Over at United? We Pray, my friend and one-time fellow pastor Isaac Adams introduced the concept of historical asymmetry to help us understand the relationships between blacks and whites in the United States today. You should go read it yourself, but to capture his point in a single vignette: a black person calling a white person a “cracker” is just not the same as a white person calling a black person a “n*****.” Both remarks are racist, yes, but the latter insult will weigh more heavily—risk more damage—in light of America’s long history of discrimination and domination from white to black. While those two epithets may be formally equal, they possess asymmetrical meaning or significance to most hearers. I could take another paragraph explaining all this, but I’m going to assume most readers intuitively grasp the point.
I’d like to take this idea of asymmetry and apply it to gender and our debates in Christian circles about complementarianism, the abuse of women, and the #MeToo movement. Here’s my basic point: complementarians such as myself should be the first to recognize the responsibilities and dangers of authority because we recognize the God-intended asymmetries between men and women in the church and
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