Christian Feminists from Abroad Confront US Sexual Politics

American evangelicalism has become increasingly visible in the political arena since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the more recent proliferation of self-identified Christian nationalists like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Democrats and moderate Republicans alike are concerned with the seeming fusion between conservative evangelical Protestantism and far-right reactionary politics in the United States. In their book Taking America Back for God, sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry describe Christian nationalism as a cultural framework that “idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.” This vision of America is infused by “nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.” Not all Christians, however, are Christian nationalists, or hold to these values.  

As a scholar of American religion, I see our current moment as a culmination of efforts in the 1980s, when evangelicals and other conservative Christians coalesced into what is now termed the Religious Right with an aim to gain political power. Systems of power were changing during and after the civil rights movement and the feminist movement, and some American Christians opposed that change, while others embraced it or helped to bring it about.  During this time, theologians responded to progress in women’s rights and an emerging evangelical feminism by creating a particular form of white-dominated American Christianity in which male hierarchy was emphasized. 

My dissertation research focuses on a network of contemporary feminist Christians who resist these dominant patriarchal forms of American evangelicalism. From various political contexts, they question the hierarchal and authoritarian forms of evangelical Christianity that have been exported through American evangelical books, curricula, and music over the last forty years. While many of these authors I study are American, a significant number of authors from beyond our national borders speak back to American evangelicalism through their writing, podcasting, and social media. 

In this essay, I share the perspectives of three feminist authors: Sarah Bessey from Canada, Devi Abraham from Australia, and Cindy Wang Brandt from Taiwan. All three can be seen as part of a new generation of women leaders who have arisen along with digital media in the twenty-first century who challenge dominant forms of US evangelicalism.

Canadian writer Sarah Bessey describes herself as a “happy-clappy mum.” Bessey uses the word “happy-clappy” as a colloquial way of referring to the kind of charismatic evangelicalism in which she was raised, where congregants stand and clap enthusiastically when music is played. In addition to being a writer, Bessey is the mother of four children with her American husband Brian. 

Bessey began blogging in 2004 when she was experiencing a crisis of faith. Drawing from her own experiences and Christian scriptures, Bessey’s first book, Jesus Feminist (2013), argues for the equality and coleadership of women. When the book came out, she launched an accompanying social media campaign on Instagram in which she and other Christians identified themselves as “Jesus feminists.” Evangelical Christians often call the form of feminism based in their Christian faith “egalitarianism.” In a recent newsletter celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Jesus Feminist, Bessey described her motivation to write the book as a calling to spread the message to laypeople of women’s value to God. “A homemade theologian-wannabe, the more I read about egalitarianism and feminism in academic work, the more I wanted to make sure that it jumped that ivory tower…and landed in our church pews, dorm rooms, kitchens, public parks, friendships, and families.” In other words, while Christian theologians were aware of the arguments for Christian feminism, many evangelical laypeople were not. 

When Bessey and other feminist writers in the 2010s questioned the God-ordained nature of patriarchy, they upset a popular tenet of American evangelicalism. Though feminism itself was not particularly controversial in broader North American society, within the evangelical subculture, it was seen as a minority position to hold. 

In a recent interview with the UK’s Church Times, Bessey said that publishing Jesus Feminist felt like putting “the cat amongst the pigeons,” a British phrase meaning to cause a disturbance by saying something that makes people angry. Though Christian feminism is not new—and in fact had an influential presence during both the battle for women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the second-wave feminist movement in the late twentieth century—patriarchal theology has remained dominant within contemporary American evangelicalism. 

In the 1970s, at what might be called the zenith of progressive evangelicalism, a few evangelical feminists published books and essays arguing that the Christian scriptures were compatible with women’s liberation—and in fact, that they demanded it. In 1974, Americans Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty published All We’re Meant to Be. The book and its claims were impossible to ignore because it used evangelical language and evangelical understandings of scripture and theology. Its detractors soon organized in opposition.

In response to this new wave of evangelical feminism, American evangelicals John Piper and Wayne Grudem popularized an innovative form of patriarchy they labeled “complementarianism.” Their 1991 book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, argues for male headship and female submission in the home, the church, and in broader society. These complementarians believed that husbands should be in charge of their wives and households, only men should be allowed to be ordained as church pastors and elders, and that men should be the leaders in the workplace and broader society. Grudem and Piper, for instance, do not think men should professionally supervise women, or that women should be in certain professions they consider to be inherently authoritative, such as law enforcement. Complementarianism became influential within mainstream American evangelicalism and was subsequently disseminated by American evangelical organizations, denominations, and missionaries to other parts of the world. 

Despite its message opposing mainstream evangelical understandings of gender, Bessey’s book, Jesus Feminist, was embraced by many American evangelical readers, some of whom were in leadership in evangelical institutions. One reader who worked at an evangelical university in Michigan wrote to Bessey about the book, “It was transformative, playing a key role in shifting my perspective and approach as a leader…completely shifting my perspective from soft complementarianism to egalitarianism.” One of the reasons that much of Bessey’s audience was American is that there are so many evangelical Christians in the United States. American evangelicalism also has a robust book-reading culture in which Christian books are read during individual devotional time and discussed in group Bible studies. Memoirs are a popular genre of Christian writing, especially with Christian women. 

