Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power Since World War II.

Campbell-Reed, Eileen R.

Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power Since World War II. By Elizabeth H. Flowers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 275 pp.

Elizabeth Flowers' Into the Pulpit offers the most sustained and compelling analysis of gender and power, available to date, for understanding Southern Baptists of the late twentieth century. Flowers takes her point of departure from feminist historian Ann Braude, to explore women's history as America's religious history and to examine a season of cultural unrest when Baptists renegotiated gender, race, and identity. Flowers focuses in sharply on both "the struggle of Southern Baptist women and the Southern Baptist struggle over women" (p. 194), allowing the intertwined stories to construct a new understanding of the SBC battles, situated within a larger set of evangelical and Protestant culture wars.

Flowers demonstrates in five chapters how ideas about gender, women, and especially women's ordination were ...

* triggers for the battles before 1979

* central for conservatives to mark ecclesial dividing lines in the 1980s

* replacements for previous divisions over race in the South

* a point of contention within the moderate leadership (some supported ordination and others preferred compromise or avoidance)

* motivating forces in the formation of both the moderate Southern Baptist Women in Ministry (S/BWIM) and the conservative "women's ministries" movement

* a test case for fellowship and employment as conservatives consolidated power in the 1990s

* central to the loss of influence by Woman's Missionary Union (WMU)

* an ongoing point of contention for moderates as they responded to the loss of their beloved denomination.

Drawing on archives, oral history interviews, personal participation in conferences, worship services, and mothers' groups, Flowers challenges both partisan and academic accounts of the Baptist battles. She skillfully narrates an explicitly gendered story using familiar (Dorothy Patterson, Molly Marshall, Nancy Sehested) and new voices (Sarah Maddox, Susie Hawkins, Joyce Rogers, Anne Nell, Lynda Weaver-Williams). Among the book's best contributions are accounts of ...

* how conservative women developed theologies to support "biblical womanhood" and "women's ministries," which became a multimillion-dollar SBC program

* how moderate and progressive women developed feminist and biblical theologies of women's ordination

* how WMU's theology of calling and missions supported ordaining women, but was inadequate for holding together all Southern Baptist women.

Into the Pulpit presents a lively, first-person narrative style. Flowers' motivation to understand her own Baptist past recedes quickly as she weaves together a central cast of characters and Baptist events across the tumultuous decades. Baptists most familiar with the era will find a few missteps among the dates and names, but on the whole Flowers manages a remarkable number of facts, stories, statistics, and events, crafting a persuasive new narrative.

In the end conservatives won the rhetorical battle over gender, memorializing it in the revised Baptist Faith and Message (2000), where wives graciously submit to husbands and the office of pastor is limited to males. In the shadow of SBC changes, WMU lost influence while S/BWIM and "women's ministries" became increasingly polarized. The Alliance of Baptists (1987) embraced women's leadership and ordination for pulpit ministry, following an initial struggle. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (1990) took longer to affirm women's ordination and leadership.

Scholars and students of history, religion, gender studies, and Baptists will find Flowers' reframing of SBC controversies refreshing and compelling. Bringing together stories and events of Southern Baptists and the women who were renegotiating gender--stories never before narrated in such useful proximity--will indelibly change the understanding of Southern Baptists, evangelicals, and the meaning of gender in Christianity of the late twentieth century.--Reviewed by Eileen R. Campbell-Reed, Co-director of the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project, Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota