What Is a Woman? What Is a Man?

Evangelicalism's thin anthropology lacks a compelling answer to these questions.

If evangelicalism is going to have a good future in America, it has to reform in a number of critical areas where it has problems. One of those is gender.

I caused a bit of a controversy recently when I posted on X that, “The biggest problem facing the evangelical complementarian gender theology is its inability to articulate a compelling role for women apart from wife and mother. Unsurprisingly, this is unappealing to women with talents and inclinations beyond that, or who are single.”

I have long been critical of the way evangelicals talk about men, such as their flawed “servant leader” teachings, but the way they talk about women also has problems.

One root of this is their very thin anthropology of gender.

There are two basic gender theologies in evangelicalism: egalitarianism, which is evangelical feminism, and complementarianism. Both acknowledge some degree of complementary differences between the sexes, but in complementarianism these tend to be seen as more significant, and affect the roles men and women have in society. They believe men are the head of the home and only men can serve as ordained elders/pastors in a church.

Complementarianism itself has two main strands, thin and thick. The thin vision is essentially egalitarianism with exceptions for the roles of head of household and pastor. Thin complementarian Kathy Keller likes to say that, “A woman can do anything an unordained man can do.”

The thick version says these differences are more expansive, and by that typically meaning that they apply to more roles. One person in this camp, John Piper, doesn’t believe women should have jobs where they give personal directions to a man, for example.

A third neo-patriarchy movement takes the thick complementarian position and hardens it, both rhetorically and in terms of especially women’s roles. Some of them don’t believe women should work outside the home, for example.

A Thin Anthropology

All of these groups would say that they start with creation, that God created man male and female, and that this has implications. But the anthropology they derive from this is extremely thin.

Anthropology is defined either as, “The study of human beings and their ancestors through time and space and in relation to physical character, environmental and social relations, and culture,” or, “Theology dealing with the origin, nature, and destiny of human beings.”

I use the term to refer to the nature of men and women. We can view this as deriving from the created order, or nature as God created it. Catholics might say “natural law” of this, but I’m going to avoid that term. (Secularists might see their origins in evolutionary psychology). The key is to understand who men and women are, biologically, sociologically, and culturally.

What we will see is that evangelicals have very little to say about this. I will hone in on complementarianism to illustrate.

Complementarianism is slippery to analyze, because its proponents can dodge many things about it because there’s only a minimalist official definition it. It’s a very simple and basic document called the Danvers Statement.

The Danvers Statement has only ten basic affirmations. Seven of them deal specifically with men as the head of the home or as pastor, and the final one simply says that the other statements are important. Just two of the affirmations potentially involve gender apart from those two roles:

1. Both Adam and Eve were created in God’s image, equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood (Gen 1:26-27, 2:18).

2. Distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order, and should find an echo in every human heart (Gen 2:18, 21-24; 1 Cor 11:7-9; 1 Tim 2:12-14).

This is the sum total of its anthropology. That men and women are distinct and that their roles are likewise distinct.

There’s little to no tangible content in this statement beyond the two roles of head of household and pastor. It says “roles” in general in affirmation two, but there are no specifics about this except for those two specific named roles. And there’s nothing about the nature of manhood and womanhood. (There’s also nothing about the symbolic realm, such as marriage as a microcosm of the relationship of Christ and the church, or of the celestial bodies. There’s no cosmic structure to the world here).

No wonder there’s a vast spectrum of people with very different ideas about gender who all rightly claim that they are consistent with the Danvers Statement. The Danvers Statement itself has an extremely thin anthropology of gender.

Beyond the Danvers Statement, the main complementarian text is Recovering Manhood and Womanhood (RBMW) a collection of essays edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem. This is the basic exposition of complementarian theology, though not all complementarians would agree with the entire contents of the book. In it, John Piper’s lead essay defines what he calls biblical manhood and biblical womanhood. Here is how he defines biblical manhood:

AT THE HEART OF MATURE MASCULINITY IS A SENSE OF BENEVOLENT RESPONSIBILITY TO LEAD, PROVIDE FOR AND PROTECT WOMEN IN WAYS APPROPRIATE TO A MAN’S DIFFERING RELATIONSHIPS.

“AT THE HEART OF….”

