The New Yorker:

A proposal to ban Southern Baptist women from serving as pastors failed a two-thirds-majority vote, signalling that the far right has not yet consolidated its control of the Church.

By Eliza Griswold

On Wednesday, in Indianapolis, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant body in the United States, rejected a proposed ban on allowing women to be called “pastor.” The measure, which would have amended the S.B.C.’s constitution, fell just short of a two-thirds-majority vote. The S.B.C. has officially barred women from leading churches since 2000. Yet this ban would have gone further, threatening to “disfellowship” churches that allow women to use the title of pastor in any way. I called Rick Warren, the founder of Saddleback Church, in Southern California, and one of the most influential evangelical pastors, shortly after the vote with the news. “That’s a relief for over two thousand S.B.C. churches who have women pastors, whether they lead churches or not,” Warren told me.

The vast majority of evangelical Christians, who number about a quarter of adults in the U.S., oppose the idea of female pastors. For most, the Bible’s stance against female pastors is starkly clear. “Women should be silent in the churches,” the apostle Paul writes to the members of the early Church. “For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is something they want to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” Other passages reinforce this injunction. “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission,” Paul writes to Timothy, a leader of the church in Ephesus. “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”

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