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 asked, “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 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 told myself the issue wasn’t a pivotal one. And I avoided answering God’s question.

Toxic fruits

Then, out of nowhere, 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.

One situation stands out.

Anguish and cruelty

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 supposedly godly 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.²

Jarring and battering

Just as 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.

I felt the jarring in my spirit that signaled the Holy Spirit’s grief. I became convinced something was very amiss.

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, a spiritual awakening surged, and Christianity flourished across the Deep South.

Revival and reversal

In the high tide of awakening, as every time in history when the Holy Spirit has mightily moved, a view of women emerged that more closely reflected God’s design. Women in the church experienced greater freedom to share in decision-making, to speak and to lead.

God forgive us

Many awakened Christians also denounced slavery, as evil and a curse.

Surprisingly, records show that “most of the abolition societies established before 1827 were in the South.”³

Further, “the majority of masters, small slaveholders and large planters alike, were evangelicals.”⁴ Their letters, diaries and private papers attest to their ongoing inner turmoil over whether to free their slaves – and their deeply troubled consciences, and terror of God’s judgment, when they did not.⁵

In 1861, a remarkable South Carolina gentlewoman named Mary Chesnut wrote:

God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity.⁶

She also affirmed this statement by a black plantation overseer:

In all my life I have only met one or two womenfolk who were not abolitionists in their hearts – and hot ones, too.⁷

Yet, by then, almost no white Southerner would admit anything of the sort.

A stunning shift

In 1858, secessionist James Henry Hammond described the stunning reversal that had occurred:

And what then [in 1833] was the state of opinion in the South? … She believed slavery to be an evil – weakness – disgraceful – nay, a sin.

Why, it would be difficult now to find a southern man who feels the system to be the slightest burthen on his conscience.⁸

What provoked such a turn-around? According to Hammond, “a few bold spirits” set out to change things.

Tactics included:

• Co-opt Scripture to justify the South’s profound injustices.⁹
• Preach that “men are not divinely inspired now” (and apparently, women never were?). So Christians must look – not to the Spirit of God – but to properly indoctrinated pastors “to distinguish truth from error.”¹⁰
• Pronounce anyone who questioned any of the above incendiary and anti-Christ.

The results were dramatic. In short order: The Southern abolitionist societies disbanded. Those who benefited from slavery began calling it a “necessary evil,” and then, “a positive good.” Southern preachers quit challenging the status quo, and then, reinforced it.

The upshot? 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.

How could such a thing have happened? As Christians hardened their hearts to the Spirit’s conviction, they welcomed a beguiling myth.

Chivalry and myth

Antebellum Southerners loved Sir Walter Scott’s romanticized stories of medieval knights and maidens. In his novels, gallant nobles ruled. Everyone else knew their place. And together, they created something glorious. Thing is:

While the rest of America read Scott with enthusiasm, the South assimilated his works into its very being.¹¹

It began with the Southern elite – in particular, the gentlemen planters. Thanks to slave labor, they had time to read. And they found in Scott’s novels a “stratified” culture, presented as lovely and consummately good.

So they “set themselves to imitate” the “old ideals of fine lords and fair ladies” in fictionalized medieval Scotland.

Soon, the “aristocratic elements of the towns” joined in. That is, the South’s influential professionals, business leaders, politicians and pastors embraced the myth too.¹²

By the 1850s, “instead of longing awkwardly for the days of knighthood, the gentry [was] now convinced that it [was] living in them.”¹³

They began calling themselves, “the Chivalry,” and held actual jousting contests to prove their valor. Proudly, they noted their “quick sensitiveness” (i.e. instant ill will) if anyone did anything that embarrassed them (or in their words, questioned their “personal integrity and honor”).¹⁴

The Chivalry had a reputation for dueling in public, abusing in private and doing whatever they had to do to control everybody and everything.

Mary Chesnut told how that looked:

The master is kind and amiable when not crossed. Given to hospitality on a grand scale. Jovial, genial, friendly, courtly in his politeness. As absolute a tyrant as the czar of Russia.¹⁵

In short,
the 1% of the day
manipulated the vast majority,
in order to own an entire culture.

One tragic result? The slaveholding elite stirred all the men “to think of themselves as proud knights ready to do or die for some romantic ideal.”¹⁶

Lauded and constricted

And the women of this culture? In the thinking of the gentry: The women had already said far too much. Things they should not be allowed to say. That had to be stopped. They had to be managed.

The church-affirmed Chivalry set out to do both.

According to the chivalric ideal, woman was a being made of finer clay than man, someone to be admired, adored, and protected, but someone to be confined to a narrow sphere of activity.¹⁷

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.¹⁸

And thus, between awakening and war, the white South and the church therein created its own portrait of ideal womanhood.

Lauded as virtue incarnate,
women were also denigrated
as weaker, more easily deceived
and less mentally astute than men.

That view only intensified during and after the Civil War.

The Chivalry-turned-Confederacy counted “their women” as “the highest symbol of Southern virtue.”

