Ann, could you clarify what you mean by YWAM being sucked into heresy? I know that the founder of that organization, Loren Cunningham, wrote a book that has been hugely influential in the egalitarian movement (Why Not Women?). I also served with YWAM for a couple of years. Granted, that was several years ago, but where I served they were very much living out Cunningham’s vision.

I reran all of my analyses with a sub-sample of women who had more egalitarian attitudes. Even for these women, they’re more likely to be happy when their husbands earn the lion’s share of income, when they share religious attendance with their husbands, when they share a strong, normative commitment to marriage with their husbands, and when they don’t work outside the home.

Most of the above assertions are just common sense, and to try and present them as “traditional” simply points out how biased this study is. I mean, the husband earning more money is debatable, but of course women will be happier if their husband shares their religion and church. Lee Strobel wrote an entire book documenting that women usually end up being miserable when they marry non-believers. And who would be happy with a spouse who wasn’t committed to their marriage? Who wants to get divorced? And I think the desire to stop working is pretty universal among both men and women. What else would explain the rise of reality TV shows like “American Idol”? I mean, the whole premise of these shows is to leave your dreary day job behind and become an instant star, with the implication that you’ll never really have to work anymore. Again, the fact that all these are passed off as being representative of “traditional” people, as opposed to progressive ones, just shows how outdated this survey is.

My secular friends would roll over laughing at this. They all have egalitarian marriages or relationships, and look at the complementarian marriage as ancient and out of touch with today’s world.

The article quoted in #3 is basically the same article that Preato also published in God’s Word to Women. However, there’s a quote in the second article that I think is very revealing.

By religion, Jewish and born-again Christians have the highest divorce rates at 30% and 27% respectively, followed by other Christians at 24%.[5] Even more revealing and disturbing is the finding that atheists and agnostics have the lowest incidence of divorce at 21%. Why is this? Spokesperson Ron Barrier for American Atheists offers some reasons why he thinks this is so. He says, “Atheist ethics are of a higher caliber than religious morals,” and “with Atheism, women and men are equally responsible for a healthy marriage. There is no room in Atheist ethics for the type of ’submissive’ nonsense preached by Baptists and other Christian and/or Jewish groups. Atheists reject, and rightly so, the primitive patriarchal attitudes so prevalent in many religions with respect to marriage.”[6]

I wonder if Christianity Today will allow the other side of this story to be told?

They’ve actually published several articles that presented a balanced view of the egalitarian movement. That’s why I’m so disappointed that they would present this nonsensical study as the “truth.” It just shows once again how biased the Christian media is towards the complementarian movement, and how if the egalitarian movement is going to gain more recognition, they’re going to have to bypass them.

You wrote:
“I left because of authoritarianism and church abuse (circa- shepherding movement which is still pretty rampant.) Most of these churches are also armenian which I don’t particularly agree with. I did not leave over gender issues. Just a couple of thoughts… I find it curious that abuse arises in leadership even when it is egalitarian.”

The Shepherding Movement, of which I am intimately acquainted, is an ultra traditional deeply patriarchal movement and which predates the current patriarchal, hierarchal, complementarianism, which it contributed to birthing. Any church that was involved in the Shepherding Movement in it’s leadership is as far from egalitarian as East is from West.

What made you think your church was egalitarian?

God bless all of you and I will keep reading! Thankyou for your courage and voice!!

I do know of at least one very traditional church in which the pastor’s marriage was, for all practical purposes, nonexistent. He was verbally abusive to her from the pulpit, he ignored her the rest of the time, there were questions about affairs on his part, and the problems in that marriage affected all of us at the church. She only stayed because she did not want to destroy the ministry. Never mind that everyone else could easily see the problem and nobody would have blamed her for getting out. She felt like it was God’s will, no matter how much it hurt her. (Fortunately, something appears to have happened because their marriage eventually came back to life and the church’s ministry has improved in some ways… but some very nasty damage has been left behind.)