Beth Barr on the suppression of women in church

Beth Barr is the author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. She is here to speak with us on an important issue: complementarianism and suppression of women in the church.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason. I am delighted to welcome to the program, Beth Allison Barr, who is the author of this book, which is The Making of Biblical Womanhood. I don't know if you can see it well as I'm holding it up, but it is subtitled How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. First of all, Beth, welcome, and thank you for joining us.

Beth Barr:
Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me.

George Mason:
Absolutely. Beth teaches at Baylor University. She actually is a Baylor grad and then went and got her masters and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her area of expertise is in European women medieval in early modern England in terms [inaudible 00:01:04], and-

Beth Barr:
Sorry about that.

George Mason:
That's okay. Mic drop. Yeah, right.

Beth Barr:
Well, it was a mug falling over.

George Mason:
Okay. All right. So you have had a really interesting confluence of things happening both personally, and professionally that led to this book. I think it's extraordinary. This is almost an Esther moment. Where for such a time as this, have you come to this position. It was a decision to research and write this book that was both personal and professional. Can you describe some of the things that came together for you?

Beth Barr:
Yes, no, it was. It was a perfect storm as they might say. My husband and I, we grew up SBC. So we grew up in complementarian circles and went complementarian churches and really didn't think all that much of it. It wasn't something that really impacted me personally all that much. My parents weren't authoritarian. It's one of those things. It's somewhat cultural. It wasn't until I went to Chapel Hill, and started a medieval history program that emphasized women's studies.

Beth Barr:
At the same time, my husband went to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and it was at the rain, the height of Paige Patterson. Who we didn't really know very much. We were young. We were making decisions based upon Southeastern was close to Chapel Hill and my husband got reduced price because he was Baptist. That was really the choice that we made there. But very quickly, we realized we were walking in very different worlds, and we were also coming face to face with sort of the hardness of this complementarian movement that was becoming increasingly more patriarchal, and more rigid towards women. Really culminating in around 2010, is really, I think maybe the high point of it.

Beth Barr:
So we had already sort of started having conversations, and were moving gradually away from agreeing with complementarianism. While this was going on, we also ended up at a church in Waco that was doing the opposite. That had started off really just in name only sort of complementarian. I don't even think it was really mentioned. It didn't seem to matter. Then starting, at least from the perspective of seeing women teaching, and women in all sorts of spaces.

Beth Barr:
But then it began to move the other direction at the same time that my husband and I had become more aware of it. We also had become more aware of the impact of it on the lives of women as well as the lives of men in our youth group. We began to think really hard about what does it mean when you tell a young man that there is something about him that he is able to teach over women. That women are never going to be able to have. Those are not good lessons to teach young men that there is something about them that makes them superior in some way to young women, and for young women to internalize those same messages.

Beth Barr:
So we had been growing more and more uncomfortable because of our youth ministry, and I was also teaching women's history and learning what I now know. I became more and more unable to even hold lip service to complementarianism. This sort of culminated in, as I said, our church drawing harder and harder lines until finally my husband and I decided we could no longer support where our church was going.

Beth Barr:
We either could just leave quietly and try to go out the back door, or we could see if we could make a difference. We tried to make a difference and it turned out badly. My husband got fired. This was the same time that Donald Trump got elected. It was kind of a shattering moment for me in which not only did I suddenly lose my church congregation, I realized the hardness, the rigidity of these attitudes towards women that I no longer saw as biblical, but as cultural informed.

Beth Barr:
At the same time that the people I was going to church with had just elected a man who was outwardly misogynist. It was frightening. It set me on the path I realized I could not be silent anymore. I began speaking out on my blog and that eventually led to the book.

George Mason:
So Beth, let me, for the sake of those who are listening or watching, I think it would be helpful to define some history and terms that you used in your introduction to all of this. So the acronym SBC is Southern Baptist Convention and the term complementarianism, which is a mouthful itself refers to this idea that women and men are in their essence before God equal. But in their created nature, they are unequal in terms of the roles they play.

George Mason:
They've been given specific roles that compliment one another in church and society. But the background of that of course is that while they may be complimentary, men are always in an authority position over women, and have leadership and teaching opportunities that women do not have without their husband's permission. Even sometimes in that case not so much, right?

Beth Barr:
Exactly. Exactly.

