Shakespeare illuminates our lived experience with this profound metaphor, inviting us to question the stages we stand upon, the stories we live within, and the characters we perform. While “the Bible is a script that is waiting to be performed,”
2 the present social order has a script of its own, casting us onto a rival stage to perform a rival drama.
Jarena Lee offers a poignant example of this dynamic. In her 1836 autobiography, she defends her calling to preach the gospel, “as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach.”3 While Lee is thoroughly convinced her character should preach within the biblical drama, she knows this act is unseemly on the world’s stage. Catherine Mumford Booth perceives the same in her 1859 Female Ministry: “The first and most common objection urged against the public exercises of women, is that they are unnatural and unfeminine.”4 The public ministry of a woman is assumed to be out-of-character—unseemly, unnatural, and unfeminine. On the world’s stage, an actress must not stand in the actor’s pulpit.
In 1988, white evangelicals in the United States coined the term “complementarian”5 to describe a contemporary ideology derivative of the ancient social performance of male authority and female submission. To understand the roles we perform, I will turn to Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter, whose poignant works on race illuminate the unseen imagination energizing both racial and gendered social order and hierarchies.
Jennings, in The Christian Imagination, powerfully argues “that Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination,” and, therefore, “people’s social performances of the Christian life [are] collectively anemic.”6 Rather than accepting Christ’s invitation into a narrative of radical joining within the covenant family of God, Western Christianity often performs division and dominion, thereby perpetuating the present evil age. How else can we explain a Church that was instrumental in the trafficking and enslavement of millions of Africans made in the image of God? Jesus said, “a good tree cannot bear bad fruit” (Matt 7:18 NRSVue), and we can be sure that the toxic fruit of slavery and White supremacy throughout church history has been possible only because the tree has grown within the soil of toxic imagination.
What Jennings calls the “diseased social imagination,” Carter calls “modern racial reasoning.” Carter reminds us that a renewed mind rejects the logic of separation and domination to inhabit a new world: “To enter into Christ’s flesh through the Holy Spirit’s Pentecostal overshadowing is to exit the gendered economy and protocols of modern racial reasoning” (italics mine).7 The stage on which we play is thoroughly racialized: White players and Black players must perform the social dynamics of race in this drama, while modern racial reasoning upholds a “gendered economy.” The tendrils of division and domination touch both race and gender, energizing both subtle and extremist expressions of racism and misogyny alike. Furthermore, I argue that racializing logic depends on an ancient gendered imagination sprouting from the post-fall garden of Genesis 3:16. Because men came to imagine separating from and taking authority over the gendered Other, they could also imagine the possibility of enslaving the racial Other.
I contend that complementarianism, which casts women and men into roles of submission and authority, is an ideology built upon the same diseased social imagination that allowed colonists to cast Europeans and Africans into the roles of White and Black. While complementarianism and White supremacy differ in scale and consequence, I believe they rest upon the same theological imagination and perform from the same social order of separation that promotes dominion. I do not claim that complementarianism derives from White supremacy. Rather, I contend that both ideologies perform on the same stage. They are fruit of the same tree, ideologies born of the same social imaginary.
Jarena Lee perceived a metanarrative, a social imagination, that made female preaching “unseemly.” Lee, however, was not bound by this assumption but was liberated by the call of God on her life. Lee “refuses to hand Christian theology over either to whiteness,8 to the blackness [that] whiteness created, or to the racialized gender conventions attending either of these. Instead, she receives herself anew from Christ, understanding her body as articulating his body and his body hers.”9 Through this, Lee stands on the new stage, liberated from division and dominion to perform radical Christian belonging.
Genesis 1 and Creating Race
The colonial moment reconstructed—ideologically speaking—the world and the people in it. Europeans re-narrated Genesis 1. The biblical narrative begins with a God who separated light from dark, naming the light “day” and the dark “night.” The Creator separated and named. This creative impulse was turned upside down in the colonial moment, as European colonists separated light skin from dark skin, naming Europeans “white” and Africans “black.” Genesis 1 narrates the creation of humankind in God’s image, highlighting the similarity and belonging between God and humans. Colonists, in their re-narration project, perversely re-imagined human beings as opposites.
