Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

Christian Patriarchy Yet Once More

(Published in The Progressive Christian Magazine)

“Christian Patriarchy Yet Once More”

By Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

In October 2008, a “True Woman Conference” in Chicago attracted 6000 women.  Its goal was to teach “biblical womanhood” or “hierarchical complementarianism,” now touting itself as “Evangelical Anti-Feminisim” or “the Christian Patriarchy Movement.”  The Associated Baptist Press reports that 100,000 signatures are currently being collected for a “True Woman Manifesto” intended to set off a “counterrevolution to the feminist movement of the 1960’s.”  The counter-revolution proclaims these concepts:

1.       The calling of women is to affirm “godly masculinity.”

2.       Women must honor the God-ordained authority of their husbands and pastors.

3.       By submitting to male leadership, women reflect Jesus’ submission to God [shades of the Arian heresy!]

4.       Selfish focus on personal rights is contrary to Christ’s spirit of submission.

5.       Bearing “quiverfulls” of children is God’s blessed gift to women.

6.       Christian women must teach the next generation how to submit to male leadership in church and home.[1]

I have been studying this movement recently because of an e-mail correspondence initiated by a professor at a Southern Baptist Seminary.  My subsequent reading has put me on the alert.  Although I grew up in a very patriarchal Plymouth Brethren Assembly, I had forgotten the dreadful power of hierarchy to destroy male-female intimacy.  That loss of genuine intimacy was graphically depicted by Margaret Atwood in her great novel The Handmaid’s Tale, where male commanders and heads of household visited underground state-sponsored brothels and secretly pled with their handmaids (concubines) to kiss them like they really meant it.  But I have also been astonished by the slippery use of language in the “new” patriarchy.  At worst, it looks like a dishonest manipulation of meaning; at best, unconscious hypocrisy.

The language problem begins with the basic definitions of manhood and womanhood.  According to patriarchalists, the eternal essence of manhood – the created underlying nature of men – is “a sense of leadership” or authority.  And the eternal essence, the created underlying nature of femininity, is a “disposition to submit to male leadership.”  This of course provides perfect complimentarity and relieves men of any sense of guilt when relegating to women all the drudgery of housework and the pangs of secondary status.  The only novel aspect of this essentialist concept is the claim that women are “equal in being but unequal in role.”  This amounts to a sexist reincarnation of the old racist “separate but equal” rationalization for unjust dealings.

Then, having proclaimed a distinction between equal being and unequal role without a shred of biblical or scientific evidence, the leaders of the movement proceed to use the concept as the hermeneutical lens or grid through which all other biblical data are interpreted.  But as Rebecca Groothius brilliantly demonstrates, because Christian patriarchy subjects the wife to her husband’s authority in every area of her entire life, “The male is constantly advantaged with respect to the female, and the female is constantly disadvantaged with respect to the male.”[2]  Therefore, speaking truthfully, this is a matter of unequal being, not just a role that new and different circumstances can change.

When absolute power triumphs absolutely, can cruelty be far behind?  Patriarchalist John Piper comments that “A wife who ‘comes on strong’ with her advice will probably drive a husband into passive silence or into active anger.”[3]  Fellow patriarchalist Bruce Ware is explicit about the red flag Piper has raised:  “Women victims of domestic violence are often to blame for their own abuse because they were failing to submit to their husbands’ authority.”[4]  This attitude is widespread in the patriarchy movement, as Jocelyn Andersen has documented in her 2007 book Woman Submit!  Christians and Domestic Violence.  Only if women are “beaten regularly” by their husbands can they qualify for a temporary separation, but never for a divorce, because the Bible permits divorce only for adultery or abandonment.  Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church is only the best-known of the churches that proclaim this teaching.[5]

Fear of gender ambiguity (transgender) and homosexuality lurk just beneath the surface of the male supremacy resurgence.  Old Spice, producer of men’s shaving products, recently held a contest to choose its first annual “Man of the Year” – and he had to “epitomize the manliness that used to exist before the arrival of metrosexual pretty boys.”  The winner was a Republican politician whose wife runs a web site called “Ladies Against Feminism.”  Vision Forum, which publishes books used by conservative Christian homeschoolers, insists that “the absence of biblical patriarchy leads to male effeminacy which leads to homosexuality.”  And Christian Reconstructionism, founded by J.J. Rushdoony, not only pushes theocracy but also wifely submission as opposed to the “emotionally androgynous power-woman.”  According to Reconstructionists, women should submit their vote to their husband’s choice and should never hold public office; and girls should stay at home under their father’s rule until they marry into their husband’s authority.[6]

In my area, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese held a March 28, 2009 conference for men that, like Promise Keepers, emphasizes that men must be the “spiritual heads of their family.”  One speaker describes “androgyny” (that is, the “tendency for society to downplay the differences between men and women”) as a key problem for men, who are “confused and uncertain over how to express their masculinity.”[7]  Recent priestly pedophile scandals have never been fully acknowledged by the church as stemming from sexual repression, silence, and hypocrisy; so this patriarchal initiative can only bring new dangers for women and children.  And because the Mormon Church has long fostered male primacy, it was no surprise to me to learn that residents of the state of Utah are the greatest consumers of internet pornography in the United States.[8]  Where there is hierarchy, mutual sexual intimacy is almost impossible to achieve, and pornography forms a cold but distracting substitute.