George Mason:
So, just sort of to give people a sense of where we are here now. Now, Beth, I grew up in an evangelical church culture as well. It was not Southern Baptist, but it might as well have been in that I remember very well going with my red binder to Bill Gothard basic youth [crosstalk 00:07:45].

Beth Barr:
Oh, really?

George Mason:
Yes. All of this was an attempt, it seemed to me looking back, an attempt by people like my parents, my family, my church to create a godly and orderly society in the midst of a time of great change when we found that women's roles were beginning to change. We had the feminist mystique, and we had the proposal of the equal rights amendment. There was all this language in my family, and church growing up about women's lib. The liberation of women.

George Mason:
This was scary to people. Here was a way of reading the Bible that would bring order back to the home. It was asserted that this was actually not an innovation, but rather it was biblical, and rooted in creation. It was God's design for everyone so that any deviation they're from, would bring about chaos and pain and results that would be terrible for society. We certainly couldn't honor God with it. So your research says otherwise. I think it's very important to really go back to addressing this from the point of view of exactly the assertions that are being made about whether this is biblical womanhood, or something else. So tell us what that something else is and what biblical womanhood really is?

Beth Barr:
That's exactly right. You've been in these conversations. I'm sure some of the people listening have been in these conversations. The conversation over women's roles in the church has really come down to almost a stalemate between how people read different passages in the New Testament. As a historian, I realized that I had a bigger picture. That I could see why we thought the Bible said these things. The context matters. A text without a context is a pretext. Then Withington said that once, and I've never forgot that. Pretext to say whatever we want.

Beth Barr:
So my thought was, I still remember this, and I talk about it in the book. But I was in, one of my early seminars in graduate school was women's history seminar. We read very widely in it. One of the theories that I began to learn about was a word that I had heard before growing up. I'd always heard about it in negative connotations, and was the word patriarchy. I learned that patriarchy is a human system that's been in place. It changes throughout time, and throughout depending context matters.

Beth Barr:
But at the end of the day, it means that women are always under the authority of men. It plays out and there's different justifications for it. Scholars have investigated why does this happen? Sort of the dominant theory is that it's connected to the rise of personal property, and people passing inheritance down. But it's a system, cultural, social, economic, legal in which women make less money than men. Women have less access to property, to occupations. Women legally are often defined by their relationships to men, and always under the authority of men. Women are much less likely to be in positions of leadership.

Beth Barr:
I began to realize that this system of patriarchy that I was learning about in the ancient world, like ancient Mesopotamia and ancient India. That it looked scary similar to what I had been taught was Christian. My thought was, "What is this?" Why does what we are Christians teaching about women look like what was being taught about women in ancient Mesopotamia? That was kind of my starting point.

Beth Barr:
I was like, "What's going on here?" Is what Christians doing or what we are doing really different. Is it really different for many of us? As I begin to explore, and investigate that, what I found is that while patriarchy has always been a part of the church, it has been different in how we have justified it. Which made me realize that if this was really biblical, this was really from God, it wouldn't be justified based upon culture. That was when I began to really realize that the reason we thought the Bible said these things was not because the Bible said these things. Was because we were reading the Bible with our cultural bias. Biblical womanhood, my argument is that it is not biblical.

Beth Barr:
That it is actually constructed in for modern women. It is constructed in a particular form of Christianity in the United States that developed in a particular moment. It has roots in the fundamentalist modernist controversy, and it has roots in what happened in the late 19th century in England, and spread over to the US. But really this modern form of biblical womanhood was born in the aftermath of World War II in the US, and all of the changes that happened at that time.

George Mason:
Okay. So let's go back a little earlier than that. I want you to talk about the cult of domesticity. Then move into the post World War II era, but then we're going to go back to the medieval period and the reformation. If we could, I think people would be fascinated by your argument about all of this, and when this really changed, and what's been going on in society and this connection. Because what we're talking about largely here, and for those who are listening, who have not been to seminary, don't have advanced degrees. When Beth is talking about how we read the Bible, the word that we're talking about here is hermeneutics.

George Mason:
That is the means by what we take with us as a kind of lens through which we read a text. I have glasses on here. Think of the glasses as a way of what kind of glasses are you reading through. We bring our culture and our biases and our desires and needs and all of that with us to it. So it's not so much a pure objective reading of a text, and this is what we're striving for that we have a sense of what gave rise to a text in its original setting, and how it's been read since. So, let's do the cult of domesticity, the postwar era, and then jump back, okay?

