No, not every evangelical or fundamentalist engages in these extremes, but anyone with any familiarity with these subcultures will know her observations have a ring of truth to them, and it is high time someone from the inside steps up to these bullies. The examples Evans gives from her own fundamentalist subculture of her youth and from highly influential public leaders like John Piper, Wayne Grudem, and Mark Driscoll are anywhere from comical to disturbing. Of course, most Christians–conservative or not–are aware of this in principle, but Evans’s experience, which certainly mirrors the experience of many other American Christian women, is that when it comes to talking about women, passages from the Old and New Testaments are whipped out willy-nilly as proof for what God wants a Christian woman to look like. Evans seems concerned to point out that being a “biblical woman” involves much more than obedience to certain verses in the Bible (featured most prominently for Evans is the common abuse of Proverbs 31:10-31). The main point of the book is to critique the phrase “biblical womenhood,” and the expectations of women surrounding this phrase, by engaging in a witty and entertaining way what the Bible says about woman. Rachel Held Evans’s recent book A Year of Biblical Womanhood has inspired some strong reactions in certain American Christian subcultures. And I am going to keep beating it, because I think its a huge point that gets overlooked. For those of you have have read my blogs over the past year or so, I am about to beat on a familiar drum.
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