Those of us who grew up in white evangelical schools and churches are used to being coerced into submission under the threat of exile. In what we experienced as a theocracy, these institutions held total control over our lives, including what we did in the privacy of our own homes.

If we didn’t submit to our school’s authority, we’d be expelled. If we didn’t submit to our church’s authority, we’d be “handed over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.” Men always were the authority, women always were their helper or their threat, and virtually every rule always related back to sex.

The independent Baptist world I grew up in used to be considered fringe. These were extremist outliers who were laughed at by the supposedly more liberal world of Southern Baptists. But as conservatives to

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