Beth Barr:
Okay. So as a woman's historian, I began teaching. I had this framework of classes where I would teach from the ancient world through the medieval world. Then I would pick up at the end of the middle ages, and teach through the modern world. So I was very familiar. I was trained in the ancient world and the medieval world. That part of it was really easy for me. The part that I had to do a lot of homework on was really when I got to the modern world. I still remember this.

Beth Barr:
I remember that I was doing some prep for the first time that I taught the second half of the women's history course. I was reading a lot of different sort of textbooks, and different things that I might assign. When I hit the 19th century, I began to learn about something called the cult of true womanhood, and also known as the cult of domesticity. Kind of depending in cult of domesticity was the European. Then in the US, it became sort of known as the cult of true womanhood. I remember thinking, "This is exactly what was taught in Bill Gothard." It is. It's exactly what's taught by James Dobson. It struck me. You can go piece by piece through it.

Beth Barr:
It's this idea that women are actually designed, are more spiritual than men in some ways. Because they are more pure than men and that they don't have sexual appetites in the same way as men. That women have to protect their bodies to protect men, because men can't control their sexual urges. This is purity culture. All of this and that women are designed for home. That their brains aren't as smart as men's. That we aren't wired for leadership. We are wired to take care of children in the home for domesticity. It was this amazing thing.

Beth Barr:
Because I was like what we are being taught in the modern 21st century church is exactly this cult of domesticity that arose out of, really the enlightenment period. Which argued that women's bodies were created to bear children. Therefore that was women's primary job. That women's brains were smaller than men. The same argument was made for race by the way. That women's brains were smaller than men and therefore women weren't as smart as men. This was really just true transposed from the 19th century to the latter half of the 20th century. To send women back to their home so that men could go into the jobs that had been displaced from in the aftermath of World War II.

George Mason:
Right. Okay. So there's that movement both in the late 19th century, and then picking up after World War II in the 20th century. In both cases, what we're talking about is a cultural change, a social disruption that has taken place. That is again an attempt to reorder society to give it stability. Every time we have this sort of disruption, the tendency is to create a new shape shift of patriarchy, right?

Beth Barr:
Yep. That's exactly right.

George Mason:
All right. So now take us back to the medieval period, and the reformation. Because leading up to the medieval period, you're going to have to tell us about Marjorie camp. You're going to have to tell us about Hildegard, and about some of these women that defy in their era the role of women being complementarian. So please take us into this shift that took place.

Beth Barr:
Yeah. This is really for fun. This is one of the most fun things about writing this book. Was getting to introduce people to a time period that I love that most modern evangelicals know very little about. That's of course medieval history. One of the things that I know, and that my students began to learn about was that, first of all, while patriarchy existed in the medieval world, it existed in a different way for women in the church.

Beth Barr:
The argument was is that the reason women couldn't lead, and couldn't have authority over men was literally because their bodies were weaker than men. They were more spiritually inclined towards evil, which is actually the exact opposite of the cult of domesticity. So it's really funny. But women could [crosstalk 00:19:56]-

George Mason:
Shape shifting again, right?

Beth Barr:
It's shape shifting. That's exactly what it is. The medieval understanding stems from the Greek, from Aristotle essentially. This idea that women's bodies are deformed male bodies. So that's what's wrong with women. But in the medieval world, what they believed though was that women could overcome these challenges of their bodies by leaving behind what made them a woman, and dedicating themselves to the church. When they did this, it allowed them to gain authority, religious authority in the church.

Beth Barr:
One of the medieval sermons that I often quote it said women and God be men. Sort of this idea that women through this power of God can become like men, and often can exercise the authority of men. So we had these things that people in the modern church have no idea about. Like, these double monasteries in the early medieval world in which we have male monastics living in one side, and female monastics living in the other side.

Beth Barr:
The person who was in charge of those communities was the woman who was in charge of the female monastery. She was actually the avis of these mixed monasteries over both the male houses and the female houses. Very famous example of this is Hilda of Whitby, who in England presided over the decision to put Easter.

