In what is an amazing turn of events, the leftist-progressive and “soft-complementarian” (also known as an egalitarian) and Beth Moore’s chief Southern Baptist armor bearer, Russell Moore, dropped some incredible lines in defense of Patriarchy.
Yes, that’s right. You might have thought you would never live to see it, but the soft-handed yard gnome mascot of the SBC promoted Christian Patriarchy, the belief that gender roles should be strictly enforced. Patriarchy is a more extreme version of Complementarianism, varying by higher degree and extending male headship even to civic authority.
This might be hard to believe about the ERLC’s resident Lilliputian, considering he has most recently been defending, promoting, and expanding the spiritual influence of Beth Moore. But believe it or not, and as strange as it seems, Russell Moore came out defending Patriarchy.
Moore came out with a paper, After Patriarchy, What? Why Egalitarians Are Winning the Evangelical Gender Debate, and explicitly defended the term and the practice (for some completely inexplicable reason, you reach a 404 error when trying to access the paper from Moore’s own website, but can still be found from another source by clicking the hyperlink above). In the article, Moore very explicitly promotes the opposite of his more recent position on gender roles.
Ironically, a more patriarchal complementarianism will resonate among
a generation seeking stability in a family-fractured Western culture in ways that soft-bellied big-tent complementarianism never can. And it also will address the needs of hurting women and children far better, because it is rooted in the primary biblical means for protecting women and children: calling men to responsibility.
Again defending Patriarchy, Moore said in a different venue:
Gender identity and complementarianism… I hate ….the word ‘complementarian’, I prefer the word ‘patriarchy’… Complementarianism doesn’t say much more than the fact that you have different roles. Everyone agrees that we have different roles, it just a question of on what basis you have different roles? So an egalitarian would say, “Yeah, I’m a
complementarian too, it’s on the basis of gifts.” I think we need to say instead, “No you have headship that’s the key issue. It’s
patriarchy, it’s a headship that reflects the headship, the fatherhood
of God, and this is what it looks like, you then have to define what headship looks like…
Moore again argued for Patriarchy and against “soft complementarianism” to The Social Gospel Coalition’s Joe Carter. In this article, Moore argued:
What I fear is that we have many people in evangelicalism who can check off “complementarian” on a box but who really aren’t living out complementarian lives. Sometimes I fear we have marriages that are functionally egalitarian, because they are within the structure of the larger society. If all we are doing is saying “male headship” and “wives submit to your husbands,” but we’re not really defining what that looks like . . . in this kind of culture, when those things are being challenged, then it’s simply going to go away.
Compare this Patriarchy position of Russell Moore to his “soft-complementarianism” and his promotion of Beth Moore as a lady preacher for men.
UNFORTUNATELY
Unfortunately, the above quotations from Russell Moore didn’t come from 2019. They came from 2005, 2008, and 2012.
Today, Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) is promoting quite the opposite of his previous position before the SBC got ‘woke.’ Whatever you think about the trajectory of health of the SBC, you have to admit that things are changing.
