Can evangelicalism survive its white, straight, conservative victory?
When Jann Aldredge-Clanton enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1982, she considered herself a bona fide evangelical Christian with a reverence for the Bible and a love for the church. It soon became clear that neither her Southern Baptist denomination nor the wider evangelical world held much space for her.
In her preaching class, male students who objected to women teaching men criticized her sermons. One male student in another class dismissively asked if she came to seminary to get an “M-R-S” degree. Her growing interest in feminist theology made her feel like an outsider among her conservative classmates, who felt such ideas were heretical. As graduation neared in 1985, Aldredge-Clanton was informed by the seminary’s placement office that it only sought to place males as pastors. After her applications to evangelical churches across Texas went unanswered, she took the hint.
“It had finally been made clear to me that as an ordained woman and a feminist, I was on the outs as a Southern Baptist and in the evangelical world,” she told me recently, “so I took a job as an associate minister at a United Methodist church instead.”
The same year Aldredge-Clanton entered seminary, I was born in a hospital near Louisville, not far from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary where my father was completing a Ph.D. Our family and the churches I grew up in regarded people like Aldredge-Clanton — as well as political progressives, gay people and other outliers — as threats to orthodoxy who should be barred from denominational life.