Different By Design
A woman's guide to gaming the system
I was given Carrie Sandom’s Different By Design shortly after going on a date with the man who gifted it to me. I didn’t have time to give him a review. Our short affaire ended when I found out that his ‘side gig’ at Google was writing Google restaurant reviews. Alas.
Carrie Sandom was an associate minister for women and pastoral care at a church in Tunbridge Wells when she published Different By Design. She is now Director of Women's Ministry at The Proclamation Trust, best known for their Cornhill Training Course. Students who attend a class at Cornhill two days a week are given a course completion paper in exchange for £9,300 - the cost of a real Masters degree in theology. I was surprised when I found out Sandom had been promoted from a obscure church in Tumbridge Wells to a prominent post in the evangelical world.
Different By Design is Sandom’s only book and it’s the reason why an unknown women’s ministry worker is now considered an expert when it comes to women in the church. Different By Design is promoted by big evangelical book companies, such as 10ofThose and The Good Book Company, for those ‘concerned about the growth of feminism’ as Sandom ‘leads readers along the path to restore God's design to its rightful place’. As this book is part of the blueprint of teachings of gender in many conservative evangelical churches, it’s worth knowing what it actually says.
In Different By Design, Sandom aims to achieve three things:
To prove that men and women are fundamentally different
That these differences make men and women capable of different roles
That God gave men and women’s distinct characteristics for the purpose of filling their roles
Different By Design faces the same difficulties as every other fundamentalist book which pushes complementarianism — the belief that men should be head of the family and church, although they are ‘equal in dignity’ before God. The difficulty these books face is that, ultimately, they have to argue why 52% of the world’s population make bad leaders. They resolve this in one of two ways.
Either they shrug and say ‘That’s the way God made it.’ But, if you can not reason why the rules makes sense, they do not make sense. That’s the foundation of critial thinking. The second way is to defend gender essentialism. In other words, men and women have evolved (or were designed) differently, and gender roles are assigned according to what a person’s sex is best suited for.
Sandom uses both ways of resolving this problem. However, since Sandom is only regurgitating other writers’ works to argue ‘biblical’ reasons for complementarianism, I want to look at the way she eventually works her way up to biological essentialism, starting with word-play.
Sandom follows Wayne Grudem’s ‘Grudem’s Grid: How different views on gender affect other areas of life’, published in 2000 by Evangelicals Now.
[Email: Click on grid, Mobile: Scroll right]
While there’s a lot of wacky stuff in Grudem’s Grid, the sections that Sandom focuses on are the three middle columns, particuarly the ‘Men/Women’ and ‘Marriage’ rows. What is the difference between humble submission and a doormat? Or between a leader and a tyrant? Sandom illustrates the difference how most conservative evangelical books explain anything — with a dubious story.
Pete and Sue are married with children. Pete is made redundant from his job, but he receives a job offer which is 200 miles away from where the family is based now. Pete wants to go, but Sue is against uprooting the family especially with their children settled in the church and growing spirtually. After a discussion with a friend, Sue decides that this is bigger than submitting to her husband; She needs to submit to God. She decided to trust the Lord ‘as Pete was keen to do’ and uproot the family.
The difference, to Sandom, between a husband being a tyrant or a leader, is dependant on whether his wife’s submission is voluntary. Submission cannot be demanded, it must be given willingly. But, if your motivation to submit to a man is because you believe an all-powerful deity commands it, can your submission be voluntary? Sandom doesn’t really think so either, writing that wives ‘need to submit to their husbands in everything and, if they don’t, they will have to suffer the consequences’.
What are the consequences? Eternal damnation? Well, yes and no. The theology of conservative evangelicals, like Sandom, can’t dole out damnation for egalitarianism alone, given that this is a ‘secondary issue’. The way that Sandom (and other conservative evangelical writers) get around their official theology is via the ‘slippery slope’ narrative. Enter Jo and Gavin:
Jo and Gavin’s story follows a similar arc to Sue and Pete’s, with one crucial difference — Jo decides not to go along with Gavin’s idea to move the family. This leads to Gavin throwing all of his toys out of the pram: withdrawing from the marriage, leaving Jo to raise the children by herself, and, eventually, stops attending church.
Sandom thinks she’s portraying a happily complementarian couple’s desent into Grudem’s ‘egalitarian left’. But if Gavin is using the silent treatment to punish his wife, and if Jo doesn’t tell her husband to either grow up or pack his bags, then it seems they are more suited to ‘tyrant’ and ‘doormat’. And if icing out his wife is always one disagreement away, Gavin is always a tyrant. But the responsibility for the salvation of men is put on women.
At the time Different By Design was first published, the Church of England was debating whether women could become bishops. Unsurprisingly, Sandom predicts that ‘Men will be driven out of church if women are too prominent in it’ and the number of men seeking ordination would drop if women were allowed to be made bishops. Equally unsurprising, the number of men seeking ordination in the Church of England has not changed as the number of women has increased.
Bishops juggle a large number of diverse churches in an area, which is an issue for Sandom who describes women’s brains as ‘spaghetti’ and men’s brains as waffles. Men’s brains are organised into neat boxes, like the squares in a waffle. Women’s brains are a mess of interlinking topics like a bowl of spagghetti — unable to focus on one thing at a time, one point leads to another topic which leads to another point. Spaggetti-brained bishops will drive out the waffle-brains!
Allan Pease is a ‘body-language expert’ who has been running his seminars at the Kremlin since 1991. With his wife, Barabra, they write books on body language (a disproven pseudo-science) and have lauched a series of gender-essentialist books (including Why Men Lie and Why Women Cry). Sandom quotes the Peases’ book, Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, to argue that men have ‘enchanced long-range vision’ because of ‘the hunter in them’, but ‘can’t see the butter in the fridge’. Meanwhile, women have well-developed short-range peripheral vision because ‘of the need to protect their children from predators’.
New research published before Different By Design indicates that hunting and other jobs during the prehistoric period were not divided by gender roles. Although there have been questions around whether male and female humans have evolved to see colour differently, it only takes a trip to a local Specsavers to know that neither sex has superior vision.
To avoid complementarianism and male headship appearing arbitrary, it’s understandable why Sandom feels the need to push the idea that God designed male and female biology to conform to rigid gender roles. Naturally, I am not arguing that there are no differences in male and female biology. I just do not believe that differences, such as physical strength, are a good reason to prohibit a qualified woman from pastoral leadership.
How can Sandom, a woman herself, peddle these ideas? How can she affirm her own subjugation? Because Sandom is not subjugated — at least not to the extent of other women in evangelicalism. Sandom was a women’s minister, wrote a book which is used to promote policies in evangelical churches, and is now a director at a prominent evangelical organisation. In other words, Sandom is a leader. Sandom gamed the system.
For loudly promoting women’s submission, the conservative evangelical church rewarded Sandom. The church needs women like Sandom to promote submission becuase the message is easier to digest when it is delivered by a woman. For their efforts, women who endorse complementarianism can tap into male power, earning them influence and respect in their churches.
Breadcrumbs from the men sitting at the table.