Dr. Beth Allison Barr | How a Medieval Historian Entered a Modern Culture War
Preacher Boys Podcast
Eric Skwarczynski
4.6 • 701 Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pre-order a copy of Beth Allison Barr's book, Becoming the Pastor's Wife: https://amzn.to/3WSOM3v
Beth Allison Barr is the U.S.A. Today’s bestselling author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. An academic by training and a pastor’s wife by calling, Beth uses her unique voice to speak out on the relevance of medieval history to our modern world—especially concerning women in both medieval and modern Christianity. Her work is described as “smart,” “powerful,” and “a game changer” for women in modern evangelicalism.
Barr is currently the James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University, where she teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses, but she also speaks and writes as a public intellectual. She has been featured by NPR and The New Yorker, and her bylines include Religion News Service, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, The Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. She also continues to write regularly on The Anxious Bench, a popular religious history blog on Patheos.
As a pastor's wife for twenty-five years, Beth Allison Barr has lived with assumptions about what she should do and who she should be.
In Becoming the Pastor's Wife, Barr draws on that experience and her academic expertise to trace the history of the role of the pastor's wife, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions. While they gained an important leadership role, it came at a deep cost: losing independent church leadership opportunities that existed throughout most of church history and strengthening a gender hierarchy that prioritized male careers.
Barr examines the connection between the decline of female ordination and the rise of the role of pastor's wife in the evangelical church, tracing its patterns in the larger history (ancient, medieval, Reformation, and modern) of Christian women's leadership. By expertly blending historical and personal narrative, she equips pastors' wives to better advocate for themselves while helping the church understand the origins of the role as well as the historical reality of ordained women.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Trigger warning. This podcast contains descriptions of various abusive situations. |
| 0:06.1 | Listener discretion is advised. My name is Eric Skrinski. As a former religious fundamentalist, |
| 0:13.0 | I'm shedding light on the dark side of the church, from the pulpit to the pews. But I'm not |
| 0:18.5 | doing it alone. Each week, I'm sitting down with survivors, |
| 0:21.8 | advocates, authors, and more to uncover the inner workings of these abusive religious groups |
| 0:27.3 | to give tactical tips on how to escape and to find out what we can do to take them down. |
| 0:34.3 | You're listening to the Preacher Boys podcast. All right, everybody, welcome back to the |
| 0:39.5 | Preacher Boys podcast. Dr. Beth Allison Barr, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. |
| 0:45.5 | It's great to talk to you again. Yeah. I was trying to think, is this our second interview or |
| 0:49.9 | our third conversation? I, you know, we've, it may be our third. I don't remember, honestly, Eric. |
| 0:59.5 | I mean, I just, I've talked with you, I've talked with you a lot over the past few years. |
| 1:05.0 | So I don't remember how many of those were official conversations. Sure. Yeah. Well, regardless, I'm really excited to chat with |
| 1:12.7 | you today. And for anyone listening, we're talking about becoming the pastor's wife, which is available |
| 1:17.9 | right around the time of this recording, if anything, it's available for pre-order. I want to just start |
| 1:23.7 | just right out of the gate. When the publishers approach you to write another book, |
| 1:28.6 | you said, no way. Why was that your initial response to that proposition? Well, you know, |
| 1:35.7 | the making a biblical womanhood, as I tell people, was not something I ever had in my game plan. |
| 1:40.3 | I had thought about writing a trade press book on women in church history, which would have been really a textbook sort of thing for, like, churches to use in Sunday school. |
| 1:51.0 | And so the making a biblical womanhood is not that. It's really an activist book, fighting against the rise of complementarian theology from an academic and Christian |
| 2:04.1 | perspective. And so after I wrote it, you know, I tell people it was an act of desperation to |
| 2:10.7 | write it. One of the things that also was beginning to come out right when I wrote the book, |
| 2:16.8 | I wrote the book in 2019, 2020, so during COVID, all of that stuff. But we see it was the beginning of these SBC sex scandals that were beginning to really pick up and emerge. And so that was also something that I was with the making of Biblical Womanhood is I really wanted to draw attention to the connection between complementarian theology and the sex abuse culture. |
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