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The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities
Kate Bowler
Princeton University Press (2019). 368 pp.
The subject of women in ministry is one which elicits strong emotion from congregants and pastors. It is indelibly tied to feminism in America, and it is a matter worthy of extended pastor-theologian reflection. Kate Bowler’s history on evangelical women celebrities is an excellent starting point. Bowler organizes her study by dedicating a chapter to each of five roles of a “preacher’s wife,” which evolved in a particular manner over the course of the last century. These roles include: Chapter One, The Preacher; Chapter Two, The Homemaker; Chapter Three, The Talent; Chapter Four, The Counselor; Chapter Five, the Beauty. With each of these roles, conservative evangelical women bargained for power by playing according to socio-cultural rules acceptable at a given time. As culture shifted, these women shifted with the currents and used what they could to their own advantage.
Bowler’s study involves the use of material and print culture, which analyzes texts, advertisements, consumable products merchandized by women’s ministries, along with numerous personal interviews either conducted at conferences or visits women made to Bowler during her cancer treatment. The book is pretty hefty because of its high-quality printing that includes much of the material culture related to The Preacher’s Wife. These depictions, Bowler indicates, help readers understand the body image pressure that women in ministry, especially the pastor’s wife, had to satisfy as the “slender wife at his side” (1).
Bowler presents Beth Moore as the pristine example of a woman successfully serving in a teaching capacity today. Moore is one among a rich heritage of women drawn from the Middle Ages to the present. American Christian women across nineteenth and twentieth century history exercised influence in areas of public policy such as temperance, suffrage, education, and labor, while simultaneously pioneering world missions. In 1815 Clarissa Danforth became the first ordained woman; a century later Aimee Semple McPherson became the first female radio preacher and founded a denomination; she was then followed by divine healer and evangelist Kathryn Kulhman. As time marches on, the depiction of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s tattooed preacher, Nadia Bolz-Weber, becomes an interesting foil to other mainline Protestant women in ministry and a foil to Beth Moore as well. Bolz-Weber is the exception to the rule that ordained women in Protestant mainline denominations rarely yield as much power or influence as conservative evangelical women such as Beth Moore. Moore has accumulated significant celebrity and influence in spite of the fact that she has led within a social structure of submission and complementarity. The rest of The Preacher’s Wife supports this foundational thesis.
Conservative, evangelical women functioned as homemakers, musical and stage talent, counselors, and beauties in order to work within the confines of conservative theological guardrails. These women started conference movements, fashion lines, biblical study and counseling resources, and maintained a public image in order to accumulate power and influence that frequently outshined husbands or the influence of particular churches. Bowler insightfully indicates that these women occasionally bucked accepted expectations or conventions and leveraged crises to their advantage. Kay Warren, wife of Rick Warren, became a voice of vulnerability after their son took his own life. Liz Curtis Higgs used her “large and lovely” body and personality to her advantage when “slim” was the normal expectation for women conference speakers. Of course, occasionally women found that when they broke taboos they were wrested from power. When Jen Hatmaker spoke out about LGBTQ, her books were pulled from Lifeway Christian Resource stores. Jennifer Knapp voluntarily backed out of her CCM career because she did not wish to keep up the appearance of celibate, straight, and waiting when in fact she was waiting for another woman. Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, these women brokered a delicate balance between theology, culture, and influence.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Bowler’s study was her section on the emergence of women’s ministry. By default, most women’s ministries were championed by the pastor’s wife. They became a unique subculture within conservative churches for women to teach and mentor other women. These subcultures produced “Christian” copies of secular values—modest fashion, self-help and diet books, and feminine Christian merchandise. They also created conference and retreat space for women to be vulnerable, check-out from homemaking responsibilities, and recharge for a day or two. Women who led or organized women’s ministries or the non-for-profits that serviced them accrued quite a bit of influence in their churches and denominations. Returning to the instance of Beth Moore, this kind of influence has yielded both opposition and affirmation for Moore to exercise her power for continued socio-cultural and theological change in her own tradition.
Another constructive aspect of Bowler’s study is her ability to peel back the ostensible layers of her historical actresses and their activities by leveraging interviews and her own expert testimony about these subjects. Bowler shares about the piety of Christy Nockels, who is not just talent but a model for reflective and humble creativity. Bowler brings to life the edgy appeal of Nadia Bolz-Weber. Nonetheless, some actresses continue to feel flat such as Victoria Osteen, who quietly and prettily remains under the protective covering of Joel’s arm.
Bowler’s contribution to the history of women in ministry is significant and she has offered compelling evidence to support her argument. One lament about this history is it would have been very interesting to see a construction of how women have nestled their way into various teaching spheres outside the church and in the academy. Evangelical women have found a space for their teaching talent in biblical studies, history, counseling, and even in theology departments. There is a handy appendix providing some of the data about these women, but their stories are not accounted for in Bowler’s work. I found this interesting in light of Bowler’s personal narrative at the beginning of the work and her important role in the historical guild. The Preacher’s Wife is a much-needed study that paves the way for further exploration as women in ministry continue to press through glass ceilings in the twenty-first century.
Joey Cochran is a historical theologian specializing in Jonathan Edwards. He earned his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS). He serves as guest faculty at Wheaton College and TEDS. He is a member of the St. Augustine Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
