Rehabilitating Masculinity

Putting to one side the specific issue of female pastors, Foster and Tennant argue that when “women hold power in the church—whether officially or unofficially—two things tend to happen:

• They strive to include anyone agreeable, regardless of error.
• They strive to exclude anyone disagreeable, regardless of orthodoxy.”

By using their God-given feminine gift for peacemaking in the wrong way and the wrong place, these women end up allowing heresy into the church. Why are they not prevented from doing so by men in the church? Because the men have been taught to suppress their masculine aggression and to seek out and defer to the validation of women.

To make matters worse, because these men “are ‘nice guys,’ and conditioned in using feminine tactics, they will seldom engage with masculine strategies like direct confrontation and factual refutation.”

Painting by Norman Rockwell