Is Complementarianism Wrecking Your Health?

Why do complementarian women have worse health than others?

You may have heard of studies that report better health among churchgoers than among non-worshipers. However, a comprehensive study by the American Sociological Review finds that while this is true for men, it is not true for women in churches who believe women are prohibited from teaching and leading men:

Women only experience a health benefit from religious participation when they attend religious institutions that are gender inclusive and allow women to hold meaningful leadership roles within the congregation.¹

In fact, structural sexism within the church may be making women sick. Study authors Patricia Homan and Amy Burdette write:

We find that among religious participants, women who attend sexist religious institutions report significantly worse self-rated health than do those who attend more inclusive congregations. Furthermore, only women who attend inclusive religious institutions exhibit a health advantage relative to non-participants. We observe marginal to no statistically significant effects among men. Our results suggest the health benefits of religious participation do not extend to groups that are systematically excluded from power and status within their religious institutions.²

Complementarian women live in a complicated reality, adhering to rules that require them to submit to male authority within the home and church while believing in, and accessing, freedoms won in broader society (like voting, having a bank account, expecting equal access to healthcare, and being able to lead and manage men in the workforce or politics).³

Many “soft” complementarians say, “Exactly! We love women, and we heartily endorse all of those freedoms women have won. We simply remind you that God prohibits you from preaching behind a pulpit on a Sunday.” They say women can write worship songs, devotionals, and even perhaps Bible commentaries, in some cases teach Bible classes, and, especially, teach other (perhaps “secular”) topics to men like parenting, how to manage a budget, how to regulate emotions, etc (none of which would Paul have regarded as “secular” topics).

But as I show here, 1 Timothy 2:11-15 cannot be restricted to the Sunday pulpit. Thankfully, it is NOT a permanent restriction. If it were, however, this epistle would prohibit far more leadership and teaching activity for women than soft complementarians claim. This and other inconsistencies within the system will be registered by women, whether consciously or subconsciously, who must navigate these waters. It’s difficult for them to know when they “go too far” or can safely do one thing but not another that seems related. It’s disorienting and lacks logic. I have personally heard this from more women than I can count, and have witnessed male church leaders reacting as if they simply cannot understand this.

“Exposure to religious structural sexism may undermine women’s mental and physical health by creating a stressful source of internal conflict …. Structural sexism may be particularly detrimental to women’s health within religious organizations, given that churches are ‘greedy’ institutions that often demand high levels of time, energy, and commitment.”⁴

In other words, if you volunteer a great deal or do “grunt work” in the lower levels of the church staff, making less money, receiving less validation, or having less ability to affect change, that’s not going to do wonders for your health.

This “When Religion Hurts” study draws on “a unique dataset created by linking two large nationally representative studies: the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Congregations Study (NCS). The GSS is an individual-level survey of attitudes, behaviors, and characteristics of U.S. residents conducted yearly by NORC [National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago] since 1972. The NCS is a hypernetwork sample of religious congregations in the United States conducted in conjunction with the GSS in 1998, 2006, and 2012.”⁵

The study authors define structural sexism as “systemic gender inequality in power and resources,” and they situate complementarianism within this framework.⁶ Only three percent of their sample attended a non-Christian congregation,⁷ so we can’t blame the results on, say, patriarchal Jewish or Muslim congregations. The average level of education and income is higher among churchgoers than nonchurchgoers, and church attendance among women is higher than among men,⁸ so we can’t attribute the comparatively poorer health of women who attend sexist churches to low income or education or to “not attending enough, compared to men.”

This coincides with a growing body of work that measures the negative effect of male authoritarianism on women, such as The Great Sex Rescue research, which found that “Women who do not believe traditional gender roles are moral imperatives feel more heard and seen in their marriages,” and that gender-based hierarchies adversely affect marriages and sexual satisfaction.⁹

How Could This Be True?