Europeans beheld a vast continent of diverse peoples and imagined them as one “black” African monolith, the degraded opposite of European Whiteness. While a biblical imagination aims at joining, a racialized imagination divides. In Jennings’s words, “the Christian imaginary that [emerged] out of colonialist power naturalized segregationalist mentalities and thereby denied one of its most basic and powerful imaginative possibilities, the deepest and most comprehensive joining of peoples.”10
White and Black were not neutral categories, but a dramatic range from Black savagery to White civility. Juliany González Nieves defines Whiteness as a sociological construct which preaches in word and deed the presumed (g)od-given superiority of Euro-American aesthetics, theologies, cultures, and ways of life and thinking, locating everything and everyone in a spectrum that grants degrees of privilege based on their proximity to the White man.11
As Europeans usurped God’s role as creator of worlds and ripped Africans from their lands, they displaced Jesus as well. Carter explains: “Christ was abstracted from Jesus, and thus from his Jewish body . . . In making Christ non-Jewish in this moment, he was made a figure of the Occident [West]. He became white.”12 White Christians no longer imagined Jesus of Nazareth as an embodied Judean belonging to the culture of the Middle East in the timeline of world history. Rather, they imagined an abstract, spiritual, malleable Christ conformed toward the “baptized idol of the White man.” Within this diseased theological imagination, non-White and Black flesh was deemed inherently opposite to Christ’s flesh, and as such, inherently inferior to White flesh.
The colonists did not only exit the biblical narrative. They chopped the Bible up into isolated texts and used these as building material for their new stage, one that served the interests of Whiteness. “[F]or the slave the Bible was offered only in conjunction with the interpreting word of the slave master.”13 In the hands of enslavers, the Bible was weaponized toward social control and economic prosperity. In the United States, in Carter’s words:
Scripture [has] been made to function as the “immaterial” or “spiritual” superstructure that sanctions the “material” structures of power in the American social order . . . Christian thought has tended to ventriloquize the American social order rather than witness to an alternative form of sociopolitical existence. Theology’s failure [leaves us] with no live alternative by which to (re)imagine the world.14
The Bible served as justification for division and dominion. Instead of asking what theology required of Christians, Christians were to ask what Whiteness required of theology. This is why, till today, there is a “tendency in many White Churches to assume that the Bible basically tells a story about White people and that the other races are simply added on as part of our gracious missionary enterprise.”15
The colonists usurped God’s Genesis 1 role to re-create human identities; they re-imagined humanity in opposition to one another, with White flesh in authority over all others; by displacing Jesus, they lost the capacity to imagine radical joining together of peoples; and instead of inhabiting the world of the Scriptures, they deployed the Bible in favour of the White.
Genesis 2 and Performing Gender
As “Christian formation [was] reconfigured around white bodies,”16 human identity was redefined to fit a narrative that exploited Christian language in service of Whiteness. Because Europeans understood themselves as civilized and as civilizers, as quintessential Christians and as Christianizers, they cast themselves in the role of judge over all others, according to their standards of White civility and Christianity. Black and White are not biological categories, but storied identities, expected to fill certain roles on the world’s stage.
Within this diseased imagination, male and female also became social descriptions of “players” expected to perform certain roles. It is not enough to be male or female. A male must perform masculinity, and a female, femininity. Male and female were not mere biological categories, but a set of contrary character attributes as well. Carter highlights this process and its integration with the racialized imagination, noting that “woman or the feminine as acquiescent passivity effectively comes to represent what it means to be a slave . . . freedom, which entails the struggle for release from the condition of racial indignity, is . . . a struggle against the loss of masculinity.”17
Before Black could be created as a racial construct, femininity was already equated with passivity and masculinity with activity. The slave fills a “feminine,” passive role, while the master is active, authoritative, and quintessentially “masculine.” For an enslaved person to escape to freedom, he must leave behind feminine passivity and be conformed to the image of masculine agency and activity. This gendering of slavery was only possible within a logic that already imagined femininity as passive, as apparently opposite to masculine agency. Racialization—and the roles it created—was enabled by a social imagination already predisposed towards male separation from, and authority over, female. Racial logic was imagined as a possibility because men had already assumed the logic of division and dominion over women. In other words, because colonists had already conceived of “the opposite sex,” the colonial imagination was primed to think in terms of “the opposite race.” “Ultimately, this type of separation always restricts one group (e.g., blacks, women) while the other group has no such restrictions (e.g., whites, men).”18 Jennings writes that “we must think through to the utter limits of the racial calculus to expose its deepest fault lines. We must do this in order to tear open racial identity so as to reveal the original relation—exposing it afresh to our social imaginations.”19 If we are to be radically joined in Christ, we must uncover all that separates, categorizes, and ranks us—both the “racial calculus” and the gendered calculus.
