Two thousand years ago, ancient Mediterraneans believed that men should tell women what to do and never vice versa. Because of the culture freezing power of religion, many modern people still hold to the same belief even now. For example, in Saudi Arabia women still aren’t free to vote, drive, or go out in public without a male chaperone* and even in America most evangelical Christian churches prohibit women from occupying leadership positions unless it’s over children or other women, and as long as their title steers clear of the word “minister.” Both the Bible and the Koran speak of women as property because that’s the way people thought back when those books were written.

Evangelical icon John Piper was recently asked if he sees any acceptable exceptions to the biblical prohibition against women holding leadership positions in the church. In a word, his answer was “No.” The Christian Daily gives us his rationale:

Paul, Piper explained, provided two reasons for why he would limit the teaching and governing office in the church to spiritually qualified men. First, Adam was formed before Eve. Second, Eve was deceived by Satan. Paul was not trying to absolve Adam of blame (Paul lays all the guilt on Adam in another text) but the main point of 1 Timothy 2:14 is to show that Satan’s first assault was on the order that God appointed, Piper explained. “Paul is saying Satan undermined the order of creation and focused his deceptive words on Eve and made her the spokesman, not Adam, and she became the focus of deception,” said Piper. “Adam failed in his leadership and she was willing to take it up and the result was the fall.”

So according to Piper, whom incidentally my old social circle positively adored, the fall of mankind and the consequent corruption of the entire cosmos (I know, right?) was initially due to a disruption of the proper order of male-female relations such that a woman was enticed to do a man’s job. A woman failed to know her place, and a man failed to occupy it himself, and that’s ultimately why the world is going to Hell in a handbasket. No wonder the fundamentalists are so obsessed with controlling how American culture defines the family unit. Somehow this one item has become the crux of their whole culture.

Piper is the leading spokesman for complementarianism, which I call Patriarchy Lite, and his words here aren’t surprising to anyone who has heard him speak on this before. But I highlight them here for two reasons: 1) Because I had to sit through a sermon this past Sunday morning in which the pastor reiterated the same convictions Piper expressed, explicitly condemning men like myself who step away from church and the religious hamster wheel, laying the blame for America’s demise on us, and 2) because Piper’s use of the story of Adam and Eve illustrates why it doesn’t matter if you think the Genesis story is literally true or only a metaphor—either way, you’re using an ancient book to govern the lives of modern people and that never turns out well. His argument for this kind of thinking doesn’t hinge on whether the story should be taken literally or figuratively. The point is that as long as you believe this book is an authoritative guide for life, you’re going to subject your thinking to its mentality.

Ignoring Them Won’t Make Them Go Away

Last week I posted about the ongoing efforts of many to remodel the evangelical approach to the Bible in order to accommodate evolution and common ancestry, and many commenters contended that simply viewing the Genesis story as a metaphor will solve their interpretive problems. But it’s not that simple. So what if you decide the talking snake and the magic tree and the naked people were all just mythology? If you still cling to the notion that God is speaking authoritatively through this ancient book then you’re still going to feel obligated to pattern your thinking after it, and you’re still likely to expect others should do the same. That’s still a problem.

Piper’s response illustrates this really well. You could see the creation story as a fanciful tale but as long as you think God is speaking to us through it, you’re going to order your thinking after it anyway. That means dragging first-century thinking forward into twenty-first century life, and that’s really not a good idea. You can’t so easily conflate two cultures which are so drastically separated by both time and distance because that’s not how things work. Yet they keep on doing it, convinced this is the way God wants it.

This is one of the reasons you can’t just leave fundamentalism alone, hoping it will go away on its own. First of all, it doesn’t contain within it any mechanism for self-correction, so it’s quite unable to change its mind about anything without a great deal of pressure from the outside. Second, these people have been steadily building a culture war on multiple fronts, and with the help of money from some very non-fundamentalist political action groups, they’ve already been able to dial back legislative progress on things like birth control, stem cell research, science education, marriage equality, climate change, and equal pay for women. Large groups of very well organized people are being easily manipulated by self-serving oligarchs who use religion as a means of controlling them, and they’re eating it up.

I fault those churches which teach their members to embrace logical inconsistencies and beliefs which contradict empirical observation. The stubborn anti-intellectualism of evangelical Christian culture has disabled too many people’s irony meters, making them gullible targets for both preachers and politicians who say one thing but do another. It has also conditioned modern people to cling to ancient social norms which have long since expired but like zombies never seem to die. In Piper’s case, this mentality has made inadvertent misogynists out of otherwise kind and loving people. This kind of thinking keeps women down in American life, making it that much easier to objectify them and treat them like helpless children even as grown adults.

It doesn’t matter if you think we should read the Bible literally or metaphorically, either way you’re forcing an ancient mentality on modern people and it just doesn’t work. Please stop idealizing Bronze Age beliefs. It’s time to put these things away.

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* The restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia are slowly changing, with much controversy. But as of this past year, women still were not allowed to vote and even though no official law prohibits women drivers, overwhelming social convention prohibits it as if it were law.