Patriarchy
Who is Shannon Harris? This is the question that Harris herself was asking as she began to untangle her life from the fundamentalist, conservative evangelical faith she had married into.
SEVERAL OF THIS month’s lectionary readings deal with the tensions of navigating wrongdoing, judgment, vengeance, and forgiveness. They call readers to forgive — and forgive again: not just once, twice, or seven times, but at least 77 times and counting (see Matthew 18:22).
These texts have been used throughout history to trap people in positions of disempowerment, abuse, and enslavement. Consider, for example, how victims of intimate partner violence have been pressured to forgive and return to their abusers, who then proceed to hurt them again. Or how entire marginalized communities are expected to “get over it,” whether that is the colonization of Turtle Island, enslavement, or generations of misogynist, queer- and transphobic policies, laws, and violence. In light of the rampant misuse of these texts, we’re right to be wary of biblical interpretations for how to handle conflict that reinforce domination. The texts tend not to deal directly with inherent interpersonal and structural power dynamics. We must do that work ourselves. Any of us preaching the lectionary this month must also be careful.
Attending to the power dynamics of these passages doesn’t mean we dismiss them as useless. Rather, such attention helps us discern how these texts invite and bear witness to God’s presence in processes of interpersonal, intergenerational, and even international healing. They call us to attend to what our own pain has to teach us and to seek hope through community life. And they promise that throughout our attending, God will abide — waiting patiently to see us through.
AFTER THE SOUTHERN Baptist Convention announced that women cannot be pastors, Sunday mornings have taken a new form across the nation. People are seeing the potential of an uninterrupted two-day weekend for the first time and relishing the freedom.
In clarifying its stand on women in leadership — that Baptists won’t stand for it — the SBC suddenly confirmed what groggy teenagers have been telling their parents for generations — namely, that sleeping in might be a better idea than attending a church where females are only needed for child care and potlucks.
In fairness, when the SBC committee — composed almost entirely of men — made the recommendation, it was mainly to free up parking. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in the country (high five!), and what better way to open more spaces than by telling half of humanity they’re not appreciated?
OUT OF DARKNESS, the Lord lit a flame — then shaped humans by the glow and placed them in a garden, charging them to tend it and make it beautiful. In her new memoir, poet Maggie Smith promises that this is possible: You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
Smith explores her rise to fame after the publication of “Good Bones,” deemed the “official poem of 2016” by Public Radio International and the source of her memoir title. In the poem she writes, “Life is short and the world / is at least half terrible, and for every kind / stranger, there is one who would break you, / though I keep this from my children. I am trying / to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, / walking you through a real shithole, chirps on / about good bones: This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.”
According to Smith, her rise in popularity contributed to the end of her marriage. In her memoir, she shares how she forged her way back to herself. She realized her marriage was structured around patriarchal gender roles: She’d spent years of her adult life with a man who saw her writing as an activity for her “spare time,” outside of housework and child care. At the end of her marriage, Smith asked, “What do I have now? What do I have to hold on to?” She goes on, “When I looked down, I saw the pen in my hand.”
IN RATTLING THOSE DRY BONES: Women Changing the Church, activist and author Susan Cole writes an essay in response to the question, Why do I remain in the church? In her answer, she shares how she healed her relationship with God through the figure of Sophia, who she defines as “the Wisdom of God, the divine imaged as female.” Cole writes, “Through [Sophia] I have discovered in a whole new way, divine presence within myself, within my sisters, within all that is.” Cole’s portrait of a female God, filled with kindness and joy, stands in stark contrast to the millennia of androcentrism that shapes Christian teaching and practice. The treasure of the Christian female godhead remains buried, but it can be uncovered.
