From Franco to Feminism: Challenges to Spanish Evangelicals for a Biblical View of Gender and Ministry, Part 1
This article is the first in a two-part series. In part one, Rubén Videira-Soengas traces the rise of feminism in Spain from its roots in opposition to Franco’s patriarchal regime to its modern form shaped by mass media and celebrity influence, arguing that today’s popularized, consumer-driven feminism pressures Spanish evangelicals to adopt unbiblical views on women in ministry. Videira-Soengas contends that male leadership in the church is rooted in God’s creation design, not cultural chauvinism, and warns that the current feminist climate will continue challenging the church’s adherence to biblical teaching.
The countless publications on the topic of women in ministry over the last three decades reveal that it is a highly divisive topic in both Europe and the United States.[1] A global online newspaper interviewed several influential leaders in Spain regarding the role of women in the church.[2] It illustrates how feminism has taken over that nation too. Among those interviewed were the vice-president of the Spanish Baptist Convention, a political leader, the national coordinator of Aglow,[3] a seminary professor, and the executive secretary of the FEREDE.[4] In their interviews, they all either promoted female pastors or encouraged women to teach and exercise authority over men in the context of the church.
Yet, 1 Timothy 2:12 says unequivocally, “I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” With Christian leaders on the national level advocating for female preachers and pastors, Spanish Christians are increasingly confused about Christ’s design for the church. But if the Spanish church is to remain the pillar and support of the truth (1 Tim 3:15), it must submit to what Scripture says about women, regardless of whether it may be politically incorrect according to today’s standards.
In light of the church’s call to uphold the truth in her predominantly feminist context in Spain, this article argues that Paul’s instruction for women in 1 Timothy 2:12 is not a byproduct of cultural or personal chauvinism,[5] as is often argued, but rather the plan of God in creation. The divine blueprint is the fundamental reason to defend male leadership in the church, not anything else. The different gender roles are not established by a social agenda, nor are they a consequence of sin; rather, they are God’s design, a design that precedes the fall and the emergence of any cultural tendency toward misogyny.
Persuading Spanish Christians to take 1 Timothy 2:12 at face value is not an easy task, nor should it be undertaken flippantly. Feminist ideology is deeply ingrained within the Western mindset.[6] Long has it now called into question the necessary mechanisms for society to function properly.[7] In Spain, this has resulted in a national paradigm shift in gender roles. The pendulum has swung from the neglect of women to the casting off of the shackles of patriarchal society with great prejudice.[8]
The Spanish church has noticed this shift and welcomed it with open arms, producing as a result a Christianized version of feminism. But, as the American anthropologist David J. Ayers observes, “Christian feminism has produced the same fruits as the secular variety,”[9] since it comes from the same “destructive viewpoint based on faulty analyses.”[10] For this reason, in order to better understand why Christianity has fallen under its spell, it is vital to see how feminism arrived in Spain.
THE ARRIVAL OF FEMINISM
Sixteen days after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, the first symposium for female liberation was held in Spain. From the 6th to the 8th of December 1975, five hundred women met in Madrid, officially beginning the feminist movement in the country.[11] Thus, feminism in Spain needs to be interpreted within the social and political frame of Franco’s regime. The fight for democracy in the nation cannot be detached from the battle for gender equality.[12]
The Communist Party of Spain (PCE), a Marxist-Leninist party, had been the torchbearer for the anti-Franco alliance.[13] Within the party, an anonymous group of women became the driving force for gender equality.[14] This underground resistance was set in motion by many of their husbands being thrown in jail for their political convictions.[15] Over time, the wives’ influence grew to such a degree that in 1959 the first underground magazine to advocate for women’s equality was published. It sought to attack the regime’s patriarchal structure and pressure it to release some of the husbands from prison.[16] A few years later, in 1964, the Democratic Movement for Women (MDM) was founded. This (also clandestine) organization promoted equal rights for women whose husbands were political prisoners.[17] According to the historian Fernanda Romeu Alfaro, the MDM was key to making the general public aware of common legal and social discriminations against women.[18]
That brings us back to the year 1975, the pinnacle of feminism’s rise in Spain. The UN had declared it three years in advance to be International Women’s Year. The death of Franco in the same year drastically increased the expectations for the feminist movement to transform Spanish society. In 1975, the permiso marital was abolished. It had legally required a woman to obtain written consent from her husband in order to work. Without this marital permission, women could not receive a salary, obtain a driver’s license or passport, or even open up a bank account.[19] Two years after Franco’s death, in 1977, the government instituted the Subdirección General de la Condición Femenina, a governmental agency tasked with promoting the integration of women into the professional sphere. Its creation served as a public demonstration of the government’s commitment to advancing gender equality.[20] The year after that, 1978, the Spanish Constitution legalized women’s suffrage.[21]
