(Excerpt)
What can account for the gradual decline of public ministry opportunities for evangelical women between the world wars? First, fundamentalist separatist subcultures emerged which tended to harden on the women’s issue. Second, as fundamentalism institutionalized, women were squeezed out of leadership roles. Third, the conservative Protestant backlash against changing social values resulted in restrictions on women in ministry. Finally, a more literalist view of Scripture among fundamentalists meant less flexibility in interpreting the subject of women in ministry.
Separatist fundamentalist subcultures. Between the world wars, fundamentalists lost the battle for control of mainline denominations and schools; in regrouping, they created a host of separate institutions. Whereas the nineteenth-century evangelical empire had stood near the center of American culture, the fundamentalism of the 1930s withdrew and formed distinct subcultures. Part of the movement veered in a militant, separatist, extremist direction, often allied with far right-wing politics. In that process of narrowing, opportunities for women also tightened.
Although united briefly in the initial attack on modernist theology, fundamentalism began to splinter in defeat. A growing disputatious, antiecumenical attitude among fundamentalists eliminated earlier cooperative interdenominational undertakings such as WCTU meetings. The Pentecostal practices of tongues and healing and even Methodist perfectionism increasingly antagonized fundamentalists.
The feminist heritage was lost even among the holiness churches, except where it was institutionalized, as in the Salvation Army. By World War II most evangelicals could go a lifetime never having heard a woman preacher or pastor, and girls grew up with fewer and fewer role models of women in public ministry.
Significantly, fundamentalism widened geographically during the same decades in which it narrowed denominationally. Whereas early fundamentalist strength had lain in the urban North, the welcoming into their fold of southern conservative cousins like the Southern Baptists produced a shift of strength to the southern Bible Belt. This change paralleled the establishment of Dallas Seminary, a fundamentalist graduate school in the South. Southern conservative social values, which traditionally included the subordinate place of women in society and church, typified an increasingly large segment of the fundamentalist constituency.
The early fundamentalist involvement in social action waned as the movement became more rigid. Historical distance from earlier temperance and suffrage crusades decreased one’s chances of hearing evangelical women speak publicly in church. The secular feminist movement certainly lost steam and direction after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the vote in 1920. As evangelicals turned from active social concern and reform to institution-building and theological squabbles, women lost opportunities to speak out on behalf of others as they had done in support of temperance and suffrage.
Institutionalization. Both Moody Bible Institute and the Evangelical Free Church illustrate the process of institutionalization and its effect on women’s roles. Changes in educational programs in these denominations furnish one indication of this change. MBI, for instance, began in the 1880s as a practical training center for women and men in lay ministry. MBI’s inauguration of a graduate school a century later suggests an enormous transformation. Similarly, early Free churches typically supported itinerant lay evangelists rather than seminary-trained pastors. The establishment of doctoral programs at Trinity University later in the twentieth century also indicates immense institutional transition.
With the rising social status of many churches came the demand for professional, seminary-trained clergy in place of charismatic lay ministry. As frontier churches previously viewed as home mission fields increased in numbers and wealth, congregations could afford to support a married man as minister. Some considered the presence of a female pastor a tacit acknowledgment of a church’s poverty.
Educational attainment and credentials often replaced spiritual gifts as the essential leadership qualifications. The establishment of interdenominational Dallas Theological Seminary in 1924—the nation’s first strictly fundamentalist seminary—symbolized this shift. Lewis Sperry Chafer, undoubtedly influenced by Charles Scofield’s view on women while teaching at Philadelphia College of the Bible, was the founder of Dallas. Emerging from the modernist-fundamentalist debates of the 1920s, it admitted only born-again male college graduates endowed with ministry gifts. Chafer clearly distinguished his school from Bible institutes, claiming that “those Bible courses which have been designed for laymen and Christian workers generally are not adequate as a foundational Bible training for the preacher or teacher.”
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Bible institutes furnished a large slice of local church leadership and influenced theology accordingly. Later, Dallas and similar schools began training the men who went on to administer and teach at Bible institutes When evangelical churches were clamoring for seminary-trained pastors, Dallas sent out only men to fill those posts. Other seminaries trained women but discouraged them from preaching and pastoral roles.
By the mid-twentieth century, churches increasingly directed women gifted to minister away from pulpit and pastoral duties toward safer spheres of service. Since World War I, the rapidly rising field of religious or Christian education has drawn trained women into its fold. A female Bible institute graduate who in 1910 might have pastored a small church or traveled as an itinerant revivalist would by 1940 more likely serve as a director of religious education.
