Last December, Janice Shaw Crouse traveled to Zimbabwe for the World Council of Churches Jubilee Assembly. As project vice chair for Proclaim Liberty: A Jubilee Appeal, sponsored by the Association for Church Renewal, Crouse is part of the effort to call the World Council of Churches away from syncretism and back to biblical orthodoxy. She is also the director of the newly formed Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society, which was created to oppose radical feminist inroads into mainline churches. “A Christian Women’s Declaration,” published by the organization, serves as a rallying point to bring mainline, Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical women together around a model for biblical womanhood that both “traditionalists” and “egalitarians” can affirm. Crouse served as White House senior writer on domestic issues during the Bush administration. She now heads her own public-relations firm, Crouse Communications, and serves on the board of trustees of Asbury College. Crouse lives with her husband in Manassas, Virginia.
In addition to being director of the Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society, you have also been part of an effort to bring renewal to the World Council of Churches. All of us who belong to the Association for Church Renewal are members of churches that are part of the WCC, but we’re all evangelical and biblically orthodox and are quite concerned about the direction that the WCC is going. This is the fiftieth anniversary of the WCC, and their literature has said, plain and simple, that they can go in one of two directions. Either they can incorporate all religions, so that Christianity be comes one of many different religions, or they can incorporate the people who have been truly marginalizedthe Pentecostals, the evangelicals, the orthodox believers. The Association for Church Renewal exists to say: The latter is the path to real vitality. The WCC has declining membership and dwindling funds. Radical feminist ideologies are being pushed by the hierarchy. And at the same time, around the worldin Latin American and African and Asian churchesthere’s a tremendous revival going on. But the more evangelical, alive branches are not in power.
Was the Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society formed to give a biblical response to radical feminism? We’re not out there saying that feminism itself is inherently bad; that is not our position. But the religious radical feminists go so far as to say that there are five genders, or that gender is fluid, or that you really ought to experiment with all the various types of gender. The bottom line is, our churches are being destroyed by the radical feminist ideology, which is a combination of heresy and paganism, and that is what we’re trying to combat.
Since the Re-Imagining conference of 1993, radical feminists have gone under the radar screen. I went to the 1998 conference and it was absolutely astounding. The center of their ideology is to take over churches, to have their ideology be the theology of the church.
Can you sum up what you consider this “ideology” to be and why it is dangerous? They take away the deity of Christ, and anything having to do with the centrality of Jesus Christ to the gospel is disputed, denied, debunked, and made fun of. For example, the Nicene Creed was mentioned at the Re-Imagining conference to hoots of laughter. So the very premise of the church is laughed at and denied. Instead, there’s a lot of Wiccan ideology woven in. It’s all about the earth, the moon, the stars. This is something the Association for Church Renewal deals with in our position paper on unity. We say that ecumenicism is a matter of unity, and we don’t have unity aside from Jesus Christ. With out Christ, we have nothing to unify us, so why would we have a World Council of Churches?
So these aren’t the attacks on the divinity of Christ we’ve become accustomed to from a scientific, positivistic point of viewthat the Incarnation simply isn’t a scientific reality? No, it’s not, and you point up something that I think is really important. It’s a contradiction to me that you have these feminists who are so big on promoting womensupposedlyand yet their whole theology is so nonscientific and nonintellectual. It’s very mystical, supernatural, and experience-centered. They have this touchy-feely attitude about women. There’s a lot of talk about the mystery of the menstrual cycles, glorification of physical things like breastfeeding. But no mention of babies. There’s a real disconnect there, with the focus on the process and yet no sense of it resulting in a child that you’re responsible for. Some of the radical feminists talk about motherhood as antithetical to feminism. This ideology is infiltrating the literature of the mainline denominations very clearly. It’s more and more part of what’s being taught in the seminaries, so more and more people in the pulpit are espousing their views. And they will continue to have impact unless we band with other orthodox believers.
The Christian Women’s Declaration, which comes out against radical feminism, was signed by a number of ordained women. Do you find that this makes it difficult for you to rally some of the more conservative believers to your side? In the Christian Women’s Declaration, we followed C. S. Lewis’s ideas in the pre face to Mere Christianity where he says that you ought to focus on the central ideas of Christianity and keep your disputes among yourselves. With the evangelical branches, right now there’s a war going on between groups like the Council on Biblical Man hood and Womanhood, which is very traditional, and Christians for Biblical Equality, which says that women and men are coequal women have a responsibility to their calling, and if they’re called to the pulpit, that’s where they ought to be.
Both groups are within our parameters, and they war with each other. But we’re all up against radical feminists who say that Jesus was not divine, that we identify with him only because he was abused and he suffered, just as women suffer. So it’s foolish to start arguing about the things that we disagree on. We have to agree on the central issues and respectfully disagree on those peripheral kinds of things.
What approach do you take to those who would affirm the divinity of Christ and also say that homosexuality is acceptable? The Bible is very clear about that. Sex is reserved for marriage, and that precludes premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexuality.
A lot of your possible allies among evangelical believers would say that the Bible is equally clear about women in leadership. I think that they err in looking at the Scripture. We worked very hard, in the Christian Women’s Declaration, to say that women have a responsibility to their calling, that they were created equal, and that the Bible has been the most powerful force in history for lifting women to higher levels of respect, dignity, and freedom. There’s a very high view of Scripture at the center of what we do, and that high view of Scripture says that women were created equal with men. And if you look at our signers, you see that we have many ordained women aligned with us. One of the things that the Ecumenical Coalition is trying to do is appeal to intellectual women. We are trying to encourage Christian evangelical women to study issues, and not just react emotionally to issues, and not just stay in certain preconceived boxes.
Christian women are grappling with the issue of feminism. They want to know: How can we incorporate a biblical view of marriage and a biblical view of family with the biblical view of equality of human beings? There are a lot of women out there who don’t identify with the radical feminist ideology, who feel that a mother’s first responsibility is to raise her children, yet who also want to stay alive intellectually, who want to discuss ideas, who feel that they have a responsibility to develop their talents and gifts to their fullest capacity. We really want to find these women who are well informed and can think their way through issues, so that we can band together and say: We’re going to do something about our culture. We’re going to do something about our churches, to return them to biblical orthodoxy. That niche hasn’t been tapped before.
Susan Wise Bauer is a writer and novelist. Her second novel, Though the Darkness Hide Thee, is published by Multnomah.
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