I emphasize the widespread nature of the “new patriarchy” movement in order to urge Christian feminists to speak up more urgently, not to assume (as I was assuming) that our case is “out there” and that the truth will speak for itself.  Hence I want to illustrate how thoroughly unbiblical the movement is, and how irrational is its use of language.

First, the Bible.  Although many egalitarian interpretations are acknowledged and “answered” through the grid of “equal being and unequal role” in the 2006 edition of Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, at no time do the patriarchalist authors wrestle with the significance of the statements in Genesis 1:26-28 that God gave dominion to them (to both Adam and Eve) and told both of them to “have dominion” over the rest of creation.  Raymond Ortland makes much of God’s describing the entire human race as “man” – as if God were speaking traditionalist modern English – and asserts that God chose the word man (not woman) because of the “backdrop of male headship.”[9]  But since patriarchalists agree that “as Genesis 1-3 go, so goes the whole Biblical debate,”[10] it seems remarkable that no attempt is made to explain what Scripture means by assigning power and authority to Eve as well as to Adam.

I also notice that male authority is frequently supported by reference to the statement in I Timothy 2:14 that Adam was not deceived by the serpent, but Eve was deceived.  I have not found any hierarchalist who admits that according to Genesis 3:6, Adam was right there with Eve when she ate the forbidden fruit.  And to my knowledge no one has dealt with the lack of logic involved in granting authority over the deceived person to the one who watched her transgress and then knowingly, deliberately defied the will of God.  Why would the male’s fully conscious defiance be preferable to the female’s mistaken belief that what she was doing would be helpful?

Patriarchalists also make much adoo concerning Ephesians 5:21-33.  The Scripture index to Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood lists 80 references to that passage, but only 5 references to Ephesians 4:15, which instructs both male and female believers to “grow up into him in all things, which the head, even Christ.”  In the light of this verse, even if Ephesians 5:21-33 could be construed as teaching that the one-way submission of the wife to the husband’s authority is essential to honoring Christ’s authority in the church, nevertheless the wife (like the church) is urged in Ephesians 4:15 to grow up into full authority as soon as possible.

I have also noticed that even when patriarchalists quote Ephesians 5:21 along with the remainder of the chapter, nobody acknowledges that 5:21 calls for “submitting yourselves one to another” rather than for one-way submission.  (The closest anybody comes is to claim that Paul’s teaching of “mutual submission” does not mean husbands and wives are to submit in the same way, and therefore does not compromise male headship).  Nevertheless, the fact remains that a verse about male-female mutuality introduces and controls the entire limited analogy of “husband is to wife as Christ is to church.”  (Even patriarchalists have to admit the limitations of the analogy, since husbands do not provide salvation for their wives, nor are they sinlessly perfect).

If human suffering were not involved, it would be amusing to notice the equivocation and dishonest wording by which the biblical case for patriarchy is advanced.  For instance, John Piper states that “in a well-ordered Biblical marriage both husband and wife acknowledge in principle that, if necessary in some disagreement, the husband will accept the burden of making the final choice.”[11]  What a burden it must be, knowing that once the discussion is over, the freedom to choose will always be your own!  By contrast, doing the housekeeping, which is “God’s assignment to the wife,” is described as a “joy.”[12]  Granted:  repetitive clean-ups are best handled as cheerfully as possible, but by no stretch are making beds and scrubbing floors and toilets intrinsic “joys.”

I found no patriarchalist who bothers to explain why male and female are created simultaneously in Genesis 1, whereas Eve is drawn from Adam’s side in Genesis 2.  In fact, much is made out of the sequence in chapter 2:  “The most natural implication of God’s decision to bring Adam on the scene ahead of Eve is that he is called to bear the responsibility of the headship.”[13]  No mention is made of the fact that Jewish scholars, who might be expected to know their own Scriptures, regard Adam as an Earth Creature who does not become a human male until the same moment that Eve becomes a human female.[14]  That Jewish interpretation provides harmony between the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2, but it does not support notions of male supremacy, so it goes unmentioned.

I was interested to see that the slippery language of the “new patriarchy” extends to bearing false witness against other people.  Because Nancy Hardesty and I thought the Evangelical Women’s Caucus’ 1986 support of the civil rights of homosexuals was a “step of maturity,” readers are told that “In other words, they view the movement away from role distinctions grounded in the natural created order as leading inevitably to the overthrow of normative heterosexuality.”[15]  Wow!  I feel moved to supply my own “in other words” here:  in other words, male supremacists are so determined to keep their social advantages that they use the fear of homosexuality to argue that men must control women in order to preserve heterosexual privilege for both males and females.