This phrase signals that the definitions are not exhaustive. There is more to masculinity and femininity, but there is not less. We believe this is at the heart of what true manhood means, even if there is a mystery to our complementary existence that we will never exhaust. [caps in original]

I’ve noted multiple times before that this defines manhood entirely in terms of how a man relates to a woman. (The definition of womanhood is similar in this regard). The only thing about man qua man is in the way he relates to women. There’s essentially no anthropology of masculinity apart from this.

The complementarian defender will certainly deny this, pointing to the statement that “there is more.” It’s true that the text says there is more, but what is this more? We essentially never hear about it.

RBMW talks a lot about why we have to reject the idea that men and women are the same, but virtually nothing about how they are actually different. Piper writes:

Men and woman as God created them are different in hundreds of ways. One helpful way to describe our equality and differences is this: Picture the so-called weaknesses and strengths of man and woman listed in two columns. If you could give a numerical value to each one the sum at the bottom of both columns is going to be the same. Whatever different minuses and pluses are on each side of masculinity and femininity are going to balance out.

What are some of these hundreds of differences? Can I see a chart with those columns of strengths and weaknesses? What are some distinctively masculine strengths? Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see anything about it.

Note again the Danvers Statement’s focus on “roles” rather than natures. This comes through also in RBMW, which says:

Our understanding is that the Bible reveals the nature of masculinity and femininity by describing diverse responsibilities for man and woman while rooting these differing responsibilities in creation, not convention.

In other words, rather than deriving roles from natures, they actually go backward, seeking to derive nature from roles and responsibilities. If anything, complementarians argue that there’s not much in our natures, except perhaps for the biology of childbirth, that suits men and women to their roles.

For example, elsewhere Piper says, “Another way to talk about this same reality is to point out that the roles of leadership and submission in the marriage are not based on competence. God never said that the man is appointed to be head because he is more competent or that the woman is appointed to submission because she is less competent.” He also wrote, “My whole position assumes that competencies and character are not the criteria for who fights the enemy. Women may be more courageous than men in any given situation. They may have nobler vision. They may be smarter. That is not the issue.”

He even likes to tell an unrealistic imaginary story about a woman who is a karate master defending a guy she’s on a date with:

As they walk he finds out that she has a black belt in martial arts, and that she is one of the best in the state. At 19th Street two men block their way ominously and say, “Pretty girlfriend you’ve got there. We’d like her purse and your wallet. In fact, she’s so pretty we’d like her.” The thought goes through his head: “She can whip these guys.” But instead of stepping behind her, he takes her arm, pulls her back behind him, and says, “If you’re going to touch her, it will be over my dead body.”

When they make their move, he tackles them both and tells her to run. They knock him unconscious, but before they know what hit them, she has put them both on their backs with their teeth knocked out. And a little crowd has gathered. The police and ambulance come and she gets in the ambulance with the young man.

He doesn’t want to defend his positions on women’s roles by saying that in general or on average men are stronger and more suited to combat or to any other role. Instead, he wants to play up and highlight ways that an individual woman can best an individual man in even classic areas of male advantage like physical strength and fighting. As I recently noted with regards to David French, who does not believe courage is a masculinity virtue, evangelicals are reticent to ascribe any positive quality other than sacrifice and service to men or masculinity.

Piper is certainly not the only one who talks this way. In their book The Meaning of Marriage, the thin complementarians Tim and Kathy Keller also have very little to say about the actual differences between men and women. We hear the occasional knock on men as being more likely to string women along in relationships without committing. We see the occasional reference to scholarship claiming women make better orchestra conductors than men and the like. But not much substantively about gender differences.

This is basically the norm for how evangelicals talk. They will endlessly debate Biblical passages about two specific roles and things related to them, but are unwilling to say much specifically about the difference between the genders beyond that.

As a result, if you ask questions like “What is a man?” or “What is a woman?” they basically can’t tell you.

Substantive Gender Complementarity

My hypothesis about why they do this is because evangelicalism has an essentially Biblicist view of truth. That is, their view of the Bible is so high that they are unwilling to venture truth claims that can’t be proof texted in the Bible. Hence they talk a lot about whether women can be pastors, because the Bible specifically talks about it. But virtually nothing about the different natures of men and women.

One of the things that makes the Catholic writer Stephen B. Clark’s 1980 book Man and Woman in Christ so superior to the evangelical treatments of the subject is that he devoted a significant amount of space to looking at what the social sciences - anthropology, psychology, and sociology - have to say about gender. Evangelicals aren’t willing to do this for some reason.

