Top 10 Lesbians in Evangelical America

Guess who runs an anti-queer religion?

As I’ve been looking over the history of America’s #1 religion, I noticed something odd. Straight white guys seem to run the show, but really they don’t.

There are male clerics up on stage. But the religion is substantially staffed by women. Among them, key leaders have been typically unmarried, and seem to have close female companions.

I realized: Evangelicalism was run by lesbians.

1. Frances Willard, president of the WCTU

For the last two decades of the 19th century, as president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard was the model of ‘biblical womanhood’, and a titanic force in American social and political life.

In real life, she was called ‘Frank’, and “would in today’s parlance be called a lesbian,” as Lillian Faderman puts it in To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America. Willard’s longtime partner was Anna Gordon.

It wasn’t even really a secret. It just wasn’t seen.

2. Katharine Bushnell, activist and scholar

She was a household name in late 19th century America. She sold the nation on a new idea: sexual trafficking is bad. She and her partner, Elizabeth Andrew, lived and worked together for 26 years.

Then Bushnell devoted herself to becoming a self-taught Bible scholar. In 1921, she self-published God’s Word to Women as a correspondence course. It would be hugely influential. Most any later effort to inspect the gender bias of Evangelical theology has her in the mix.

3. Henrietta Mears invents Sunday School

Traditionally, the congregation arrived at church on Sunday morning as the pastor just started in on you. But throughout the 1940s and 1950s, a chemistry teacher named Henrietta Mears split the service in two, and created an event before the sermon: ‘Sunday School’.

Mears wrote her own curriculum, and church started to feel like an interesting, educational experience. Lately called the ‘mother of modern Evangelicalism’, she retrofitted the religion as a post-War practice.

She was often dressed in wildly extravagant, colorful clothing. Don’t think Evangelicals don’t like drag queens. It was all a performance.

Before, and after:

Mears lived with her sister, and had a little speech for why she didn’t marry (the apostle Paul wasn’t available, etc.). As a biographer notes, she was “close friends and personal prayer partners” with a woman for 35 years.

A very Christian way of putting it.

4. A. Wetherell Johnson founds Bible Study Fellowship

In 1959, a woman founded an organization for women to get together in small groups outside church. Bible Study Fellowship was expanded to include men, and became widely known in the Evangelical world.

Don’t go calling her ‘Audrey’. She hated it, and went by her middle name, Wetherell, or ‘Miss Johnson’. Unmarried, she had two female partners over the years. Her second, Alverda Hertzler, worked alongside her at BSF. They often fought, but were hugely effective. A memoir notes:

“They made a perfect pair. BSF couldn’t have happened without their unique combination of strengths — which were perfectly suited for what God called them to do.”

In 2019, BSF released a short bio-pic about Johnson. The absence of a husband or martial yearning is unexplained, and the relationship with Alverda reads as vintage 1950s queer drama.

5. Eugenia Price, Evangelical self-help guru

She became a born-again Christian in 1949, and started writing religious self-help books. She was often found in Christianity Today. Her 1959 book Woman to Woman sold a million copies. It was a startling text for speaking to Christian women as reasonable creatures.

Eugenia Price never came out, but had a partner, Joyce Blackburn, for four decades. Her Christian writings are lesbian feminism, Evangelical style.

6. Rosalind B. Rinker teaches prayer

The traditional method of Christian prayer was to get on your hands and knees and formally ask God to give you stuff. What else is God for?

A woman named Rosalind Rinker set out to teach Christians to pray in a different way: like having a conversation with God. This involved speaking. It also involved listening. Her 1959 book Prayer: Conversing with God, taught that prayer was “a dialogue between two persons who love each other.”

Championed by Eugenia Price, Prayer: Conversing with God was a huge bestseller. In 2006, Christianity Today called it the #1 most influential Evangelical book. Beyond an obituary, not mentioning marriage, nothing seems known of her life.

But Evangelicals wouldn’t want to know.

7. Elisabeth Elliot, missionary and “purity” teacher

Throughout the late 1970s and into the 1990s, a stern, solemn, deep-voiced woman in antique dresses was all but the leader of Evangelicalism.

In reality, she wasn’t even Evangelical. In private, she’d mention that she was Catholic. And though married three times, there’s a hollowness to all her relationships with men. Her diary has odd talk of some kind of inner ‘struggle’ since she was a teenager. “I cannot write it even here,” she writes. “O God, purge me, take away all desire!”

Her relationship with her missionary husband, Jim Elliot, was deeply troubled, as she concealed. She also never discussed the mannish woman, Eleanor Vandevort or ‘Van’, often living with her.

Elliot was famous for her “purity” teachings. Most readers thought the ‘impurity’ was premarital sex. I think it was queerness, the shadow she was always trying to evade.

8. Luci Swindoll, Chuck’s sister

She was the older sister of Chuck Swindoll, a legendary Evangelical minister, and had her own ‘ministry’. Her special project: to convince Christians they don’t need to be sexual. As in her 1982 book, Wide My World, Narrow My Bed, she held out a single life as sufficient.

Her 2002 memoir, I Married Adventure, continues the portrait of a Christian woman who just doesn’t want to get married for some strange reason. But she was the only one who seemed to be having any fun.

9. Jennifer Knapp isn’t in “Kansas” anymore

A singer-songwriter, her 1998 debut album Kansas was a mega-hit and made her an Evangelical star. Somehow it seemed possible for Evangelical women to rock out, more like Melissa Etheridge than Sandi Patty.

In 2002, Knapp moved to Australia and seemed to want to leave Evangelicalism. In 2010, she disclosed that at the time she’d met her female partner, and didn’t wish to be associated with American Evangelicalism anymore. She remains a Christian, and musically active.

10. Rebecca McLaughlin explains it all for you

A phenemenon in recent years is women identifying themselves as former lesbians, and say they’ve gone straight or simply repress the urge—as they become famous Evangelical speakers on a wide range of issues.

There are many—Rosaria Butterfield, Jackie Hill Perry, Rachel Gilson—but a crisp British Anglican woman plays the game the best. Rebecca McLaughlin presents as a Christian intellectual (she has a Ph.D. in English literature) with a common touch.

There are many more curious (closet) cases in and out of Evangelicalism.

I could do a post on all the many mannish ‘unmarried’ stars of the faith, like the famous Scottish Presbyterian missionary Mary Slessor (1848–1915). The ‘white queen of the cannibals’ was more a king, if you ask me.

Or Corrie Ten Boom, the famous Holocaust heroine, who had a weird story about liking a man for about ten minutes when she was young.

And for all the CCM stars who’ve come out—Semler, Brandi Carlile, Nicole Serrano—there might be a few who didn’t. Kathy Troccoli, did you ever really tell the ‘story of love’? 🔶