OK, I’ll admit it: I hate to use the term at all. While I wouldn’t consider myself an egalitarian, complementarianism has come to mean so many things I don’t stand for.
Between John Piper saying a woman shouldn’t give directions to a man who is lost on a road trip and SBC pastor Josh Howerton saying newlywed brides should “stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do” on their wedding night, and Doug Wilson reposting all of it on Twitter and mocking, I am so done with being a “complementarian.”
By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of Howerton’s wedding night “joke,” as he called it in a later apology.
Shannon Makujina
While some good pastors teach a version of complementarianism that is safe, healthy and sustainable, way too many evangelical pastors teach things that are harmful at worst and unhealthy at best.
Lest you think that is a hasty generalization, remember that 10,000 people in the audience heard Howerton’s joke and laughed. 10,000 people who were numb to the glaring red flags in Howerton’s “joke.”
“It was just a joke. … Maybe he just shouldn’t have said it that way. … You’re just too sensitive.”
People keep telling me these things and I’m so sick of it.
Howerton’s “joke” perpetuates the evangelical lie that marriage is a “one time covers all” consent for everything ever after. It makes marriage into a contractual arrangement where he does his part by letting her make the wedding ceremony arrangements, so now she should do her part and be his life-sized sex doll. Howerton’s “joke” assumes women don’t look forward to sex or want it. It takes “mutual” and “consensual” out of marriage and replaces those words with something selfish at best and rape at worst.
“Do what he tells you to do” and “you only have to do what you want to do” are vastly different, and we need more of the second in evangelical churches. My heart hurts for all the evangelical women who were raped on their honeymoon because their husbands didn’t catch the memo that “advice” like this was clearly a joke.
Howerton’s joke reminds me of an excerpt from Doug Wilson’s book Fidelity where he says something remarkably similar, except not as a joke:
In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. … Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon-to-be-made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless. True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.
Apparently, both Howerton and Wilson have neglected to read 1 Corinthians 7, which clearly establishes that the only “authority and submission” in the marriage bed is the completely equal and mutual authority of both spouses to practice consent and the submission of both spouses to the other person’s wishes.
Wilson’s remarks would raise a lot of evangelical eyebrows, but Howerton expressed some of the same sentiments, packaged as a “joke,” and no one batted an eye. There are a fair number of evangelical men who would grudgingly admit that what Howerton said is wrong, or maybe just in bad taste if they were pressed on the issue enough — and had all the problems with it thoroughly explained to them. But even if they did think it was wrong, most of them still wouldn’t care about it. It’s just not important enough to them.
What is more important to them is addressing the landslide of families that are leaving traditional gender roles to find peace and safety in more progressive churches or no church at all.
“People are abandoning this theology because it is abandoning them.”
“We need to preach more on gender roles because it’s such a huge issue today,” evangelicals say. “People are abandoning what the Bible says about gender and becoming liberal.”
What’s really happening is people are abandoning a theology that abused them and looking for way to be safe. And while I don’t wholeheartedly agree with egalitarianism, I get it.
People are abandoning this theology because it is abandoning them. If you want to fix it, instead of trying to make men stronger, make women safer. We are the ones who suffer the most when complementarianism is abusively, indifferently or even clumsily applied.
Actually, give a crap instead of just pretending. Go to a seminar and educate yourself on the dynamics of domestic violence. Listen to women talk about sexual assault. Read the stories of evangelical women who were raped on their wedding nights because she was uneducated about consent and he was uneducated about self-control. Listen to our stories and weep with us. And then go back and look at what you teach about marriage and what you believe about gender roles and think, “How could this be used to hurt someone, how could someone misuse this?” and preach more carefully in light of that.
Maybe you need to adjust your theology a little. Maybe you just need to contextualize what you are saying better. Or maybe you need to tell the couple coming to you for marriage advice that this is not your area of expertise and they should go see a professional therapist.
What you believe has real-life applications. What you teach, others will practice. And what we’ve been teaching and people have been practicing has been a disaster. Maybe it’s time to preach less of a good thing (complementarianism) and more of all the needful things we have to say because it’s a broken world.
“What we’ve been teaching and people have been practicing has been a disaster.”
Here is my plea to evangelical pastors: If you believe in a gender hierarchy and a system that leverages a power structure, you should be the very first to call out any abuses of that system.
You should be the first to champion the rights of women, condemn domestic violence and actively acknowledge the harm complementarianism can cause if not rightly used. You should be taking preventative action, in word and deed, so that the theology you espouse so strongly doesn’t have the opportunity to turn into the next police report or investigation. You should be calling it out. You should be caring. Other people should not have to do it for you.
As a complementarian woman, it is unspeakably disheartening to look around at the vast majority of evangelical pastors and ask, “Where are all the men who are supposed to be standing up for us?” and see almost no one. Where are all the men who are supposed to be protecting us as the “weaker vessels”? Is there not a cause?
I used to just call myself a complementarian. Now I have to give a whole list of disclaimers of what I do and do not believe for people to understand I am not on the same side as Piper or Howerton or Wilson. They are the face of complementarianism. They are the loud, strong male voices telling the church what to believe — and we are just laughing along with it, not seeing the slide to our own destruction.
I used to think I could be the change from within. Now I’m wondering if that’s too idealistic.
Shannon Makujina lives in Uganda as a missionary, serving as a social worker. Before her recent move to Uganda, she loved her job as an Emergency Medical Technician. She is from the upstate of South Carolina and writes about church abuse, religious trauma and pursuing a relationship with Jesus after growing up in fundamentalism. Find her work at shannonmakujina.org.
Related articles:
Pastor’s wedding night advice to women opens a conversation on harmful evangelical teaching on sex
Here’s how toxic male supremacy keeps on infecting the church, even in a supposed ‘apology’ | Analysis by Rick Pidcock