Lux Lucet

The Monstrous Regiment of Women, title page.

In part one of this series we looked at the history of the idea of a woman president. As it turns out, people have been agitating for a woman president since at least 1872 when Victoria Claflin Woodhull became the first woman to run for president of the United States.

But even though in some quarters there has been a push for a woman president for well over one hundred years, in recent decades the clamor for this has increased considerably. Those who favor this idea scored a major victory with the nomination of Hillary Clinton as the first female presidential candidate of a major political party.

The spirit of the times is such that to question the propriety of having a female chief executive is viewed at best as hopelessly out of date and at worst a thought crime worthy of severe punishment in the gulags of political correctness. No current day political thinker, at least none that I am aware of, questions whether having a woman president is a good idea. Perhaps the only high-profile secular writer of recent times who clearly opposed the notion of a woman head of state was Ayn Rand, who commented that a woman commander-in-chief was “unspeakable.”

Part two of this series took a look at woman suffrage, which was a necessary condition to bring us to the present state. When the nations of the West gave women the vote, by this very act they also implied that it is appropriate to have a woman head of state.

At least some people were aware of this at the time woman’s suffrage was being debated. According to Grace Saxon Mills, one reason to oppose women getting the vote was, “because the acquirement of the Parliamentary vote would logically involve admission to Parliament itself, and to all Government offices. It is scarcely possible to imagine a woman being Minister for War, and yet the principles of the Suffragettes involve that and many similar absurdities.”

Mills obviously understood where the logic of woman suffrage would lead and had the good sense to reject it as absurd. One could hope that today’s Evangelicals would be so perceptive and courageous. But such is not the case.

The Current Evangelical Outlook

That the world has veered off in the direction of feminism is not surprising. It is the nature of those who do not know God to be blown about by various winds of doctrine. Christian certainly cannot expect unbelievers to adopt a consistent Biblical worldview. But it is not too much to ask those who claim to follow Christ to do so. And yet, among Evangelicals principled opposition to a woman as president is almost entirely absent, at least in the public writings of leading Evangelicals.

Southern Baptist Russell Moore’s comments in 2011 concerning Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton are fairly typical of current day attitudes among conservative Christians. Moore is fine with the idea of a woman as president, because as he tells us, “The state in this age doesn’t – and can’t -reflect God’s kingdom purposes in the way that the church or a family can…I’m not all that worried about the gender of our political candidates, precisely because, relatively speaking, the political arena just isn’t all that important when compared to the church” (Who’s Afraid of a Woman President?).

Moore’s decision to punt on the important question of whether it’s Biblical to support the election of a woman president strikes one reader as rather inconsistent with his other words and actions. Moore certainly hasn’t been afraid to attempt to apply the Bible to other political issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and immigration. But when the subject of a woman president comes up, suddenly he concludes that the whole issue really isn’t all that important and that, apparently, the Bible has nothing to say on the subject. Is this a matter of conviction, or one of cowardice?

Hannah Anderson was more direct than Moore in asserting the propriety of having a woman as president. For Anderson, those who believe that the Bible prohibits Christians from supporting women as heads of state, “are practicing a form of chauvinism,” and that, “This particular type of chauvinism rests on a hierarchical understanding of gender that extends to all male/female relationships.”

Apparently Anderson considers the apostle Paul a chauvinist, for when he wrote, “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man, but to be in silence..Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says,” he claimed exactly what Anderson denies, that there is, “a hierarchical understanding of gender that extends to all male/female relationships.” And this hierarchical relationship applies, not just in the churches, but in all walks of life.

Anderson and Moore are hardly along in their stance. In September 2015, World Magazine published the results of its monthly presidential poll of, “103 evangelical leaders and insiders.” According to this poll,

Republican Marco Rubio [Rubio is a religious eclectic who as of last year was both a practicing Roman Catholic and attended a Baptist megachurch in Miami FL; at one time, he was a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints] still holds a commanding lead in WORLD’s third evangelical insiders survey, but GOP rival Carly Fiorina is gaining ground..respondents clearly liked what they saw in former Hewlett-Packard CEO Fiorina. She more than doubled her first-choice votes from last month and edged Rubio as the most popular second-choice candidate.

Fiorina, a self-professed feminist, announced her own understanding of feminism in Time article published in June 2015, just three months before the World poll.

A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses. …A woman may choose to have five children and home-school them. She may choose to become a CEO, or run for President (“Here’s How Carly Fiorina Wants to Redefine Feminism,” Time, June 11, 2015).

So for Fiorina, a woman can choose to be an business executive, president or home-school mom, and no ethical difference attaches to any of these choices. In one way this is better than what other feminists have said in that at least Fiorian acknowledged that there’s nothing wrong with being a stay at home mother. But on the other hand, she is off base in her assertion that there is no ethical difference between a woman being a homemaker and running for president.

As proof of this, we quote again from the apostle Paul, who charged the older women in the churches that, “they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things – that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to lover their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed” (Titus 2:3-5). Noticeably absent from this list is joining the army, heading up a company, or running for political office.

Fiorina’s support eventually faded among the Republican electorate, but she still was a favorite in some circles. In April 2016, perhaps sensing that there remained strong support among Evangelicals for Fiorina, Ted Cruz, the most overtly Evangelical candidate in the 2016 presidential field, abandoned the Biblical principles he claimed to cherish and named Fiorina as his running mate.

Sarah Palin, a darling of the religious right since bursting on the national scene as John McCain’s running mate in 2008, is another self-proclaimed feminist, who has called for the launch of a, “new, conservative feminist movement,” a chief tenant of which is opposition to abortion. While this is certainly better than the Margaret Sanger feminism that has long dominated the movement, feminism – whether we’re talking about the pro-choice or the pro-life variety – is still feminism, a movement representing a toxic, unbiblical, anti-Christian worldview.

Conclusion

Last week in Part 2 of this series, we noted that significant change had taken place in Protestant through between the 16th and the 19th/early 20th centuries. Where John Knox and John Calvin had boldly reasoned from the Scriptures against female government, those who opposed woman suffrage, a necessary condition for a woman president, for the most part made use only of practical arguments.

But even in the 19th century, there still were some theologians who took a Biblical view on feminism. In 1891, Presbyterian scholar Robert Louis Dabney, “condemned the women’s movement as ‘part and parcel of French Jacobinism, that travesty of true republicanism, which caused the reign of terror in France, and which disorganizes every society which it invades’ ” (John W. Robbins, The Church Effeminate, 252).

But among today’s Evangelicals, at least among the movers and shakers whom World Magazine deems “Evangelical insiders”, not only is there no apparent opposition to electing a woman as president, but many of them positively support it.

Such foolishness among Evangelicals is evidences a profound lack of discernment among the members of the professing church. As John Robbins put it, “The age of the Luthers, Calvins, and Knoxes is gone, and we are left with the spiritual equivalent of Neville Chamberlain to defend the faith” (Scripture Twisting in the Seminaries, Part 1: Feminism, xii).

To be continued…