Feminism in the seventies, however, did not have a collective mindset. Instead, it was a plurality of perspectives,[22] their common tenet being simply the recognition of female discrimination.[23] In 1979, Spanish feminism collapsed due to internal power struggles and the almost non-existent unity within the movement. From that moment on, it became a diffusive idea, significantly reduced to a conglomeration of activist groups and organizations seeking their own separate interests.[24]
Thus, feminism in Spain was born as a non-collective response to the misogynist, discriminatory judicial system and the patriarchal politics of Franco’s regime.[25] Nuria Varela, a Spanish expert in gender discrimination, explains that during the time of Franco’s regime, Spanish society viewed women as physically and psychologically weaker than men and, thus, in need of male protection, first under the father’s authority and later under the husband’s. Single women were considered social outcasts. Moreover, according to Varela, women were to be obedient, submissive, tender, and sacrificial; their only priority was to attend to their family’s needs.[26]
Yet, Franco’s many legal restrictions of women to the role of a wife and a mother, meant feminism arose in Spain as something rather different than in the United States.[27] The radical American feminism of the 1960s and 70s (“second-wave feminism”[28]) was not primarily born out of the legal repression of women but social factors: the dissatisfaction of many returning to domestic roles after World War II, the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement, and the proliferation of abortion, among other things. In Spain, by contrast, feminism was largely a counter-reaction to the regime’s influence. Thus, to be a feminist meant to fight against dictatorial abuse.
As a result, holding to a biblical perspective on women in ministry is often construed as heartless male dominance, just like Franco’s dictatorship. For this very reason, the evangelical church in Spain has felt pressured to blur the lines, opening the door to “evangelical feminism.” But that pressure has especially risen in recent years. For although feminism as a political movement eventually lost momentum in Spain, it nonetheless left a deep imprint on the cultural worldview. I would argue that this influence has shaped a uniquely Spanish form of feminism—distinct from its American counterpart—one that continues to affect how issues of gender, authority, and equality are understood today.
POPULARIZING FEMINISM
In recent years, two pivotal changes have taken place in the Spanish mass media. First, there has been a generational transition as young media professionals, mostly women, have replaced the information “gatekeepers” of old, who did not hold to the current feminist agenda.[29] The second change has been the need for sensationalism (“going viral”) for the mass media companies to make a profit.[30]
In addition, thanks to celebrity marketing on social media,[31] feminism has reached mainstream Western culture. The power of social media networks to turn a passive worldwide audience into activists gave birth to the so-called “Fifth Estate” of alternative, non-mainstream media sources.[32] Such an internet movement enables people to network with others globally and to access a vast range of information—and misinformation and opinion. Yet, a worldwide network of informed people allows for new sources of accountability in government, geopolitics, and other sectors.[33] In other words, people are now able to question and directly challenge social and political structures.
Celebrities, as part of both mainstream culture and the alternative media phenomenon, have taken it upon themselves to hold society accountable. They have become the voice of feminism that calls into question those elements in the culture that they assume to be patriarchal. Since they have millions of followers on social networks, their feminist influence often goes viral, as with, for example, British celebrity Emma Watson. The hashtag #HeForShe, coined after her 2014 United Nations speech for women’s equality, impacted people around the world and affected a change from viewing the topic as an issue for women to viewing it as a human rights issue relevant for men too.[34] Soon after, other celebrities, in order to demand women’s rights, but especially equal pay and opportunities for women, used their social media platforms to take the #HeForShe movement viral.[35]
Even TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to spreading culturally relevant ideas “without an agenda,”[36] jumped on the bandwagon of accountability. In 2012, they promoted at a worldwide level “Why Should All Be Feminist,” a speech by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. According to TED’s description of the video, the idea worth spreading was contained in this ironic statement of Adichie: “We teach girls that they can have ambition, but not too much... to be successful, but not too successful, or they’ll threaten men.”[37] In other words, society is doing something wrong if women are not allowed to be more successful than men. A year later, in 2013, the singer Beyoncé quoted Adichie’s TED Talk verbatim in her song, “Flawless.”[38] Celebrities play a huge role in spreading feminism.