“Christian patriarchy” also makes false promises:  “The boy who is encouraged to act in a masculine way will develop a firm male identity,” and the same for girls and feminine identities.[16]  No evidence is offered for this promise because no reliable scientific evidence would support it.  What about the boys who kill themselves, or run away from home, because they can no longer endure the “encouragement” that attempts to force them to develop a “firm male identity”?  And what about transgender girls?[17]  I wonder how patriarchalists would explain people like the Rev. Elise Elrod, who’s been married for 39 years, has 3 grown children and 3 grandchildren, and served as pastor of two Southern Baptist Churches.  She transitioned from male to female in 1999, and none of her experience as an ordained Southern Baptist minister, husband, and father ever enabled her to develop a male identity.[18]

One more example of dishonest language will have to suffice:  George Rekers claims that “sexuality in men and women reflects the ‘image of God.’  When the unisex mentality denies the human ‘distinctions based on sex,’ it is denying the image of God in the human personality.”[19]  But elsewhere, patriarchalists insist that God is beyond human sexuality:  for instance, “Scripture never represents God as sexually differentiated.”[20]  There is an occasional admission that the Bible depicts God in both male and female imagery, but to hierarchalists the preponderance of male imagery is not a reflection of cultural roles at the time, but rather is intended to affirm God’s lordship and male authority.[21]  If this were true, why is there any female God-imagery included in the first place?

Back in 1987, the Danvers statement upheld “Christian hierarchy” and accused egalitarian feminists of utilizing “hermeneutical oddities devised to reinterpret apparently plain meanings of Scripture.”[22]  I have supplied a few of the “hermeneutical oddities” and linguistic oddities currently being used by hierarchalists to revive the age-old dying paradigm of male supremacy.  My major concern is to sound and alert to those Christians who believe in human equality and the good diversity God has created  - and alert about the very powerful last gasps of a movement that in its dying throes is more dangerous than ever because it has fine tuned its arguments by opposing feminist insights.  For many thousands of people, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are at stake; so progressive Christians need to take the “new patriarchy” seriously.

 

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Ph. D., is Professor Emeritus of English at the William Paterson University of New Jersey and the author of thirteen books, most recently Sensuous Spirituality:  Out from Fundamentalism, Revised and Expanded (Cleveland:  the Pilgrim Press, 2008).

 

 

 

 

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[1] Kathyrn Joyce, “Women’s Liberation Through Submission:  An Evangelical Anti-Feminism is Born,” Religion Dispatches, Jan. 11, 2009.  http://www.religiousdispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/890/

[2] Rebecca Merrill Groothius, “Equal in Being, Unequal in Role,” Discovering Biblical Equality:  Complementarity Without Hierarchy, 2^nd ed., R.W. Pierce and R.M. Groothius (InterVarsity Press, 2005), 327.

[3] John Piper, “A Vision of Biblical Complementarity,” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood:  A Response to Evangelical Feminism, ed. J. Piper and W. Gruden, 2^nd edition (Wheaton:  Crossway Books, 2006), p. 52.

[4] Ware is quoted by Kathryn Joyce in “Biblical Manhood Conference Espouses Male Supremacy,” Religion Dispatches, July 3, 2008.  http://wwwreligiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/3371/

[5] Kathryn Joyce, “Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome:  Christian Women and Domestic Violence,” Religion Dispatches, January 22, 2009.  http://religiondispatches.org/archive/1007/

[6] Frederick Clarkson, “Gimme that Old Spice Religion,” Religion Dispatches, Dec. 18, 2008.  http://www.religiondispatches.org/archives/874/

[7] John Chadwick, “Diocese plans ‘a call to action’ for Catholic men,” The Record (Thursday, March 5, 2009), L-8.

[8] “Online porn sells in Utah,” The Record (Wednesday, March 4, 2009), A-3.

[9] Raymond Ortland, Jr., “Male-Female Equality and Male Headship,” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 98.

[10] Ortland, p. 95.

[11] John Piper, “A Vision of Biblical Complementarity,” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 40, emphasis mine.

[12] Dorothy Patterson, “The High Calling of Wife and Mother in Biblical Perspective,” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, pp. 366-7.

[13] John Piper and Wayne Grudem, “An Overview of Central Concerns:  Questions and Answers,” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 81.

[14] W. Gunther Plaut, The Torah:  Genesis – A Modern Commentary (New York:  Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1974), pp. 19 and 24.

[15] John Piper and Wayne Grudem, “An Overview of Central Concerns:  Questions and Answers,” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 83.

[16] George Alan Rekers, “Psychological Foundation for Rearing Masculine Boys and Feminine Girls,” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 305.

[17] For a description of the sufferings of transgender youth, see Virginia R. Mollenkott, Omnigender:  A Trans-Religious Approach (Cleveland:  the Pilgrim Press, 2007).

[18] Rev. Elrod can be reached c/o Evangelicals Concerned Western Region, P.O. Box 19734, Seattle, WA 98109.

[19] Rekers, p. 311.

[20] John Frame, “Men and Women in the Image of God,” Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 229.

[21] Frame, p. 229.                                                                                                           

[22] Appendix Two, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 469.

Updated contact info for Virginia:

Dr. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott
102 Arbor View
Pompton Plains, New Jersey  07444

973-839-3008

jstvrm@aeitv.net

More book reviews...

