White evangelical men weaponize the gospel against women because they don’t respect women

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on January 27, 2025.

“Do men desperately need respect, while women desperately need love?”

This was the question posed by Sheila Gregoire on a recent episode of the “Bare Marriage” podcast. “That is the thesis of a lot of best-selling books in evangelicalism like Love and Respect; For Women Only; His Needs, Her Needs; Marriage on the Rock … Power of a Praying Wife — basically all the bestsellers say that respect is this God-given need of a man.”

It’s a relevant topic to consider, given the prevalence of this mindset among evangelicals. But it’s also a timely one given how many of our current controversies boil down to men demanding respect from women while at the same time disrespecting women.

Eric Metaxas and Franklin Graham promote two of Metaxas’ books lionizing Donald Trump.

White evangelical Protestants voted 85% in November for a president who bragged about grabbing women by the genitals and was found liable for sexual abuse, and for a vice president who complained about “childless cat ladies.” In other words, they overwhelmingly and enthusiastically voted for two men who disrespect women.

It’s no wonder, then, that while surveying more than 2,800 women who had worked or volunteered in Protestant churches for his book Safe Church: How to Guard Against Sexism and Abuse in Christian Community, Andrew Bauman found that 82% of respondents “agreed that sexism plays a role in the church.”

At Trump and Vance’s inauguration, nobody lifted an eyebrow when Franklin Graham prayed while mentioning the dark times of the previous four years in front of President Joe Biden. But when Bishop Mariann Budde asked for mercy for the vulnerable at the Washington National Cathedral, all hell broke loose.

And while much of the criticism of Budde has been about politics, there is definitely a misogynistic undertone. Denny Burk, president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, called Budde an “apostate priestess,” while Joe Rigney, a professor at Doug Wilson’s New Saint Andrews College, said, “Women’s ordination is a cancer that unleashes untethered empathy in the church (and spills over into society).” In a separate piece one year ago, Rigney wrote, “The empathetic sex is ill-suited to the ministerial office.”

Whether we’re talking about sexual abuse, women’s roles in society, or political dialogue, the gendered dichotomy and weaponization of respect and love continues to permeate our conversations.

“The sickness that is spilling over isn’t empathy, but a lack of respect for women.”

You would think respecting one another would be simply a human ideal, beyond the reach of ideology and regardless of gender. In her newsletter this week, Kristin Du Mez said: “These core values — respecting others’ dignity, telling the truth and acting with humility — are neither inherently conservative nor liberal. Yet today, some of the loudest Christian voices are advancing a religious and political agenda that undermines each of these, one that distorts core Christian teachings beyond recognition and weaponizes the faith.”

In a sense, Rigney is correct in saying what’s happening in the church is spilling over into society. Unfortunately, the sickness that is spilling over isn’t empathy, but a lack of respect for women.

Of course, we can and should examine how evangelical theologies of authority and submission sacralize the weaponization of the gospel against women. But at some point, all the links between theology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and ideologies boil down to one simple fact: Conservative white evangelical men weaponize the gospel against women because they don’t respect women.

A weaponized faith

Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense came down to a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance due to credible accusations of Hegseth being drunk on the job and sexually assaulting women. But one of Hegseth’s defenses is that he has supposedly turned to Christianity and has become a different man.

Pete Hegseth with large Crusader tattoo. (Photo: Pete Hegseth via Instagram)

As Charlie Kirk celebrated, “Hegseth’s first words as Secretary of Defense: ‘All praise and glory to God. His will be done.’”

Unfortunately, the version of Christianity Hegseth joined is run by Doug Wilson, who tells women to call their husbands “lord” and says sex is not “an egalitarian pleasuring party” and that during sex, “true authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.”

According to the Idaho Capital-Sun: “Wilson and his allies have a rigid patriarchal belief system and don’t believe in the separation of church and state. They support taking away the right to vote from most women, barring non-Christians from holding office and criminalizing the LGBTQ community.”

And lest we think Hegseth may be an ignorant bystander who is unaware of what his church teaches, his former sister-in-law said under oath this past week that Hegseth believed “women should not vote or work and that Christians needed to have more children so they could overtake the Muslim population.”

This is why Kristin Du Mez recently wrote: “If I had to choose a poster boy for Jesus and John Wayne Christianity, it would be hard to find a better candidate than Pete Hegseth. Almost chapter by chapter, he exemplifies the themes of the book.”

‘Would you rather?’

While complementarianism, the belief that men and women should relate to one another through relationships of male authority and female submission, has been around for a long time, the current scripts about men wanting respect and women wanting love go back to a discussion in 2004.

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.