It made me think about the implications of the Billy Graham rule for women in Christian academia. It isn’t surprising that Karen Swallow Prior’s article, not to mention the criticism that followed it, caught my attention. I felt, as my 8th grade self would have said, “Duh!” Suddenly, after hearing the Billy Graham rule explained for the first time, lots of things within my gendered evangelical world made sense. We determined that the Apostle Paul’s mandate to the young pastor Timothy would be ours as well: ‘Flee…youthful lusts’ (2 Timothy 1:22, KJV).” From that day on, I did not travel, meet or eat alone with a woman other than my wife. We pledged among ourselves to avoid any situation that would have even the appearance of compromise or suspicion. They briefly summarized for me what Billy Graham decided in 1948 and later articulated in his autobiography: “We all knew of evangelists who had fallen into immorality while separated from their families by travel. So I asked what the Billy Graham rule was (just FYI: advanced graduate students, especially graduate students preparing for comprehensive exams, can answer fluently almost any question within their given field of study). I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two Baylor history graduate students and overheard the phrase. I actually just learned about the Billy Graham rule a few years ago. As she writes, “Virtue ethics relies on moral character that is developed through good habits rather than rules or consequences for the governing of behavior…Virtue ethics is better than the Billy Graham rule.” For those of you who missed Prior’s article, she eloquently argued that good moral character is better than rigid behavioral rules. Recently, Karen Swallow Prior spoke out against the “Billy Graham rule”–married men distancing themselves from women to avoid temptation and the appearance of evil.

Are women human by dorothy sayers