10 Lies the Church Tells Women: How the Bible Has Been Misused to Keep Women in Spiritual Bondage 
by J. Lee Grady
Lake Mary, Florida: Creation House, 2000
220 pp., paperback, $12.99.

Reviewed by Nancy A. Hardesty

Biblical feminists would certainly agree with J. Lee Grady's list of lies the church has told, including "God created women as inferior beings, designed to serve their husbands"; "Women are not equipped to assume leadership roles in the church"; "Women must not teach or preach to men in a church setting"; "A woman should view her husband as the 'priest of the home'"; "Women are more easily deceived than men"; "Women can't be fulfilled or spiritually effective without a husband and children"; and "Women shouldn't work outside the home." 

Grady, the editor of Charisma magazine and father of four daughters, argues forcefully for the ministry of women in whatever field God calls them to serve. He decries the church's silencing of women down through the centuries. He encourages equality in marriage and parenting. He criticizes the prejudices that discourage single women from fulfilling careers and church service. Grady seems unaware that this is the message that EEWC and others have been preaching for the past quarter-century. 

Grady also perpetuates a few lies and stereotypes of his own in this book. He says the "secular feminist movement . . . teaches women to hate men and to kill unborn babies" (p. 81). He asserts that confining women to their homes ("closeted as a slave") "is taught rigidly by Muslims, who also insist that women must wear veils" (p. 161). In truth, the Quran only says women should dress modestly (which has, as in Christianity, been defined differently by different cultures). Grady also vilifies the Jews of Jesus' day by pointing to the fact that they "segregated [women] from men in the synagogues" (p. 10). He is obviously unaware that Norwegian stave churches have separate entrances for men and women and that men and women still sit separately in some Christian congregations (e.g., among the Amish). Even Methodists did so until very late in the nineteenth century. He blames first-century Jews for the doctrine of original sin (p. 11), which was really concocted in the fifth century by Augustine, a Christian bishop in north Africa. 

Alongside denunciations of "faulty biblical interpretation" practiced by Crusaders, South African supporters of apartheid, Southern defenders of slavery, and Hitler, Grady lists "several pro-homosexual religious groups" that "twist verses of the Bible to teach that God condones gay sex." Grady seems oblivious to the fact that opponents of his own efforts would make similar charges. Some church members, including President George Bush, are still using "biblical passages about Israel's wars with enemy nations to defend violence against Muslims," which Grady labels as a "misreading" by earlier Crusaders (p. 7). Grady admits that some Christians still use Scripture to denigrate people of color. But it apparently does not occur to him that his certainty that the Bible "flatly condemns homosexual behavior" (p. 9) may be just as antiquated, prejudiced, and misguided as the views he condemns. 

Grady's heart may be in the right place with regard to women's roles and rights, but his research and thinking are incredibly shallow and sloppy [see sidebar]. He refers frequently to church history, but with little cultural understanding. Almost 40 percent of his citations come from two sources: Ruth Tucker's and Walter Liefeld's Daughters of the Church, and Carroll Osburn's Essays on Women in Earliest Christianity. Tucker and Liefeld offer a fine overview of women and ministry across the past two millennia, but they often cite quotations from original sources that they found in secondary monographs, which Grady then cites third-hand -- and edits to fit his point or modern linguistic conventions! Another 13 percent of Grady's sources are from random Internet sites. The only serious work of biblical exegesis he cites is Richard and Catherine Clark Kroeger's I Suffer Not a Woman. 

We can only hope that readers of Grady's book will be motivated by his Good News for women to do their own research. Biblical feminism is far better grounded in Scripture and church history than Grady demonstrates.

Table of Contents

Reviewer Nancy Hardesty is Professor of Religion at Clemson University in South Carolina. She is author of Inclusive Language in the Church; Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century; and co-author, with Letha Scanzoni, of All We're Meant to Be: Biblical Feminism for Today.

© 2002 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus