Is there an "Evangelical Bro Code"?

a few thoughts.

In a series on her substack,

Katelyn Beaty

recently completed a series on “The Evangelical Bro Code”.¹ Beaty is an editor at Brazos Press and a former employee of Christianity Today. She is writing about patterns of “institutional displacement” that she sees as endemic among evangelicals. I’ll quote from her at length here so you can see what she’s concerned about:

1.    A woman takes a job at an evangelical institution (ministry, university, church) excited by its mission and ready to contribute her skills and expertise.

2.    Within the first few years, and especially if she has or aspires to a leadership position, she meets overt or covert resistance from a male colleague or several colleagues.

3.    Her job performance, Christian orthodoxy, soundness of mind, or institutional loyalty is called into question. These efforts are aimed at casting a shadow over her presence in the institution and slowly edging her out.

4.    There’s some internal battle in which a top leader or board is roped in to determine next steps, often after a crisis. Perhaps everything is chalked up to a “personality conflict,” which obscures any bullying on the part of the man and any power imbalance at play. The leader or board feels caught between competing narratives, doesn’t want to lose talented employees, and has a mission to get on with.

5.    [Here’s the kicker, for the purposes of this essay]: The top leader or leaders will usually take the side of the man. In the warp and woof of evangelical institutions, the woman has to go. This is especially true if the institution receives support from people outside of it who are raising Cain about her presence there.²

By her own account, Beaty is concerned by the difficulty some women face when they attempt to climb the ranks of evangelical organizations. “If she has or aspires to a leadership position”, she “meets overt or covert resistance”. Her job performance, Christian orthodoxy, soundness of mind, or institutional loyalty are called into question. In Beaty’s mind, it seems like the real tension is revealed when a crisis occurs. At that point, the woman takes the hit and is let go.

Beaty attributes letting women go after conflict entirely to patriarchy. When tension occurs in a workplace, and a woman experiences friction or conflict, it is (necessarily?) an example of “evangelical bro culture”. And when a woman is asked to leave after an internal conflict, it is definitely such an example. She has solicited examples from her readers about “bro culture”,and has published a few in her substack series. Seeing as “story-telling” is a large part of her method, let me add my own to the deck.

Beaty is certainly right that evangelical institutions have come late to thinking about issues of gender in the workplace, and that in certain fields (like my own of theology) there are theological reasons that some men are hesitant about female leadership. She is right that evangelicalism remains a “traditional culture”. For our purposes here, that means that a) norms of behavior are passed down and the maintenance of these norms is deemed, for the most part, desirable and b) one of these norms is often the idea of men as the “head” of households. This is of course contextually variable- it is much more common in Texas than in Maine- but for the most part the norm, if not operative, will be recognizable to individuals from this tradition. (I think its interesting to ask if, according to this definition, any culture is or could be something other than a “traditional” one, but that’ll have to wait for another day).

So I think Beaty is right when she observes that men lead most evangelical organizations and that there might be some resistance toward change in this area. Change is difficult and we can absorb the way things are as normative; this I think is often the case when it comes to women in leadership.

However, my experience has been quite different and might challenge the idea of “evangelical bro culture”.

What I have experienced, overwhelmingly, is men who want me to succeed, and who go out of their way to promote me and my work even when I strictly speaking haven’t earned the opportunity. I could certainly name times when I have experienced pushback or behavior that might be gender specific. But if I judged between negative treatment and positive, it’s not even that close.

For me, the phenomena Beaty is trying to name, and the one I am naming- both being shut out of the “higher” positions of power, and receiving positive attention because of my gender- are related, and its actually the latter that I find more concerning. Here is why.

I have been, more than once, given opportunities that I did not earn and was not qualified for. I attribute this to a gender credit, and sometimes I have been told that this was the case- “we needed a woman”, etc. For the most part I refuse opportunities when someone tells me outright that they “needed a woman”. I think it is tacky and on principle I don’t like the way it feels. I also only take opportunities that I feel I could successfully complete. There have been invitations where I felt that the invitation was both belying a “gender credit” and that it was not something I could do well. If I had not declined such an invitation, my participation would not be up to snuff, because I just wasn’t ready for the attention or up to the level of the project. I’d be second rate, and it might be clear that the lady wasn’t all that qualified. That would be embarrassing for me, but it might also reflect badly on women in theology.

If I had taken these opportunities, and experienced pushback or a narrowing of my opportunities, it might feel like a ceiling to my success, when in fact it could just be the end of my leg up. I would be standing on my own two feet, facing the friction, frustration, and foiling of my plans that is part of institutional life, or coming up against the boundaries of my intellect and skill, and finding myself wanting.

What I want to point out that this experience of one’s own “ceiling” is natural and good. If you have to choose between being the smartest person in a room and the dumbest, always be the dumbest. There is a lot more to learn that way! But the fact that you bump up against a ceiling might not be a systemic disadvantage. It might be a place of growth!

What I am saying is that there are more interesting and likely explanations for a woman not being promoted than “misogyny”. Additionally, feelings of being stifled, not heard, shut down, silenced, or frustrated are universal to professional life. Not every institution or room is going to value your contribution. You get to find the ones that do.

There has been a lot of attention paid in the last several years to women in evangelicalism. The first thing that we should note is that “evangelicalism” is not exactly a monolith, and experiences in evangelicalism vary widely due to region and denomination. But I also think many of these conversations act as if the year were 1970 and not 2024. Women have outnumbered men in doctoral programs in Religion for several years now. I don’t buy that women are “socialized” not to achieve or compete. Do you know why women dominate MLM sales? Because they are competitive and motivated! (Are they more prone to working inside the home and not outside because of socialization? Absolutely.)

There are many women with academic training, but few who are true crossover writers for lay audiences. There are also some women without Phds who have written fabulous theological books (I’m looking at you, Fleming). There is no prescription for excellence or for success. Some of it is skill, some is drive, some is luck. And none of it is guaranteed to last.

I trained in religious studies outside of evangelicalism, and though there was a small boost attributable to gender, in my case there was also a bit of a disincentive. Because I wanted to be trained in systematic theology, there was some push back among female faculty and peers who felt that the tradition of systematic theology perpetuated patriarchy. Women in my program mostly worked in other more contextual, more creative disciplines and there was some stated and unstated concern that I was playing for the wrong team. All that to say, being a woman was not really an advantage during those years, mostly because of the questions I was interested in.

For the most part, you just took your hits and your opportunities as they came, gender notwithstanding. This remains the case in the secular world of academic publishing -- a very small gender bonus exists for women, but not really a notable one. I was never willing or able to work that hard to develop and promote my work because the years of my academic training coincided with the years of starting my family, but this too provided its own sort of bonus- you want out of a boring professional volunteer opportunity? I can’t, I have a baby! Etc.

The situation is very different in evangelical academic and publishing spaces. There are very few women who are professionally trained theologians who work in evangelical spaces. This means that there is a substantial bonus if you happen to be a woman working in such spaces.

Quick aside- why are there fewer women with vaguely “evangelical” bona fides and Phds? There are a few takes on this, but in my opinion it is because academic theology often rids of your evangelical instincts- sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad ones. So more individuals enter higher level training as “evangelicals” than leave as evangelicals. There is also the matter of what sort of institutions are granting Phds, and whether the deck is stacked against women in theology in particular, but we can save those for another day.

All this to say, I wonder if some of the “bro culture” Beaty is naming is simply that a) evangelical institutions are still mostly men, combined with the fact that b) institutional life is really really hard and frustrating.

Without undermining Beaty’s broader concern about gender politics promoting men and keeping women in their place, I suspect it is likely the case that many women have gotten in the door and received significant support in evangelical spaces like publishing on account of their gender. Evangelical institutions for the most part do want women present, and they recruit and hire accordingly. It is just the case that the gears of institutions grind, gender notwithstanding, so it is easy to mistake something for patriarchy when it is just hard to be a professional, and hard to be excellent.

In my experience, many men have been grieved by the treatment and wasted opportunity that women have experienced in church and religious settings. Many, at the same time, hold views that would retain a male only priesthood or pastoral role. For this reason, men can go out of their way to open doors for women professionally and personally, recognizing that some doors remain inevitably closed. Many men also do this just because they are good guys and take pride in being so. Some do it, I think, because they find the company of women fun and refreshing in a mostly male environment. Either way, what has happened in my opinion is that the pendulum has swung from Beaty’s concern- women are being oppressed, let’s take down the evangelical bro-code- to my concern- which is that in many rooms, men are so concerned to be good to women that they are almost deferential.

This might seem like a good thing, but I am framing it as a problem. Here’s why.

When men behave out of a sense of obligation to treat female professionals well, and when they also carry an awareness that women may need a kinder, gentler touch, they go out of their way to both treat women well and to mute their critiques of their work. Note that in Beaty’s treatment of the Evangelical Bro Code, the fact that there may indeed be an issue with a woman’s job performance, soundness of mind, orthodoxy, or institutional loyalty is not considered. It never comes up. The only explanation for why a woman’s work is criticized is “bro culture”. If you want to squash constructive criticism, this sort of strategy is a great way to do it. Men will feel only increased pressure to be “good to women”, and any time a promotion is denied to a woman, misogyny is the answer closest at hand. Or a thesis that is sorta dumb is called “excellent”- this has happened to me more than once, where I give a talk or paper and think- no, that really was not that good, tell me what its flaws are! What I would like is for my ideas to be taken seriously and critiqued accordingly- for critical feedback is only due to serious ideas, not silly or deeply flawed ones. When low level errors or failures of logic are ignored in favor of a “good job”, it feels lazy or patronizing.

This is personal for me, because my favorite thing is high level critical feedback, and I have found it incredibly difficult to receive. I have seen in many rooms the pressure on men to be good allies and to dampen their critiques of women’s intellectual labor “because of what she’s been through”. I’ve seen them endorse books they know are flawed because they want to promote women. And I’ve seen them give women a leg up before they have proven their quality or stamina or character, because they think it’s a good that women are in a particular room. If they keep doing this without the ability to criticize women’s participation on its own merits, women will keep entering the room without any accountability as to the value of their participation or their labor. They will at some point experience a ceiling to their promotion and will attribute it to gender bias. Now misogyny may be at hand in any given situation, but it need not be for a woman not to be promoted. Life is much more interesting and varied than that!

The best thing that could happen to women thinkers, writers, and academics especially is that they stay in the room, learn the rules, and are challenged to participate to the best of their ability. The worst thing would be that the men in the room court the presence of women, mute their feedback, and say nothing when truly stupid and clearly false ideas are propagated. There are in fact stupid ideas- I know, I’ve had some! And it is good for intellectual life that they are called stupid, even in public! It is possible that none of my concerns overlap with Beaty’s, insofar as our contexts are quite different- but I find this unlikely.

There are, indeed, other explanations that might describe a case of a woman being passed over for positions of power within evangelicalism. In this piece, Beaty seems uninterested in them. With this series, she lacks curiosity about the conditions that this lack of curiosity may in fact promote. By calling everything a “bro code”, we make other explanations impossible.

The version of reality in evangelicalism that Beaty has suggested is one where the deck is stacked against female success. Men are in charge, women must be subservient or they must get out. If Beaty is correct, women under such a view must be considered flawless- there is nothing they could have done, or not done, to inhibit their promotion because the “bro code” is at work. This will inevitably bleed over into our anthropology, so that we come to view men as more sinful than women- an ironic inversion of the curse of Eve, alighting upon Adam.

The danger of flawless women is of greater concern to me than the “evangelical bro culture” Beaty raises, and more is at its heart than not getting the critical feedback we deserve. We will turn to the question of female sinlessness in a future letter.

I have been slow to publish this because I hate being called an outlier or having my motives questioned. But I do think there is a lot to lose, both in terms of actual rooms being valuable and open to women, and in terms of grave theological error. With a spate of books on women in evangelicalism coming to press, I suspect many of these questions will remain at hand.

1. https://katelynbeaty.substack.com/p/no-woman-can-crack-the-evangelical.

2. See https://katelynbeaty.substack.com/p/no-woman-can-crack-the-evangelical.