Beth Allison Barr

I've been there.

With Beth Allison Barr.

Of

course.

And deeply influential.

I write a bit about her in this book, but I could do much more, should do much more.

Beth Allison Barr writes about her in Becoming a Pastor's Wife.

But there is so much more to be said on that.

They're just not the ones that we chose sort of culturally to really double down on.

Actually, and as I was reading your book, I got so many Beth Allison Barr vibes, too, because, you know, Beth Allison Barr looks at history and says, here's a bunch of examples of women who were leading in the church, and we just chose to ignore that and write it out of our history.

And you're kind of doing that with art history, right? Like, here's a bunch of other ways we could have seen women, other ways that we could have done this, and we didn't.

But it was there the whole time.

I get that.

I think I write about how Particularly as a teenager, I was very compelled by this idea that if I was good, then I could be, especially be desirable for being good and help everybody else be better.

But Karen Swallow Pryor, Beth Allison Barr have also both written about how that idea of women as being inherently more virtuous than men is actually a fairly recent phenomenon.

And how in the medieval period, even into the early modern period, more often than not, women were seen as being more sinful than men, that they were more animalistic, more corrupt, more prone to sexual lust, things like that.

What do you take to be, if we were to kind of put on the hat of the culture despiser, what is the real thrust of the argument that evangelical beliefs are in fact evil? And then maybe how can we go about unpacking that?

Yeah, so that chapter is focused on engaging, in particular, Christian Cobey's Dumes, Jesus and John Wayne, and then two books from Beth Allison Barr, Becoming the Pastor's Wife and The Making of Biblical Womanhood.

And so as you can guess from those titles, a lot of it is about how like gender relations within evangelicalism, men and women, and particularly, you know, like our evangelical men enacting like a dominant patriarchal patriarchal control, and our evangelical women oppressed and being subjugated.

And so the the bulk of the chapter is a careful engagement with these books and with their arguments.

And I think that that can't be emphasized enough.

Sometimes it seems as if we are operating on, we meaning evangelicals ourselves, but also the wider culture are operating on outdated ideas of what evangelicals are like on like a multi-decade lag.

And I think for instance, Beth Allison Barr's books are very much about roles of women, women in ministry, women in the home.

I'm an egalitarian, which is to say I think women can be ordained and pastor and preach just as men can.

Yeah.

And I've loved Beth Allison Barr, who's also been on the show.

I've loved seeing the two of you.

Your work is so connected and so overlapping.

And I had good guidance at the time to just be like, just do the thing and then you can do another thing.

So I was actually in a class with Beth Allison Barr and on women in early Christianity through, I think we did through the 1500s.

So prior to, no, maybe not that far.

We did prior to the Reformation.

So she still expected that.

And, and a lot of women talk about like, well, what happens? And actually there's a researcher, her name is Beth Allison Barr.

And she, wrote a book called The Pastor's Wife, where when a male pastor is hired, they expect the woman to do unpaid labor, kind of like organizing the potlucks and stuff.

And it's not like really ever expected of men.

... uh, along with-

We got Beth Allison Barr's col- collection from her last book, and, and now-

Yeah

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