Scripture contains the very story that helps us re-narrate the world. After the creation of ha’adam—the human formed from the dust and energized by God’s breath—God places him in the garden of Eden to work it and care for it. God, however, recognizes “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen 2:18). This is the first “not good” in a sacred text that features the repeated refrain, “and God saw that it was good” (Gen 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). God responds, “I will make him a helper as his partner” (Gen 2:18 NRSVue). The Creator of all that is good responds to the first “not good” with a resolution to create “a helper as his partner.”
Marg Mowczko explains that “the Hebrew word for ‘helper’ used in Genesis 2:18 and 20 is ‘ezer, and it is always and only used in the Hebrew Bible in the context of a necessary and powerful assistance.”20 Sixteen of the twenty-one occurrences of ‘ezer in the Hebrew Bible refer to God himself. While Raymond Ortlund argues that Eve “was not [Adam’s] equal in that she was his ‘helper,’”21 this argument is only tenable if we assume God may be subordinate to anyone he helps. Furthermore, Eve is not just ‘ezer, but ‘ezer kenegdo: “a helper as his partner.” Mowczko explains that kenegdo expresses “similarity, correspondence, mutuality, equality.” Therefore, she concludes, ezer kenegdo expresses “nothing whatsoever . . . that implies a subordination of the first woman or an authority of the man over the woman.”22 There is no division or dominion between male and female in Genesis 2. Eve is neither man’s opposite, nor his inferior.
Furthermore, Genesis neither portrays Eve as uniquely passive, nor Adam as uniquely active.23 These gendered attributes do not derive from Genesis, but are later characterizations of Adam and Eve, as articulated by John Milton’s 1667 description of the Edenic couple:
For contemplation he and valor formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace:
He for God only, she for God in him.24
God created Adam; we imagined him heroic and intellectual. God created Eve; we imagined her soft, sweet, attractive, and gracious. God created the sexes; we perform gender.
A diseased social imagination assumes the male is made “for God” while the female exists “for God in him.” Man is centered, fully human, while woman orbits him in submission. We have torn male and female asunder, creating opposites where God created “one flesh” (Gen 2:24). Man has seized authority over the ezer kenegdo created as his equal. How has this happened?
Genesis 3 and the Logic of Domination
Genesis 3 portrays the “fall” of humanity and the entrance of sin into the world. When God speaks with Adam in the wake of this downfall, Adam shifts the blame for his actions onto both his wife and God: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate” (Gen 3:12 NRSVue). In this moment, the man separates from God and woman, and the logic of “the opposite sex” enters the human imagination for the first time. God sees and forewarns the woman: “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Gen 3:16b).25 Because the man and the woman, bone of bone and flesh of flesh, have been torn asunder in the act of blame, he will soon claim authority to “rule over” her. The logic of division, God warns, always gives way to the logic of domination. He who perceives another human being as “opposite” will always subsequently seek to “rule over” them. Here, in Genesis 3:16, are the roots of the diseased social imagination behind misogyny and White supremacy alike.26
South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) described the center of the social order in the antebellum South: “Every plantation is a little community, with the master at its head.”27 Jennings explains: “In antebellum America, the household stood at the center of the social world of the new republic, and at the center of the household stood the male landowner.”28 In an 1857 sermon, Alabama Presbyterian minister, Frederick A. Ross, makes the White master’s universal authority explicit: “I make the rule of . . . master and servant, parent and child, husband and wife, the same rule; i.e. I make it the same right in the superior to control the obedience and the service of the inferior, bound to obey.”29 Wife, children, and enslaved persons were brought together in the racial, gendered flesh of the White master. This is a grotesque distortion of the biblical narrative that draws all people together in Jesus, who came not for possession or domination, but in loving service.
Just as Adam separated himself from his wife to “rule over” her, so the White master assumed that his authority over wife and children also granted him divine authority over others. “Biblical justifications had embedded slavery in a set of orderly domestic hierarchies so that the power of slave owners over slaves paralleled the power of husbands over wives and of parents over children. Slavery was legitimate, so the arguments went, because it was like marriage.”30 Slavery was biblically justified because the separation and authority of one over another was imagined as the divine order.
