Is Biblical Womanhood a Revolutionary Movement?

Religion Dispatches, a news service not exactly noted for its sympathy toward conservative evangelicalism, recently published an article in which writer Kathryn Joyce displayed no small fascination (and mild amusement, if I discern the article's tone correctly) at last year's True Woman `08 Conference. Entitled "Women's Liberation Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism is Born," the article redefines biblical womanhood and complementarianism with its own terminology: "the patriarchy movement," using it pretty much throughout the article.

Interestingly, Joyce describes True Woman, which was held last October in Chicago, as "evangelical counterculture at its most contrarian," because it bucks the cultural assumption that feminism is normative. Joyce views the True Woman Manifesto and its drive for 100,000 signatures as particularly contrarian:

"The ‘countercultural' attitudes that signers support include the idea the women are called to affirm and encourage godly masculinity, and honor the God-ordained male headship of their husbands and pastors; that wifely submission to male leadership in the home and church reflects Christ's submission to male leadership in the home and church reflects Christ's submission to God, His Father; that ‘selfish insistence on personal rights is contrary to the spirit of Christ'; and, in a pronatalist turn of phrase that recalls the rhetoric of the Quiver-full conviction, their willingness to ‘receive children as a blessings from the Lord.'"

After providing a summary of TW addresses by Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Mary Kassian and John Piper, Joyce concludes by admitting that the biblical womanhood movement is one that should not be taken lightly in spite of how "laughably retrograde (True Woman's) prescriptions and manifesto might seem."

Joyce, who is the author of a forthcoming book on what she calls "the Christian patriarchy movement," is obviously correct in asserting the countercultural nature of biblical womanhood when placed within the present postmodern cultural context. Her argument, however, is not as accurate when understood in light of church history: feminism, relatively speaking, is a newly minted movement, with its roots reaching back to 1960s America. Biblical womanhood has a much older pedigree, with roots in holy Scripture and more than 2,000 years of church history. Considered in light of history and biblical truth, feminism is actually the counterculture or "contrarian" movement. Popularity makes an ideology neither normative nor true.

The contrarian claim insinuates a clandestine activist and alarmist ethos, one that agitates against the status quo. But one listen to the audio of the speakers from the True Woman conference reveals just the opposite: a calmness and peacefulness of a group of godly women who are placing their hope in timeless truth that has withstood the ages.  Some may see that as contrarian, but many throughout history have seen it as normative.