Adolescence – A Warning To The Church
So God created humankindin his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27, Old Testament, The Bible
Last week, the youngest male actor to ever win an Emmy was named. He was awarded the accolade for his part in the Netflix drama Adolescence, a drama about a young teenage boy who murders a female classmate. It was of particular interest because it sought to portray the reactions of the boy’s family from the moment of the police bursting into their house to the realisation that what was alleged about their son was not some ghastly error but the horrifying truth. As the story unfolded through its various episodes we learned that the family was a perfectly ordinary, decent family, nothing anyone would say could lead to the misogynistic rage exhibited by the boy. It was his exposure to misogynistic incel culture on social media that led to his violent attitudes towards women that we saw disturbingly exposed in the harrowing third episode.
The warning for the church is not that we need to be careful about what our young people might be exposed to on social media, although that might indeed be a concern, but the holding on to teaching that, however tangentially, provides justification for the misogynistic narrative propagated by various online influencers. That teaching is complementarianism.
Complementarianism is held by some (not all) conservative evangelical churches across the world. It holds that men and women are not interchangeable but complement each other. By itself, this notion seems unexceptionable and, indeed, a positive way of thinking about relationships between men and women. But complementarianism goes further to teach that headship and authority belong to men and not to women. There are various flavours of this but the most common, at least in UK churches, is that this applies to marriage and order in the church. Regardless, complementarianism has at its core the belief that women are by nature subordinate to men. This is openly taught in complementarian churches and while modern complementarians go to great lengths to extol the value and competence of women (in their proper roles) it is not hard to see how young minds could easily take hold of the core idea that women are subordinate and lesser than men, and how that could be exported into the wider culture thus affirming and justifying extreme misogyny.
The biblical basis of this teaching rests principally on three passages (1) found in the letters of the New Testament. Each of these passages carry significant interpretive problems that, ordinarily, would mean they would not be used to formulate teaching. However, these three passages are an exception. They are used as the interpretive prism that shapes and controls the interpretation of the rest of scripture in the matter of the relationship between men and women. Leaving out these passages when developing teaching about men and women results in the exact opposite of complementarianism: women in the Bible exercise leadership and authority in society and church in the same way that men do and it is never questioned or qualified. It is this overwhelming weight of scriptural witness that ought to control the interpretation of the three passages (1) and not the other way around.
The weakness of the complementarian case is amply demonstrated by the desperate theological attempts to buttress the teaching by reaching for the central doctrine of the Trinity (the being of God) only to end-up perverting the doctrine of the Trinity by resurrecting a teaching that was condemned as heretical in the 4th and 5th centuries AD (2). That attempt has been roundly repudiated and complementarians have retreated from that position (3).
Complementarianism is a pernicious teaching that distorts our understanding of the relationship between men and women. It gives affirmation and justification for the widespread abuse and exploitation of women that still pervades our societies. Complementarian churches may strive to gloss and mitigate the notion that women are innately subordinate but it does not eliminate it. The subordination of women is the foundation of all exploitation and abuse of women. There ought not to be any room in any church for this unscriptural doctrine.
- 1 Corinthians 11:2-16; 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36; 1 Timothy 2:8-15
- https://diaryofamayberetiredpastor.blog/2024/09/03/i-didnt-know-this/
- Kevin Giles, The Rise and Fall of the Complementarian Doctrine of the Trintiy, 2017 Cascade Books.
Diary of a (Maybe) Retired Pastor 
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