NICE CHURCHY PATRIARCHY

Jenkins examines the sexism of evangelical communities.

The author, a writer and preacher, concentrates on patriarchy, which she defines as “the ways men hold more power than women and are valued more highly.” This inequity has governed her dealings with her church: “Everything about my relationship with evangelicalism was influenced by my gender as a woman,” she writes, “especially as a woman in ministry.” She stresses early on that she’s not talking about the most extreme evangelical communities, which adhere doctrinally to the stark misogyny found in the Bible—as she puts it, she’s talking about nice people who are nonetheless operating in an unfair system. Jenkins chronicles her interactions with these nice people and nice congregations, starting in earnest with her undergraduate years at Stanford attending a nondenominational evangelical institution she calls Faith Bible Church, where people were kind and genuine. Jenkins had grown up in a church that endeavored to make its female members and pastors feel seen and respected; the change to the polite but lock-step patriarchy of other communities was jarring. These pages recount her growing awareness of church attitudes and her pointed reading of the Bible in search of counterbalancing teachings. “Because the Bible is not just full of patriarchal assumptions and mixed messages for women,” she writes. “It’s also full of liberation—if we’re looking for it.” Her analysis of familiar biblical characters, including Miriam, Pharaoh’s daughter, and the women in the parables of Jesus, is sharp and compelling, though it sometimes shows evangelical overreach, as when she writes, “Whatever she might have come to mean to us over two thousand years, though, Mary was a real historical human” (there is no historical verification for the Virgin Mary). But the energy and optimism in this text will be a pure gift to her fellow Christians yearning for a more enlightened church.

A sympathetic but clear-eyed look at the polite patriarchies that rule modern Christianity.