Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power Since World War II by Elizabeth H. Flowers (review)

From about 1800 until 1980, the Baptists were an integral component of the mainline Protestant denominations that constructed church buildings on Main Streets across the country and anchored American community and family life. Yet, over the past half century, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has intentionally departed from the "Protestant consensus," moving in a conservative, doctrinally pure direction provoked, in part, by the election of one of its own, Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter, as president of the United States.

In 1979, two years after the liberal human rights activist Carter took office, Jerry Falwell, an independent Baptist preacher (not yet affiliated with the SBC) founded the "Moral Majority" and prodded Americans into cultural warfare over conservative shibboleths such as opposition to abortion, homosexuality, and feminism, and provoked a take-no-prisoners struggle between conservatives and "denominationalists-turned-moderates" in the Southern Baptist Convention (69). Entire libraries have been written about conservative ascendancy in the SBC, which resulted in leadership purges of its theological seminaries, denominational agencies, and even local churches, but none of those works focus on what this stark change of direction meant to and for Southern Baptist women. Elizabeth Flowers's book fills that significant gap in the literature.

Southern Baptists were not much affected by the Fundamentalism vs. Modernism debates of the 1920s because they were mostly white, rural, working-class people who lived in the Old South and did not engage with Darwinism, liberal theology, and higher biblical criticism. After World War II, thousands of Southerners left the region looking for jobs. The denomination followed those migrants to all fifty states; its members grew more educated, more affluent, and more conservative. Only when its social location changed after the war did the SBC engage in the modernity debates that had riven the rest of Protestant Christianity decades earlier—only this time, the conservatives won control of a major denomination, unlike in the earlier contests when the liberals won.

Flowers argues that the civil rights movement made it impossible for Southern Baptists to be openly racist, so they took their frustrations with the modern world out on women. The conservative SBC leadership used the doctrine of biblical inerrancy (meaning that every word in the Bible is precisely true) to force changes in the status of and programming for its women members. Not only was ordination of women clergy halted—in 1980 there were 233 ordained SBC clergywomen—but lay women's prime opportunity to exercise leadership, the Women's Missionary Union (WMU), was also undercut. The denomination instead promoted "Christian womanhood," in which strongly delineated gender roles were developed from conservative exegesis of certain biblical texts that ostensibly establish hierarchical male authority in family and church, to which women "graciously submit." The terminology was eventually softened to "complementarianism," which lauds the "complementary differences between masculinity and femininity" (134). Ironically, it was seminary-educated, professional women who worked outside the home—with their husbands' permission, of course—who provided much of the theological groundwork and advocacy for submission and complementarianism.

The evisceration of the WMU and its adjuncts, Acteen and Girls-in-Action, is tragic. From the early nineteenth century, women in all the Protestant traditions founded, led, administered, and funded mission societies, organizations that spurred development of the temperance and women's suffrage movements. Most of those groups were eventually subsumed under denominational control, although women's leadership of them continues to a certain extent. The Southern Baptists, however, regarded the independence of the WMU as insufficiently "submissive," and aggressively undermined it. The WMU faded to a shadow of its former self.

Flowers leaves mostly unexplored the considerable influence of nondenominational evangelicalism on the Southern Baptist struggles. It might be argued that the SBC has abandoned traditional Baptist theology and polity to join contemporary megachurch-dominated evangelicalism, although she hesitates to engage that argument. She also avoids addressing the impact of Baptist Landmarkism, a...