says, “Wait ’til we get to your sex life,” noting that the kids are present in the room.

Then her husband, Jonathan Cain, adds, “Women should look at a man and find out what turns him on. And you can talk about this. This is something that, you know, how freaky do you want to get?”

White and the congregation begin to laugh as White lifts her arm and says, “I love my husband!”

Cain continues, “If you don’t have that conversation, then you’re not fulfilling everything that he really truly wants.”

Notice how the conversation centers and prioritizes men, without being concerned about women.

Then Cain adds, “Ladies, if you don’t know what he likes, figure it out. Get a book. Go get the porn. Do something.”

With White giggling next to him and the church beginning to scream with laughter and cheers, Cain concludes, “If he likes to watch porn, watch porn with him! It’s like, you gotta get where you’re gonna go! Figure it out!”

Not many other evangelical pastors are going to advise their congregants to watch porn.

Male pleasure and power over the ‘childless cat ladies’

While Driscoll, Jeffress, MacArthur, Feucht and Howerton probably wouldn’t recommend White’s apparent embrace of porn, they all hold to a vision of male headship that ultimately centers and prioritizes male sexual pleasure, without giving much of a nod to women’s pleasure.

Throughout history, the driving concern of patriarchy tends to be a blend of men’s personal pleasure and prestige, often through passing on their name to the next generations. So it should be no surprise that the tradition of “biblical family values,” which was shaped through the likes of James Dobson in a history of white supremacy and eugenics, would obsess over promoting childbirth.

JD Vance has promoted incentivizing childbirth by allowing the head of the household to vote as many times as they have children. Because white evangelicals and Catholics have 2.3 children per family, atheists have 1.6, and agnostics have just 1.3, this would give unprecedented voting power to white evangelicals and Catholics, who overwhelmingly support the MAGA movement.

Last week, the White House held meetings to strategize how to encourage more women to have more babies, even considering offering $5,000 baby bonuses or government-funded education for women about their menstrual cycles. It’s all part of the same conversation Vance has been promoting through his demonization of single women as “childless cat ladies.”

And the net result of it all is white male power.

Complementarianism and consent

The through line is clear. When you define a marriage as being between one man and one woman in a military hierarchy based on gender, you create dynamics that center male pleasure and power to the exclusion of female pleasure and consent. These dynamics are considered ethically to be abusive and they are demonstrated in every one of the leaders mentioned in this piece. And now it’s being promoted in the White House.

It’s no wonder a group of pastors who center male pleasure and power would all join ministries in the promotion of a sexually entitled, power hungry man like Donald Trump.

Given that belittling women is now being promoted in the White House Faith Office through White and the complementarian men she invites in, I wanted to give the final words of this piece to two women who have spent significant time deconstructing male entitlement in the church.

Sarah McDugal, co-founder of Wilderness to Wild, told me: “When we approach marriage like a military hierarchy, we replace mutual love and partnership with power-over and control. In any other context (military, medical, clergy) we easily and clearly recognize that an officer/enlisted, doctor/patient, pastor/congregant hierarchy disqualifies them from the equality needed to have a safe and sustainable sexual relationship. We identify these hierarchical dynamics as unethical, imbalanced, even predatory. It is equally impossible to forge a healthy, loving, mutually beneficial baseline in marriage if hierarchical control is built in at the very foundation. Godly, healthy, loving marriage should be a partnership of equals, not a superior/subordinate relationship. Otherwise, it isn’t love — it’s institutionally sanctioned coercion.”

Sheila Gregoire, author of The Marriage You Want, added: “This whole idea has grave connotations for the idea of consent. If he is truly in authority over you, and you have to obey as you would a military commander, then consent is impossible in marriage. If you cannot say no, then you cannot truly say yes either, and that’s why the criminal code makes illegal sex when there are power differentials.

“This also shows they don’t actually consider women equal. They often say ‘equal in value, different in roles,’ but if she can only ever be subordinate because of her very being, then she is not, in effect, equal in value. When people make these sorts of comments, they miss part of the point, too. A private in the military can one day be a general, but a woman can only ever be a woman. So if they think a woman must always be a private, then it’s actually worse than the military. And there is no equality or value in that.”

 

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 produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.