Ordaining Women: The Diffusion of an Organizational Innovation
Why do religious denominations vary in the extent to which they resist granting full clergy rights to women? Here, the extensive loose coupling between formal policy & actual practice concerning female access to religious positions are established indicating the symbolic rather than the practical importance of rules about women's ordination. Also offered is an event history analysis for US Christian denominations, focusing on the adoption of gender equality as official policy. The rate at which denominations begin to adopt gender equality is lower among denominations with largely southern constituencies, & it is higher during second wave feminism, among more recently established denominations, denominations tied via interdenominational networks to prior ordainers of women, denominations that are neither sacramental nor biblically inerrant, decentralized denominations, & denominations with autonomous women's mission organizations. Women's ordination emerges as a symbolic marker of a denomination's position vis-a-vis liberalism & modernism more than as a policy governing the internal affairs of religious organizations.