When you have a thin anthropology of gender and are unwilling to articulate fundamental differences between men and women, then your anthropology is essentially egalitarian. And if your anthropology is egalitarian (feminist), then anything you say about differences in roles is long term untenable. This is one reason I believe thin complementarianism will collapse into egalitarianism.

Interestingly, the thick complementarians and neo-patriarchy movement also focus heavily on roles and little on nature, except perhaps in their insistence that women are by nature made to be almost entirely focused on being a housewife and mother. I’ll return to this later, but this is also a type of narrow anthropology, which is one reason their positions are so brittle.

What is needed is a broader vision of substantive gender complementarity. That is, we need to recognize that men and woman are different, that these differences exist in many domains, that they are substantive and important, and that they exist on overlapping spectrums in most cases.

We also need to be specific about what some of these differences are. Some are biological, others psychological, some cultural, and some products of particular social structures. These vary in their universality and importance.

For example, biologically men have greater upper body strength than women. Women are better at endurance. These are averages with overlapping distributions. That is, some individual women can be stronger than some individual men, and some men can swim longer distances than certain women can. But they are different on average. Similarly, men are taller on average than women. There are a wide range of biological differences between men and women. Most notably, of course, in their biologies of reproduction.

Men and women are different psychologically. This NIH paper summarizes some of those differences. Women are more agreeable than men. They are “more nurturing, tender-minded, and altruistic more often and to a greater extent than men.” They are higher in politeness. Women are higher in neuroticism and anxiety. Men are higher in “assertiveness and excitement seeking.” “Men tend to be more dominant and agentic than women.” There’s a vast literature on this.

There are also differences in the way men and woman interact with each other. As I noted in newsletter #17 and newsletter #18, men are primarily attracted to youth and looks, whereas women are attracted to a broader range of attributes including power and status, confidence and charisma, looks and style, and resources like money. One net result of this is that the power dynamics in the dating market favor women during our 20’s but around age 30 flip to favor men. I have an essay on what online dating sites tell us about how men and women behave that sheds further quantitative light on this. While it’s all to easy to tell a just so story about why this is, some of this is potentially derived from biological imperatives. Youth is a good general measure of fertility in women, for example, so it makes sense that men are interested in younger women.

There are also a variety of socio-cultural differences. Manhood is typically seen as an earned and contingent status. Men are required to prove to other men in the public arena than they measure up. Women are not typically required to provide that they are real women. There are a variety of cultural expectations typically put on men: to protect the tribe, to provide for others and build up the community, to reproduce, to demonstrate agency, independence, energy, courage. The specific vary by culture, but there are common themes. There is a different set of expectations on women.

This leads to a variety of famous “double standards.” Female promiscuity and infidelity is judged more harshly than that of men. In the other direction, people are more solicitous of complaints from women than they are of men. Men are treated as more disposable, less important.

There also seems to be essentially universal sex role differentiation, though the exact nature of that sex role division of labor is highly variable. Famously, even in the highly gender egalitarian Nordic countries, men and women still work in different professions. One study found that 60% of workers in Denmark are in a profession where their sex makes up 75% or more of the workers.

It’s not my point to produce an exhaustive list here. The key is that there are substantive differences between the sexes that have real implications for life.

Talking about this is where secular figures like Jordan Peterson excel. He has a Ph.D in psychology, has worked as a professor at elite universities, and spent a long time with a clinical counseling practice. From a psychology perspective, he knows the literature on this stuff forward and backward, and can speak authoritatively to it.

But if you want to get started, here are a couple of highly recommended resources. The first is the book Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity by anthropologist David D. Gilmore, which provides something of anthropology of manhood:

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of a similar title for women.

The other is the book Gender by the radical Catholic social critic Ivan Illich.

Both of these are short and very readable.

Before moving on, I should mention that some evangelicals attack aspects of gender complementarity they don’t like by suggesting that these these differences result from the Fall rather than creation. I don’t have time to fully address that here, but this tends towards highly misleading teachings about the reality of the world we inhabit and how we should live in it. And it’s worth asking them what exactly they do think the differences between men and women are, if anything.

In any event, developing an approach rooted in substantive gender complementarity is an important part of what evangelicals need to do to reform their teachings in the area of gender. They need a more robust anthropology of men and women.