The “When Religion Hurts” study authors write that “religious structural sexism” may affect women’s health via a number of pathways—for example, undermining psychosocial resources, increasing psychological distress, and increasing sexism in other structural domains.”¹⁰ A Threads post from Sydnee Clark may flesh this out:

You know what really hit me the most when I was in complementarianism? It wasn’t even the rules themselves. It was how I internalized them. I constantly felt like I was too much: too opinionated, too ambitious, too emotional, too smart. Like my very presence had to be moderated so I wouldn’t ‘upset the balance.’ And the worst part? I was trying so hard to fit in and please people who didn’t even see me as a full person.

It made me doubt myself constantly. Made me feel like my voice didn’t matter, that my thoughts were secondary, and that my body, even my mind, wasn’t really mine. It was like they were telling me, ‘You can have worth… just as long as you shrink to fit our idea of it.’ And I hated it. I hated that I had to mute myself to survive, and I hated how quietly devastating it was. Because at the same time, I had to keep pretending I was okay with it.

It left me questioning everything about myself: my worth, my value, my purpose. And honestly? I’m still peeling layers of that off me. But now, at least, I can see how toxic it really was.

The potential for long-term, adverse health effects, even among women who think they are fine, is especially prevalent in women who have suffered emotional, spiritual, or physical abuse, because trauma lives in the body. The heightened, anxious vigilance in which trauma survivors live can slowly erode the strength of their immune system, leading to physical and mental health issues.¹¹

Even for women with loving husbands, fathers, and pastors, living inside a system that says, “You have less of a voice than other kinds of people” (or, “You should use your voice less,” which is a distinction that makes no difference), the potential for damage is there. Going back to Clark’s quote above, “It wasn’t even the rules themselves. It was how I internalized them.”

Twenty years ago, I developed a severe form of eczema on the soles of my feet that went misdiagnosed through several doctor visits. I spent a lot of time and money on medication and new footwear that would have worked if my condition were a fungus, but my soles got so bad that I walked with a limp. Every step, especially walking down the stairs, was agonizing.

Finally, I saw a podiatrist who asked, “Are you under a lot of stress?” I immediately said, “No, just the normal stuff of life.” It took more soul-searching than it should have to realize that I was indeed under considerable stress, most of which I had “normalized” and excused. The doc was correct — the body keeps the score. The anti-fungal medicine was never going to work because I didn’t have a fungus; I had internalized stress that my conscious mind ignored until my feet said, “Try ignoring this.”

Is the Study Flawed Since the Women Self-Reported Symptoms?

Homan and Burdette note that self-rated health (SRH) measurements (such as rating your health on a scale of 1 to 4, where one is poor and four is excellent) are based on decades of research demonstrating SRH’s reliability and its strong record as a predictor of mortality (people who rate themselves in poor health die sooner than those who self-report stronger health).¹²

Even if we granted that self-measurement could be inaccurate and that these women may be just as healthy as other women, we would still need to ask why complementarian women report worse health and comfort than women in mutualist (or what the study authors call “inclusive”) churches.

It is also true that correlation is much easier to prove than causation. The study authors admit this, writing:

It may be that women who select into sexist religious environments are in some way different from women who opt out of these contexts in ways that influence their physical health. However, it is also likely that the women whose health would be most harmed by sexist institutional arrangements are those
who perceive them as particularly unfair and oppressive and who therefore are likely to leave this type of congregation or never select into one to begin with.”¹³

Still, correlation can’t prove causation (saying “there is a correlation between coffee drinking and cancer” doesn’t prove coffee drinking causes cancer; perhaps coffee drinkers are also more prone to do something else which causes cancer). The cross-sectional data limit the ability to infer causality. But even the critical response to this study by Case and VanderWeele for the Institute for Family Studies concluded:

Homan and Burdette do provide some modest evidence that restricting opportunities for women to exercise leadership within a congregation may diminish the positive health effects of service attendance for them, and perhaps especially so in communities with the highest gender-leadership disparities. Such leadership structures may, but need not necessarily, lead to contexts that are problematic for women, and these issues should be taken seriously. Every effort ought to be made for women to thrive. Even without revisiting age-old and doctrinally-freighted conditions for ordination or denying that there are typical differences of personality or preferences between men and women, these communities might receive this research as an invitation to reflect anew on how they can provide the fullest possible scope for their female members to exercise their God-given gifts for teaching or administration in the service of God and neighbor.¹⁴

I think Homan and Burdette’s findings are more than modest. Regardless, if there is any reason to suspect a correlation between negative health outcomes for women and patriarchal theology, we should revisit the theology, read the ancient texts with fresh eyes, and (agreeing with Case and VanderWeele) take a hard look at how our practices may be disenfranchising women in ways that are demoralizing and ultimately harmful.

