Has Complementarianism Failed?

The camel's nose of feminism was under the tent the whole time

The assumptions of feminism have been so thoroughly baked into our culture that many Christians feel embarrassed by the Bible’s teaching about manhood and womanhood.

For several generations now, feminism has been the default mode of thinking for many Christians. Egalitarianism is feminism in practice—the assumption that men and women are interchangeable in nearly every conceivable way.

Back in 1987, some Christian leaders pushed back on this trend by coining the term “complementarianism,” publishing the Danvers statement, and launching the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW).

Nevertheless, the complementarian project has largely failed. It was leavened with its own demise from the start. Initially, it showed promise as a way to oppose the errors of egalitarianism/feminism while accounting for the alleged abuses of patriarchy. But as it turns out, it just didn’t have enough gas in the tank to answer the most pressing issues of our day regarding sexuality.

My issue with complementarianism isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s just incomplete. The assertions of the Danvers statement are true and biblical, as far as it goes. It clearly asserts the husband’s headship in the home, and that only biblically qualified men may be elders in the church. So far, so good.

But those commitments are paper thin, and therein lies the problem. The fatal flaw of complementarianism is its narrow focus on roles and rules. It prescribes gender roles in the home and church without sufficiently grounding them in nature and the created order.

Complementarianism’s truncated vision for manhood and womanhood was not sustainable since it essentially reduced the biblical vision of the sexes to a few dos and don’ts in the home and church, leaving men and women ill-equipped to counter the world’s push for near absolute interchangeability between the sexes.

In other words, complementarianism is simply too weak to deal with modern problems, and it is far too reductionistic to sustain any meaningful coalition. Its vision of sexuality is too thin and arbitrary. Its logical inconsistencies are felt at the ground level, in local churches, where a complementarian pastor may teach that a woman can’t be an elder in church, but he also can’t explain why she shouldn’t run for President. Complementarianism lacks the explanatory power to answer such questions.

The problem is that it does not see male headship as a built-in design feature of creation, anchored in the masculine fatherhood of God himself, but more of an arbitrary tie-breaker to resolve marital conflicts. Similarly, a male only pastorate is simply seen as a matter of ordination, a mere technicality that can be usurped by clever manipulation of procedure, like finding a loophole in Robert’s Rules.

This has created a mess in many churches, not because of what Danvers affirms, but because of what it fails to affirm. It was balanced on a knife’s edge between patriarchy and egalitarianism from the start, and most people were bound to eventually fall off on one side or the other. As it turns out, a great number of self-proclaimed complementarians have fallen off on the egalitarian side, while still credentialing themselves as complementarians.

Complementarianism retains enough brand strength to lend conservative credibility to those who wear the label, siphoning trust from the men who initially championed it, namely, John Piper (the pastor) and Wayne Grudem (the scholar). These faithful, conservative men lent their names to a movement that allowed just enough wiggle room for feminists, who craved respectability within the evangelical establishment, to technically uphold the doctrine with their lips while denying it in practice.

This is why organizations like the SBC, PCA, and Acts 29 can attract conservative members by claiming to be “complementarian,” boasting their adherence to “historic Christian teaching on sexuality,” while also hiring women to be “pastors” of various kinds, and inviting them to preach in their pulpits (under the watchful authority of male elders, of course).

All of these organizations (and others) have had significant problems maintaining consistent standards of practice regarding sexuality. “Welcome! We’re a complementarian church! To honor Mother’s Day this year, we’ve invited Sally, our women’s pastor, to preach!”

It’s been nearly 40 years since Danvers was first published, and the results are now in. The complementarianism project has failed. We’re back to where we started. It’s either feminism or patriarchy. Take your pick.

Complementarianism just doesn’t have the firepower to answer a world hell-bent on every conceivable form of sexual anarchy. The gravitational pull of our culture pulls with black-hole force towards feminism. And complementarianism, lacking the strength to oppose it, is getting slowly sucked into the sexual void along with the rest of the world.

Thus, from the day the Danvers statement was published, the camel’s nose of feminism was already under the conservative tent. It took less than 40 years to find its way all the way inside.

We need to return to the Bible’s teaching on manhood and womanhood, anchored in nature and the created order, and refusing to be embarrassed of whatever names the feminists will call us for it. This is the only answer to the sexual treason of the modern world.

The God of the Bible is our Heavenly Father, a Patriarch, who created sexuality for a good and glorious purpose, and who effortlessly holds the universe, gravity, stars, galaxies, and black holes in the palm of his hand.

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This argument is developed further in my book, God’s Good Design: A Biblical, Theological, and Practical Guide to Human Sexuality.