In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, Kate Boyd sits down with Dr. Beth Allison Barr, historian and author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood and Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, for a fascinating conversation about how the role of pastor’s wife has functioned to limit women’s leadership in the church.
This isn’t just about theological debates—it’s about recognizing how economic anxieties, racial prejudice, and fear of losing privilege have repeatedly driven backlash against women’s independence throughout history, and how biblical language gets weaponized to justify keeping women in subordinate, unpaid positions.
Topics Covered
* How 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message that encoded complementarian theology into Southern Baptist doctrine, and recognizing this as part of a historical pattern where women’s subordination rises during periods when women gain legal and economic independence
* Understanding backlash against women’s ordination as rooted in cultural anxieties—particularly white anxiety about demographic changes and fears about losing economic privilege—rather than purely theological concerns about biblical interpretation
* Why the pastor’s wife role has become “the primary ministry role model for women” in conservative churches, creating a safe space for women’s gifts while simultaneously keeping them under male authority and conditioning congregations to reject independent female leadership
* The economic reality that women’s ministry is almost always expected to be unpaid volunteer work while men’s ministry comes with salaries and benefits, revealing how “noble calling” language masks structural inequality and devalues women’s contributions
* How closely associating female leadership with marriage trains churches and broader culture to only accept women’s authority when it’s subordinate to men, contributing to resistance against women in business, politics, and other spheres beyond the church
* What the church has lost by silencing women’s theological voices, contrasting with historical examples like Catherine of Siena convincing the Pope to return to Rome because medieval Christianity respected that “God spoke through women to men”
Timestamps:
01:00 25 Years of Complementarian Theology’s Damage
05:00 Cultural Anxieties Driving the Backlash Against Women
10:00 How Economic Fears Shape Attitudes Toward Women’s Equality
14:00 The Pastor’s Wife Role as Gatekeeper to Female Leadership
19:00 Unspoken Expectations and Their Cost to Women
23:00 What the Church Loses Without Women’s Voices
28:00 Historical Hope: Women Who Never Stopped Speaking
32:00 Finding Beth’s Work and Resources
