Status: 🔴 Evangelical "complementarian" organization whose 2017 Nashville Statement codified anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ doctrine, later weaponized by the international anti-trans network.
The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) is a US evangelical Christian organization promoting a "complementarian" view of gender — the doctrine that men and women have distinct, God-ordained, hierarchical roles. It was organized in 1987 by theologians including Wayne Grudem and John Piper, who coined the term "complementarianism" in 1988.
Its stated mission is to "set forth the teachings of the Bible about the complementary differences between men and women, created equally in the image of God." Its president is Denny Burk, a professor at Boyce College and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
CBMW grew out of a 1986 meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, followed by a meeting in Dallas with Grudem, Piper, Wayne House, and others. At a subsequent meeting in Danvers, Massachusetts, the organization finalized the Danvers Statement (1988) on biblical manhood and womanhood.
In 1991, Crossway published Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, edited by Piper and Grudem, which became the movement's foundational text.
On August 29, 2017, CBMW released the Nashville Statement, a 14-article manifesto on human sexuality drafted during the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission's annual conference in Nashville. Signed by more than 150 evangelical leaders, it denies that "adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God's holy purposes" and denies that approval of "transgenderism" is a matter of moral indifference.
The statement was widely condemned as homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic — including by other conservative Christians.
CBMW's complementarian framework — that "biological sex" determines fixed, hierarchical roles — is the theological backbone of the modern anti-trans movement. The Nashville Statement has been endorsed by institutions including the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Signatories included Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, linking CBMW's doctrine directly to the SPLC-designated hate group that issued anti-trans Title IX briefs immediately after Obergefell in 2015.