Faith of Our Feminists

From Christianity Today Library:  Faith of Our Feminists

Some evangelicals are joining two ideas that our culture has tried to put asunder.

In what could well be the "man bites dog" story of the month, Feminists for Life purchased the historic home of Susan B. Anthony last August. A spokeswoman for the organization said they hoped to turn the building into "a museum highlighting the work of early American pro-life feminists." For many, Christian and secular alike, that feminism and pro-life activism could co-exist, much less be combined, is an alien idea.

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But Stackhouse also notes, "If evangelical feminist scholarship is strangely absent in accounts of contemporary feminist theology, it is also true that any feminist thought is strangely absent in most contemporary evangelical theology." Stackhouse is rightly reluctant to accept feminist thought wholesale. But he argues that feminist theology, like other new interpretive methods, should at least be tested for usefulness.

It remains to be seen how evangelicals will continue to use feminist resources. What is certain is that evangelicals have increasingly diverse views about feminism and gender roles, and that the influence of feminists on evangelicalism, and evangelicals on feminism, is far from finished.