I REMEMBER HER green dress. She stood in center stage, shoulders barely clearing the pulpit. She was preaching, except the Southern Baptist Church didn’t call it preaching. As a missionary returning from two years in Jordan in the mid-1980s, Martha Bumpas was giving her “testimony.”
Bumpas was, I think, the first woman I heard speak from the pulpit. She sounded so full of hope. As her friendship with my family deepened, God’s calling on her life deepened too. She began to pursue a calling into full-time ministry.
Her timing proved poor. In 1988, Dorothy Patterson delivered a paper at the annual meeting of what was then the Southern Baptist Historical Association that articulated a “biblical theology of women’s submission to men’s authority,” as historian Elizabeth H. Flowers tells it. Patterson’s sharp wit—despite her historically inaccurate argument—won the Southern Baptist day. Ten years later she won again, this time on the floor of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting as she fought for the inclusion of language on women’s “gracious submission” in the Baptist Faith and Message, the repository of doctrine for Southern Baptists. Patterson succeeded in narrowing options for SBC women like Bumpas: Baptist seminaries deterred women from master of divinity degrees and, by 2000, pushed them out of preaching classes. Only men were deemed biblically fit to serve as pastors.
The implications of these SBC changes played out in the real life of Martha Bumpas. She quit seminary, frustrated by her inability to earn an M.Div. She earned a graduate degree from a public university instead. Later she attained a placement through the SBC International Mission Board, but—again—quit after the Baptist Faith and Message stripped women of leadership roles in 2000. She continued serving internationally, but never again as a Baptist and never again with a mission organization.
Bumpas’ story is only a small part of the cost of complementarianism, the theological position that women are divinely called to follow male “headship.” Take Rick Warren’s SBC-affiliated Saddleback Church, for example. When it ordained three women to pastoral ministry, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, clarified the price tag: Any SBC church not in agreement with limiting the pastoral office to men is acting contrary to scripture and thus no longer in fellowship with the SBC.
Yet the cost of complementarianism can soar higher still. Take Abby Johnson. Like Bumpas, Johnson grew up in the SBC world of Texas. Again, like Bumpas, she has left her Baptist roots—albeit for different reasons. Johnson is a controversial but popular pro-life advocate who has converted to a conservative form of Catholicism. In May 2020, she offered her support for a head-of-household voting system that would undo suffrage for married women. The reason is complementarianism: “In a Godly household, the husband would get the final say,” she explained. The cost of complementarianism, in other words, can even extend to women’s agency as citizens.
Christian patriarchy doesn’t stay confined to Christian spaces. Complementarianism claims to be about biblical faithfulness but costs women their biblical callings. Bumpas got out before she paid too high a price. If Johnson has her way, other women might not be so lucky.
Beth Allison Barr, author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood, is professor of history at Baylor University in Texas.
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