American Complementarianism Needs some New Sunglasses

Response to Neil Shenvi

Recently my son and I watched and enjoyed the new Ryan Reynolds movie Free Guy. I’d describe it as “The Trueman Show” meets “Ready Player One.” Spoiler alert, basically a man named “Guy” realizes that he’s a non-playing-character in a video game by putting on a pair of sunglasses that the playing characters wear. At one point, Guy tries to get his best friend “Buddy” to put on a pair of sunglasses too so that Buddy will see what Guy sees, know what Guy knows, and see the true nature of the reality that they are both in. But Buddy refuses to, he’s either too scared, or too comfortable with how things are.

To be honest, I feel like I’m Guy and parts of American Complementarianism and Evangelicalism are Buddy.

What many of us have long suspected, and what authors like Kristin du Mez, Beth Allison Barr, and Aimee Byrd show, is that there is another way of looking at the history and culture of American evangelicalism and esp. complementarianism (i.e., AmEvComp).

AmEvComp has a backstory, it has cultural forces that have shaped it, it has political connections, local and parochial qualities, key personalities with issues and failings.

As a result, the teaching of AmEvComp is not based purely and simply on a plain reading of Scripture, they are shaped by other things too like plantation patriarchy, figures like Ted Roosevelt and Ted Nugent, movies like Brave Heart, books like Wild at Heart, opposition to books like The Feminist Mystique, opposition to the Equal Rights Act. And yet, if you point out how AmEvComp are products of a situated history and are producers of a type of culture with things like “Focus on the Family,” purity-rings, Promise Keepers, the AmEvComp bros overreact like Reagan in Grenada.

AmEvComp be like “The culture is out to get us,” but I wanna say, “Brother, but you don’t see the culture within you.”

I do not expect my AmEvComp friends, and I genuinely call them friends, to abandon everything they’ve known and to join Christian for Biblical Equality. But maybe authors like du Mez, Barr, and Byrd can lead you to a more self-aware, self-critical, and humbly chastened view of complementarian manhood, marriage, and ministry.

Neil Shenvi has produced a friendly response to my post CBMW and the Heresies of ‘Sociology’ and ‘History’ which responded to his initial piece Sociology as Theology: The Deconstruction of Power in (Post)Evangelical Scholarship. So many responses to responses to responses.

Shenvi chides me for supporting the du Mez and Barr thesis that AmEvComp is a white male protection racket. But if you look at the networks within AmEvComp and their defense of Donald Trump and Paige Patterson, how do you draw any other conclusion? But it gets even worse, Shenvi is kind of blatant about what he’s trying to protect.

I’m immediately left wondering what, exactly, is keeping someone from slipping “heterosexist, cisnormative” in between “white” and “middle-class” and then using precisely the same reasoning to dismiss Prof. Bird’s own stance on sexuality or gender identity as a “product… of a specific culture, in a specific place, with a specific set of values.”

He worries that the same exposure of the ills and power dynamics behind AmEvComp patriarchy could also be applied to white-ness, to heterosexuality, or to middle-class-ness. But this is exactly the point. He’s not worried as to whether white-ness, heterosexuality or middle-class-ness - I’m all three by the way - have done any harm or contributed to any suffering or disempowerment, he’s only interested in protecting them, history and reality be damned. In effect, he is worried, “Don’t let them do to my race, class, and gender what they did to my manhood!”

Even Shenvi’s critique proves du Mez and Barr’s point, AmEvComp doesn’t operate from exegesis to application, it is its own culture, that is propped up with a mixture of scriptural appeal, pop culture, personalities, and networks of patronage and power, and he wants it defended.

Let me offer an olive branch to Shenvi, should we do theology based just on sociology? No, of course not. If I were teaching a course on Bible, Church, and Gender, I’d have du Mez, Barr, and Byrd on the reading list, along with some diverse biblical commentaries, works by Rosner and Trueman on “identity,” stuff from CBMW and CBE, some recent treatments on anthropology, and some things on culture-making, and ethics. I would say with great confidence that I think du Mez, Barr, and Byrd will agree with me on this.

Am I a product of my Aussie context? Undoubtedly, and many friends will have much fun pointing out how it jaundices my view. You could point out how Australian’s lean towards egalitarianism, which is why my students call me “Mike” rather than “Prof. Bird,” we could talk about Australian male mythology with the epic poem “The Man from Snowy River,” we could discuss “The White Australia Policy,” Kevin Rudd’s “Apology” to first peoples, Anglican debates about women and ministry in the 1990s, and the influence of Aussie feminist Germaine Greer on Aussie culture. Fair game!

But to my AmEvComp friends, Buddy, just put on the glasses for a minute, you don’t have to keep them on, you can take them off, but you’ll never be the same! And you’ll learn some painful truths: You’ll learn that the men you thought were like Cliff Huxtable acted more like Bill Cosby, it is a sad truth, confronting yet liberating!