In an interview I conducted for my dissertation, a reader named Amy who lives in Washington state told me that she connected with Bessey’s writing because of Bessey’s blend of intellectualism and emotional intelligence. Listening to Jesus Feminist on audiobook, as well as hearing Sarah Bessey speak at conferences and following her on social media, gave Amy permission to call herself a feminist, which had always been “a dirty word” in her evangelical circles.

Bessey is not the only international writer to question patriarchal ideas distributed by American evangelical publishers and organizations. Devi Abraham, a Sri Lankan who grew up in the Philippines, spent time in Switzerland and Sweden, and now lives in Australia, produced a three-season podcast called Where Do We Go from Here? that rejected American evangelical “purity culture.” 

Purity culture is a descriptive term for a movement that had its heyday in the 1990s through the popularity of organizations such as True Love Waits and books like Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997)—which the author retracted in 2018— and which might be considered an outgrowth of complementarianism. These evangelical cultural products promoted sexual abstinence until marriage, modesty guidelines for girls’ and women’s behavior and dress, and hierarchical heterosexual marriages. 

According to religious historian Sara Moslener, author of Virgin Nation, twentieth-century purity culture, like its nineteenth-century predecessor, was for the purpose of securing a strong nation state. The purity campaigns of the late twentieth century rested American national security on the backs of Christian adolescents, especially girls, who were tasked with upholding white, middle-class, heterosexual Christian families, which would in turn produce a strong nation. Yet, these culturally specific evangelical ideals of purity were imported across national borders and denominational lines to Christian youth in other countries. Leaders like Abraham and her former cohost Jessica Van Der Wyngaard, also an Australian, call attention to the harm that purity ideology did to young people, especially to girls and women. Purity culture places responsibility and blame on girls to uphold sexual standards, and shames girls who do not appear to be conforming.

Another international figure calling attention to the detrimental effects of patriarchal American evangelical practices is Cindy Wang Brandt, a Taiwanese writer and former missionary. Brandt runs a Facebook group, “Raising Children Unfundamentalist,” and produces a podcast, Parenting Forward, which questions the authoritarian parenting practices popular in conservative American evangelicalism that center the authority of the father. 

A Christian form of authoritarian parenting in the late twentieth century was spread through evangelical organizations including James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, which was examined in the recent documentary, Shiny Happy People. These organizations emphasized the hierarchy between parents and children and between husbands and wives, and recommended disciplining children through corporal punishment. 

Through the Facebook group Brandt started eight years ago, English-speaking parents from around the world who were exposed to parenting practices common in conservative evangelicalism discuss their experiences with authoritarian parenting. They also brainstorm ways to raise their own children differently, with values such as gender equality and respect for people outside of Christianity. The group now has over thirty-one thousand members.

One of the reasons Bessey, Abraham, and Brandt are adept at analyzing and criticizing American evangelicalism is that they have been on the inside. Bessey attended Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, founded by the charismatic televangelist of the same name. She and her husband spent several years at a megachurch in Texas where her husband was on staff before moving back to Canada. Brandt attended Wheaton College for her undergraduate education and Fuller Theological Seminary for graduate school, which are two of the most prominent evangelical institutions in the United States. Abraham lived for part of her childhood in Arkansas, where she experienced American evangelicalism. Moreover, all three writers were exposed to materials produced in the United States that spread late twentieth- century versions of complementarianism, purity culture, and authoritarian parenting around the globe. 

For writers like Bessey, Abraham, and Brandt, and for the readers and listeners who pay attention to them, examining one strand of American evangelicalism often leads to the re-examination of other strands. For instance, complementarianism, purity culture, and authoritarian parenting are all connected to a theology of gender that essentializes gender distinctions and justifies a male-dominated hierarchy. Moreover, twenty-first century Christians who reject patriarchal theology often have intersectional concerns about other forms of hierarchy: many of them question several points, including the exclusion of LGBTQ people and relationships from Christian community, the centrality of white culture and white leadership in evangelicalism, and the imbrication of Christianity with political power. 

Bessey recently published her fourth solo-authored book, Field Notes for the Wilderness, in which she reflects on her journey of faith that brought her from conservative evangelicalism into a more progressive form of Christianity. Her progressive Christian faith now compels her to write not only about the viability of Christian feminism, but about LGBTQ equality, racial justice, and occasionally, foreign affairs. 

She and her peers from around the globe form an informal network of authors resisting the patriarchal and authoritarian versions of evangelical Christianity that were promoted by conservative white evangelicals in the United States. They promote each other’s work on their blogs and speak at conferences together. For example, Cindy Wang Brandt blogged about Sarah Bessey’s writing, and Bessey asked Brandt to speak at Evolving Faith, a conference Bessey led with American authors Rachel Held Evans and Jeff Chu. 

Women like Bessey, Abraham, and Brandt lead through their writing and speaking, which has become more directly accessible to their readers through the internet via social media, Substack newsletters, and podcasts. While conservative evangelical institutions may not consider them to be leaders, readers and listeners on the internet do. Through their leadership, they call American Christians to reconsider the social and political implications of their faith. 

Contributor Bio

Kelsey Hanson Woodruff is a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is a PhD candidate in religion with a secondary field in anthropology. Her dissertation is entitled “Faithful Dissent: the Feminist Counterpublic on the Margins of Evangelicalism.” Her research interests include evangelicalism and post-evangelicalism, women’s religious history, and religion in digital media.