Sophia sits (metaphorically) at artist Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” the famed feminist installation anchored by an enormous triangular banquet table, 48 feet long on each side. From 1974 to 1979, Chicago scrupulously created unique, historically precise place settings for 39 “guests of honor,” female figures both mythical and historical, ranging from Mother Earth to Georgia O’Keeffe. An additional 999 names appear written on tiles surrounding the table. According to Brooklyn Museum curators, at Chicago’s table Sophia stands as a powerful “creative force in the universe” and a cross-cultural symbol of a female God. And the elements of Sophia’s place setting — a flower plate with watery petals and a runner made from remnants of a wedding veil — symbolize Christianity’s role in “the downfall of female power, particularly religious power.” On a grand scale, “The Dinner Party” reminds us of what patriarchy has erased.
Healing from religious harm: Why compassionate community is part of the journey.
ENDORSEMENTS RARELY CATCH my eye, but some names that grace Zachary Wagner’s Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality made my jaw drop. Amy Peeler and Kristin Kobes Du Mez — scholars renowned for tackling purity culture and male-centric theology — aren’t names you’d expect on a book like this. Most traditional Christian men’s thoughts on “biblical manhood” are not only flimsily dressed in culturally secular activities like playin’ sports and shootin’ guns, but also fatally based in unbiblical standards of hypersexual and violent behavior. Thankfully, Wagner swings over such pitfalls, laying out an expansive vision of masculinity rooted in the Jesus ideal: love for God and neighbor.
Wagner articulates how purity culture failed both women and men. “Many of the theological and cultural foundations of the movement were sub-Christian, even worldly,” he writes. “Dehumanizing theology leads to dehumanizing behavior” — behavior that includes fetishized virginity, body hatred, tolerated abuse, and sexual segregation. Purity culture, Wagner explains, calls men “animals” and “perverts,” confounding rhetoric I heard growing up in the church. This type of gendered, sexual denigration — especially when attributed, in part, to God’s design — only serves to further dishonor the imago dei of men and excuse sexual sin.
There’s a “pathetically low and impossibly high bar for masculine sexuality [that] trains men to resist, flee, and medicate (through marital sex) their untamable boyish immaturity rather than grow beyond it,” Wagner writes. The divinization of high libidos and heterosexual marriage can be doubly damaging for queer Christian men, who face additional stigmatization and erasure in the church.
THE WORD “SELFISH” is used many times throughout writer-director Laurel Parmet’s coming-of-age film The Starling Girl. Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) hears it most often from her parents. Her father (Jimmi Simpson) uses the word to describe the period of his life before he got saved and gave up drinking. Her mother (Wrenn Schmidt) chides Jem for selfishness when she isn’t performing her duties at home. And at church, congregants direct the insult at Jem whenever her performance in the worship dance troupe pulls attention toward herself and away from God.
This understanding of “selfishness” dismisses the community members’ unmet needs. Jem, like most teenagers, is starting to consider what kind of person she’ll become. However, the only guidance she’s getting is from her fundamentalist church, which advises her to give up her dreams, fear her changing body, and let her church decide who she’ll marry. It’s no wonder that Jem’s thoughts turn increasingly to the only person who gives her positive, albeit problematic, attention: the youth leader, Owen Taylor (Lewis Pullman), the married son of her church’s pastor.
The Starling Girl is an empathetic portrait of the vulnerability and power of young women. It shows what can happen when the structures around them — family, church, patriarchy — limit that power and stifle their desires and dreams. This leads Jem to a sexual relationship with the similarly frustrated Owen, who’s drawn to Jem’s seemingly boundless potential.
HBO’S BIGGEST POST-APOCALYPTIC SHOW, The Last of Us, imagines a brutal world — and the mushroom zombies are only occasionally the source of danger. The first season followed Joel (Pedro Pascal), as he escorted teen Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who is immune to the zombie infection, to a hospital that can turn her immunity into a cure. In the final episode [SPOILERS], Joel and Ellie reach their destination. But when Joel learns they can only manufacture the cure by killing Ellie, he kills the doctor who was set to operate on Ellie. Joel’s decision raises the question: If the world can only be saved by sacrificing the innocent, is it a world we want to save? The Last of Us, itself an adaptation of a beloved video game, is far from the first show that employs apocalypse to interrogate our morality. Our end-time imaginings can show us who we are ... and who we could be.
