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“Conservatives doubled down in their opposition to women’s rights,” Ms. Du Mez said by phone, “making male headship and female submission defining features of modern evangelicalism. Letha was such a threat because she presented her case for feminism in evangelical terms, making it hard for critics to depict feminism as a wholly secular movement intent on undermining traditional Christianity.”

Her best friend was a preacher’s daughter, and with her parents working on many Sundays, Letha would accompany her friend to church.

Letha was a talented musician and excellent student, and after graduating early from high school, she enrolled at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where she studied the trombone.

Letha Dawson Scanzoni, an evangelical author who argued, gently but persuasively, that the Bible considered women equal to men, inspiring a wave of Christian feminism and, perhaps inevitably, a backlash against it, died on Jan. 9 in Charlotte, N.C.

Letha, Sylvester’s mother, cleaned homes in Baldwin Park and took care of him and his siblings; his father, Sweet, left when he was a baby.