Whoa there...

Ok, so this morning I'm reading along, trying to finish up a textbook for American Church History, and then BAM! I run into this paragraph:

"Some denominations, rather than taking steps in the direction of female ordination and greater leadership opportunities for women, have taken steps in the opposite direction. The Southern Baptist Convention had ordained women as early as 1964 and by the mid-1980s had ordained over 400 women. By that time, however, ordaining women to the ministry had become highly controversial, with an increasingly conservative leadership becoming ever more outspoken in opposition to such action. At its 1984 annual meeting, in a crucial fundamentalist move, the Southern Baptist Convention declared that women should not assume a role of authority over men. Women were to be excluded from the pastoral ministry to 'preserve a submission God requires because the man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.' In 1986 the convention's Home Mission Board voted not to grant funds to any church that employed a woman pastor, and then in 1998 the convention capped its reactionary turn by declaring the women were to practice 'gracious' submission to their husband's leadership."
~Edwin Gaustad & Leigh Schmidt, The Religious History of America, 389 (emphasis mine).~

Whoa there! I had no idea that the SBC had ordained women at one time! Can you imagine being one of those women who had been ordained, then told that their callings were invalid so they couldn't be pastors anymore? And it's prrrrretty interesting that their conservative position on women's submission did not formally crystallize until the 1980s. Granted, you can't make an argument for women's ordination (or for egalitarianism) based on this fact, but I'm just saying...

Perhaps we should all recognize that the way these debates unfold in the U.S. are as much cultural as theological.