Women’s Roles Reconsidered

Back to the idea that many complementarians believe women should only be housewives and mothers, the responses to my post suggests this is not an exaggeration. Many people do believe just that. I have cropped out the identifying formation from these replies.

Let’s be clear: being a wife and mother is the normative path for women, just as being a husband and father is the normative path for men. I’d argue there’s actually a stronger sense of this among women, who seem to feel it more keenly than men do if they aren’t able to have children of their own. Culturally, there seem to be more negative stereotypes of women who don’t get married - spinster, old maid - than there are for men who don’t marry.

It’s also the case that most women would like to be able to stay home and/or work a reduced schedule when they have young children.

Again, these are general cases. There are exceptions, and it’s a free country where people can decide what they want to do for themselves.

There does seem, however, to be an underdeveloped set of female archetypes. Guest writer Kennaquhair, in newsletter #65, for example, talked about the missing heroic feminine.

Newsletter #65: The Missing Heroic Feminine

The “hero’s journey” is an essentially masculine story. He explores a bit about what the feminine equivalent of the hero’s journey would be, drawing from Talmudic accounts of Moses’ sister Miriam.

There also seems to be an underdeveloped set of female role archetypes. Typically masculine role archetypes abound: the king, the warrior, the builder, the priest, the hermit, the sage, the trader, the craftsman, etc. While some of these have obvious feminine equivalents such as the queen, there seems to be a lesser developed set of female archetypes like maiden, mother, and matriarch. Female archetypes in myth and literature are often encountered in their shadow or negative form: the witch, the wicked stepmother, the siren.

Interestingly, feminism has tended to validate masculine roles as the better option, and seek to have women occupy and excel in them, rather than developing a more highly articulated set of distinctly feminine roles. Their anthropology is largely that men and women are innately very similar and interchangeable, with any differences being social constructed. As I said, the majority of evangelicals de facto agree with this position, even if they wouldn’t articulate it quite this way.

For egalitarian evangelical feminists, this is not a problem (though see below). For thin complementarians, it means their system is likely to collapse over time. Practically speaking, if you are unwilling to articulate a significant, specific substantive gender complementarity, this is what you believe.

But the thick complementarians and the neo-patriarchy movement also have a weak anthropology, derived from their focus on the two specific roles of head of household and pastor. They simply tend to elaborate these into a harder edged approach, with a more restrictive view of what women can do in church, and a more directive vision of women as stay at home moms.

Questions I don’t see them addressing compellingly:

How can women develop their talents, inclinations, and potentialities in areas beyond being a housewife and child rearing? The point is not to denigrate the role of wife and mother or to say women shouldn’t pursue those things. But is that all they should do?

The obvious case here is the high IQ woman. I didn’t screen shot it but saw at least one person suggesting that what highly intelligent women should be doing is having lots of smart babies. Maybe they should have babies, but shouldn’t they be able to directly develop and utilize their intelligence too? The same could be true for many other interests and talents.

There do seem to be women, and I see them on X, who say that they don’t have any desires beyond being a homemaker. That’s great for them. But what about the women who do?

What do women do who are single, don’t have children at home, etc? Is there a compelling vision for that?

Also, as many people have pointed out, and as I discussed in newsletter #26, the household has been drained of most of its economic functions. Historically, both men and women were economically productive in the home. Industrialization eliminated most of that for most people. Men migrated to the industrial economy, and most women have too. Women at home are no longer spinning cloth, making clothes, preserving food, doing laundry on a washboard, churning butter, etc. Domestic tasks other than childcare aren’t nearly as labor intensive as they used to be. For women who don’t homeschool, the children are even out of the house much of the day. (For those women who do homeschool, the system is ahistoric as sons would have been working with their father in his trade from a relatively early age, not spending the entire day with their mothers). What else are women at home supposed to do with their time?

I’m not surprised that so much of the neo-patriarchy and “trad wife” movements are bound up with labor intensive homesteading and homesteading adjacent activities (albeit live posted on social media from iPhones). But we are not rolling back the clock to a pre-industrial economy unless the collapse really does come.

What about other roles women have frequently taken on in society? Even prior to feminism, women played many important roles in society besides raising kids and keeping up the house. Many social reform and political movements, for example, were spearheaded by women. Women from Jane Addams to Phyllis Schlafly are prominent examples. As are movements ranging from the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to Moms for Liberty.

