Warrior Wives and Evangelical Gender Norms

Seth Dowland

Over the weekend, The Atlantic published a fascinating piece on the “Warrior Wives” of evangelical Christianity. The title grabbed my attention immediately, as it connected the normally masculine warrior ideal with women. Such a connection is not totally surprising; evangelicals have employed militaristic metaphors for decades, if not centuries. It turns out, as well, that Atlantic editors were merely taking their cues from one of the more popular evangelical women’s blogs, Warrior Wives. But I still found it curious. When is it OK for a woman to be a warrior? How do evangelicals simultaneously hold gender norms that assign men and women to complementary roles alongside a rhetoric that enjoins everyone—man or woman—to fight?

The Atlantic piece rightly placed gender norms at the center of evangelical understandings of marriage and sexuality.  Author Emma Green repeatedly turned to Amy DeRogatis, whose excellent new book Saving Sex shows (among other things) how evangelical women have recast the feminist ideal of empowerment in the realm of sexuality. Women can wield power by withholding sex before marriage and by indulging their husbands’ purportedly stronger sex drives after the wedding day. Chaste evangelical women also claim power by avoiding the “sexually transmitted demons” that plague the unfaithful and the promiscuous.

Evangelical women’s power has allowed some to claim the mantle of “warrior wives,” revising over a century’s worth of female gender norms that have envisioned women as weaker vessels or as the fairer sex. When anti-feminists fought against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, conservative women baked cakes and brought them to their legislators’ offices, telling them, “we need you, (male) legislators, to fight for us.”* Today’s evangelical women, it seems, can fight for themselves.  Reading the Warrior Wives blog confirms the insights that Marie Griffith made about the “power of submission” in her still-timely 1997 book, God’s Daughters. Many conservative evangelical women still prioritize submission to their husbands, but their version of submission sounds quite egalitarian. Today’s evangelical women “fight for their marriages” and aren’t afraid of confrontation.

Now I know what I need to be wearing for fantasy football drafts.

I’m intrigued about how this focus on female fighting will reshape gender norms for evangelicals. In particular, I’m curious about what the presence of warrior wives will do to evangelical norms for men. We’ve highlighted on this blog some of the über-masculinity in conservative evangelicalism, from MMA evangelists to the Power Team** to Tim Tebow. I don’t think that evangelicals’ understanding of men as fighters is going away anytime soon. But there does seem to be some slackening in strict complementarianism. Evangelicals have inherited the notion that some women want to fight, too, and all men may not be into MMA. Who knows where this will lead? A century ago, liberal Protestants talked incessantly about manliness and muscular Christianity. That rhetoric slowly faded among liberals. Are evangelicals entering a similar phase of rethinking their understandings of gender?

* This awesome anecdote comes from Don Mathews and Jane Sherron DeHart’s book Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA.

** Please see Elesha Coffman’s brilliant Then & Now post for another reading of gender in evangelicalism that also mentions the Power Team.