A Southern slave-owner’s wife had little choice but to accept her husband’s dominion, as “the law gave husbands authority to ‘discipline’ their wives.”31 Domestic abuse was expected if anyone on the master’s stage failed to perform their role. Within this diseased, deadly imagination, subjugated women came to assume their oppression was natural and divinely ordained. They had never received permission to imagine an alternative. Catharine Beecher, representing the dominant views of antebellum Southern culture in her 1837 public letter, Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, said:
It is the grand feature of the Divine economy, that there should be different stations of superiority and subordination . . . Heaven has appointed to one sex the superior, and to the other the subordinate station, and this without any reference to the character or conduct of either. 32
It is a tragic consequence of a diseased imagination when separation and domination come to be seen as “the Divine economy.” Historian Laura F. Edwards explains this dynamic:
Although Evangelical southern Protestants believed that everyone was spiritually equal in the eyes of the Lord, the same did not hold true for matters of this world . . . White women, like slaves, were supposed to realize their spiritual mission through cheerful obedience to the authority of white men . . . This social order, the South’s ministers assured their congregations, was not just natural but divinely ordained. Any change would bring down the wrath of God.33
A century and a half before the advent of modern complementarianism, the prevailing social order of the antebellum South claimed the spiritual equality of wives while explicitly calling them to slave-like submission due to their inferiority.
The Complementarian Imagination
The complementarian emphasis on “roles” signifies that men and women are expected to perform the drama of separation and authority. In 1988, the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood (CBMW) published the Danvers Statement expressing the core beliefs of complementarianism. Danvers imagined and perpetuated division with their statement that “distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God . . .”34 It enforced the logic of authority in saying “wives should forsake resistance to their husbands’ authority and grow in willing, joyful submission to their husbands’ leadership.”35
The development of complementarianism in the latter half of the twentieth-century is unsurprising. Historian Paul Harvey writes:
A theology that sanctifies gendered hierarchy has become for the post-civil rights generation what whiteness was for earlier generations of believers. For religious conservatives generally, patriarchy has supplanted race as the defining first principle of God-ordained order.36
While complementarianism does not explicitly differentiate between races, it rests on the same imaginative foundation as colonial and antebellum racial reasoning. Separating female from male as “the opposite sex” and Black from White as “the opposite race,” the White master created order they imagined to be “God-ordained.”
Jennings highlights “the rule of the plantation father over the family and of the master as the organizing center of domestic and public life.”37 The plantation presents us with a social order wherein the White male rules over home and institution. Within plantation life, “people have a role, and if they resist that role then their existence is rendered unassimilable and useless.”38 The logic at work on the plantation was that of separating one man and authorizing him to rule over both familial and institutional domains. Has the White evangelical church perpetuated this racial and gendered logic?
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest evangelical denomination in the United States,39 as predominantly White40 and a strong proponent of complementarianism, is a helpful case study. The SBC was founded by separating from the Triennial Convention in 1845 to authorize slave-owners to serve as missionaries.41 SBC roots are firmly planted in allegiance to a racialized social order and a corporate imagination given to the idea of division and dominion. In recent years, the SBC has disfellowshipped churches who ordain women42 while claiming that local church autonomy prevents them from holding churches accountable for employing male sex offenders.43 Thus, the SBC performs within a drama that perceives any female preacher as more unseemly than an abusive male preacher. This is nonsensical and ethically disastrous within the biblical imagination, but perfectly coherent within the idea of division and dominion. This behavior is only possible within a diseased social imagination.
Historian Beth Allison Barr notes that “the sex abuse scandals that are currently plaguing the SBC are not anomalous; rather, they are the product of a systemic culture teaching that women are worth less than men . . . To be a Christ follower, they argue, is to privilege male power.”44 Christa Brown, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her SBC minister, describes this theology as
a theology of domination. It focuses not on human flourishing but on the controlling of human beings through hierarchies of power and oppression. It proclaims as divinely ordered that some should hold dominion over those deemed lesser, and it invokes religion to rationalize categorizations of who should exercise authority and who should submit.45
The idea of division and dominion evidently clouds moral and ethical judgment. Jennings explains that “the judgment of good and evil tied to black obedience and disobedience overrode considerations of the immorality of black murder and enslavement.”46 Black disobedience to White authority was seen as a greater offense than the White evils of enslavement, family separation, physical assault, and murder. Toxic theological roots will always grow rotten ethical judgments, as evidenced by John Piper’s advice on domestic abuse. Piper, one of the cofounders of the CBMW, opined that as long as an abusive husband is “not requiring [his wife] to sin, but simply hurting her, then I think she endures verbal abuse for a season, she endures perhaps being smacked one night, and then she seeks help from the church.”47 We recall that husbands were legally permitted to discipline insubordinate wives in the antebellum South. When the world is imagined according to division and dominion, a wife’s refusal to submit to abuse is a greater immorality than a husband’s abusive violence.
