Thank you for a fine article on the ways in which traditional Christianity has aligned masculine and feminine roles. However, it’s important to remember that the slice of Christianity you describe, while flamboyantly visible in the United States and stubbornly embedded in the culture, by no means represents the whole pie.
As others have pointed out, Jesus’s radical message has always included women as well as men, starting from the moment he first commissioned the gospel to be told by women. Throughout the centuries, Christianity’s embrace of the feminine has ebbed and flowed in various mystical ways, albeit imperfectly because always within the context of patriarchal societies.
In recent years, feminist thought in the secular world has been paralleled by deep scholarship in feminist theology and feminist philosophies of religion, interrogating gender as well as race and class in ways that secular feminist theory neglects. The fact that the secular and the religious movements have indeed run parallel to one another is exactly the problem, as you so rightly perceive.
Most of the people in the pews, while reacting to the secular feminist movement one way or another, have been blissfully unaware of feminist theologies that might have allowed them to rethink their own religious ideas. They could not have cared less about them. God was still “He,” and it would just piss them off if you tried to suggest otherwise.
Meanwhile, progressive and mainline Protestant denominations have responded to those feminist theologies. They began to ordain women in increasing numbers, and by the 1980s, when I attended a well-established Methodist seminary, more than half of the incoming students were women.
Though congregations and councils still struggle with this paradigm shift — it takes time to deconstruct 2000 years of indoctrination — women have gradually attained positions of authority in those more-or-less progressive denominations.
But here’s the thing: While progressive Christians are taught a great deal about other strands of the faith (traditional, conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist), I’m not so sure the favor is returned.
It’s my impression that folks in conservative churches don’t learn much about progressive churches that isn’t labeled heretical. I can’t prove it. My evidence is anecdotal, based on many conversations with people who have outgrown their very conservative backgrounds.
Often they believe that progressives have thrown out their faith altogether, and they are astonished to learn that there are whole congregations, whole denominations, who believe in the equality of all, the priesthood of all believers, and the idea that God really does transcend human categories of gender, and yet remain devoutly Christian.
It grieves me that these inclusive Christian communities must constantly struggle to be heard among the loud proclamations that women should stay in their place, the poor should accept their lot and just wait to go to heaven, and the rich are surely the most godly because, well, they are rich.
I hope those young Christian women, caught in constricting roles, will find some of the many other Christian communities that will empower them through learning, acceptance, opportunity, and love.
Those transitions will be harder than we might think. We are asking someone to exchange a known place in the universe, a place of absolute belonging, for an uncertain identity and the challenge of making their own way through this world and the next.
Plus, the evangelical churches usually have better music, I must say, so they’ll have to give that up, too.
But if Christianity itself is to survive and thrive and continue to evolve into the transformative movement I believe it was meant to be, then all of us need to get out of our comfort zone and be part of that movement.
Tell the sisters: Don’t bother setting the tables for the potluck.
Jesus is about to turn them over.
Keep the faith.
