The New Yorker:

On Wednesday, as ten thousand members of the Southern Baptist Convention gathered outside the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, in downtown Dallas, for the denomination’s annual conference, about two dozen women stood on faded grass nearby. They carried white banners with black-and-blue-lettered slogans, such as, “Calling Women to Preach Since the First Easter Morning,” and “I Can Call It Evil Because I Know What Goodness Is.” They were there to represent a protest movement, which includes such groups as #SilenceIsNotSpiritual and #ChurchToo, and has the potential to transform evangelicalism, by pressing churches to condemn domestic abuse, training pastors in caring for victims, and allowing women to assume positions of leadership. “God values women,” Ashley Easter, a protest organizer, told me.

Among the demonstrators was Autumn Miles, a thirty-seven-year-old evangelical leader and domestic-abuse survivor. Miles, who has a cascade of tousled hair that she describes as “fluorescent blond,” grew up as the daughter of a Southern Baptist pastor, in Terre Haute, Indiana. She married her high-school boyfriend when she was eighteen; after six years of physical and psychological abuse, she filed for divorce. Miles said that a panel of seven male elders at her family’s church called her in to explain her decision, instructing her father not to attend. “I know it might sound weird, but I could feel the presence of evil,” Miles said. They asked her to return to her abuser. She refused and left the church. When her father defended her, he was fired. Since then, Miles has told her story to many evangelical congregations, while speaking about the need to reform teachings on sexual and domestic abuse.

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