Russian sociologist Leonid Grinin points out the connection: “Modern mass media cannot do without famous people… there is an obvious symbiosis.”[39] Media corporations seek celebrity influencers to their own advantage because “it is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenized franchise owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City.”[40] Essentially, these corporations need a face, and it must be “the face of someone we see as often as our next-door-neighbors.”[41] What is better than the face of a celebrity? Celebrities hypnotize the general public with their lives and bodies, opening society up to embrace whatever product they sell.[42] Now, however, they do not only advertise products but also ideas, ideas favored by the younger, more progressive media corporations—feminist ideas.[43]
Yet, there is a problem with celebrity feminism. It belongs to a fantasy world, according to academic feminists, and they reject it.[44] Academic, or intellectual, feminists argue that feminist celebrities are in fact the opposite—anti-feminists—because they portray themselves in sexually objectified ways via social media, tabloids, and special edition magazines like TIME 100: The Most Influential People in the World.[45] This is the great irony of the movement. By becoming the face of feminism, celebrities feed one of the greatest faults of sinful patriarchal societies, making themselves objects of desire and lust. Accountability is undermined or lost altogether.
This type of feminism does not really aim to transform a misogynist worldview or to question its presuppositions and ethical values. Instead, its only concern is to sell an image, an ultimate good of glamor, popularity, and sexual power.[46] By it, political feminism has been rebranded and reduced to a T-shirt or a hashtag for a mainstream audience. Now its mission seems to be, as though it were an ad campaign, to convince the new generation to pursue the same status as the celebrity feminists: moral independence and celebrity success.
Nevertheless, the reduction of feminism to a marketing product, its removal from the academic world, and its continual publicity by celebrities in global media have increased its influence by leaps and bounds. In the 1980s, only 12 percent of the Spanish population claimed to be feminist. Only a decade later, that number was almost double at 22.1 percent. In the year 2014, the number increased to a shocking 56 percent, and in 2018, four out of every six Spaniards declared to have embraced feminism.[47] The swell is so large that on March 8, 2018, the first national strike for feminism took place in the country. It was supported by several Spanish celebrities. Thousands of people took to the streets to show the world that Spaniards are now feminists. International press, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, BBC, Le Monde (France), La Repubblica (Italy), and Publico (Portugal), covered this event.[48]
Thus, while political feminism’s counter-reaction to Franco’s regime collapsed in 1979, a different form of feminism has risen from the ashes and is stronger than ever before. This time, its goal is not to fight against dictatorial abusive structures of a patriarchal society but to sell a new kind of femininity: one that portrays women as successful and powerful via the hypersexualization of their bodies. It carries the same baggage as the political version of the seventies, which equated a rejection of feminist ideals to a defense of abusive male authority. But unlike the former, today’s feminism seeks to go viral and appeal to popular, consumerist appetites.
Mass media, in the name of accountability, though obviously confused about whom they are holding accountable and for what, has taken upon itself the task to spread this new feminism throughout Western society. And the Internet, the omnipresent platform, advances their task without hesitation. What this means for Spanish Christianity is that mainstream feminism will keep knocking at the church’s door until it is fully embraced. Its champions believe they must change the church for the sake of its accountability and social relevance. To that conflict we will turn in the next article.
[1] Already in 1993 Gerald Bray identified the ordination of women as behind some attempts to purge “elements suspected of being resistant to ‘openness’... in a particularly nasty and brutal manner” within the Anglican Church (“Editorial,” Churchman 107, no. 4 [1993]: 292). In the United States, according to J. Ligon Duncan and Randy Stinson, “egalitarianism has been steadily encroaching to where it is now the cultural norm” (“Preface (2006),” in Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem [Wheaton, IL.: Crossway, 2006], ix).
[2] The full interview may be read as a two-part series on http://protestantedigital.com/magacin/9329/ and http://protestantedigital.com/espana/22958/.
[3] Aglow is an interdenominational association of more than 4,000 churches worldwide that promotes gender equality in the church (for more info see their website: http://www.aglowes.com).
