A Call for Academic Studies on Evangelical Male Chauvinism

Guess who recently said this: “Male chauvinism has been the major problem through much of history. For most cultures through most of history the most serious deviation from biblical standards regarding men and women has not been feminism, but harsh and oppressive male chauvinism. It still exists today, not only in some families in the United States, but also in number of cultures throughout the world…. I believe that one of God’s purposes in this present controversy is to correct some wrongful traditions and some wrongful assumptions of male superiority that have existed within churches and families in the evangelical world.” Well, then. Perhaps a major change in the Christian Church is in order.

Don’t know who wrote it? Wayne Grudem in his recent book, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, Inc., 2004) p. 524. Most of you will have come across his name, but for those of you who haven’t, he is the number one, most aggressive theologian defending hierarchical/complementarian, anti-egalitarian positions on women in church and family issues.

What’s interesting is that a few pages later Grudem opines a big long list of destructive consequences if Christian egalitarianism succeeds — from increasing self-hatred, greater internal frustration (particularly in men!), even further breakdown of families to the total breakdown of the authority of Scripture. Talk about a disconnect. Could it be that patriarchal church structures and teachings had anything to do with the rampant male chauvinism? How could a little more balance between the sexes within family and church authority structures be anything but beneficial?

The new complementarians claim that their new soft patrarchialism will create the most Godly churches and families (and the least, I assume, male chauvinism). Well, if so, then let’s measure it. I call on social scientists to study male chauvinism within both evangelical camps, both the complementarians and the egalitarians, and let’s measure marital happiness, church attendance, Bible study and education, prayer, good deeds performed, patterns of communication, how decisions are made, patterns of church and family abuse, and whatever else can be proved to be convincingly appropriate to the survey at hand. It might also be advantageous to compare these results to control groups of different kinds, such as believers in non-Christian religions, Christian “liberals,” and nonbelievers of various stripes. George Barna has done some of this, and perhaps there are others as well, but no one as far as I know who has studied this convincingly. If any of you think so, please pass along the research citations.