From Racism to Patriarchy: The Evolution of Southern Religious Conservatism
Since the 1960s, the standard biblical arguments against racial equality, now looked upon as an embarrassment from a bygone age, have found their way rather easily into the contemporary religious conservative stance on gender. A theology that sanctifies gendered inequalities has become for our generation arguably what whiteness was to earlier generations of believers. Behind the recent battle for control of the Southern Baptist Convention, won by theological conservatives in a nasty denominational fracas lasting over a decade, has been a deep divide between those for whom human equality and autonomy reign as fundamental principles, and those for whom communal norms and strictures and a divinely ordained hierarchy remain determinative of social values. For contemporary southern religious conservatives, patriarchy replaced race as the defining principle of God-ordained inequality.
Paul Harvey, University of Colorado