Bursting the Bible Bubble: Thoughts on Womanhood as a Political Act

“What do you think is wrong with society today?” my high school Bible teacher once asked us. No one said anything, so he continued. “We’ve become a society disconnected with God. We’ve strayed away from what is pure and good, and have delved into sin and filth.” He paused, and I waited for what he would say next. “We had it better in the 50’s,” he said.

He was a full-fledged WASP- upper middle-class, coach of the football team, son of the church’s senior pastor, telling a classroom full of teenagers –half of which were girls of color- that their existence would have somehow been better in the days of Jim Crow and gendered classified ads.

“I’m not saying things were perfect back then,” my teacher continued. “But it’s worse today. Look at the music we listen to. Look at the clothes people wear. Men have become feminized and have lost their strength. Marriages are breaking up, little boys are growing up without a strong father figure in their lives. And I’d say that women were treated better back then…

“…They were cherished.”

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I should maybe mention that I attended an incredibly small, conservative high school that often pushed its alumni to attend a college so insanely sexist it has its own Cracked article. Thankfully, the high school itself was never so extreme to segregate stairwells by gender…but then again, another one of my teachers once tried to convince us that gay men were a result of women voting, so take that as you will.

But the message my professor was attempting to give was clear. It was the same message preached to us during Sunday school, and during chapel hours. “Men and women are equal in value, but not in function.” It’s just that men hold value in leading, and women have value in shutting up and cheerleading from the sidelines.

I sometimes wonder if he understood the weight of what he was saying. I wonder if he understood that if we were in what he believed were “better times”, half of us wouldn’t be in that classroom.

But you know what’s worse than a fifty-something year old man telling a group of young girls that marriage is preferable to having rights in the workplace? Those girls believing it.

Because for a long while, I did.

Playing the Part

The more insidious aspects of attending a conservative, religious institution is that they do not have the same filters that make microaggressions within the larger part of society so hard to catch. There is no “PC language” that they hide behind to excuse their own perpetuation of sexism- because they don’t perceive their sexism to be wrong, because God’s Word can’t be wrong. And this includes the women involved.

We watched each other like hawks. Who had a skirt that was an inch too short, who was secretly kissing boys and dancing to rock music? Those who didn’t fit exactly in our perfect Christian girl mold was perhaps not excluded, but were observed and prayed for- and sometimes reported for “their own good”. We were, after all, vessels- if not for God, for our future husbands.

It was made clear to me- to all of us- that to be a woman was to be conscientious of the man’s eyes 24/7. Which means, it was perfectly acceptable for teachers to tell female students that their vaginas barred them from leadership in the church and in the home, that they were responsible for whether an adult man gawked at them or not, that their ultimate worth was as baby machines destined to pump out the next Duggar family. It was also perfectly acceptable to compare female sexuality as a carefully wrapped present. (Clearly they didn’t understand that sex is the gift that keeps on giving.)

And we…I…accepted this for a long while. It seems like self-hating, but the reward seemed so nice. Play the part, and you get to be cherished. To be loved and adored, by God, and then by a man that takes care of you and loves you. To a self-conscious religious teenage girl, comfort was worth the price.

But in that moment, I felt tired. I was tired of feeling like I was somehow “less than”. That I was supposed to make myself smaller, to give boys more space to be themselves. Because God said so.

Women had it better because they were cherished

I approached him after class, that statement burning in my mind. “I don’t want to be cherished,” I told him. “I want to be respected.”

He looked at me blankly. “Isn’t that the same thing?” he asked. “Don’t you want someone to love you and adore you above all else?”

“Not really,” I told him. “I just want to be treated like a person.”

“I’m not saying that you can’t have a career or be respected,” he insisted. “I’m just saying that it used to be that men provided and took care of girls instead of treating them like men. Not like the politically correct culture we’re in.”

My request to be treated as a peer rather than a pet was instantly made into an argument. My desire to be respected as an individual was clearly a manifestation of the “PC propaganda” he so clearly hated.

To Doubt is to Grow

One cannot underestimate the role of authority in shaping social relationships. My teacher kept on insisting that biblically-enforced imbalance somehow protected women, and insinuated that a woman’s ultimate goal should to be supported by a man. “Different, but equal”- the man leads, the woman supports. Submits. Because God says so.

For the longest time, I didn’t dare question. I didn’t want to. Why would I want to pit myself against God’s Word, of all things? But that’s exactly what I did. I questioned. Which in itself shouldn’t be a radical act, but in that moment it felt as though I was going against the words of God Himself- and it was terrifying. I was going against a hierarchy that severely harmed my self-esteem, but provided me structure for most of my life. I was claiming space that I felt was not mine to take.

In short my first political act was to be a woman who realized she could have an opinion in a conservative Christian setting- an environment where a woman’s quest to become more than her father’s daughter or her husband’s wife is twisted into an assault of male identity. Because heaven forbid, a woman want to be treated “like a man”. Or, in other words, like a person.

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