Should Women Lead Men?
“Do I happen to be a woman? Yes. Do I happen to be Indian? Yes. Do I happen to be a military spouse? Yes. Do I happen to be a mom? Yes. All those things are great... I think that when I become the first female president, it won’t be because I’m a woman. It’ll be because … I’m the right person for the job.”
Nikki Haley, the former Governor of South Carolina and current candidate for the Republican nomination for President, said this recently. Her candidacy to lead the political party most evangelicals will vote for in 2024 is only the most recent example of our having to reflect on whether a woman should have an office such as President of the United States. Our society glamorizes and celebrates women leading virtually any organization or institution, and so evangelical Christians will certainly feel the social pressure to conform their own thinking to those sentiments. It’s 2024, for crying out loud. Why shouldn’t we nominate a good, conservative woman to become our next President?
We Didn’t Make the World
It can’t be said enough in our current philosophically and religiously confused moment: God really did make the world a certain way. We can be frustrated by it, uncomfortable with it, or delight in it, but we can’t recreate it. And we’d be wrong to try.
The God who is Father, Son, and Spirit made the cosmos, and as the capstone of that creative work He made a man and woman in His image and gave them the task of taking dominion of the earth He’d placed them on. The man was to work the ground, continue his task of subduing it and of naming the creatures (Adam even named her, both “woman” and “Eve”). The woman, meanwhile, was composed from the man’s very flesh to be his helper, the one without whom he could not have been fruitful and multiplied and taken the dominion he was called to.
Their union was very good, and part of its goodness was the distinction in their natures and their callings. They were not made interchangeable. To this day, no woman can be a man, and no man can be a woman. This is not merely a statement about genitalia. It is a description of the good, hard, solid reality of the distinctness of male nature and vocation and its female counterpart. Men are not simply taller, stronger women; women are not merely men of a different shape. There is profound goodness in that which is peculiarly masculine about men and that which is peculiarly feminine about women. This is simply a reality, a God-authored beautiful reality. To ignore it, overlook it, or pretend it doesn’t apply is to walk off the ledge of a building out of a pretense that gravity doesn’t exist.
But gravity always wins.
I’ll Grant You Pastors and Husbands, But…
The question of whether women should be presidents or governors or CEOs of large corporations isn’t a question about our own personal taste. It’s a question of whether something is fitting and good or not. And knowing that God made and governs the world, it is ultimately a question of whether He calls it fitting and good. If He does, then 2024 America will have one less reason to be angry at us evangelical Christians. But if God does not bless and smile upon women leading men, it doesn’t matter if our tastes or preferences or sentiments run contrary. We’re not in charge.
Among those present-day Christians who acknowledge Scripture’s clear teachings that husbands are to lead in marriage and women cannot be elders/pastors, there is a large group that contends that these are basically the only two areas or ways in which God says women should not lead. In all other areas, business, government, education, and even parachurch organizations, it can be just as appropriate for a woman to lead as a man. This sort of “thin complementarianism” avoids the charge of outright disobedience to some of the most plain and obvious commands in Scripture. But by indicating that those commands (and the rest of the Bible) have no bearing on female leadership elsewhere in society, they set the commands themselves up as an arbitrary act of God. It’s as though men and women are equally qualified to lead each other, but in these two fundamental areas of human society, the household and the church, for no particular reason God simply just picked the men to lead. The calling of only men to lead in marriage and in the pastorate doesn’t correspond to anything in the natures of manhood and womanhood. Frankly, that is preposterous.
Doubtless many who hold this thin complementarian position will point to Deborah (if you’ve been in many of these debates I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re groaning already) in Judges 4-5. But even setting aside Deborah’s apparent rebuke of the Israelite man Barak for not leading the army in battle unless she goes with him (Judges 4:8-9) and the fact that Hebrews 11 (the famous “Hall of Faith”) identifies Barak as the exemplar of faith in the story, the very fact that this single two-chapter story in Judges virtually always gets brought up is itself telling. (Interestingly, if you ask someone who brings up Deborah in this way about Ehud, Jephthah, or Abimilech, stories of similar length in Judges, they are likely to stare at you blankly.) If God is equally pleased with women leading generally as with men leading generally, why do we have to scour the Scriptures to find examples? Instead, it is vastly more plausible to see this story of the prophetess Deborah as an outlier God occasionally allows for in the world, not a template to be normalized. To seek out Deborahs to regularly lead society is to seek out a world God didn’t make. To try to normalize women leading men is to try to normalize the aberrant.
