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M ary Stewart Van Leeuwen, a native of Canada, is a self-proclaimed Christian feminist, which has occasionally caused a stir. A leading evangelical scholar and professor of psychology and philosophy at Eastern College in Saint Davids, Pennsylvania, she has been derided by Christians as being too "feminist" in her interpretation of gender issues while being dismissed by feminists as being too "Christian."

Reared in the United Church of Canada, she became disillusioned with the faith until after college, when she served in Zambia as a schoolteacher. She was rebaptized there in 1971 and has remained on the frontlines of evangelical academic debate on gender and other issues for decades. She has written and edited many books and is presently working on a book about masculinity and served as an editor and signer of "Women of Renewal: A Statement," a project of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. The document asserts that the radical feminist agenda "leads to women being demeaned, their lives destroyed, and their spirits en slaved."

Van Leeuwen and her husband, Ray, an Old Testament scholar at Eastern College, are the parents of two grown sons. They shared domestic and parenting responsibilities while their children were young.

Because you identify yourself as a Christian feminist, some have challenged your commitment to orthodox Christianity. How would you describe your faith?
I'm comfortable calling myself a Calvinist evangelical Christian. Through out my childhood and youth, I was skeptical of Christianity. I held the view that to be a Christian, people had to put their minds in cold storage. I began to reconsider this position as a young adult when I encountered Christians who were very thoughtful and intelligent people.

I consider myself an evangelical based on the standards cited by George Marsden: someone who holds a high view of Scripture, who has had a conversion experience, and who has a concern for evangelism. I recognize that these standards can be interpreted in different ways.

In essence, I believe that biblical truth is something that has captured me more than I have captured it. Christian conversion is being caught up in the biblical drama, realizing that I am a character in search of an Author. I have found that Author and continue to walk through the biblical drama of Creation, Fall, redemption, and future hope.

To many evangelicals, the label feminist carries negative implications. Do you have reservations about calling yourself a Christian feminist?
As for the term Christian feminist, both Christians and feminists say there is no such thing. My patience with the term feminist has been somewhat strained in light of feminist reactions to Bill Clinton. For them, he's on the side of the angels when it comes to abortion, but somehow the feminist movement in general has ignored the implications for feminism of his other behaviors. Still, I call myself a feminist. I decided I would not give up a perfectly good word be cause some have misused it. Other wise, I couldn't call myself a Christian either.

What were the beginnings of your feminist convictions?
I tell people I was born with the gene for it. My parents moved to a medium-sized city from the small farming community where they grew up. On weekends and in the summers during the 1950s I visited my cousins back at the farm and could see that the family farm subscribed to an entirely different construct of gender relations. In the city, a woman could be fired from a teaching job for the sin of getting married. But on the farm, everybody was economically important.

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September 6 1999, Vol. 43, No. 10