Despite this routine, Priscilla insists that she submits to Jerry — especially in the family’s bigger decisions. “If I will follow him as he’s following the Lord, then the responsibility for navigating our family well falls on him, not me,” she said. “Gratefully, I’m married to a husband that values my opinion and values my ideas. . . . We have lots of discussions, there are times of discontent.” She recalled their fierce debate over what to name their youngest son, Jude. When they couldn’t agree, Jerry asked the advice of male mentors he calls his “accountability guys,” “strong Christian guys who I’ve put in my life.” (Promise Keepers and other “biblical manhood” ministries encourage men to form and submit to “accountability groups” to keep one another on a godly path.) When the men ruled in Jerry’s favor, Priscilla relented. “It was a tough pill for me to swallow for a minute,” she said. “But when he told me why, and told me he’d talked to several different people about it that we both trust, then I was able to just relinquish and not be upset. . . . What made all the difference in the world is he cared about what I was feeling.”

“MY HUSBAND’S HIDING in the breezeway,” Shirer told several thousand women in June when she took the stage at a women’s Bible conference in Denver. “He’s always trying to hide.” Dressed in a baby-doll tunic, skinny jeans and high heels, she grinned and pointed. It was Jerry’s birthday, and she had vowed to embarrass him. The cameras found their way to a tall “handsome hunk of man” (in Priscilla’s words), his head shaved bald. He winced as he saw his face appear on the four jumbo television screens suspended above the stage. The women cheered and sang him “Happy Birthday” before turning back to Priscilla, rapt, Bibles open on their laps.

Priscilla then dove into a two-hour sermon about the importance of taking risks for the Gospel and trusting in God’s will. In her books she is often vulnerable and intimate, laying bare past struggles with men and her weight. (A failed diet is often “a direct sign that we have not submitted ourselves completely to the Lord,” she has written.) When speaking live, she dresses in shimmery blouses and fitted jackets, and melds her femininity with a revivalist’s charisma learned from her father, pacing among the audience and preaching with hardly a glance at her notes.

While many evangelical women’s conferences involve less Scripture and more girl talk, at this conference (sponsored by LifeWay, an organization affiliated with the conservative Southern Baptist Convention), Shirer and the other speakers joked about makeup and kidded about long-suffering husbands just to break the ice before preaching messages of sovereignty, sin and repentance that would not have sounded much different had the audience been male. If men were present, however, the women would not have felt free to speak openly and have a good cry if they needed to, said Neida Gross, 50, one of the volunteer “encouragers” who stood at the foot of the stage wearing blue vests, ready to pray with anyone who needed it. “Being female, we’re emotional beings,” she said. As the worship band broke into strains of a mellow hymn, a stream of women approached each of the volunteers ringing the stage, praying in her embrace or sobbing against her shoulder.

Conferencegoers say this instant bond among total strangers springs from their femininity, as well as from their common faith. “In today’s culture, men are encouraged to reach their inner feminine self, and they don’t have one,” Gross said. Yet the iconic image of the all-male Promise Keepers rally is that of two men hugging and crying, vowing to be better husbands and more pious Christians. Evangelicalism’s emphasis on climactic spiritual experience and surrender to Jesus Christ, as much as the single-sex audience, accounts for the outpouring of emotion at women’s Bible conferences — but the women there often insist it is the fruit of their God-given sex.

Shirer describes her connection with God in ways she says reflect “a feminine heart,” and might scandalize a secular reader. “My God reached down from the heavens, dipped his finger into the depths of my being, and began to rouse in me a desire for a real relationship with him,” she wrote in her most recent book, “One in a Million: Journey to Your Promised Land.” Her account of spiritual stagnation sounds like a marriage on the rocks: “My spiritual disciplines became more of a chore, a duty, an effort. When I did make the time to be quiet before him, I was much more anxious to cut the whole thing short. . . . He just wasn’t knocking my socks off anymore, and I wasn’t sure why.” To Shirer, women are “prone toward words that are surrounding relationships and love and connection and intimacy. Our hearts are wired that way.”

But she grants that the Bible is shot through with romantic language describing the relationship between God and his people (the church, after all, is the bride of Christ). Throughout Christian history, men as well as women have written erotically about their relationship with God — especially medieval monks, who wrote more commentaries on the Song of Solomon than almost any other book of the Bible. Yet the idea that men and women have different spiritual dispositions is crucial to the logic of “biblical womanhood.”