God never appoints a queen to rule over Israel or Judah (the only ruling queen is a temporary usurper and murderer, Athaliah, who is finally put to death when the priests are able put the rightful young king Jehoash on the throne and reinstitute their covenant with Yahweh). God does not call a woman as one of the prophetic writers of Scripture. He does not call a woman to be one of His twelve apostles. These Biblical realities are not arbitrary results of chance or God’s fearful accommodation to antiquated gender beliefs that He’s glad now we’ve now evolved past. They are manifestations of how He really has made men, women, and the world around them.
Clearly each individual man does not exhibit all masculine qualities in the exact same measure, nor are all women identically feminine. Variation within manhood and womanhood is a part of God’s creation, and certainly it has even been complicated by the Fall. Nonetheless, neither those variations nor the Fall eliminated the realities of manhood and womanhood. Not all men are tall, not all men are strong, but all men are men. And inherent to manhood is fatherliness, the calling to and capability for the glad assumption of responsibility. Benevolence as a patriarch, a father-ruler, characterizes manhood and God’s own purposes as Father and Ruler over creation.
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being.
Ephesians 3:14-16
Women are not men, and mothers are not fathers. They were never called or crafted to be, and it is only the pervasiveness of the core feminist assumption, that womanhood is contemptible, that makes us uncomfortable with that fact.
Our day scorns womanhood, and instead fetishizes women adopting certain male roles. The idea of a woman being an astronaut or an entrepreneur or a Senator is tantalizing to us, while gentleness and working at home and loving a husband is barely tolerable. An indie film about a homemaking wife is certain to tell us about how hard and unsatisfying her life can be, whereas the musical swells of movies about women working with NASA or climbing the ladder in the legal profession catechize our hearts to believe that career and vocational success are far more natural places for women to look for satisfaction in. Our children’s movies teach us that young girls should dream of conquering and achieving worldly success and self-actualization, and when they become depressed after a career doesn’t satisfy the way it sure seemed like the movie promised, there will always be a new one to explain away the problem.
We disdain what God made womanhood as, and instead desire women to be glamorous men.
“Who Has Been a Mother to Me As Well”
Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’ Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
‘This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.’Genesis 2:18-23
The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
Genesis 3:20
Inherent to womanhood is motherhood, even among women who do not bear their own flesh-and-blood children. And that feature, the cherishing and cultivation of life, is fundamental to God’s purposes in the world. If women pretend to be men, and if we encourage them to do so, humanity suffers.
When Paul considered the Christian faith that was alive in his protege Timothy, he remembered particularly Timothy’s mother and grandmother, who nourished that faith as women of God.
I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in you grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.
2 Timothy 1:5
That nurturing of life, most especially young life and spiritual life, is inherently feminine as it is inherently motherly. It is not Adamic, it is not going out into creation and naming the creatures and working the ground and assuming responsibility for the people. It is something different, without which Adam would have been alone and unfruitful. It is the incubation of life, the warmth and hospitality and beautification without which life fails to bloom. It is the sort of blessing Paul recognizes when he writes, “Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord; also his mother, who has been a mother to me as well” (Romans 16:13). It is an adoptive quality, a quality that can create home and family and warmth where there was none before, even if unaccompanied by literal children. It is Naomi to Ruth, Dorcas to the saints in Joppa, the childless Shunammite woman to Elisha. It is Esther as opposed to Jezebel, Mary of Bethany as opposed to the false prophetess of Thyatira. It is that which makes any woman a mother of the living and a daughter of Sarah.
There is a reason Paul characterizes Godly widows the way he does:
Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband, and having a reputation for good works: if she has brought up children, has shown hospitality, has washed the feet of the saints, has cared for the afflicted, and has devoted herself to every good work.
1 Timothy 5:9-10
Notice what he commends: faithfulness to her husband, a reputation for good works, bringing up her children, hospitality, and gentle service and compassion to the saints. These are the norms God assumes. This is the frame of womanhood. The sort of mercy and gentleness that cultivate home, that fosters life and love, this is the form God made womanhood to exhibit. When we expect women to lead our armed forces or govern our societal institutions, to lead men in subduing the earth and ordering creation, we are expecting something contrary to nature. We are exchanging womanhood for masculinity in women.
Reality is Stubborn
Women are essential for creation. Creation was not totally good until God made the first woman. Men, likewise, are essential to God’s cosmic purposes. But each is essential in distinct ways. God did not make men, generally, to be the primary nurturers and nourishers of tender life. He did not make women, generally, to lead men in subduing the earth. While exceptions exist, the world is not an arbitrary place where anything goes and all options are equally good and proper. Just as it goes against the grain of created order for a father to try to play the role of a mother, it goes against that grain for a woman to try to play the role of a man.
In general, women should not lead men. Our taking offense at this will not change reality, or reality’s Author, one bit.