David M. Carr, The Erotic Word:  Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Bible (Oxford, 2003).  Arguing that "real change requires an engagement with the cultural resources we already have," the Professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary demonstrates that the Bible is far more affirming of eros than most folks imagine.  Leading us on a tour through Eden, Isaiah's vineyard, the prophets, and the Song of Solomon as seen against the background of other ancient love poetry, Carr is both convincing and enlightening.  (VRM)

Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History.  (Phoenix, 2002).  This book delivers what its title promises:  the essential facts about Muslim insights and struggles from 610 C.E. until today, including a commentary on the meaning of September 11, 2001.  In her always-engaging style, Armstrong answers all my most urgent questions about Islam. (VRM)

Malise Ruthven, Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning (Oxford, 2004).  Ruthven, who has written several books on Islam and is a former scriptwriter for the B.B.C., provides a perceptive analysis of the differences and similarities in fundamentalism as it functions within various religious traditions:  Protestantism (drawing upon the ideas of J.N. Darby, 1800-1882), Roman Catholicism (known as integralism, with papal infallibility corresponding to biblical inerrancy), Judaism, and Islam.  Even Buddhism and Hinduism have a form of fundamentalism with its closely-linked violence, though their fundamentalism is better described as the nationalization or secularization of religion.  In the United States today, where elections have been won and wars are being rationalized by the utilization of religious catch-phrases, Ruthven's discussion of the relationship between fundamentalism and nationalism is vitally important. (VRM)

Chris Beam, Transparent:  Love, Family, and Living the Truth with Transgender Teenagers.  (Harcourt, 2007).  It matters to me that almost half of the kids who "age out" of foster care become homeless and on the streets within six weeks of their emancipation.  And it matters to me that almost 40% of male-to-female transsexuals suffer abuse every year, while almost 60% have a history of being raped.  And there are far more murders of transpeople than are investigated or even reported.  Journalist Chris Beam focuses on the stories of four transgender youth she befriended in Los Angeles, and through their stories tells us a great deal about young transpeople and their entire subculture. (VRM)

A note from Virginia!

Hello, everyone!  I'm happy to tell you that my 2001 book Omnigender:  A Tran-Religious Approach is now available in a revised and updated edition.  It sports a new preface, an interesting new section on the sexuality of Jesus, lots of up-to-the-minute information, and insights from more than 36 recent sources.  The Pilgrim Press lists Omnigender under gender studies, but it is really about the whole spectrum of sexualities as well as genders, and about social change and spirituality, too.

Meanwhile, I have massively revised my 1992 book Sensuous Spirituality. It is now at the publishers and will be available from Pilgrim in 2008.  I'll tell you more about it when we're nearer to the publication.

At the 2006 conference of the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus, I delivered a speech called "Comprehending the Dimensions of God's Love:  What Is Our Constitution?"  It is now available in print in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of Christian Feminism Today.  You can also hear it at eewc.com. 

There is a newly revamped website for transgender people of faith (and our allies!) at www.transfaithonline.org.  It contains 365 news items, books, articles, and other resources, including several by yours truly.  The whole beautiful site is published by Chris Paige, who was formerly manager of The Other Side. 

Several new articles and four new "book briefs" (reviews) have just been posted on my website.  Please look them over, and I'd love to hear your comments:  jstvrm@warwick.net.

Virginia

Book review from Virginia...

(Taken from the EEWC website)

My Life So Far

by Jane Fonda
New York: Random House, 2005

Reviewed by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

“Committing every ounce of everything I had to what I believed in.” Although Jane Fonda uses this phrase to describe her 1972 Indochina Peace Tour with Tom Hayden, it could very well be the theme of her life so far, and hence the theme of this beautiful, open-hearted, energetic and inspiring memoir.

Act One (“Gathering”) deals with Fonda’s childhood, initial films, and relationships with her mentally unstable mother and emotionally distant father – relationships that set her up to marry three men who were allergic to intimacy: Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden, and Ted Turner.

Act Two (“Seeking”) describes Fonda’s activism, giving a sober, sincere, and fully responsible account of her opposition to the Vietnam War. (The Fonda-hatred of that era’s “hawks” seems painfully familiar in contemporary America, where many folks apparently use “Support Our Troops” to mean “Don’t you dare to question Bush’s policies in Iraq.”)

Amazingly, during that same Act Two, Fonda managed to win Academy Awards for her stunning performances in Klute and Coming Home and an Emmy Award for The Dollmaker. She also produced 24 home exercise videos and five best-selling books and was involved in several other important films, not to mention her constant concern for her children and the man in her life.

Act Three (“Beginning”) shifts focus to an inner journey of learning to be her own person, learning to move at “soulspeed,” learning to inhabit her own body at last as she feels herself alive with Spirit. Not that she’s “just sittin’ and a rockin,” either: she has made a new film, sponsors an Adolescent Reproductive Health Center at Emory University School of Medicine, chairs the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, and works tirelessly to overcome destructive gender stereotypes.

