Church Fires Teacher for Being Female

From the AP via AOL courtesy of AlterNet:

The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on Aug. 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men. She had taught there for 54 years.

The letter quoted the first epistle to Timothy: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."

The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, who also serves on the Watertown City Council, issued a statement saying his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a city leader in Watertown, where all five members of the council are men but the city manager who runs the city's day-to-day operations is a woman.

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In principle, this shouldn't be so surprising to me. After all, I recall several "wives submit" sermons back from when I was a Southern Baptist years ago: Southern Baptists are not feminists. But this church isn't Southern Baptist; it's American Baptist, one of the moderate mainline protestant denominations, and it's in upstate New York, a region not necessarily flaming with liberalism, but then not terribly conservative, either. So this swing into Scriptural literalism, a.k.a. fundamentalism, from a denomination usually not inclined to do so is disturbing, to say the least. It's difficult to not think about reports I've heard that mainline church attendance has been decreasing over the years while fundamentalist attendance continues to rise. Is this Baptist church's journey to the dark side an omen of things to come? Is rational Christianity in the US doomed to die out? I can't help but think that we're definitely headed in that direction.

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