The picture outlined here is admittedly bleak. “We inhabit a social world constricted through whiteness that has left us with limited options for imagining how we might be with each other.”48 Christianity, the imaginative engine that should make the world new in Christ, has been distorted and usurped and thus made both complicit and instrumental in advancing the diseased racial and gendered logics of division and dominion. How can we truly be with each other in Christ?
Old World Exegesis and New Creation Exegesis
Matthew’s Gospel narrates the story of Israel’s Messiah entering Gentile territory, where a Canaanite woman—an ethnic and gendered “other”—requests aid from Jesus for her beloved daughter. Jesus “did not answer her at all” (Matt 15:23 NRSVue). I imagine she felt this deeply, another reminder of the pervasive narrative that names her separate and subordinate. Her voice is unheard, her agency diminished. This woman, however, would not give in to the role her culture had pressed on her. Rather, “she came and knelt before [Jesus], saying, ‘Lord, help me’” (15:25 NRSVue).
This time, Jesus responds, pressing her with a question, which I paraphrase: “I am here to feed my children. Why should I give their food to dogs?” This question feels unseemly on the lips of Jesus. We must remember that Jesus took on human flesh, making himself vulnerable to death, precisely to shatter the power of death. Perhaps he now presents this woman with the logic of separation and domination precisely to shatter it. He reveals the supposed boundaries of the family of God. She bravely challenges the divisions.
“She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table’” (15:27 NRSVue). Even though the dogs are separate from the children and subordinate to “their masters,” the children and dogs can eat together. This woman imagines a way out of the idea of division and dominion. In Christ, Canaanite women and Israelite men eat together.
The voice of this ethnic and gendered other, her empowered activity and agency, becomes the pivot between old and new narratives. “Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith!’” (15:28 NRSVue). Great is the faith capable of imagining together and equal in Christ, even though surrounded by division and dominion in the world.
Following this encounter, Jesus, still in Gentile territory, “went up the mountain, where he sat down. Great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the blind, the maimed, the mute, and many others. They put them at his feet, and he cured them, so that the crowd was amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel” (15:29–31 NRSVue).
This is the heart of Christ’s re-narration project, fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy regarding “the mountain of the Lord’s house,” that “the nations shall stream to” (Isa 2:2 NRSVue). Jesus, on the mountaintop, receives the nations who are joined together around Israel’s Messiah. Gentile multitudes stream up this mountain of the Lord, like the heavenly “multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev 7:9 NRSVue). The Canaanite woman re-narrated the diseased assertion that Israelites and Canaanites cannot eat together, so Jesus “took the seven loaves and the fish, and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds” (Matt 15:36 NRSVue). With the nations seated together around the Messiah’s table, Jesus gave bread to his Israelite disciples who offered it up to the nations of the world. The “children’s bread” becomes nourishment for the nations. In this new creation narrative, “crumbs” for “dogs” become abundance for the world.
This is a new imagination empowering a new narrative of radical joining, written by “the author and perfecter of faith” (Heb 12:2 NASB) who refuses to write us into roles of separation and domination. In Christ, we do not conform to this age, but we are transformed by the renewing of the imagination. Old narratives are crucified, along with the diseased imaginations that energize them, and a new performance is on display: The utter destruction of division and dominion in light of our radical togetherness in Christ.
Notes
- Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1623, ed. B. A. Mowat and P. Werstine (2019) 2.6.146–47
- Walter Brueggemann on episode 301 of The Bible for Normal People podcast (Apr 10, 2017).
- Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008) 339.
- https://www.salvationarmy.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/female_ministry_or_womans_right_to_preach_the_gospel_.pdf.
- https://www.dennyburk.com/complementarianism-whats-in-a-name-2/.
- Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010) 6.
- Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 340.
- Jennings describes Whiteness “not simply as a marker of the European but as the rarely spoken but always understood organizing conceptual frame” (The Christian Imagination, 25). Whiteness is not simply skin called “white,” but is the formation and performance of the diseased social and theological imagination.
- Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 341.
- Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 208.
- Juliany González Nieves, “When We Were Not Women: Race and Discourses on Womanhood,” in Discovering Biblical Equality: Biblical, Theological, Cultural, and Practical Perspectives, ed. Ronald W. Pierce, Cynthia Long Westfall, and Christa L. McKirland (IVP Academic, 2021) 597–98 n. 1.
- Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 6–7.
- Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 239.
- Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 305–7.
- Daniel Hays, From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race (IVP Academic, 2003) 202.
- Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 35.
- Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 296.
- L. Bennett and A. J. Fletcher, “Separate but Equal: The Great Lie behind Jim Crow and Progressive Complementarianism,” Priscilla Papers 39/3 (2025) 17–20.
- Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 275.
- https://margmowczko.com/gender-hierarchy-creation-narrative-genesis-2/.
- https://margmowczko.com/ezer-kenegdo-subordinate-helper-eve/.
- https://margmowczko.com/gender-hierarchy-creation-narrative-genesis-2/.
- Adam’s most significant “activity” in Genesis 2 occurs while he passively sleeps, as God creates Eve from his side.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, ed. M. Y. Hughes (2003) 3:296 –299.
- John Calvin argues that “the woman, who had perversely exceeded her proper bounds, is forced back to her own position. She had, indeed, previously been subject to her husband, but that was a liberal and gentle subjection; now, however, she is cast into servitude.” Men, in Calvin’s estimation, were made to rule gently, but woman is now punished with “servitude.” Martin Luther disagrees, claiming that Eve “was wholly free and in no sense inferior to the man” until she sinned. As punishment for her sin, however, she “according to the command of God is bound to obey” her husband, because “the rule and government of all things remain in the power of the husband” (Everyone’s Luther: Genesis Chapter 3, trans. J. N. Lenker, 132). Luther sees the man’s rule as God’s command, although it is only God’s command after Eve’s sin. John Wesley makes a similar argument to Luther: “She is here put into a state of subjection: the whole sex, which by creation was equal with man, is for sin made inferior” (https://biblehub.com/commentaries/wes/genesis/3.htm). Woman, in Wesley’s commentary, is not just put in subjection, but is “made inferior.”
- See the Autumn 2025 issue of Priscilla Papers on this difficult and influential verse, Gen 3:16.
- John C. Calhoun, Speech on the Importance of Domestic Slavery (Jan 10, 1838).
- Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 235.
- https://www.google.com/books/edition/Slavery_Ordained_of_God_by_Rev_Fred_a_Ro/WwGTH1ZQ7FMC?hl=en&gbpv=1.
- Jemison, E. L., “Proslavery Christianity After the Emancipation.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 72/4. (2013) 255 –68. Tennessee Historical Society.
- Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era, 2000, 15.
- Catherine Beecher, 1837, 99. Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism.
- Edwards, 2000, 19.
- https://cbmw.org/about/the-danvers-statement/.
- Ibid.
- Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) 246.
- Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020) 117.
- Jennings, After Whiteness, 142.
- https://churchanswers.com/blog/the-15-largest-protestant-denominations-in-the-united-states/.
- 74% White according to Pew Research Center (https://pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-denomination/southern-baptist-convention/).
- https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/southern-baptist-convention-sbc, also see https://sbcvoices.com/the-southern-baptist-convention-whats-in-a-name/.
- https://baptistandreflector.org/2023-sbc-meeting-messengers-disfellowship-three-churches/.
- https://baptistnews.com/article/sbc-officials-reject-idea-of-sex-offender-database/.
- Beth Allison Barr, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry (Brazos, 2025) 270.
- Christa Brown, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation (Lake Drive Books, 2024) 301.
- Jennings, After Whiteness, 184.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OkUPc2NLrM.
- Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 213.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick O'Brien is a graduate student in Trevecca Nazarene University's Theology and Biblical Studies Master’s program. He has served in worship ministry for the past fifteen years, and lives in Virginia with his wife and two sons. Nick writes on theology, spiritual formation, and social transformation at Renewed Mind.
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