When biblical scholar, feminist, and lesbian evangelical Virginia Ramey Mollenkott died last fall, my father forwarded me her New York Times obituary and reminded me that she’d had a profound effect on his life. I didn’t need reminding.
In the spring of 1988, the summer before my junior year in high school, he handed me a copy of Mollenkott’s book Women, Men, and the Bible. If I remember correctly, he said something like, “Don’t let anyone else tell you what is in here. Read it for yourself.” I had the sense of being handed something important but also secret, maybe even potentially dangerous—the feeling of being invited into a society. My adolescent mind instantly divided the world into “people who read Virginia Mollenkott” and “people who tell you not to.”
I read it voraciously, passionately. I all but memorized it. To this day, I can recite key arguments that leapt off the page and into my adolescent life. “Jesus boldly pictured God as a woman.” Genesis 1 is not a prescription for female and male identity; it is a description of the world men and women inhabited.
