Beth Allison Barr, PhD
Beth Allison Barr is the U.S.A. Today’s bestselling author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. An academic by training and a pastor’s wife by calling, Beth uses her unique voice to speak out on the relevance of medieval history to our modern world—especially concerning women in both medieval and modern Christianity. Her work is described as “smart,” “powerful,” and “a game changer” for women in modern evangelicalism. The Making of Biblical Womanhood was also named one of the best books about women in the Middle Ages by Sara M. Butler, the King George III Professor in British History at the Ohio State University.
Barr is currently the James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University, where she teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses, but she also speaks and writes as a public intellectual. She has been featured by NPR and The New Yorker, and her bylines include Religion News Service, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, The Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. She also continues to write regularly on The Anxious Bench, a popular religious history blog on Patheos.
With her ability to connect to both academic and lay audiences, Barr speaks at international and national venues--such as the University of Notre Dame, Duke Divinity, Sarum College in Salisbury, England, the University of Calgary, Parks Cities Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, the Evangelical Free Society of Canada, Newbigin House in San Francisco, California, and Brite Divinity School in Ft Worth, Texas.
Barr received her B.A. in History (with a minor in Classics) from Baylor University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has served as the president of the Conference on Faith and History and president of the Texas Medieval Association, as well as remaining an active member of the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society, American Society of Church History, Sixteenth Century Society, and American Historical Association. In addition to The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, Barr is the author of The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England and co-editor of The Acts of the Apostles: Four Centuries of Baptist Interpretation and Faith and History: A Devotional. Since receiving tenure in the History department in 2014, Dr. Barr has served as Graduate Program Director in History (2016-2019), received a Centennial Professor Award (2018), and served as an Associate Dean in the Baylor Graduate School (2019-2022).
In addition to all this, Beth is also a Baptist pastor's wife and mom of two great kids.
BETH’S TOPICS
The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth
Barr's historical insights provide context for contemporary teachings about women's roles in the church. Interweaving her story as a Baptist pastor's wife, Barr sheds light on the #ChurchToo movement and abuse scandals in Southern Baptist circles and the broader evangelical world, helping readers understand why biblical womanhood is more about human power structures than the message of Christ.
The Cost of Forgetting Medieval History for Modern Evangelicalism
History forgets much more than it remembers, and what it remembers is often what people have chosen to preserve. As a medieval historian and an evangelical Christian, Beth contends that evangelical amnesia has come at a great cost not only for women’s leadership in the modern church but also for human dignity.
HERE’S WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT BETH
““Throughout this book...shakes our shallow historical foundations by revealing how much of so-called ‘biblical’ womanhood reflects the culture rather than Christ. By taking us through her own heartbreaking journey of exclusion from her faith community, she demonstrates the temerity that we need to live the simple, yet disruptive truth that all women and men are created in the image of God. The Making of Biblical Womanhood is about unmaking the harmful patterns of patriarchy in the church, society, and our own hearts.”
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““This is a book, unlike anything I’ve read before. Drawing on her extensive research into the history of Christianity, Barr upends everything you thought you knew about Christianity and gender. This fervent, bold, and sweeping history of Christianity and patriarchy is an absolute game changer. Any future debates will need to reckon with Barr’s contention that the subjugation of women has nothing to do with gospel truth.””
“This book has the power to help Christians build a faith where ‘there is neither male nor female,’ to liberate women from patriarchal hierarchies, and to heal the pain inflicted by countless churches. I have waited my entire adult life for a book like this, and I am excited that it has finally arrived.””
““The Making of Biblical Womanhood is a journey into the sometimes pained, sometimes joyous heart of Beth Allison Barr’s own story but also into the secret rooms of a conservative Christian doctrine of ‘biblical womanhood’ that is no more biblical than choir robes or three-point sermons, or Christian nationalism. The number of mistaken theological interpretations present in evangelical complementarianism Barr exposes are too many to count. Barr’s careful historical examples drawn especially from medieval history hold together a brilliant, thunderous narrative that untells the complementarian narrative. I could not put this book down.””
VIDEOS OF BETH SPEAKING
