Virginia Mollenkott’s Women, Men, and the Bible shaped my life
The lesbian evangelical scholar bravely shared her view of God—in love.
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.