Beth Barr:
There was a discussion over which date of Easter should be observed. The decision was made in the Roman Catholic Church at the Senate of Whitby overseen by this woman, Hilda of Whitby. It's this amazing moment. We also have women like Hildegard [inaudible 00:21:42] be who went on preaching tours in Europe, and preach to the Pope, and preach know to all of these bishops. They submitted to her authority to her teaching authority.

Beth Barr:
Then of course we get women like Marjorie Kemp, who is one of my favorites. I always tell people that I love learning about Marjorie Kemp. I don't think I would want to be Marjorie Kemp's friend. I definitely would want to sit next to her in church, because she's a very volatile person. But at the same time, she represents sort of this quandary that the medieval church had with women. Because on the one hand, they did argue that women couldn't be priests. They couldn't be ordained, because women's bodies were flawed. That was the reasoning behind it, but at the same time, they also believe that women could overcome those challenges, and exercise religious authority.

Beth Barr:
So what we find is a woman who is married, has 14 kids. But she manages to buy her way out of a sexual relationship with her husband. She actually buys him off. It's amazing. She buys him off and dedicates her life to God, and essentially becomes a street preacher. Traveling England, traveling to the holy land, going around. She gets confronted several times, where people are like, "What are you doing? You're preaching. You're not supposed to be preaching."

Beth Barr:
Each time she argues, and she uses a very clever argument. She says essentially, "I'm not a preacher because I'm not ordained. Because you won't ordain me. So therefore I'm not preaching. I'm just teaching God's word and you can't stop me." They're like, "You're right. We can't stop you." She keeps doing this all the way through. She really represents this, on the one hand, that women still were considered to be under male authority. But there was a loophole in the medieval Christianity, where women could exert authority, and follow God's calling in a way that became less likely for them to do after the reformation.

George Mason:
This seems to be the loophole that evangelicalism found for years with Beth Moore in the same way. She can teach, but she can't preach.

Beth Barr:
It is interesting. Yeah.

George Mason:
Beth, that is not having any of that anymore, but anyway. So having said all of that, and I think it would be interesting for people to realize about the spiritual qualifications for women in the medieval period that actually was strengthened the farther they were from marriage. The farther they were from the home that then just flipped during the reformation. Tell us about that.

Beth Barr:
Yeah. That's exactly right. This is the big moment of shape shifting. Some people have walked away from my book, and they said, "Oh, the reformation was bad for women." I'm like, "No, that's not what I said. I said patriarchy shape shifted." It still existed in the medieval era. It just existed in a different way. After the reformation what we see happen is on the one hand, women's roles in the medieval world, the best thing a woman could be on sort of the godly scale if we think about what's the closest to God. A virgin was the closest to God dedicating her life to following God.

Beth Barr:
The second one would be a widow who had been a mother, and done everything, but now had dedicated her life to God. The person lowest on that totem pole was a married woman. That's not really great because most women were married and mothers. So in the reformation era, this flips, and the best thing a woman can be is a married woman. It elevates marriage. It elevates what most women were. It also though flips where the worst thing you could be was a single woman. This actually has stayed with us till this day.

Beth Barr:
You can think about the old made game. That's exactly where this came from, and all of the complaining, rightful complaining of single women in the evangelical church that there is no space for them. There's not. It's because of the shift. What happened with the reformation is that there began to be this emphasis that the godliest a woman could be was to be married under the authority of her husband. If she was married legally, she's under the authority of her husband according to law. This is outside of the Bible whatsoever.

Beth Barr:
But that meant that women in the church then were all always in this legal subordinate position. It supported even more women not being allowed into leadership positions in the church. So the options for women narrowed. The role of wife was elevated, but the options for women narrowed.

George Mason:
So as such, we have a shift then to the point where in evangelical culture in America. If women are going to exercise some authority, or actually to have credibility in some way, their resume needs to start out in a different place, doesn't it? Like, Twitter profiles. Say a little bit about that. How you could spot it.

Beth Barr:
That was that was a fun thing for me to do. So many things come out of teaching. When you're thinking and you're trying to think about things that will connect with students, and that students will understand. This is something that I've used in class. It's like, okay, so how would these women... If we were thinking about how they would define themselves in a few words, what would be, what would their Twitter profiles be?

Beth Barr:
If you think about it in the medieval world, a woman's Twitter profile probably wouldn't include her married state. Especially if she was a woman of religious, if she was trying. That really would have nothing to do with it. Because it wouldn't be the most important thing. The most important thing would be what she was doing religiously. So, was she an anchorist? I did Julian of Norwich. Was she an anchorist? Was she a monastic? Was she a vowed woman? These types of designations that would've been important to these women.