Professionalization affected women’s service on the mission field as well. Foreign missions continued as an acceptable ministry option for women throughout the twentieth century. But the shift to overseas specialties in medicine, education, agriculture and construction influenced perceptions of appropriate roles for women. Before specialization, churches sent missionaries primarily as preachers, church planters and Bible teachers, with women filling those positions along with men. As specialization increased, women more often than not filled supportive roles as men handled preaching and pastoring. And female missionaries unused to preaching overseas felt less comfortable in American pulpits on furlough.
In summary, women found declining opportunities for leadership in evangelical churches, schools and agencies as institutionalization squelched earlier gift-based forms of ministry. In worship as well as in education, routinization set in. In a shift toward more regulated and formalized church services, praying and speaking were no longer left to chance. Structured rather than spontaneous worship tended to exclude women from public participation.
Fundamentalist reaction to social change. Opposition to women’s public ministry was part of a post-World War I reaction to vocal, extreme feminism and a perceived decline in womanhood. Dress, appearance and habits constituted the most conspicuous signs of American women’s growing independence. Shorter skirts, bobbed hair, cosmetics, public smoking and drinking—these externals marked the “liberated” woman. More substantially, the expansion of women into the workforce produced growing economic independence.
The onset of the Depression undoubtedly accelerated the return of fundamentalists and evangelicals to traditional values. Evangelicals feared that cultural trends toward women’s freedom in dress, habits, morals and occupations might destroy the family. As churches identified women preachers and pastors with the secular women’s movement, opposition rose. Hoping to save the American home, many evangelicals narrowed their view of appropriate women’s roles. The attack by John R. Rice, a separatist fundamentalist, against Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives and Women Preachers illustrates how these issues connected in this era.
The backlash in conservative Protestant circles against changing social mores can be traced in Moody Monthly magazines of the 1930s. Numerous articles appeared on the “new woman,” exposing the ill effects of modern morality. The disturbing shifts in the roles and behavior of women in American society frightened conservative Christians. Convinced that the survival of the traditional family and of the entire social order was at stake, many evangelicals tightened their approach to women in church ministry. Might not women’s leadership there give encouragement to other destructive tendencies?
MBI and other evangelical institutions began to advocate a more limited role expectation for women in an effort to maintain traditional family and moral values. In the process, evangelicals took away ministry opportunities from women.
Fundamentalist exegesis. In reaction to perceived threats to the family and society, many fundamentalist institutions revised their earlier perspectives on biblical teaching on women. Fundamentalists no longer interpreted the passages in 1 Timothy 2 or 1 Corinthians 14 as occasional advice for specific problems; instead these passages were regarded as giving transcultural principles for all times and places.
In the early twentieth century, fundamentalists had tightened the lines around the concept of inerrancy; it became one of the Fundamentals and was understood to require a literalistic interpretation of Scripture. Opposition to women ministers may have been formalized as a byproduct. Just as the South had employed extremely authoritative and literalistic views of Scripture to justify slavery, the North adopted similar attitudes toward women after the modernist battles. As this type of literalism became entrenched, fundamentalists interpreted passages about women more rigidly.
Opportunities for women to preach and pastor declined as evangelical churches identified such service as contrary to Scripture. Support of women’s public ministry came to be seen as a denial of biblical inerrancy. Straton’s 1926 pamphlet was one of the last publications from the fundamentalist camp arguing for women’s right to preach. Few evangelical men followed in the steps of Moody, Gordon, Simpson, Franson, Riley and Straton to publicly defend women preachers. When the publications containing feminist exegesis from the evangelical perspective went out of print, little appeared to replace them. Unable or unwilling to view women’s public ministry as consistent with Scripture, evangelical churches increasingly labeled their pulpits “For Men Only.”
This shift in biblical exegesis produced theological reformulation. For example, the same premillennialism used by Gordon and Franson to advocate women preachers was utilized by later writers to restrict women. Certain dispensationalists began to interpret women’s leadership as an evil sign of the end times, identifying such women with the whore of Babylon.
Turn-of-the-century evangelicals committed to the imminent, premillennial return of Christ had put their intense convictions into action. The urgent need to mobilize workers to spread the gospel worldwide left no time for one sex to remain silent. Later premillennialists apparently retained intellectual assent to Christ’s soon return but relaxed considerably on the urgency of evangelizing the world. They proved more concerned with opposing evolution than promoting evangelism, and thus evangelical recruitment of female preachers subsided.
Although knowledge of the past does not and should not dictate the future, it helps illumine how recent attitudes toward women developed. For several decades at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, evangelical churches did not leave the public gifts of women in the church buried. We, in turn, dare not bury the accounts of those courageous, committed pioneer women.
