This girl is a woman now

Monument to Confederate women: This photo was taken in Nashville, TN. An identical monument stands in Jackson, MS. — This monument “represents Fame supporting the wounded and exhausted Confederate soldier with her left arm while with her right hand she is placing a wreath upon the head of the Southern Woman, whose every nerve is vibrating with love and sympathy for the soldier and his cause, as expressed by the palm she is trying to place upon his breast, thoroughly unconscious that as her reward a crown is being placed upon her own head.” - Belle Kinney Scholz, the monument’s designer

I was a good Christian girl until well into middle age. Then, God led me where I did not want to go, to show me what I desperately needed to see.

For one thing, I deeply feared inspecting the view of womanhood I had been taught.

Typically, I love to search the Scriptures. I’m committed to living out and speaking out what I’m learning. Yet, on the subject of women, I avoided searching for a very long time.

The church culture of my birth teaches, “Women are equal to, but different from, men.” Which sounds correct, but part of me knew what I didn’t want to see: It was code speak for, “Women rank below and are inferior to men.”

This stance is counted the biblical view, as foundational to the faith as the cross. Yet, within me, a voice that sounded like the Holy Spirit whispered, “If what you’ve believed isn’t true, don’t you want to know?”

I didn’t. Not enough. If an open-hearted Scripture search changed my views, what would I do? To declare as much and to act on it would have devastating consequences. It would label me a heretic – or, worse, a liberal. It would destroy the only outlets for ministry my church culture allowed. It could leave me exiled.

I love God. I wanted to serve him. These were my people. So I ignored a matter that I, a woman in ministry, chose to count as peripheral to the task of making disciples.

Little did I know:

Seeking to follow God
within a system committed to keeping women in their place
has consequences more devastating
than those I was trying to avoid.

Toxic fruits

I finally learned that when God led me into a full-time position within my denomination. For seven years, he showed me the toxic fruits of my church culture’s beliefs about women.

From day one, I saw male leaders demean women, sometimes flagrantly; more often, subtly, under pretext of protecting or giving praise. The pervasive dishonor that had hung in the atmosphere all my life now materialized before me.

One situation stands out. I worked with a female leader who was gracious and winsome, a woman of integrity who loved God and genuinely cared for people.¹

Once when we talked, her eyes filled with tears as she mentioned how badly she had been treated by other denominational leaders – “just because I’ve told little girls they can be anything God calls them to be.” It was the only time I saw her cry.

I marveled that she opened up to me that way. My male boss had risen up as a defender of the doctrine of limited permissions for women. She might have seen me as working for the opposing camp. She might have treated me with hostility or distrust. Yet, she didn’t try to win me to her “side.” She didn’t give details. She didn’t express bitterness, but rather deep grief. Briefly, poignantly, she spoke to me as a friend, from her heart.

I left the encounter deeply moved and deeply concerned over the anguish etched into her face.

Shortly after that conversation, I learned she had had a stroke. My boss heard the news the same time as I. To my shock, he laughed. He was glad she was incapacitated, her voice silenced, and he made no attempt to hide his delight.

Even more disturbing, that incident was not atypical. Again and again, I watched what happened as people tried to enforce the male-female rules we called biblical. Again and again, I saw such attempts produce injustice and incongruity, dishonor and cruelty. Again and again, I felt the jarring in my spirit that signaled the Holy Spirit’s grief. I became convinced something was very amiss.²

Still, I avoided searching the Scriptures or crying out to God for understanding. More time passed. I continued to see and to experience the dishonoring.

Then, suddenly, all hell broke loose. For 15 months, Christian leaders, with whom I had worked closely and well, ambushed, abused and falsely accused me. A handful of women led the charge. Only afterward did I learn: The male boss, whom I had faithfully followed, had incited it.

I left there with my heart battered, but my eyes finally opening. I dared to ask God, “What was that?” Then, I set out to search the Scriptures and the history of my church culture.

In time, God revealed the roots – and far more of the toxic fruits – of what I had experienced. One of the many things I saw that deeply grieved me was this:

I had tacitly agreed to a view of womanhood
that was far more Confederate than biblical.

