Reasoning Patriarchy out of the Bible: Doctrinal Change and the Ethics of Intellectual Autonomy at a Tennessee Church

Freedom is a foundational topic in the anthropology of ethics (Laidlaw 2002, 2014), and it all started with ethnographies about religious life. Analysts have wrestled with others’ unfamiliar—even unsettling visions of freedom, as well as documented interlocutors’ own strategies for navigating social hierarchies and managing value conflicts.

A persistent theoretical fault line in this burgeoning subfield has been critical discussion about what kind of freedom “liberalism” represents and promotes (Abu-Lughod 2002; Mahmood 2006; Moll 2023). The latter is often cast as the root of Western misunderstandings about what people in other cultures and societies actually care about. My research contributes to a growing body of work on “endo-anthropology” (Candea 2011), which turns a critical lens on familiar “heritage” cultures in European and Euro-settler settings (cf. Lehmann 2013; Robbins 2018). This requires re-examining concepts like liberalism, which have often been treated as stable heuristics in cross-cultural comparison (cf. Candea 2016; also Venkatesan 2015).

In this paper, I draw from nearly two years (between 2017-2024) of fieldwork at an evangelical church in Tennessee to reflect on how anthropologists might clarify our understanding of liberal freedom amongst people who are wrestling with it as their own cultural inheritance. I argue that liberalism must be recognized as an internally contested set of moral, political, and theological ideologies based on paradoxical presuppositions that exceed the simplicity and even monolithic character of its current status in anthropological discourse (Laidlaw 2014; also Handman 2015). Liberalism promotes individuals’ freedom from undue authorities while also requiring or even compelling individuals to acknowledge interdependency in collective life, to adhere to transcendent principles, and to trust the authority of other people’s knowledge and experiences.

These paradoxes are not merely abstract—they manifest in religious communities grappling with social change. To unpack liberalism ethnographically as a lived ideological formation and site of critical contestation (cf. Moll 2019), in this paper, I examine a kind of freedom that my interlocutors were especially concerned about: intellectual autonomy. As the church I studied moved toward accepting women as leaders, members grappled with this polarizing decision, which contradicted their denomination’s (Churches of Christ, Restoration Movement) literalist approach to knowing the Bible. Like most American evangelicals, Churches of Christ believe that the salvific essentials of the Bible can be grasped by anyone, without specialized training; they highly value “studying for yourself,” the cornerstone of an epistemological ethics deeply influenced by liberal notions of independence from arbitrary authority (whether Roman Catholicism or British monarchy, cf. Hatch 1989; Worthen 2016). Moreover, Churches of Christ have historically pursued a kind of “ecclesiastical perfectionism” (Hicks 2018) that ties salvation to adherence to a specific pattern for church governance. That pattern is gleaned from the Bible through a logical procedure modelled after inductive science and considered to be “objective” (Bozeman 1977; Pietsch 2015).

Beyond the idea itself of accepting women as leaders, my interlocutors—women and men alike—were deeply concerned about how to justify such a change in doctrine. While most members welcomed gender equality as a positive revaluation of anachronistic dogmas, suspicions still circulated about cultural politics interfering with the leadership’s changing approach to church governance. Some members felt unmoored from their long-trusted way of knowing whether or not the divine order of things is patriarchal. The Bible, these members believe, is already clear about male leadership, so why question God’s will now?

Seemingly in contradiction to their tradition’s epistemological norms, reasoning patriarchy out of the Bible as they know it requires trust not only in advanced theological scholarship that Churches of Christ have long vilified as elitist intellectual fancy, but also trust in religious testimony that contradicts literalist interpretations of the Bible, namely from women in their congregation who claim that God calls them into church leadership. To persuade others of the legitimacy of such claims, these women and their supporters must confront deeply engrained intellectual norms that cause their callings to be ignored or denied as “not biblical”. For many of my interlocutors—especially men, the idea of relying on “subjective” testimony challenges their self-perception as independent thinkers who can rely on their own direct access to God’s pattern in the Bible. This situation pushes them, often anxiously, to acknowledge their own subjectivity. That is, to see that their existing views on Christian ethics reflect deeply held social identities and personal commitments rather than merely objective understandings. As one interviewee remarked, as if it were an admission, “You know, in the end, it’s not just the intellectual stuff. This is about who we are.”

I draw from ethnographic interviews and observations to highlight this tension between “thinking for oneself” and relying on others’ subjective testimony—between the ideal of intellectual autonomy and the necessity of trusting external authority. I focus on what I call epistemic politics, or how people navigate the ethical demands of living amid others who claim different access to truth. While much focus in the anthropology of ethics has been on how individuals cultivate virtues pursuant to a life worth living, I foreground the collective stakes of moral striving. More than a matter of personal faith, epistemic politics takes religious knowing as a dynamic arena of social negotiation that happens in epistemic communities governed by particular norms and expectations about intellectual authority. My interlocutors are wrestling with the ethics of submitting to biblical authority together, a situation that finds them balancing between their own relationship with God and the influence of others. The Bible, I show, thus plays a particular kind of role as a public text (Warner 2005) that presides over tensions between liberal individualism and the sociality necessary for doing Christianity in groups (Handman 2015). In this way, freedom, even in this most western liberal of contexts, emerges as an internally contested ethical, political, and theological ideal caught between competing positive values (cf. Robbins 2013) like individual autonomy, collective interdependence, and submission to religious authority.