Popular feminist Christianity

I would of course be the first to admit that the whole course of history has in fact been mistreatment of man by man and woman by man, and also man by woman. That’s the whole point of the Old Testament. All folks being sinners, I don’t think any sex can make a claim to some sort of inherent structural guilt or innocence, although certain methods of sin have often been monopolized by one sex or the other. Apart from endorsing a theory about the sinfulness of mankind, there’s also a lot in the Bible about salvation and the work of God in us and in history.

But a lot of feminist theory is predicated on the idea that sin is actually a product of masculinity, of the patriarchal structure. In a way, the patriarchy is sin, it’s what distorts and corrupts the world. And history is corrupted by it. And salvation and the work of God didn’t come in the past, because the patriarchy wasn’t overthrown. In a way, Jesus couldn’t save us, because he didn’t understand sin. And whatever it was that he granted wasn’t righteousness or brotherhood or sisterhood or love. Because it was still patriarchal.

Salvation comes from challenging the patriarchy; righteousness comes from deconstructing its power centers. History, including Christian history, isn’t the story of God’s work through women and men, it’s fundamentally the story of men’s oppression of women and their subjugation and mistreatment by men. And that’s a very different theory of what the origins and nature of good and evil in the world are, as well as what we should do about it.

As for myself, I grew up in a particular Christian tradition where men and women were equally valued and both were participants in an important partnership that respected and optimized and balanced their differing gifts against a world of immense challenges. And we believed that this has been the goal and the design since the beginning. Two sexes, uniquely gifted, working together as one species. It’s not really so different, despite their apparent disagreements, from the view of evolutionary biologists.

It’s hard to see how that view, or any orthodox view of Christianity, squares with the views and narratives in some of these books, that hold a very postmodern view of humanity and history. The postmodern view of history is not that of a grand story of a people suffering in sin and God’s dealings with them. Instead, they view history as a struggle between oppressor and oppressed, and interpret all through that lens of internal class warfare.

The postmodern view of sex and gender is just as strange to any people, time, and place except our own. On sex, the popular views range from pure constructionism, that gender is something we invent and define that has no biological or divine basis, to radical equalitarianism claims that men and women are not only equal before God, but are literally equivalent, with no relevant differences whatsoever. And however much these books may be written by Christians, they’re couched in an academic tradition that stands on very different ideological and interpretational premises.

They aren’t exactly wrong on their facts. Some facts, like those related to radical equalitarianism, they have got so massively wrong that there’s no real basis for correction. If you can’t see something that big and that fundamental and that obvious, that in many ways your entire movement is predicated on, nothing anyone could say would make a difference. But other facts, the facts of the pain and injustice and sin spread across the history of the world, those are plain enough. Women have been victims, and men have been perpetrators. But the interpretive lens, the structuring narrative, the theory of what those facts mean, and how they should be dealt with, is a matter for debate. Is it gender that divides sin and righteousness, or sin and righteousness that divide each gender?

What these authors choose to see and not see, what they choose to ignore or emphasize, what conclusions they draw and how broadly they draw them, their technical approach, the overarching philosophical narrative, and their critical framework are all hard to reconcile with my own understanding of and experience of the faith (and of men and women). Or with Christianity in general. Or with life. I’ve known a lot of men and women and witnessed a lot of the partnerships and struggle between them. And to claim that the whole thing has just been corruption and sin in the deepest sense on a universal scale since its inception isn’t a small claim, it’s a radical criticism of the faith and all its primary establishing figures and history and doctrines.

I certainly couldn’t see a powerful and smart woman like my mother endorsing any sort of ideology that paints women past or present as mere tools or passive receptacles or victims or passengers in their family or faith, or one that paints men and all their efforts as fathers and Christians through the centuries as mere oppressors and selfish manipulators and conspirators and abusers.

I can’t help but see it as something less than a religion. It’s has the smallness and monotony of an academic theory, an ideology. It reminds me of people who claim that Jesus really came to proclaim the value of libertarianism and a tax-free, free-market economy. You could reinterpret everything through that lens. But should you? Is it justified? How much smaller a savior and a world are you wishing for?

Perhaps it’s the framing, perhaps it’s the reduction of the narrative of history and marriage and the church to a mere moral dichotomy of oppressed and oppressor. The act of reducing so much of life and history and faith to mere sexism and the preservation of power, even reducing the struggles and injustices and sins of the world to mere sexism. That, to me at least, doesn’t seem to give the women of the past enough credit. As if no women ever lived before now as humans. As if our modern conventions and conceptions and conditions were the limit of all moral significance. Only a tiny fraction of anyone in the past, men or women, could hope to match the freedoms and protections and knowledge and luxuries the least of us now possess. Are we to say that none of them truly lived, that humanity was only born when we acquired our present status? That sex, as Philip Larkin once said, began in 1963?

