A few years ago, I was asked to speak about the gospel’s justice imperative at a local Christian high school. Upon arrival, I was escorted through campus by a young administrator, who thanked me for coming to engage a topic the school’s elders had ignored for too long. With Dietrich Bonhoeffer–like resolve, he and another young teacher confided that they were subversively trying to change the culture at the school. I immediately, and perhaps hastily, commended their efforts.
Old controversies never die; they simply reinvent themselves. So it’s been with the evangelical gender wars, rekindled last fall by Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, which traces the rise of militant masculinity in evangelicalism.
The debates were further fueled by Beth Moore’s very public exit from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). She cited an overemphasis on the “man-made doctrine” of complementarianism. Next came Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of ...