There are many things to love about this memoir. I love the dozens of photographs that are scattered throughout the text and clearly labeled with names, locations, and (sometimes) dates. (Would that all of us had our photographs so carefully organized!) I love that Ms. Fonda manages to describe her successive partners’ strengths with loving admiration and their weaknesses without an ounce of vitriol. Same with her colleagues. The story of making On Golden Pond with Katherine Hepburn is priceless: Hepburn arrives at Squam Lake with her always-attentive companion, Phyllis Welbourn, and chooses for the two of them the eight-bedroom mansion Fonda had reserved for her own family and large retinue, leaving a cozy little cabin for the Fonda crowd. That detail brilliantly summarizes the Hepburn attitude, but Fonda’s tone is wry amusement rather than cattiness. She is in fact a master of tone on the page as well as on stage or celluloid.

I also love that Fonda describes her own weaknesses unsparingly, yet without ever betraying herself. In this she exemplifies one of her quotations from Frederick Buechner: “To love ourselves means to extend to those various selves that we have been along the way the same degree of compassion and concern that we would extend to anyone else.” For example, while the world was admiring her body in films like Cat Ballou, Fonda was feeling so imperfect that she suffered from eating disorders (which persisted into her early 40s!). And while people were in awe of her glittering partnership with Ted Turner, she admits to still feeling that she had to please him at the expense of herself.

Through this openness Fonda offers herself as Exhibit A for something feminists have long understood on our pulses. “The subtle power of sexist roles and their inherent inequality has been deeply imprinted in all of us raised under them.” And “If a woman has become disembodied from a lack of self-worth -- I’m not good enough -- or from abuse, she will neglect her own voice of desire and hear only the man’s.” But just as with other forms of addiction, “It’s the soft inner you” that is crushed by trying to fulfill feminine stereotypes, “not the perfect, efficient, in-charge, outer container that seems to manage life so well.”

Because of my investment in building an omnigender society, I love Fonda’s keen awareness of gender issues. She describes her youthful androgyny and her transgender sensations (“Perhaps I was a boy in a girl’s body”), fears that were alleviated by a kind gynecologist. She also understands that gender is a performance: for a while she felt that “I could do tomboy, but I didn’t know how to do girl.” Later, embarking on six years in France, “I would start down a new path -- as a female impersonator.” She admits to behaving like a chameleon in order to accommodate the interests of Vadim, Hayden, and Turner; and she charges that many lives have been lost in wars because of society’s misconstruction of masculinity, with male politicians fearing the labels of “soft” or “unmanly” should they support peaceful negotiations.

For a long time Fonda resisted feminism because she “erroneously thought it required male bashing.” But she has come to understand that “patriarchy’s toxic cloistering” has dehumanized men as well as women. Now, in Act Three, she has “left the Father’s house” where she’d been a “disembodied, male-identified woman” and is allowing her embodied spirit to “stand up all at once.” She is practicing conscious living and seeking to contribute to healing our planet. And she is “helping girls respect themselves whether or not they conform to society’s current aesthetic norms.” As she puts it, “Things change when you become intentional.”

Finally, I love the way Fonda describes her conversion to Christianity and her hesitation once she comes up against “certain literal, patriarchal aspects of Christian orthodoxy.” She is reticent enough to avoid glibness, but outspoken enough to make clear her commitment to Christian feminism. She knows that “alienation from dogma doesn’t have to mean loss of faith,” that salvation means wholeness, that “Jesus preached that each individual has the potential to embody God” so that there is “no need for…hierarchy,” and that “if Christ returned today,” he might well be labeled “effeminate” for his “emphasis on forgiveness” and his “suspicious identification with women and with the poor.”

My Life Thus Far ends with its author’s “arms and heart flung wide -- welcoming more transformation, wherever it leads.”

“Arms and heart flung wide”: that sounds like the stance of a star responding to a curtain call as it becomes a sustained and roaring ovation. Brava, Ms. Fonda, bravissima!

— Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

Bio...

The above photo is of Virginia at age 48. An English professor emeritus at William Paterson University of New Jersey, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is the author or co-author of 13 books, including several on women and religion. She is a winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2002 and has published numerous essays on literary topics in various scholarly journals. In the mid-1960’s as her feminist awareness grew, Mollenkott began including women’s literary achievements in her classes and guest lectures. In 1973 she spoke at the first conference of evangelical feminists at the conservative Baptist Theological Seminary (Denver) and also wrote the introduction to Paul King Jewett’s theological book Man as Male and Female. In 1974, she gave the first women’s liberation speech at Malone College (Ohio), but was picketed by the students there “who brought newspapers to the chapel, opened them, and loudly rattled the pages while I was speaking.” In 1975, she spoke at the first national gathering of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus in Washington, D.C., and has delivered plenary speeches at almost every gathering of this organization since then. She provides leadership every year for two conferences at Kirkridge Retreat Center (Bangor, Pa): Christian People of the Rainbow in June, and Sisterly Conversations in September. Mollenkott is a member of NOW, the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press, and the Religious Coalition of Reproductive Freedom. She also serves as a manuscript evaluator for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; and was a member of the translation committee for the New International Version of the Bible (1970 - 1978); and of An Inclusive Language Lectionary (National Council of Churches). She is also a member of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, CLOUT... and served on the Board of Pacem in Terris. In 1978, she co-authored Is The Homosexual My Neighbor? A Positive Christian View, which was expanded and updated in 1994. She has lectured widely on lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights and has also been active in the transgender cause, serving as co-author of Transgender Journeys (2003). Mollenkott, who has one son and three granddaughters, earned her B.A. from Bob Jones University, her M.A. from Temple University, and her Ph.D. from New York University. Her partner is Judith Suzannah Tilton.