Other Key Findings

1. “The negative effects of marginalization offset the beneficial impact of church attendance in the form of social support and advantageous health behaviors”¹⁵ (even if your church has excellent women’s ministry programming and you find good community there, it doesn’t offset the adverse health effects of structural sexism).

2. “We find no evidence of an interaction between frequency of attendance and structural sexism, indicating that even minimal exposure to religious structural sexism is harmful to health” (they further note that Sunday attendance is just one measure of involvement — cutting back on Sundays but continuing to participate in other ministries, groups, and social functions is still “involvement”).¹⁶

3. “The complementarian gender ideology that supports the exclusion of women from leadership in most sexist congregations (1) creates and sustains gender inequality within marriages, and (2) upholds the ideal of male leadership, thereby perpetuating gender inequality in large-scale political and economic institutions outside the religious realm.” (Women who give church leaders a free pass but advocate for socio-political reforms are working against themselves, because one area feeds the other.¹⁷

The Way Forward

What if the church were a place that followed the example of Jesus?

• Jesus had many women disciples, who were even his financial providers (Luke 8:2-3).

• Jesus taught a Samaritan woman who evangelized her entire town (John 4:4-26, 39-42).

• Jesus defended Mary of Bethany’s desire to sit at his feet (an idiom for a student who was studying under a teacher) rather than do housework (Luke 10:38-42).

• Jesus bowed to the persistence of a Syro-Phoenician woman who refused to take “No” for an answer (Matthew 15:21-28).

• Jesus waited for Peter and the beloved disciple to leave the garden tomb area before appearing to Mary Magdalene and putting her on mission (John 20:1-18).

Then, of course, there was Paul, who included many women as co-workers and celebrated their leadership, such as Phoebe, Euodia and Syntyche, Priscilla, Junia (here, here, and here), and the women prophets of the New Testament.

Scriptural fidelity is at stake.

Common decency is at stake.

The battle against abuse hangs in the balance.

And as this article demonstrates, the very health of women — even those who are not abused — is at stake, too.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-suffering-from-a-stomach-pain-3808005/

Want to drop a comment to say, “This must be wrong because of 1 Timothy 2:12” or “the Genesis created order?” First (house rules), please see my articles about 1 Peter 3:1-7, Ephesians 5, Genesis 1-3 (here and here), and 1 Timothy 2:11-15 (quite a few articles, including here, here, here, here, here), here and here). Then check out “10 Bad ‘Biblical’ Arguments Against Women Preaching,” “Questions You Must Answer if You Don’t Let Women Teach Men,” and “Complementarianism’s Animal Farm: All Humans are Equal, but Some More than Others.”

1. Patricia Homan and Amy Burdette, “When Religion Hurts: Structural Sexism and Health in Religious Congregations,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 86(2) (2021): 248. https://www.asanet.org/wp-content/uploads/attach/journals/apr21asrfeature.pdf

2. Homan and Burdette, “When Religion Hurts: Structural Sexism and Health in Religious Congregations,” 234.

3. Homan and Burdette, 238.

4. Homan and Burdette, 239.

5. Homan and Burdette, 240.

6. Homan and Burdette, 238, 242.

7. Homan and Burdette, 243.

8. Homan and Burdette, 244.

9. Sheila Ray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenback, Joanna Sawatsky, The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2021), 30-31.

10. Homan and Burdette, 249.

11. Dorothy Littell Greco, For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2025), 17.

12. Homan and Burdette, 241.

13. Homan and Burdette, 251.

14. Brendan Case and Tyler J. VanderWeele, Religious Participation and Women’s Health: A Reply to Homan and Burdette, The Institute for Family Studies.

15. Homan and Burdette, 250.

16. Homan and Burdette, 251.

17. Homan and Burdette, 250.