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Since the late '80s, evangelical Protestants have been arguing among themselves about male headship in marriage. They have divided into the complementarians (who call for distinct gender roles) and the egalitarians (who call for couples to discover and negotiate roles and responsibilities in marriage). These two groups have often seemed to be engaged in what academic psychologist Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen has called "proof-text poker." Each side hopes their "hand" of biblical citations will trump the other.

In recent years, male-headship advocates have taken increasing care to condemn abuse and to portray male headship as servanthood—all the while maintaining that the Bible commands men to take a leadership role in marriage. The effort seems to be paying off. (See the interview with W. Bradford Wilcox on page 44 regarding his new book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men.)

Now comes Does Christianity Teach Male Headship? The Equal-Regard Marriage and Its Critics. This collection of 11 essays lacks the polemical tone of some earlier books. This is due in large measure to the fact that most of the writers are more intent on solving a social problem than in winning an argument.

Co-editor David Blankenhorn sets up the problem. Blankenhorn, who advocates for fatherhood in a father-impoverished culture, recalls interviewing a group of African-American Pentecostal women at their church on the south side of Chicago. He asked the women, "Is the father the head of the family?" They all said yes. When he asked them what that meant, they said, "Working hard to support the family financially … leading the family in prayer at meal times … and … taking the family to church on Sundays." Blankenhorn pressed them: Aren't women capable of leadership? They smiled knowing smiles back at him. Of course they could do all the things they wanted men to do, they patiently explained. But they want men as heads of families because the "alternative is drugs, prison, and early death. That's the choice that our men must make, and we praise God for those who make the right choice."

Blankenhorn calls the appeal of these Chicago women the best argument he has heard for male headship in marriage. But in doing so, he shifts the meaning of the term, and headship becomes code for responsibility.

Don Browning, a second co-editor of the book, argues against notions of male headship. He recognizes that one of great social achievements of Christianity and Judaism has been the "stabilizing of male responsibility and giving it sacred meaning." But he argues that Southern Baptists and the Promise Keepers are wrong in believing that "a little soft patriarchy is the price to be paid for male responsibility."

Browning briefly pits Ephesians against Aristotle to show that early Christian ideas for ordering households were significantly out of step with prevailing Hellenic notions of male headship. He characterizes the early Christian view as "equal regard," meaning "both husband and wife treat each other as equals—as persons—and never as means to other ends, i.e. as objects of manipulation." This relational framework means that the equal-regard advocates in this book do not come across as ideologues committed to an abstract ideal, but as scholars concerned for healthy marriages.

Browning thus sets the stage for Van Leeuwen, the book's third co-editor, to set forth her argument that "'proof-text poker'… betrays a very low view" of Scripture because it treats distinct passages as factoids rather than as parts of a "redemptive-historical flow." Here Van Leeuwen sketches the views she set out more thoroughly in her 1990 book, Gender and Grace, that male domination is an effect of the Fall and should not be read back into creation (or, presumably, projected forward into the economy of salvation).

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August 2004, Vol. 48, No. 8