(Virginia may be reached through e-mail at jstvrm@warwick.net)

E-mail Contact Info...

You can reach Virginia via e-mail @...

jstvrm@aeitv.net

Oral History Project...

Check out the new link under VRM on the Web - "Virginia's "History."

An Open Letter...

An Open Letter to the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church [in response to their pastoral letter of Nov. 2, 2005]

As an elderly Christian lesbian and transgender activist, I am grateful to you for affirming salvation by grace (not merit), for asserting the sacred worth of all persons, and for rebuking the Judicial Council for upholding a pastor's refusal of church membership to an openly partnered gay man. My local newspaper carried a double headline about the defrocking of a lesbian pastor and the rejection of the gay man's request for membership, leaving the impression the United Methodist church is a very frosty place for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and those who love them. During my many years as an English professor at a state university, it was this sort of news clipping, brought to me by students who knew of my Christian faith, that was deeply embarrassing and impossible to defend.

So I am thankful that as Bishops of the Church, you have declared your belief that all persons are eligible to be professing members and participants in programs in a "community of hospitality." But for me, all this raises a disturbing moral dissonance. Hospitality, membership, participation, and community are highly egalitarian concepts. And your affirmation of people's sacred worth certainly implies that everybody is to be respected equally and offered equal access to all privileges, responsibilities, and positions within the church. Yet in The United Methodist Church, openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people are not eligible for either ordination or rituals of marriage, regardless of their qualifications and in many cases the stellar quality of their lives and relationships. How can such exclusion be justified within a "community of hospitality"?

Through the years I have met many deeply closeted lesbian and gay United Methodist pastors. The price they are forced to pay in order to maintain their credentials is stupendous. Why is the church the most egregiously unequal opportunity employer in an already unjust society? Wouldn't your concern for evangelism and social justice be enhanced by just behavior within your own sphere of influence?

Feminism and Evangelicalism

Note: What follows are Virginia Ramey Mollenkott's responses to questions prepared by Ann Braude, Women's Studies Director at Harvard Divinity School and editor of Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). Most of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott's responses below were part of a panel held at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan on May 16, 2005, entitled "Muslim, Christian and Jew: Women Who Changed American Religion."

Q: How in your personal experience did feminism interact with evangelicalism?

I was born into a working-class Philadelphia family of extremely conservative evangelicals. At that time, we right-wing evangelicals would have accepted the name fundamentalist, meaning that we clung to what we thought were the fundamental truths of the Bible. Today, almost nobody would claim to be fundamentalist because of the word's connections to terrorism. But since the evangelical right-wing still teaches the same doctrines I learned in my youth, the truth is that they are still fundamentalist.

I was taught at our storefront chapel that the deepest core of my being was evil, so that I could not trust any of my feelings or perceptions. From this shameful condition I could be saved only because Jesus had paid the price of God's anger by being crucified on my behalf. Combine this with very early physical and sexual abuse and the early realization that I was lesbian, and you can understand why I was well into my thirties before I was able to liberate myself from the fundamentalist belief system.

I earned my undergraduate degree at Bob Jones University and began to question fundamentalist doctrine while there, but especially during my M.A. studies at Temple University when I worked with a world-class literary scholar. But it was while working on my doctoral dissertation on John Milton that I gained the courage to read the Bible as carefully as I had been trained to read any other text. Feminism was just beginning to stir in the early sixties, and my dawning courage to trust myself was the point at which feminism and faith began to empower one another.

People may wonder why it would take courage to read the Bible as carefully as I would read, say, Chaucer or Emily Dickinson. Well, here's why: the evangelical right teaches that the Bible was virtually dictated by God and is without error or contradiction. But you can't read even the first two chapters of Genesis without noticing that there are two different time-lines for creation, with different tones and different plots. Those differences become perfectly understandable once they are placed in historical context, but fundamentalists tend to use the Bible as if it were all written on the same day and the same place, with little attention to cultural background unless it happens to be convenient. So I was wearing fundamentalist blinders when I read the Bible, and was afraid to take them off.

John Milton was a 17th century Puritan who loved Scripture. From studying his interpretive method, being challenged by feminist thinkers, and interpreting my dreams, I gradually began to trust my own experience. And I began to read the Bible with attention to literary formats, historical context, what words meant at the time the text was written, the use of imagery, analogy, symbol, and so forth. The text was transformed by these standard interpretive methods, and I in turn was radicalized by the Bible. I am now a member of the evangelical left, working with other Christian feminists toward a world in which all people are respected and cherished as made in God's image, and in which the natural environment is respected and cherished as being created and sustained by one Great Spirit. I guess you could call me and Evangelical Universalist.

Q: What is the spectrum of attitudes toward women in evangelicalism today?

Evangelicals come in a continuum that runs the political gamut from extreme left to extreme right. What Christian evangelicals have in common is that meaningful living requires a direct personal relationship with God, and that the Bible should be taken seriously. But what that means can differ widely, and our social attitudes differ tremendously.

