I don't spend as much time on Internet forums as much as I used to, and I expect to even less after my 36th birthday on November 9 -- but I wanted this to be my last substantive thread before I seek to largely retire from such discussions, and before husband and I plan on having a child next year.
Ok. So conservatism in the church, and women's roles, is probably one of the most difficult topics to address. Men's opinions actually vary quite widely, and so it's not always liberal feminism that brings in confusion -- men themselves are not monolithic in their views when it comes to this topic, and this is where things get confusing.
For example, let's take my dad. He loves Trump, he considers himself conservative, but he's not into the controlling, moralistic version of conservatism. When conservative men want dress codes for women and complain about Super Bowl halftime shows, he thinks such things are silly -- he says this is what people thought about Elvis in the 1950s, and he thinks they were wrong then, too. He absolutely does not have an ideal that we should return to 1950s June Cleaver womanhood; he never has considered such things important, and so when I ask him about such things, he always says, "You need to avoid extremist cults."
My dad has also never been a churchgoing, theological hair-splitting kind of guy. He believes one should read the Bible, pray to God, have conversations with God, and come to their own conclusions. Again, he's not big on morality; when I asked him once why he doesn't moralize the way other conservative men do (talking about women's roles, abortion, etc.), he said, "I don't know. I guess it's not in me." Despite admiring Billy Graham, he'd never heard of the Billy Graham rule. He had nothing stern to teach about sexual immorality; he doesn't think premarital sex is a sin. When a conservative friend of mine once went on about remarriage after divorce being a perpetual sin, my dad said, "That's just someone being self-righteous. Avoid the cults."
As far as women's roles, I just never heard much about that growing up. I never heard about dress codes. My parents I think were broadly against women being pastors, but they didn't get very doctrinal about it. My dad said, "Women pastors just tend to be weird." I later did my own Bible study, and agreed women shouldn't be pastors -- indeed, I've posted about that a few times here, and to Reddit -- but I don't necessarily think women cannot do many other things in the civic sphere, and that's where many other kinds of conservatives have disagreement.
Like right now here in the USA, we have Amy Coney Barrett. She's Catholic, not Protestant, and she has a high authoritative rank, so she's more than just a mother. I've seen varying degrees of conservative support for her. Some admire her, but others would say, she should stay at home, not have judicial authority, etc. Others might contend, well, she's not Protestant, so she's not a real Christian (I was always taught that some individual Catholics are saved, despite their excessive works emphasis and veneration of Mary, even if Catholicism as a whole misses the mark a lot more often that Protestantism).
Another thing that got me in trouble with male authorities is that I married an unbeliever. Actually my dad got in a lot more trouble than I did, for he allowed it and thought it was fine. He and I had disagreements with other Christians over how 1 Cor 7 should be interpreted. The most conservative people believe Paul only allowed it for that time because the women were already married to unbelieving men at the time, and that he didn't intend for it to be a principle for later Christians to follow. My dad and I don't qualify it to that extent -- we take Paul at his word -- so we had no issues with my marriage. But my dad did get a lot of conservative men trying to fight his authority on this for a number of years, and he had to remind them that he was MY father, that these other men had no authority over me. I've since been with my unbelieving spouse now for a number of years, and our marriage is a happy one. I contrast this with many other conservative men who frequently post to these and other forums with complaints about how their women deny them sex and other silliness. Some of these men and women would think they're much more knowledgeable or moralistic than my father and I about marriage, but their marriages are lousy, so who are they to think they have more authority on this subject than my father and I, or think they have more insight into what Paul said than my father and I do?
Suffice to say, my family and I -- despite being fairly conservative -- don't always fit neatly into what conservative churches and people expect when it comes to the specifics of the faith, especially gender roles. While we may agree that women shouldn't be pastors, we don't buy into most of the other views, doctrines, and stereotypes that conservatives have about this broad subject. And this has continued to amaze me well into my thirties now.