For all that people have taken the differences between men and women and done great wrongs with them, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t real, or are wrong in themselves, or that all that has been done because of them has been wrong or bad. In fact, most everything we have to treasure and enjoy and have accomplished in the past and in the present is because of them. They have been our means to power, mutual power and benefit, just as much as harm. Because sex is powerful. That’s why it exists. It is a powerful, innate technology that helps us succeed as a species. But like all truly effective institutions, it isn’t without its costs and tradeoffs, it’s risks and abuses. You can hate it for its abuses, as you can hate humanity itself. But what wonders it has achieved! What wonders we have achieved!

In my own life, I’ve been the primary caregiver for my children, while my wife has been the primary breadwinner. She was more ambitious and successful and not quite as good at handling the stresses of young children, so we did what seemed best. It never seemed like a problem, because I saw it as my way of providing for my family. Far from being against my faith, it seemed to be demanded by it. But that also doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a challenge, or that it is the right way to do things forever.

I wasn’t planning to be so much less successful than my wife. Neither was she expecting it. It just happened. But in time I came to see how I was fulfilling the unique calling of God on me as a man, which I believe is very real, in my own unique and unconventional way. Just because I was modern and different didn’t mean that I had escaped from what it meant to be a man, being connected to the unique inheritances of that ancient lineage, or from the needs and responsibilities being a man naturally drives you toward.

The longer I lived and the less conventional I and my life became, and the more my family grew and developed, the more I saw how I was still truly a man like any other who had to learn to work with that fact. I also began to see how much freedom I really had to fulfill my role as a husband. The game and its pieces were not of my design, but the choices, the strategies, how to play the game with what I had been given, that was my honor and my freedom and my own personal genius and offering to God. I was neither infinitely trapped in my smallness nor infinitely free in my greatness. I was just a man, born of woman, and that was burden enough and freedom enough for anyone.

I don’t know if the modern feminist Christian loves women “as women” or loves men “as men”. They seem to be afraid of men being men and women being women, not only because of how things have gone, but in principle. That if any difference can be allowed it might be abused. And that’s certainly true. It will be. But is it worth losing what it means to be a man or be a woman for that? What are you giving up? And what if you can’t do it, what if you can’t get rid of the differences? What do you do if men truly are just awful oppressors and women are fundamentally oppressed victims? How can you crush masculinity out of half the species, out of the whole world, out of all societies, all art and literature, all institutions we have built, out of all history, even out of nature itself, for nature itself presents displays of masculinity? How much power and terror will you need to accomplish that?

If men suffer from the original sin of masculinity and even the Law and Christ could not cure them, but only became pawns in their own patriarchal game, how can they be stopped? The only solution, I imagine, would be to get rid of, suppress, or overthrow men deliberately to punish them and prevent their crimes. Do women have the courage for it? What will be the likely result? Men who don’t become active leaders in good often become active leaders in evil, or waste themselves in dissolution and meaninglessness and selfishness. Are we prepared to face those distortions of masculinity, if we cannot believe there is such a thing as positive masculinity?

I’m just not sure how to navigate the current dilemma between patriarchal traditionalists and revolutionary feminists. We seem to be offered two choices, both of which tell a similar story, but with very different interpretations. Both agree that history has been a patriarchy, but one says that it is good and should be preserved for its accomplishments, and the other says that it is bad and needs to be overthrown for its failures. It’s like sitting in on a bad marriage counseling session. And I can’t get on board with either party or see much difference between the two. I don’t think either is right. How do we thread this needle? How do we respond to people arguing for one side without appearing to be defending the other?

I find that I can’t speak to many of the women in my church any more on these subjects. You can’t disagree with these popular books or narratives without seeming to side with the enemy. You can’t speak against some modern versions of feminism without seeming to be against women. We have made our enmity our identity.

For me, feminism means loving and valuing and respecting women, as women, as representatives of the feminine, as a group unique and differing from men. If I don’t know what the feminine is, if I don’t value it or recognize it as distinct, how can I ever know them or love them? And how can they claim to know or love God or themselves and not want to understand and love men and masculinity as well, his creations, that he created for them? Is it masculinity and men that are so evil, or is it sin? It seems like men themselves, or the existence of differences between the sexes, are what the new definition of sin is. This is surely an indictment of God more than man, for creating such a terrible creature.

And this new doctrine is creating some new divides in the church and new divides between the sexes. The relationship between the sexes has degenerated so very much in the wider world. More and more men and women aren’t working together or coming together in intimate partnerships. They meet and pass in the night under conditions of suspicion and fear. They go their seperate ways; they don’t form true partnerships any more, because they don’t believe in them. They think it is a trap. And not only women, but men feel this way too. They see women and commitment as a trap and as exploitation just as much as women do. They see thieves looking to steal their labor, they see the end of freedom, they see a tormenter waiting to criticize and berate. They see a hungry enemy, not a friend or lover.

It even seems like that partnership is coming apart in the church. How can it be saved? And can we truly live for long without it, who have relied on in since the beginning of time? How can we save ourselves, without saving one another? How can we love ourselves without loving one another? How can we hate and fear one another, without hating and fearing half of what we are? I cannot answer for all the wonders, sacrifice, pain, and abuse of all the long years of our partnership. But I do know that anger will not free us from fear of one another. Only perfect love casts out fear. And if we fear to love, we love nothing but fear. This is not what we were made for.