I am a member of the evangelical left, a small but passionate minority. Our three most influential organizations are the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus, the Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Sojourners ministry headed by Jim Wallis. Of these, the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus is the most radical. We believe the Bible teaches the human dignity and equality of women along with men and all the in-betweens as well: intersexuals, transsexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, nonconformist heterosexuals, and gender transgressors of every type. Although EEWC does not have an official position on reproductive rights, most EEWC members support women's moral agency in reproduction just as we support women's moral agency in every other sense, and we support human and civil rights for everyone, including the right to serve religion in an ordained capacity and to pursue happiness through marriage. We cannot support efforts toward passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment which says "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman." That would exclude not only same-sex couples, but also transsexual and intersexual couples, as several court cases have already demonstrated.

Members of the Evangelicals for Social Action tend to waffle about specifically women's issues because their focus is on combatting poverty and racism, reforming healthcare, and working toward world peace. But of course these efforts will inevitably help women to some degree. Sojourners Community, which describes itself as "a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice," works for issues similar to those of Evangelicals for Social Action. Neither Evangelicals for Social Action nor Sojourners supports reproductive choice or gay marriage, although many in the Sojourners network, including founder Jim Wallis himself, believe that compassion and justice demand respect for gay human and civil rights, including the right to form civil unions (but not marriage in a religiously sanctioned or sacramental sense).

The evangelical center is represented by such organizations as Christians for Biblical Equality, the journal Christianity Today and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Some of them are mildly supportive of women's equality in marriage and church leadership. Christians for Biblical Equality is, in fact, strongly supportive of such equality. But each of these in the evangelical center are uniformly negative toward affirmation of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people.

The enormous evangelical right wing owns many radio stations and airs many television shows by which it has become the chief interpreter of the Bible for the American public. Their largest organization is the Southern Baptist Convention, which does not ordain women and has legislated that husbands must make the final decisions for their wives and children, and that wives must "contentendly yield" to these decisions. Another hugely influential organization is James Dobson's Focus on the Family, which teaches the importance of corporal punishment of children and broadcasts many lies about lesbian and gay people: that we all suffer from a mental disorder that can be cured by "reparative therapy"; that we want to destroy marriage and seek to hurt children; and that we are ungodly people who want special rights, not civil rights. Tim LaHaye, coauthor of the apocalyptic "Left Behind" novels, and his wife Beverly, founder of Concerned Women for America, are also highly influential leaders of the evangelical right wing. Their 1976 evangelical sex manual, The Act of Marriage, is still quoted, especially their assertion that, "God designed man to be the aggressor, provider, and leader of his family," claiming that such attributes are "somehow tied to his sex drive." (emphasis mine). They add, "The woman who resents her husband's sex drive while enjoying his aggressive leadership had better face the fact that she cannot have one without the other" (p.22). Although this statement directly contradicts the Bible's statement that husbands and wives are to "defer to one another," it reflects a typical attitude of the evangelical right. Another group, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, attempts to soften their male dominance/female subordination model by calling it the complementarity of the sexes rather than inequality. They teach that male and female are each designed by God for distinctive roles in marriage and in life, based on gender alone.

Obviously, the word evangelical involves a wide spectrum of attitudes toward women and other groups. As a result, evangelicals on the left may feel more comfortable with progressive Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, or secular humanists than we do with right-wing evangelicals. And the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus sees as one of its primary missions the empowerment of women and men from the Religious Right who have become fed up with androcentrism and are ready for liberation.

Q: To what extent is the evangelical feminist movement political, and to what extent religious?

One of the things I have appreciated about my evangelical upbringing was that preachers told us everybody was expected to act with absolute conviction, throwing themselves fully into whatever they believed in. Although the evangelists really meant men when they talked like that, some of us women didn't get the message that it wasn't intended for women, too, or eventually refused to accept such exclusion.

Now the thing about going all out to embody what you believe is that it becomes difficult if not impossible to compartmentalize religion as something distinct from politics. And that can lead to positive or negative results. If a person's religious convictions do not include respect for the full human and civil rights of those who hold different convictions, going all out for one's beliefs can lead to oppression of others, brutality, and the undermining of democratic practice. Many right-wing evangelical congregations would deny that they are political at all, because in seeking to "reclaim America for Christ" and to restrict the civil and human rights of those they regard as dangerous, they feel they are simply fulfilling their religious duty. Extremists of every religion feel that God is on their side and nobody else's - which is why our world is so close to self-immolation.

On the other hand, because feminism is about respecting the otherness of the other while trying to correct injustices toward women, children, and other marginalized people, its political impact is in line with the best insights of the world's major religions. All of them call for treating others in ways we ourselves would appreciate if we were on the receiving end.

Within Christian feminism, Roman Catholic scholars have been especially brilliant in describing the seamless religious and political impact of the Jesus Movement. I'm thinking of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who showed us why women, slaves, and social outcasts were so drawn to Jesus (see In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins.) And also the work of Elizabeth A. Johnson, a nun who manages to correct the patriarchal errors of the Christian tradition with so much tact, compassion and biblical accuracy that I doubt the Vatican realizes how radically feminist she is. (Start with her book She Who Is, but read anything she writes. Her appreciation of other religions as necessary to a fuller understanding of God certainly reflects my own experience of what occurs in inter-religious worship services.)