Beth Barr:
Whereas after the rough information, what happened was since the godliest a woman could be would be a wife, and a mother that would be what would be on her Twitter profile. You still see this today. The way women justify their... if they have a career, they do something else. They also have to justify that they are still married with children. If you put that in there then it can be like my first priority of course is my home and my family, but then I also do this. Instead of that also this becoming their primary what God calls them to do. They're not allowed to put that because it detracts from what is seen as women's primary role. Which is to be a wife and a mother.

George Mason:
About 30 years ago, when as a pastor I was leading our church to ordain women, and to make clear that women were going to be equal in the church in every way. I remember preaching a sermon in which I talked about my reading of these texts as being the highway. But that you can get to the destination of heaven you might say by taking the by way too. That the by way is the more complementarian thing. I posed it as to me the egalitarian reading was really more in keeping with the intentions of God at creation. I realized that people in a generous reading can see it differently, and that sort of thing. I don't think I preach that sermon today.

George Mason:
It's 30 years later, but what I have seen is the damaging effects of complementarianism not only on women, but also on men. The cost of that in our society. So that we now find, for example, in the State of Texas that we are passing laws that are putting into legal practice the diminishing of the judgment of women over their own bodies, and over their right to shape, the course of their families, and whatnot. But even in a profession teaching, what we see is that by far and away more women are teachers than men.

George Mason:
Now we have leg legislature that is saying, "We need to tell you how you're supposed to teach also, and laying down rules." It is almost always men doing so, and making clear, whether they're educated in those fields or not. They would say so. So to me this is now a more existential matter than I even understood 30 years ago. I wonder if you could talk about your experience in that way, and where you see why is this so important that this book is written, and that we are seeing things like Christian [Demais 00:31:59] book on Jesus and John Wayne, about toxic masculinity, and ways that that patriarchy has rooted itself in our culture. Why is this so important for the future of the church and society?

Beth Barr:
Yeah. What it does is it diminishes. It diminishes who women are as created in the image of God and what complementarianism teaches. As I said, I try to be generous. I do understand why people believe the way that they do. I do understand that some women are so connected. This is so much a part of their identity. They probably are never going to step away from it. But at the same time as a scholar, patriarchy has never been good. It has never been good for women or men.

Beth Barr:
It creates hierarchies that the people at the top benefit, but it's precarious. Because it has always built upon whether or not they can sustain that power. While some people who are underneath them do benefit. I remember hearing in my women's history seminar that women who play by the rules benefits. That's one of the things I said in the book. It's something that women's historians talk about all the time. When women play by the rules, and we often our word for it is the patriarchal bargain. That there are benefits that you can come, and it's not always women being manipulative of the system.

Beth Barr:
It's making choices that will give them, and their families the best possible outcomes. So there is if you play by the rules of these games, then you can have a more successful life, but again it's precarious. Because your situation is dependent up on whether you are the person who has authority over you likes the way that you're playing the rules. It's like the old saying where goes the pastor, goes the church. If you have a new pastor come in, it can completely change the trajectory of the church.

George Mason:
Oh my goodness. Absolutely.

Beth Barr:
That's precarity. That's precarious. Where your livelihood, your future is based not just on what you do, but on the decisions made by another person. That's what patriarchy is. Women's choices are often not their choices. They're limited. They're more limited than the choices of men, and they're limited by men. Women often don't have any room to be able to speak into those situations. What that does, I thought about this a lot with, I have a son and a daughter. I've thought about this a lot.

Beth Barr:
I was like, "I don't want my son being taught that there is something innately about his body that enables him to be able to make decisions that will affect my daughter, and think it's okay to not consult her, and think it's okay to not include her in the conversation." Because there's something about him just because his body is male that makes him able to do that. Regardless of what complementarians say, it's the same thing as separate but equal.

Beth Barr:
It's exactly what it is. It's saying that. That clearly we know this. That put a hierarchy where it said white people are better than black people. The same thing happens when you say that women cannot be in leadership, because there's something about them that may them unable to lead, even if they're capable. Then what you're saying is that there is something about them that makes them below men. That matters.

