The impulse to downplay male-female difference and treat men and women interchangeably against God’s clear revelation—in the home, in the church, in marriage, and in society—is the same impulse that attempts to approach God on one’s own terms, making God in one’s own interchangeable image. This is the definition of idolatry, the opposite of Christianity.

Headlines out of the 2024 United Methodist General Conference announced the denomination’s apostasy, as votes by an overwhelming majority led the UMC to abandon the Bible and 2,000 years of Christian tradition in a capitulation to the LGBTQ revolution. What has received less attention, however, is another egregious error on display at the UMC’s General Conference, an error C. S. Lewis warned against in his own denominational context three-quarters of a century ago.

Written in opposition to women’s ordination to the priesthood in the Anglican church in 1948, Lewis’s essay “Priestesses in the Church?” contains prescient insight. For Lewis, the question of women’s ordination is not merely about what we think women can do in the church. It also implicates the nature of the church, the nature of men and women, how we think about the authority and inspiration of God’s revelation, and, ultimately, how we think about God himself.

Lewis’s reasoning is compelling. If a church disregards God’s revelation with respect to Biblical qualifications for ordination, it is only a small step to disregarding God’s own self-revelation. Lewis makes this connection clear:

Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman.

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