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Back in May — look, I’m just a bit behind on my emails. Don’t judge. — David Murrow published a column on his Substack about “grandma-cracy,” his term for the tendency for a clique of older women to take over (mostly mainline) churches. To summarize, he sees “grandma-cracy” taking hold in the following nine steps:
- Women are allowed on the church governing board.
- The board becomes majority, if not exclusively, female.
- The same few women rotate in and out of the board and other church leadership positions.
- The church becomes overly cautious about changing its traditions, so as not to offend anyone who is used to the status quo.
- One of the elders has a family crisis that leads the church to compromise (the example in the article is a gay, younger member of a prominent family wanting to be married in the church).
- This compromise opens the door to progressivism.
- The church embraces progressivism in general.
- Families avoid the church.
- Young men avoid the church.
I currently attend a church in the evangelical denomination my wife grew up in, but I grew up in a small rural mainline church and later attended another church in the same denomination in a larger, but still small, town. (The denomination in question is very liberal, but congregations within it have a high degree of autonomy.) Both had women on the governing board; the second had a female minister just before I joined. My own beliefs about women as pastors are ambivalent.
I think a couple of the first steps are a bit of an exaggeration. From what I’ve seen, women in leadership do not inevitably lead men to turn away from leadership (perhaps if this is a concern, churches could mandate a half-male/half-female board), and the problem of the same few people cycling through church leadership positions is not unique to women. In addition, I think a reluctance to change longstanding traditions (as in step 4) can protect a church from being affected by temporary fads that haven’t yet become durable.
The argument is strongest when considering why young men avoid progressive churches. When I was a single man in my twenties (admittedly, not a demographic with high church attendance), I attended the second church mentioned above as it began going all-in on “social justice.” That church, I am confident, has a membership that is both older and more affluent than the surrounding community. To someone toward the end of a successful life, talk of “white privilege” can sound like a reminder to give back from abundance. To someone just starting out and struggling to find a job and pay bills, hearing that what he manages to scrape together is “privilege” that needs to be stamped out sounds like an existential threat.
Discussion (31)
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I agree with the conclusion that the American Christian church has become feminized, which is part of why it has trouble reaching men with the Gospel. But I'm not (at least for now) buying the process outlined above.
I do not have my own theory on why, but the feminization of the church began more than a century ago (as I understand it late 19th Century), which seems to predate wholesale inclusion of women in the pastorate and other offices of church leadership. And the women who did pastor or lead churches were significantly different from the women leading them today. I'm not sure Susanna Wesley (mother of John Wesley and Charles Wesley, founders of the Methodist Church) would have much patience for many modern female church leaders. I have studied a bit of the results of that feminization, and how to change direction, but not the causes. The feminization of the church seems to run in parallel with the feminization of the education system (another development that has been detrimental for boys and men in American society).
Although I don't know why, it appears to me that through the late 19th Century and well into the 20th Century, American Christian churches and their pastors increasingly emphasized the feminine aspects of Christianity (humility, cooperation, compassion, taking care of the downtrodden, comforting the afflicted, decorum, avoidance of conflict, etc.) and deemphasized the masculine aspects of Christianity (duty, honor, protection of others, maybe even truth itself, etc.). How much more often is Jesus welcoming the little children talked about versus Jesus overturning the tables of the unscrupulous sacrifice vendors in the Temple? Why is the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) largely ignored by so many Christian churches?
Many feminized male pastors have led, or at least collaborated in, this transition. So I don't think it's just the introduction of female church leaders.
I see the "grandma-cracy" of the church as a result, not a cause, of the feminization of the church.
My personal experience with female pastors is mostly negative. I have had a couple of excellent female pastors. But most of the female pastors with whome I have dealt came to the role with some big chips on their shoulders that seem to lead them astray from preaching the Gospel.
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The path to gynocracy is predictable, as you describe. They're also more difficult to root out than, say, a business- or corruption-oriented patriarchy, albeit less openly destructive.
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Ayan Hirsi Ali disagrees with Christopher Hitchens that women can be convinced to free themselves from Political Islam. It needs to be men who change their societies and the women will follow. I am not sure but I am confident that she is right.
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It's essentially true, and not just because as I found commented in a thread about computer programming, essentially, historically...
And it's also true that even FEMINISM requires MEN to basically "enforce" it. If women had to do it on their own, it would get nowhere.
If at some point "feminism" gets too unpopular among men, men will be able to end it. And women won't be able to stop that either.
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A stay-at-home mom, when her kids start school, can have time to volunteer at church while her husband working full time may not. An empty nest homemaker will really have time to spend at church. These collections of ladies working at church develop social dynamics that men will find unpleasant. Some guy, retiring at 60, may want to contribute time to his church, but then runs into a phalanx of entrenched women and decides he would rather take up woodworking. Traditional churches have defined roles reserved for men, pastor or elder, justified by Biblical interpretation. This seems unfair to women by contemporary morality. Empirically, however, ordaining women in a church rarely ends well.
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