Authors discover connection between gender and race

Kristen Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, and Beth Allison Barr, author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women became Gospel Truth, addressed an online audience and an in-person conference at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary. (Photo by Ken Camp)

image_pdfimage_print

WACO—The authors of a pair of bestselling books on gender and evangelicals told a conference on racial healing they discovered how much their subject matter intersects with racial justice issues.

Kristen Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, and Beth Allison Barr, author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women became Gospel Truth, addressed an online audience and an in-person conference at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary.

“I thought I was writing a book about gender but soon realized I was writing about race,” Du Mez, a historian at Calvin College, told participants at a conference titled, “Do we want to be healed? Racism in the White Church.”

‘Gender is always connected to race’

As a graduate student, Du Mez recalled being told repeatedly, “Gender is always connected to race.” At the time, she questioned whether it was true, but not any longer.

Before she began the research that led to her book, Du Mez accepted evangelicals’ self-definition as Christians who hold to the Bebbington Quadrilateral—a commitment to biblical authority, the necessity of conversion, the centrality of the cross and an activist approach toward evangelism.

“A majority of Black Christian pastors could check all those boxes but do not identify as evangelicals,” she said.

As she continued her research, she concluded a series of networks—often centered more on social and cultural issues rather than theology—distinguish the boundaries of evangelicalism.

In working on Jesus and John Wayne, Du Mez examined books on Christian masculinity. While they seldom directly addressed race, the heroes they held up as worthy of emulation were all white men—often men who demonstrated their strength by subduing nonwhite populations.

“Race is not always visible, except it is if you’re not white,” she said.


Sign up for our weekly edition and get all our headlines in your inbox on Thursdays


In those rare instances where racial issues were discussed—such as in the Promise Keepers movement—leaders emphasized racial reconciliation and mutual forgiveness, not racial justice, she noted. Leaders of the movement defined racism in personal terms but did not address its systemic and institutional dimensions, she observed.

She also realized marketers recognize the culture of evangelicalism as overwhelmingly white.

“When we look at how markets are imagined, evangelicals are imagined as white,” she said.

‘White is not normative’

Barr likewise grew to realize African American Christians and white evangelicals who each claim allegiance to biblical authority have not placed equal emphasis on the same passages of Scripture.

“The ways we use the Bible are different, and they say more about culture than the Bible,” she said. “We choose small portions of the Bible to focus on.”

Barr, a historian at Baylor University, understood the rise of fundamentalism and later evangelicalism were “historically hard to separate” both from opposition to the women’s suffrage movement and from support for Jim Crow laws that oppressed Black Americans.

As she conducted her own research on how evangelicals often interpreted Scripture in ways that led to the subjugation of women, she said, “I had to acknowledge that my experience is not the same as a Black woman’s.”

“Race is always a factor, and white is not normative,” Barr said. “When we talk about our experience, we have to be careful about making it normative.”

‘Leaving safe space’

Barr and Du Mez expected their books to trigger debate and controversy.

“Anybody who talks about race is leaving safe space,” Du Mez acknowledged.

However, both were surprised at the level of vitriol and personal attacks—often from professing Christians—on social media.

“It’s shocking that Christians can treat other Christians like that,” Barr said.

Neither Barr nor Du Mez holds out much hope for wholesale changes in denominations. However, they have been encouraged by the reaction of individual readers in white evangelical churches, including congregations aligned with the Presbyterian Churches in America and the Southern Baptist Convention.

Still, when it comes to talking about race, “even convening a conversation [about racism]… takes an act of courage these days,” Du Mez said.


We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.

Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.

More from Baptist Standard