[4] FEREDE is an evangelical association founded in 1965 to represent most of the churches in Spain before the government. See http://www.ferede.es/quienes-somos/.
[5] In this article, the terms chauvinism and misogyny are used interchangeably to describe a modern cultural attitude that stands in opposition to biblical manhood and womanhood. According to the popular perspective, the biblical teaching of ontological equality—that men and women are equal in value, dignity, and worth before God—is taken to mean functional sameness, denying any difference in roles. As a result, biblical concepts such as male headship in the home and the church, or a woman’s voluntary submission in those contexts, are redefined as patriarchal, oppressive, or even abusive—i.e., chauvinism or misogyny. This mindset not only distorts Scripture but undermines the beauty and order of God’s created design.
[6] Letha Dawson Scanzoni substantiates the idea that feminism is part of mainstream evangelicalism on several grounds: 1) the use of inclusive language in preaching, 2) how evangelicals do theology, 3) how evangelicals conduct their daily lives, 4) the creation of a new climate that empowers women for ministry, 5) the rise of an opposing movement, 6) the defensiveness of complementarians, and 7) complementarians’ talk of defeat. See “Why We Need Evangelical Feminists” in New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views, ed. Mary E. Hunt and Diann L. Neu (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2010), 71–73.
[7] George Gilder, for example, writes the following analysis of modern American feminism, which also applies to Spanish feminism: “Most feminist proposals seem to establish the working mother as the social norm by making it impossible for most male providers to support the family alone. The feminist attack on the social security system for giving housewives a right to the husband’s benefits after he dies; the subsidies for day care; the affirmative action quotas for women who pursue careers outside the home—all such measures seek to establish the career woman as the national standard and incapacitate the woman who tries to care for her own children” (Men and Marriage [Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1986], 151).
[8] Geraldine M. Scanlon, La Polémica Feminista en La España Contempóranea (1868–1974), trans., Rafael Mazarrasa (Madrid: Akal, 1986), 11–12.
[9] David J. Ayers, “The Inevitability of Failure: The Assumptions and Implementations of Modern Feminism,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. A Response to Evangelical Feminism, ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL.: Crossway, 2006), 314.
[10] Ibid., 331. See pages 315–31 for a complete analysis and critique on the three main false presuppositions of feminism: 1) that physical differences apart, men and women are the same, 2) that men occupy leadership positions because of the myth that men are more aggressive, and 3) that true human individuality will come only when people view themselves as human repositories of talents and traits, without regard to sex. Feminism in Spain follows the same presuppositions.
[11] Ana Belén Gómez Fernández, “Del antifranquismo al feminismo: la búsqueda de una nueva ciudadanía del movimiento democrático de mujeres en la Transición democrática,” Revista de Historia Contemporánea 13 (2014): 267. This does not mean that there were no other attempts to establish and develop a feminist movement before Franco’s death. These, however, were never strong enough to become a suffragist force. See Nuria Varela, Feminismo para Principiantes (Barcelona: Ediciones B.S.A, 2008), 203–9.
[12] See Gómez Fernández, “Del antifranquismo al feminismo,” 253.
[13] Ibid., 255.
[14] See Amparo Moreno Sardá, “La Réplica de las Mujeres al Franquismo,” in El Feminismo en España: Dos Siglos de Historia, Madrid, ed., Pilar Folguera (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2007), 123–56.
[15] Giulana Di Febo, Resistencia y Movimiento de Mujeres en España 1936–1976 (Barcelona: Icaria, 1976), 87.
[16] Mary Nash, Rojas: Las Mujeres Republicanas en la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Taurus, 2000), 111–127.
[17] Gómez Fernández, “Del antifranquismo al feminismo,” 257.
[18] Fernanda Romeu Alfaro, Silencio Roto: Mujeres contra el Franquismo (Oviedo: Self-published, 1994), 74.
[19] María Eugenia Fernánde Fraile, “Historia de las Mujeres en España: Historia de una Conquista,” La Aljaba Segunda Época, 7 (2008): 18.
[20] Karmentxu Marín, “La Subdirección General de la Condición Femenina Levanta Polémicas entre Las Mujeres,” El País, November 17, 1977, accessed May 2, 2025, https://elpais.com/diario/1977/11/18/sociedad/248655606_850215.html.
[21] Fernánde Fraile, “Historia de las Mujeres en España,” 18.
