Lois Roden

Who was Lois Roden?

Lois Irene Scott Roden was a president of the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventist Church, an apocalyptic Christian sect which her husband, Benjamin Roden founded. The sect began in Texas in 1955 as a succession to the Shepherd's Rod movement led by Victor T. Houteff, itself a secession from the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Contemporaneous with the Feminist Movement surge of the 1970s, Roden asserted that women, like men, were made in the image and likeness of God, and that they thereby hold a position of co-dominion with man in all things. She openly shared this concept with the members of her sect since 1973, despite some resistance within the sect. In 1977, a year before Benjamin Roden died, Lois said she had received a vision of the person of the Holy Spirit symbolized as a feminine "shimmering silvery Angel." She asserted as proof her ideas that the Hebrew word for Spirit is feminine, and that Jews regard the concept of "Holy Spirit" and the "Divine Presence" are one and the same..