They also expected “their women” to conform (or, appear to conform) to “a threefold image of virtue.”¹⁹

Helpless damsels

Femininely frail women would need knights in shining armor to save them, from themselves, and from a world set against their idyllic culture. Even if women didn’t believe all that, “girlish” helplessness had its benefits.

So long as … [woman] is nervous, fickle, capricious, delicate, different, and dependent, man will worship and adore her.²⁰

Helpmeets

“Biblically submissive” women would know their place and keep to home and family. Within this “sphere,” they would bear the responsibility of doing everything for everybody. That would take up all their energy, all their time.

[Mary Chesnut, 1864:] South Carolina as a rule does not think it necessary for women to have any existence out of their pantries or nurseries.²¹

[Virginia Baptist newspaper, 1899:] We have profound respect for woman, and it is because we have, that we desire to see her moving in the sphere to which her Creator has assigned her, and for which her physical, intellectual and moral qualities eminently fit her. As the friend, companion and solace of man, all her rights and interests are secure.²²

Note that, in this view, the identity and value of women lies solely in how well they fulfill their roles related to men; i.e., “our mothers,” “our daughters,” “our sisters,” “our wives.”²³

Heroic supporters

Truly loyal women would follow wherever the men might lead. Especially, they would show “zealous faith in our cause” and suffer all things for it. In that pursuit alone, women could be fierce and “their fragility … tempered to the strength of steel.²⁴

A preponderance of Southern women tried to do exactly what was expected of them … To defy the pattern and be unladylike would lead to a woman’s becoming an outcast … Religion consistently confirmed what society told them – and that was that they were inferior to men.²⁵

According to one Monument to Women of the Confederacy, erected in 1917 and still standing outside the Capitol of my home state, these ideal women, even decades after the Confederate defeat:

• Will continue to “reverence … our sacred dead.” That’s a call to worship what is not Christ.²⁶
• As an act of “patriotism,” they “will teach their children to emulate the deeds of our [Confederate] sires.” That’s a call to wage war according to the flesh.²⁷

God. Help. Us.

Forsaking all

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

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

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.

---

I published the original version of this renovated repost on October 19, 2018.

Image: Monument to Women of the Confederacy, Arkansas State Capitol, Sgerbic, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

See also

• Where have all the women gone?
• Exploited in the church, I’m Leah no more
• Tell us about past events
• How do I tell you?
• O say, can you see?
• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• Adulthood and the church that rejects it
• Truth, desperation, spirit, life

Will You Follow Me?

• Part 1: Behind the façade in the SBC
• Part 2: The Civil War, the South and the church
• Part 3: Going with God

These books from Deborah

• We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church
• What About Women? A Spirit-to-spirit Exposé

Footnotes

1. She was Dr. Dellanna O’Brien, executive director of Woman’s Missionary Union, SBC, 1989-1999. ↩︎
2. 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. ↩︎
3. Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), p. 21. Here are the stunning figures: “Of the 130 abolition societies established before 1827 by Lundy, the forerunner of Garrison, more than a hundred, with four-fifths of the total membership, were in the South.” – W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South, p. 61; quoted in Osterweis, p. 54. ↩︎
4. James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 97. ↩︎
5. See Oakes, chapter 4, “The Convenient Sin.” ↩︎
6. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, by Mary Boykin Chesnut, ed. by C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 29. ↩︎
7. Chesnut, p. 255, quoting a man named Mr. Team. ↩︎
8. Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow & Co, 1866), p. 344. ↩︎
9. Influential pastor and wealthy slave owner Richard Furman led out in that strategy. I wrote in detail about Furman’s role, in We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church, pp. 77-85. ↩︎
10. Richard Furman, “Address to the Churches,” Minutes of the State Baptist Convention, South Carolina, 1824, SCBHS, pp. 9-11. ↩︎
11. Osterweis, p. 41. ↩︎
12. Osterweis, pp. 41, 17. ↩︎
13. Osterweis, p. 76. ↩︎
14. Osterweis, pp. 46, 87. ↩︎
15. Chesnut, pp. 261-262. ↩︎
16. Osterweis, p. 41. ↩︎
17. Osterweis, p. 88. ↩︎
18. 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), p. 92. ↩︎
19. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 46. ↩︎
20. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South (Richmond, VA 1854), pp. 213-220, quoted in Osterweis, p. 90. ↩︎
21. Chesnut, p. 569. ↩︎
22. Religious Herald (Richmond), Jan 5, 1899. Quoted in Rufus B. Spain, At Ease in Zion: A Social History of Southern Baptists 1865-1900 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), p. 168. ↩︎
23. See the inscriptions on the four sides of the Monument to Women of the Confederacy, Jackson, MS. ↩︎
24. See Wilson, pp. 46-47. And also the inscriptions on the Monument to Women of the Confederacy. ↩︎
25. David T. Morgan, Southern Baptist Sisters: In Search of Status, 1845-2000 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), pp. 14-15. ↩︎
26. Quotes are from the inscription to “Our Mothers.” See also 2 Corinthians 11:2-4 and We Confess, “Baptism of blood,” pp. 142-144. ↩︎
27. See 2 Corinthians 10:3-5. ↩︎