When I started deconstructing from fundamentalism, my deconstruction started with politics,

with political discussions that I believed were wrong, with exclusionary, racist, prejudiced, and abusive policies that were labeled as Christian that I felt were outside of the spirit of Christianity itself. That also just felt wrong.

They didn't match up with history. They didn't match up with the data. But as my deconstruction

fell apart on what Christianity had taught me to believe about America and the world, it also

started to affect me on a personal level. I had been told by the church my entire life that women

were less than, that your entire goal was to get married and have kids and serve your husband.

Purity culture taught me that my body belonged to my husband. It wasn't mine. It didn't

teach me what consent was. You had to look perfect. Everything that you did had to be pleasing

to the male gaze. And I really struggled with that. And it deeply harmed me as a

woman, both in the way that I functioned in relationships or couldn't function, the years it took for me to

understand a healthy sexuality. And after my weight loss, struggling with anorexia nervosa, and then later

bulimia for years because of

these teachings. So as I deconstructed these external beliefs, I was forced to deconstruct

my internal beliefs. Were these teachings really biblical? Did God make women and decide that they

were less than, that they were second class, that they didn't deserve as much

freedom or power? And because of that journey, I've been reading on these topics a long time.

And one of the best books on this issue that I've come across is The Making of Biblical Womanhood

by Dr. Beth Allison Barr, who is a medieval historian who talks about the role of women in the church

what medieval scholars and priests and teachers believed about the role of women and how that changed in the Reformation.

Dr. Beth Allison Barr is the James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University.

She earned her PhD in medieval history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

And she is the best-selling author of the making of biblical womanhood, how the subjugation of women became the gospel truth.

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