Rubio Appoints Grudem

Ruth Graham:

With the Iowa caucuses less than a month away, the competition for the evangelical vote seems to have become a two-man race between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Last week, Rubio made another move to win that race-within-the-race, announcing the formation of a 15-member religious liberty advisory board that will advise the campaign on issues including the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and the freedoms of Americans who oppose same-sex marriage.

The 15-member board includes megachurch pastor Rick Warren, some prominent lawyers, a few college presidents, a respected historian, a rabbi, the head of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, and so on. But there’s one name on Rubio’s list that stood out to me: Wayne Grudem, an architect of the movement to “defend” evangelical Christianity from feminism.

Within American evangelicalism, there are two broad camps when it comes to gender issues. Egalitarians—some of whom identify as feminists—believe that gender should not be a barrier to any kind of leadership. Complementarians believe that while men and women have equal value in the eyes of God, men are specially designed for leadership roles. These tenets generally apply to the church (e.g., can women be pastors?) and the home (should the husband the leader of the household?), although some also apply them to the workplace and the public sphere. The theological debate revolves around the meaning of the fall in Genesis and a handful of tricky New Testament passages like the one in Ephesians that begins: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”…

I can’t claim to know why Marco Rubio appointed Grudem to his religious liberty board. (The Rubio campaign did not respond to questions I sent them last week about Grudem’s views and why he was selected.) I certainly don’t know what the Catholic Rubio personally believes about the theology of complementarianism, if he’s given it much thought at all. He told a reporter for the Christian Broadcasting Network last year, “If you can’t lead your family, you can’t lead a country,” but he has also referred to the spiritual leadership of his family as a role he plays “alongside my wife.” For what it’s worth, the Southern Baptist church he often attends in Miami states that“while both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” Wayne Grudem would surely approve.