George Mason:
Yet God seems to continue to call women. God seems to continue to gift women in indiscriminate ways by the will of the Holy Spirit. They have gifts and graces for ministry. Yet even if we will encourage women to answer the call of God and come up in our church and do all of that, then when they want to do so, we might even educate them in seminary. But we show very little evidence that we're willing to trust them with the gospel in the churches, and in the pulpits and in leadership roles.

George Mason:
This is frustrating the body of Christ not [crosstalk 00:36:48] are modeling for the rest of society for how things should be now. All right. So you brought up the race question. I'm going to tell the story. So here's the story. You and I have talked about this by email. But to show the connection that Beth just made between segregation, and race in this matter, in Southern Baptist life when the so-called conservatives and so-called moderates were trying to find a way to live together back in the late 1980s. There was such a thing called the peace committee.

George Mason:
It was half and half conservatives and moderates. So Cecil Sherman represented a leader figure on that peace committee of the moderates, and Adrian Rogers, the pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee of the conservative faction. At a break in the proceedings, Cecil went up to Adrian and said, "Adrian, I know that you and your wife are always doing these marriage conferences in which you are talking about the biblical role of male authority, and female submission. That is an inexorable principle of biblical life that the church must accept. There's no compromise about that."

George Mason:
But Cecil said, "Each time that's mentioned in the epistles, it's in what's called the household codes. It includes that slaves ought to obey their masters. Now, if you have a consistent view of interpretation, how do you say that male and female relationships of authority, and submission have to be that way. But then we have the matter of slavery."

George Mason:
After a long pause, Adrian Rogers said to Cecil Sherman, "Well, I think that slavery is a much maligned institution. That if we still had slavery in this country, we would not have the welfare problems that we have today." Now, Cecil said at that moment, he knew there would be no peace between us. That we had to break a fellowship, and ultimately he led us to form the cooperative Baptist fellowship, which he initially led.

George Mason:
But I say that to show this intersectionality that you're talking about. That all of this is rooted in a white patriarchy, and in a kind of Christian authoritarianism that is, it is not benign. This is something we have to keep saying. This is not just a matter of people different views of things that need to be respected. This goes to the heart of the dignity of every human being.

Beth Barr:
Yeah, no. I think you're exactly right. It is. Biblically speaking, this is what's so funny. If you want to look literally, take the text literally and read that women as being under the authority of men, then you cannot read the slavery passage any differently. They go together if you're going to read them that way. But then we also know that clearly this is not that God has always pushed again. He's always pushed against. He doesn't talk explicitly about slavery. That you can explore the difference in what slavery meant in the early world, but it's always bad.

Beth Barr:
Anytime you have power over somebody else that's always bad. That's one of the reasons why he had the Jubilee year was so that no one would stay in bondage to another person for a extended period of time. I think it's really, I don't know how Christians. To me, this is just really bizarre, that we do not realize how patriarchy is interconnected with racism. One of the reasons I don't think we've gotten rid of racism is because we haven't gotten rid of patriarchy. They are embedded together. So if we want to uproot racism, we have to under uproot patriarchy at the same time.

George Mason:
Because there's always a master relationship in this. Now, we need to wrap up our conversation. I'm so grateful for your time. I want to remind people about the book. Here, we have it. The Making of Biblical Womanhood, Beth Barr. If you want to read this book, to learn how it is you can still be a faithful Christian, and read these very biblical texts that you have thought had only one way to be read in a different way. I'd urge you to do so and begin the journey of of moving away from complementarianism toward what we call egalitarianism in the church.

George Mason:
But also to recognize that this is not something that has to be this way forever. So at the end of Kristen DeMay book, she's asked, her editor is asking her, "Find a little hope here." The best she could do was basically to say we made it this way. If we made it this way, we can change it. I think what we have to come to is that this is not God making it this way. This is human beings making it this way. With God's help, we can change it.

Beth Barr:
That is exactly right. We can. I'm hoping that my book is maybe helping to do that a little bit.

George Mason:
I have no doubt. Beth, for the courage it took to do so, and for all the ways you had to wear the armor of God in response to it from so many people, thank you for that. I hope that generations will praise you for it because this one should, and some of us do.

Beth Barr:
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

George Mason:
Well, good to have you on Good God, and God bless you and your work.

Beth Barr:
Thanks.

Speaker 3:
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