For evangelical feminists, feminism means working toward a peaceful, egalitarian, humane world. Being a follower of Jesus means the same thing. So for us, feminism is both a religious and a political expression of our convictions.

Q: How do you respond to evangelical reactions against feminism?

Before I answer this question, I need to provide a context in order to show just how powerful the anti-feminist anti-humanist Religious Right has become. Bestseller lists for several years have been featuring novels about the Rapture of "born again" believers and about those who will be "left behind." I remember learning that same scenario as a girl, with the help of huge charts that covered the front of the chapel. The political implication was clear: no point in supporting the United Nations, working for world peace, or preserving the environment, because we were in the "last days." We'd soon be "out of here," while atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Roman Catholics, and even many liberal Protestants would be "left behind."

Why is this important? Because as Bill Moyers pointed out at Harvard recently, our President, 45 Senators, 186 members of Congress, and millions of American voters believe in the fundamentalist scenario of the "left behind" novels. This explains why President Bush's policies have been so cavalier about the United Nations, the environment, and seeking peaceful resolutions to conflict.

To the evangelical right, moral issues tend to be privatized; sin is personal, not collective or institutional. Matters of social justice and civil liberty, such as exploiting women and undocumented immigrants as cheap labor, are downplayed or ignored, while controlling women's sexuality through anti-abortion statutes, or opposing same-sex marriage, are regarded as "life-and-death" moral issues. Killing thousands of civilians in Iraq is not perceived as a moral issue. It should be obvious why the evangelical right is the perfect theological ally for Bush's administration.

Concerning women specifically: in the 1980's a book called The Total Woman praised female subordination and was studied in hundreds of evangelical churches. I was asked to write a response to it. What I discovered while writing Women, Men, and the Bible was that it was very easy to defend patriarchal status quo. You don't have to be particularly rational or thorough because most folks already assume that you're correct. But to challenge the dominant paradigm, you have to weave an airtight argument. Furthermore, in confrontation with right-wing evangelicals I found that what is evidence to me is not evidence to them. People tend to see what they want to see, and if they do not govern themselves by standard rules for interpreting texts, what they see can become quite astonishing. So eventually I learned to refuse debates.

Recently I was drawn into discussing same-sex marriage on Minnesota Public Radio, only to discover that the moderator permitted my opponent to set the parameters of the discussion. We were given approximately equal time, but all he had to do with his time was appeal to common assumptions, while I had to construct a cogent counter-argument and do it concerning the factors he had chosen. Nothing level about that playing field!

So this is my current policy in dealing with andocentric or misogynistic evangelicals: I try to show them human love in the hope that sooner or later life will teach them more open and humane attitudes. I write books and articles and give lectures embodying liberation theology, in the hope that those who are open to a different paradigm will find my interpretations helpful. I vote; I try to persuade anyone who shows an interest. And I keep hope alive in myself by trusting that when God's will is done "on earth as it is in heaven," women will be equal and honored partners in every aspect of that benign society. And yes, I do believe that some day God's will will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." Why? Because Jesus told us to pray for that - and I do not believe that he would have assigned to us an exercise in futility.

Q: Do you have a summary statement you'd like to share with an audience of Jews, Christians, and Muslims?

Yes, I do. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all "religions of the book" - the Jewish Bible, the Christian Scriptures, and Islam's Qur'an. So it is essential that we teach people how to read texts accurately and how to apply them in the most humane possible fashion. It seems to me that Judaism has succeeded better than Christianity in this regard, probably because for centuries rabbis have persistently surrounded the text with narratives that call for the gentlest admissible interpretations. Unfortunately, progressive Christians have allowed the evangelical right to take over the public interpretation of the Bible for most Americans (who on average read at the 8th grade level.)

For example: right-wing evangelicals point to the text that says "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church" (Ephesians 5:23) as proof that the husband should decide what his family should do. But this interpretation ignores several verifiable facts. First, when that text was written (first century of the Common Era), nobody thought decisions were made by the head; it was the heart that decided the issues of life. Second, Christ as head of the church never makes decisions for the church. The word head means source, as in fountainhead. So the analogy "husband is to wife as Christ is to church" is an exclusively non-coercive analogy. Third, the author of Ephesians recognized that husbands held all the power in that time and place. So if the marriage relationship were to become egalitarian because of mutual deference (Ephesians 5:21), the husband would have to be the head or source of that deference by voluntarily abandoning his partriarchally privileged position.

When read with attention to verifiable facts, the analogy of "husband is to wife as Christ is to church" subverts or undermines male supremacy, in precise opposition to the way the text is being used by the Religious Right.

My point: "religions of the book" can either oppress women or liberate and empower us, depending on how the text is interpreted and applied. Even more importantly, "religions of the book" can support bitter warfare or peaceful coexistence, depending on how the text is interpreted. Whether we're reading the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures, or the Islamic Qur'an, we will always tend to see what we want to see. But surely we ought to consider verifiable facts when we make our interpretations, and human kindness when we apply the texts to contemporary life.