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Why Egalitarians are Winning the Evangelical Gender Debate

The Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has done a first rate job of defending the biblical family against the destructive influence of feminism within the Evangelical community. Their website is a helpful source of important material presenting an orthodox defense of the biblical doctrine of male headship and related subjects. In his defense of biblical patriarchy on the CBMW site against what Jennie Chancey and Stacy McDonald have described as “white-washed feminism,” Russell Moore has observed that:

Egalitarians are winning the Evangelical gender debate. More and more Evangelical churches are filled with families that are not led by men. More and more Evangelical males and females are tacitly accepting the message of the culture, that is at its heart egalitarian. This is not because egalitarian arguments are stronger. Instead, it’s because in some sense we are all egalitarians now. The complementarian response needs to be more than simply a reaction to this. We must—instead of simply countering all of the proof texts of the egalitarians with our own responses to them—instead, we must present an alternative vision, a vision that sums up the burden of male headship under the cosmic rubric of the gospel of Christ and the restoration of all things in Him. We must understand that redemption is not about an escape from the creation order; it is about the restoration of the creation order, and that means that discipling the nations, means specificity in terms of what that looks like in the present era. We must produce churches that are not embarrassed to tell us that when we say, “Thou, our Father,” we are patriarchs of the oldest kind.

Evangelical Theological Society, 2005: Why Egalitarians are Winning the Evangelical Gender Debate, Russell D. Moore