The Greek title of the last book in the New Testament canon is Apokalypsis (“apocalypse”), the best English rendering of which is “revelation.” Revelation isn’t about the end of the world. It’s about a revelation — an unveiling. Revelation is one example from the genre of books we call apocalyptic literature. The genre, popular among Jews and Christians for hundreds of years before and after Jesus’ life, usually features a human receiving a message from some sort of divine messenger. The messenger wants to show the listener some deeper truth about the world — something that helps the audience participate more faithfully in the new world God is bringing forth.
CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER Ella Baker utilized the strength of her voice at the height of that movement to fundamentally question the notions and ideas of equality and leadership in this nation. In 1969, Baker said, “[T]he system under which we now exist has to be radically changed.” This means “facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”
Black women have long been considered the backbone for civil rights, social justice, church advancement, and animators of democracy in the United States. If this is so, then why are so many still overlooked for advancement in political power as well as the everyday jobs that they are more than qualified for?
While “women” won the right to vote in 1920, Black women fought for about another half century to exercise their right. The inequities of gender, race, and access are still with us — and there is no greater time than now to push hard for political and social advancement.
WITH THIS MONTH'S liturgical arc, we move from Epiphany to Lent: from a season of illumination to one of penitence. You’d think they would be reversed, though. You’d think it would be necessary to do the soul-searching first, to clean house before we get to invite God over for tea.
But the natural order of things always becomes topsy-turvy when God gets involved. God’s time “doubles back and loops around and ends up looking something like ... the name ‘Jeremy Bearimy’ in cursive English,” as Michael (Ted Danson) explains to Eleanor (Kristen Bell) in television’s The Good Place. The dot over Bearimy’s “i” represents Tuesdays, July, and “when nothing never occurs.”
Joking aside, this is the gift of the liturgical calendar: It lets us glimpse what it’s like to live in God’s time rather than our own. We don’t need to be worthy of an encounter with God before that encounter can happen because we constantly live in the kingdom space of already-not-yet. Revelation and repentance are like the proverbial chicken and egg: No one really knows which comes first, and it probably doesn’t matter in the end.
Divine time’s topsy-turvy nature is also why Christians are called to discern the difference between the “wisdom of this age” and God’s wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:6-7). What this month’s readings might call us to ponder, then, is not where human and Divine wisdoms diverge but, rather, where on Jeremy Bearimy’s curves they converge. Perhaps even on the dot of the “i.”
MUSIC IS MY safe space. When all hell is breaking out, I can put in my AirPods and turn on part of the soundtrack of my life and reset. The pandemic created a chronic hell that illuminated oppressive forces that have existed for centuries. Music became even more essential for my survival.
I am a Black clergywoman who is clear that “my emancipation doesn’t fit” many people’s equation. Let me say that another way: My authentic expression of self makes some people uncomfortable. My unapologetic expression of womanist Blackness often sheds light in the shadows of a corrupt world.
I won’t pretend that I have always felt free to be me. It took a pandemic to give space to be reminded by theologian and prophet Lauryn Hill that “deep in my heart, the answer, it was in me.” Hill’s lyrics and very existence compelled me to “[make] up my mind to define my own destiny.”
Some consider Hill to be one of the greatest lyricists of all time. An eight-time Grammy winner (with 19 nominations), she sings, raps, and acts. She is hip-hop royalty. In the ’90s, I wanted to be her. She wore the dopest locked hair style, had the most beautiful brown skin, and expressed her Blackness with boldness and class. She had, and still has, a lyrical flow that men and women couldn’t ignore. She was fly. (Translated as cool, sexy, smart, and stylish.)
Her industry-shaking debut solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, released in August 1998, will stand the test of time. Hill speaks truth in ways that penetrate the soul. I was a young mother when the album came out. She articulated things that only a Black woman could identify with. She spoke of the tension and beauty of having a child when society was telling her that motherhood and a career couldn’t coexist. She sang and rapped about self-respect, love gained, and love lost. This album is life. This album ministers. This album is sacred.