Confederate roots

During the first three decades of the 1800s, Christianity flourished across the Deep South. In the first wave of a spiritual Awakening, many white Christians denounced slavery. Some even organized to outlaw it. Many slaveholders recognized slavery as wrong, and struggled over whether to free their slaves.

Yet even as Awakening continued, the Southern abolitionist societies disbanded. The strugglers assured themselves slavery was a “necessary evil.” Preachers quit challenging the status quo.

Then, a major shift happened:

The church that could not bring itself to repent
suddenly could not see anything wrong
with mistreating whole groups of people.

On the heels of a 30-year Awakening:

The church rose up to defend and align with a culture of abuse.
The church led out in the silencing that forbade any dissent.

Tactics included: Co-opt Scripture to justify slavery and Indian Removal. Relabel the South’s profound injustices as the plan of God. Call anyone who questions these practices incendiary and anti-Christ.

In time, pastors cast the entire white South as the maligned defenders of the true faith. At the same time, a people desperate to defend the indefensible cast themselves as heroes from the misty past:

The ancient Greeks. Identifying with all things Greek, Southerners delighted in asserting that the Greeks created a democracy built on slavery. (Ancient Greeks – including prominent “church fathers” – also profoundly devalued women.)
King Arthur and the Round Table. When Southerners read Sir Walter Scott’s romanticized stories of medieval knights and maidens, they decided, “That’s us!” Calling themselves, “the Chivalry,” the men held jousting contests to prove their valor. Provoking war on their own land in order to maintain a slave culture, they said they did so to defend their women from “hosts of ruffians and felons burning with lust and rapine.”

In the Awakening, as in every time in history when the Holy Spirit has mightily moved, the place of women in the church had shifted somewhat, to more closely reflect God’s design. Afterward, though, the shift back to a second-class role for women was especially pronounced in the white South, as was the illusion that no such shift had occurred.

According to the code of chivalry … women were considered superior to men in purity and were often and in many ways assured their superlative virtue. Actually, however, they were prisoners on their pedestal.³

And thus, between Awakening and war, the South created its own portrait of ideal womanhood.

Lauded as virtue incarnate, Confederate women were imprisoned on a pedestal that required them to be (or at least, to appear to be):

Helpless damsels – who needed the Chivalry to defend and save their purity (against enemies the Chivalry had created).
Helpmeets who knew their place was home and family – that is, their identity and value lay solely in fulfilling their roles as “our mothers,” “our daughters,” “our sisters,” “our wives.”

As with slavery, the church rubber-stamped the culture’s view and found Scriptures to support it.

Still today, what many churches teach as the biblical view of womanhood is, in reality, the Confederate view of the good Southern girl.

Forsaking all

Searching history, I’ve realized: The view of women taught me from birth has its roots in a Lost Cause, not the Living Word.

Searching Scripture, I’ve seen: God created us, male and female, to reflect his image, to know him, to make disciples and to steward his world together. Jesus redeemed us fully from all that the Fall had lost.

At long last, I know: Any view that denies women full personhood, full adulthood, full redemption is neither biblical nor godly.

Following the Lord Jesus where my culture forbids has proven the greatest challenge of my life. It has tested to the limit my willingness to give up all for Christ. But also, it has forged deep, new intimacy with my Lord. It has taught me to say no to dishonor and abuse. It has grown me up.

This girl is a woman now, a woman going with God.

Footnotes

Her name was Dr. Dellanna O’Brien. She served as executive director of Woman’s Missionary Union, SBC, 1989-1999. I knew her as Dellanna. (This footnote was added 11-10-2023.) ↩︎
I’ve also told this story in What About Women? A Spirit-to-spirit Exposé © 2013, 2021, and in the post, Don’t be afraid to look. ↩︎
Luther E. Copeland, The Southern Baptist Convention and the Judgment of History: The Taint of an Original Sin, Rev. Ed. (New York: University Press of America, 2002), 92. ↩︎

Healing from toxic church – seeking what is precious, and truly God