Are Egalitarians Winning the Evangelical Gender Debate?

[At the end of the year it is profitable to step back and review the state of the gender debate.  Below are key excerpts from a paper read at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society by Russell D. Moore, Dean of the School of Theology of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  A downloadable audio recording of this address is available at the CBMW website.]

If evangelical theology is to regain a voice of counter-cultural relevance in the contemporary milieu, the gender debate must transcend who can have "Reverend" in front of his or her name on the business card. The gender debate must frame the discussion within a larger picture of biblical, confessional theology. And in order to do that, complementarians will have to admit that the egalitarians are winning the debate. The answer to this is not a new strategy. It is, first of all, to discover why evangelicals resonate with evangelical feminism in the first place-and then to provide a biblically and theologically compelling alternative...

As gender traditionalists seek to address the encroachments of practical egalitarianism, we must understand that the debates before us are about far more than the meaning of kephale or the hermeneutics of head coverings. For too long, the evangelical gender debate has assumed that this was merely one more intramural debate-on our best days along the lines of Arminian/Calvinist or dispensationalist/covenant skirmishes and on our worst days as an theological equivalent of a political debate show with a right- and left-wing representative. And yet, C.S. Lewis included male headship among the doctrines he considered to be part of "mere Christianity," precisely because male headship has been asserted and assumed by the Christian church with virtual unanimity from the first century until the rise of contemporary feminism...

It is noteworthy that the vitality in evangelical complementarianism right now is among those who are willing to speak directly to the implications and meaning of male headship-and who aren't embarrassed to use terms such as "male headship." This vitality is found in specific ecclesial communities-among sectors within the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America, the charismatic Calvinists of C.J. Mahaney's "sovereign grace" network, and the clusters of dispensationalist Bible churches, as well as within coalition projects that practice an "ecumenism with teeth," such as Touchstone magazine. These groups are talking about male leadership in strikingly counter-cultural and very specific ways, addressing issues such as childrearing, courtship, contraception and family planning-not always with uniformity but always with directness...

Right now, Western culture celebrates casual sexuality, cohabitation, no-fault divorce, "alternative families," and abortion rights. All of these things empower men to pursue a Darwinian fantasy of the predatory alpha-male in search of nothing but power, prestige, and the next orgasm. Does anyone really believe these things "empower" women or children? Instead, the sexual liberationist vision props up a pagan patriarchy complete with a picture of a selfish, impersonal, cruel deity. And ironically, the kind of patriarchy feminists rightly oppose-the capricious use of power by men to objectify and use women-is itself the product of changes the mainstream feminists championed. It does not bear the imprimatur of divine revelation but of the Darwinist/Freudian myth that sex is the measure of all things. This turns out to be a patriarchy too, but there is nothing "soft" about it...

Egalitarians are winning the evangelical gender debate, not because their arguments are stronger, but because, in some sense, we're all egalitarians now. The complementarian response must be more than reaction. It must instead present an alternative vision-a vision that sums up the burden of male headship under the cosmic rubric of the gospel of Christ and the restoration of all things in him. It must produce churches that are not embarrassed to tell us that when we say the "Our Father," we are patriarchs of the oldest kind...