[22] There were mainly three: 1) social feminism, a social movement under the banner of a liberal political party; 2) radical feminism, a perspective that understood feminism as a unique political party in itself; and 3) “the third way,” a group that believed in radical feminism but formed part of liberal political parties. See María de los Ángeles Pérez Acosta, “Movimiento Feminista en España” GénEros 9, no. 26 (2002): 7–8.
[23] Ibid., 7.
[24] Ibid., 9.
[25] See Mary Nash, “La Construcción de una Cultura desde la Legitimidad Feminista durante la Transición Política Democrática,” in Feminismos y Antifeminismos: Culturas Políticas e Identidades de Género en la España del Siglo XX, eds., Ana Aguado and Teresa María Ortega (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2011), 285.
[26] Varela, Feminismo para Principiantes, 215.
[27] The slow industrial and educational development, as the result of the Civil War, forced the country to organize its economy around agriculture, which, in return, made the middle class non-existent (see Fernánde Fraile, “Historia de las Mujeres en España,”: 13). This unique social structure made it almost impossible for feminism in Spain to have a collective mindset (see Pérez Acosta, “Movimiento Feminista en España,” 5).
[28] The movement recognized later as the “first wave” was the decades-long movement that had already led to women’s suffrage in 1920 and then largely fallen silent. More radical visionaries were on the fringes, not yet being mainstream.
[29] Marisa Soleto, “Acoso al Feminismo,” El Mundo, April 21, 2016, accessed on May 15, 2018, http://www.elmundo.es/blogs/elmundo/ellas/2016/04/21/acoso-al-feminismo.html.
[30] See Lola Fernández Hernández, “El Feminismo como Producto Mediático: La Paradoja Beyoncé,” Investigaciones Feministas 8, no. 2 (2017): 461.
[31] See online interview to Camille Paglia on, “Feminist Trouble,” Spiked Review, December 2015, accessed May 15, 2018, http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-review/article/feminist-trouble/17688.
[32] See William H. Dutton, “The Fifth Estate Merging through The Network of Networks,” Prometheus 27, no. 1 (2009): 1–15.
[33] Ibid., 1–2.
[34] See UN Women, HeForShe Alliance Impact Report 2024: A Decade of Impact 2014–2024, September 23, 2024, accessed May 6, 2025, https://www.heforshe.org/en/heforshe-alliance-impact-report-2024-launch.
[35] Fernández Hernández, “El Feminismo como Producto Mediático,” 459.
[36] See “Who We Are” on their “About” page, https://www.ted.com/about, accessed May 6, 2025.
[37] See the description under the video, summarizing the speech at 12:20. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “We Should All Be Feminist,” TED Talk, December 2012, video, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists.
[38] In the third stanza she sings: “We teach girls to shrink themselves. To make themselves smaller. We say to girls: ‘You can have ambition. But not too much. You should aim to be successful. But not too successful. Otherwise you will threaten the man.’” Beyoncé, “***Flawless,” Beyoncé, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc, Universal Music Publishing Group, Walt Disney Music Company, 2013.
[39] Leonid Grinin, “Celebrities as a New Elite of Information Society,” Social Evolution & History 11, no. 1 (2012): 129.
[40] George Monbiot, “Celebrity Isn’t Just Harmless Fun, It’s the Smiling Face of the Corporate Machine,” The Guardian, December 20, 2016, accessed May 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/20/celebrity-corporate-machine-fame-big-business-donald-trump-kim-kardashian.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid.
[43] See Zigmunt Bauman, “Identity for Identity’s sake,” in Race, Identity and Belonging, eds., Sally Davison, and Jonathan Rutherford, A Soundings Collection (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2008), 96–98.
[44] Rosi Braidotti, Lo Posthumano (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2015), 227
[45] For example, the (often explicit) works of late American feminist scholar bell hooks vehemently rejected celebrity feminism and Beyoncé’s sexualized version in particular.
[46] Susan Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010), 9.
[47] Fernández Hernández, “El Feminismo como Producto Mediático,” 461.
[48] See “8 de Marzo: La Primera Huelga feminista en España, en Los Principales Medios Internacionales.” El País, March 9, 2018, accessed May 24, 2018, https://politica.elpais.com/politica/2018/03/08/actualidad/1520528768_368042.html.