Ruth Graham Reports On the Addition of Wayne Grudem to Rubio’s Advisory Board

Ruth Graham reports at Slate on Rubio’s latest attempt get that elusive and necessary evangelical vote. Namely, he’s assembled an advisory board of sorts with some evangelical heavies, including Rick Warren. Notably, he just added Wayne Grudem – whose systematic theology and views on complementarianism are gold standards in the Neo-Calvinist world – to the board.

Here’s Ruth:

Grudem is one of the leading proponents of complementarianism. In fact, he has claimed a role in coining the term—a hideously clunky and unintuitive term, it must be said. In 1988, he co-founded an organization named Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which exists “to help the church defend against the accommodation of secular feminism.” The year before, he was among a group of concerned evangelicals who gathered in Danvers, Massachusetts, to write the Danvers Statement, a mission-defining document that reads in part:

• In the family, husbands should forsake harsh or selfish leadership and grow in love and care for their wives; wives should forsake resistance to their husbands’ authority and grow in willing, joyful submission to their husbands’ leadership …
• In the church, redemption in Christ gives men and women an equal share in the blessings of salvation; nevertheless, some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men.

As a Jesus-centered Christian, this just serves as further evidence to me of the entrenchment of inherently exclusionary positions in the evangelical ethos – now translated into Republican political agenda. Rick Warren and lots of Neo-Calvinists have claimed to have no interest in political power, but that’s not true. This is the new Religious Right. And just like the old one, it doesn’t look like Jesus in some very critical ways.

Read Ruth’s entire (excellent) piece here.