Women have also played a key role in constructing the social architecture and social capital of the community. Look back to the “trad wife” era many people long for and see that women were highly active outside of the home in exactly this type of community building. For example, in Glass House, Brian Alexander’s excellent history of the town of Lancaster, Ohio, he writes:

Through it all, Nancy threw herself into civic life. She was invited to join Twig 1 (of several Twigs), a women’s group with a mission to raise funds for the hospital. She volunteered as a “gray lady” in the hospital, working in a gray uniform at the reception desk, distributing newspapers to rooms, selling snacks.

She campaigned for school levies. When Nancy came to town, there were four main elementary schools, dating from the 1920s and 1930s and prosaically named West, North, East, and South. They were the result of a series of levies and bond issues passed by a previous generation. In 1938, despite the Great Depression and the possibility of a new world war, Lancaster’s voters passed a $268,000 school bond issue by 80%. Now, with more children and new neighborhoods, the city needed new grade schools. “And within not many years, we built all these new schools,” Nancy recalled. “We passed one bond levy after another, and we all didn’t have a lot of money, either, but we voted for them.”

She was a Cub Scout leader and a Girl Scout leader. In 1962, seven women formed the Fairfield Heritage Association to begin preserving Lancaster’s old buildings. Nancy joined. “We all worked on the Heritage,” Nancy said. The Sherman House, the Georgian, and other old buildings were rejuvenated. The association held a tour every year that attracted people from all over Ohio.

Nancy was not unique She was one of scores of young women – the “Anchor wives,” but also the wives of men who worked at Diamond Power or Lancaster Glass (the renamed Lancaster Lens), doctors’ wives, lawyers’ wives – who poured effort into bettering the town.

“We were busy girls. Our husbands were gone all the time, so we didn’t have to have a big, fancy dinner every night. We had dinner, but the kids wanted applesauce and fish sticks or hamburgers, you know. So you just kept dinner warm in the oven, and the kids rode their bikes to [sports] practice; you didn’t take them. So there was time to be a mom, because there wasn’t as much expected, or we didn’t expect as much – I don’t know which”

When the polio vaccine came out, the women ran inoculation drives. They agitated for improved sidewalks. They formed Parent League, an organization that attempted (and largely failed) to civilize children by teaching them how to play bridge and dance a waltz. The wives made Lancaster work.

Many hospitals, historic preservation societies, and other organizations were created and run by women, even in an era when they were “stay at home moms.” You’ll also see that in these eras, women didn’t necessarily spend all their days parenting either. Their kids were in school or out playing with their friends much of the time. It was “low investment parenting.”

But again, in general, specifically feminine archetypes rooted in the substantive gender complementarity are underdeveloped, or at least underarticulated. That leaves many women who have inclinations beyond what’s on offer to pursue that which was previously a male activity or domain by default. For many whose talents and inclinations are aligned, this works very well.

But for many others it does not. The median woman in America today is not a self-actualized journalist in New York City. That’s very rare. Much more common are single moms working a menial, low paying job in the service sector. Many others are doing inane bureaucratic work in white collar environments of the type satirized in Office Space or The Office. Most jobs honestly aren’t that great. Men have always understood this, as attested in so many country music songs.

It’s well known that since the advent of second wave feminism, women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men even as they’ve achieved significant success on external measures. You always see studies saying things like a quarter of women are on psych meds. Whatever the cause, it’s obvious that there are a lot of unsatisfied women in America today.

Obviously men aren’t doing so hot either today. A healthier society, and church, would be rooted in an accurate understanding of substantive gender complementarity and allow both men and women to develop and deploy their potentialities, and explore the full range of archetypal roles in structures that worth with, not against their particularities. (Just as one example here: work is largely structured from a regulatory and practice perspective around the full time male outside employment model. Health insurance is largely tied to full time employment, for example. Women would probably benefit from more flexible structures).

That’s not to say that the question of whether or not women can be pastors shouldn’t be debated. Obviously it should. That decision is fundamental to the future trajectory of every church and denomination.

But there’s a vast territory outside of those questions that is not being addressed, and it starts with evangelicalism’s extremely thin anthropology. If you don’t have a real anthropology, then all you are left with is arguing over what the Bible’s passages about two specific roles mean. There’s much more to being men and women than that.