Respect is a must-see work, moving in its revelation of a superstar whose glow many of us have seen, the shadows surrounding them more hidden from view. Ms. Franklin was not just an incredible singer but also a civil rights activist like her father.
I REMEMBER HER green dress. She stood in center stage, shoulders barely clearing the pulpit. She was preaching, except the Southern Baptist Church didn’t call it preaching. As a missionary returning from two years in Jordan in the mid-1980s, Martha Bumpas was giving her “testimony.”
Bumpas was, I think, the first woman I heard speak from the pulpit. She sounded so full of hope. As her friendship with my family deepened, God’s calling on her life deepened too. She began to pursue a calling into full-time ministry.
Her timing proved poor. In 1988, Dorothy Patterson delivered a paper at the annual meeting of what was then the Southern Baptist Historical Association that articulated a “biblical theology of women’s submission to men’s authority,” as historian Elizabeth H. Flowers tells it. Patterson’s sharp wit—despite her historically inaccurate argument—won the Southern Baptist day. Ten years later she won again, this time on the floor of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting as she fought for the inclusion of language on women’s “gracious submission” in the Baptist Faith and Message, the repository of doctrine for Southern Baptists. Patterson succeeded in narrowing options for SBC women like Bumpas: Baptist seminaries deterred women from master of divinity degrees and, by 2000, pushed them out of preaching classes. Only men were deemed biblically fit to serve as pastors.
The Rev. Dr. Amy Butler is one of the most prominent pastors in modern America. She recently served as Senior Minister for the historic Riverside Church in New York City — the first woman to ever hold that position. Butler has dedicated much of her time and attention to smashing the patriarchy within the church — what many describe as shattering the glass ceiling.
SEXUAL ABUSE is not about sex: It’s about power.
At least that’s what Ona, the female protagonist of Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking, insists in the aftermath of one of the most horrifying incidents of sexual abuse in recent history. Toews’ book is based on true events: Between 2005 and 2009, more than 100 Mennonite women and girls in a remote community in Bolivia were raped at night by what they believed were demons punishing them for their sins. These attacks were perpetrated by men in the community who used modified animal anesthetics to drug and rape the women in their own homes. The victims’ ages ranged from 3 to 65.
Toews’ novel is a fictional account of a conversation between eight of these women. As Toews’ story develops, the rapists are imprisoned, other men of the community have gone to bail them out, and the women—illiterate and unaware of what lies beyond the boundaries of their community—gather to decide between three courses of action: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. As they debate, their dialogue is infused with theological discussions and surprisingly dark humor. These conversations give insight into the community’s culture, religiosity, and the ways that each woman copes with her personal grief.
Oddly, the voice of August Epp, the meeting’s minutes taker and the only man present, dominates Toews’ narrative. This story about women resisting a patriarchy gives an unexpected amount of attention to a man.
I slowly came to understand that if I was going to remain a Christian, I needed to find a path that had room for the rage and grief I carried with me as a rape survivor. Rage is the only human and rational reaction to the trauma I’d experienced, and I could not smother my humanity in order to remain a Christian. It was around this time that I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This past Tuesday, after we read Martin & Malcolm & America by James Cone, my seminary professor asked “what elements of Malcolm’s theology could contribute to Christian theology?” and my answer was immediate: holding space for rage.
Christian leaders, on the whole, have failed to address the abuse and assault experienced by more than half of all Christian believers. When was the last time your congregation dedicated a sermon or service to sexual harassment, assault, and abuse? If you are fortunate enough to have experienced such a service, you’re the exception to the rule. Despite attending all sorts of churches within a variety of denominations and despite sitting through countless sermons, I have not once heard violence against women addressed in any significant capacity. I’ve heard homilies on the Leviathan, the Nephilim, and the dimensions of Noah’s ark. I have not heard a single sermon confronting a problem that affects nearly every woman in every congregation, and around the world
Eight years separate me from that fateful Cru retreat, and if I could go back in time with the voice I have found, I would ask the leader to instruct us in how to be disciples of Christ not for the sake of an imaginary spouse, but for the sake of the Gospel.